They chained the gate on the back straightaway in 1996 and left it that way for twenty-seven years. Weeds came up through the frontstretch. The grandstands went gray. My father raced there when the asphalt was already old, and for a long time after, the only thing that knew the place was the kudzu.
It came back a few years ago. The state put millions into it, they milled off the surface that had been down since before I was born and laid a new one, and the All-Star cars showed up on a May night like the place had never left. Dad went. Of course he went.
But an exhibition is a show, and a show is not the same as the schedule. What comes in two weeks is the other thing. A points race. The real calendar. The first one here since 1996. Thirty years, and he says the number slow, like it might not hold if he rushes it.
The tickets this time were priced so a kid could come. That is the part that gets me. There will be a grandstand full of them, college kids mostly, and near about none of them remember it any way but full. To them it is just a track that has always been here, loud on a summer night, the way the ridges have always been here. Nobody told them it was ever gone. Nobody needs to.
Dad stands at the fence with his hands in his pockets. He raced it when it was prime, he watched it die, and he has lived to see it come all the way back. He gets quiet at the good ones the same as the bad ones, and by now you learn not to fill it.
Mom will be there, of course. Book on her knee, forty years of reading between cautions, looking up more than she reads. She says the noise is going to be worse than she remembers. She has already picked out what she is bringing to sit on.
There were people down by the fence the last time we drove over, a camera on a man in a track shirt, asking him what the place means. He was giving a good answer. It is an easy question to answer well and a hard one to answer true, and you could tell he was reaching for true, which is more than most manage.
Here is what I keep coming back to. The place got its second half. It sat chained and forgotten, and then it didn't, and in two weeks it will be so full and so loud that you would never know it had ever gone quiet. Standing in the middle of it will be a man who knew it both ways. Most things don't get that. This one did.