Calhoun County Fair 
Demolition Derby 2006

    Michelle and I attended the Calhoun County Fair demolition derby last weekend.  The Calhoun derby is typical, I think, of demolition derbies throughout the United States, except that everything that makes most of us think, "Are they crazy?" about demolition derbies seems to be even more so in Calhoun.  Below are some pictures of the derby and a few of my thoughts about the Calhoun derby and demolition derbies in general. 

The Setup

    The Calhoun County Fair demolition derby is somewhat unusual because it is held in a large pit specifically constructed for the derby.  I don't think the pit has ever been used for anything else.  It is square, about ten feet deep (a little over three meters, but the metric system doesn't seem appropriate for the derby), and maybe 120 feet across on each side.  Cars enter the pit through a narrow opening on the southwest corner.  A stout post-and-wire fence rings the top of the pit three feet back from the edge.  The area between the fence and the pit forms a narrow "catwalk" for the officials, and for drivers who jump out of their cars before a heat is finished (which, of course, they are not supposed to do).  Some of the larger drivers have difficulty climbing out of the pit to the fence, but there are a few ropes hanging down to help them up.  At most other derby tracks there are logs or tires that mark "out of bounds" and a car that crosses the barrier is disqualified.  In the Calhoun derby pit, there is no out of bounds.

    Spectators line the pit and view the action from an alarmingly close distance.  At most demolition derbies the crowd is seated in grandstands that serve for tractor pulls, horse shows, and other typical county-fair activities.  In Calhoun a few portable grandstands are set up along each edge of the pit, and in-between the formal stands pickup trucks are backed up to the fence as portable viewing stations.  The trucks are completely filled with spectators – standing in the bed, sitting on the tailgate and on the back of the cab, sitting on lawn chairs and occasionally on rigged seating that spans two or more trucks.  Many of the pickups sport large beach umbrellas, awnings, and decorations.   All have the obligatory cooler with snacks, water, pop, and (poured into nondescript containers, of course) beer. 

     Before the first heat the pit is doused with water from a large fertilizer truck.  The muddy soil slows the cars so they can't crash into each other with quite so much force.  A second application of water is often necessary after the first few heats, as the mud begins to dry and the track becomes dangerously fast.  I worry that the fertilizer tank may not have been thoroughly cleaned from its last chemical use, but as Michelle points out, any trace farm chemicals are likely to be minimal compared to the oil, gasoline, radiator coolant, and who knows what else spilled onto the ground (and occasionally sprayed onto spectators) from the cars themselves. 

     The cars enter the ring and line up along the north and south walls, and a tractor wheels a large studded roller into place over the entrance (this is called "closing the gate").  The names of the drivers are announced over an intercom, oftentimes to great cheers (nearly all of them are local), the crowd counts down 5...4...3...2...1... and the derby begins. 

The Carnage

     Demolition derbies generally have very few rules, but three seem to be universal to derbies everywhere: 1) no intentional hits into a driver's side-door; 2) no deliberate high speed head-on crashes; and 3) no sandbagging (that is, no hanging back avoiding crashes; each driver must make an aggressive hit every 60 seconds or so).  Like the cars themselves, the rules often get broken during the derby, particularly rules 1 and 2.

     The action of a derby is intense and confusing.  With 10 to 20 cars in a typical heat in the Calhoun pit, it is impossible to concentrate on more than a few sets of cars at the same time.  Particularly loud or high-impact crashes usually draw the entire crowd's attention, as do engine fires, radiator blow-outs, and side-impact hits that threaten to overturn a vehicle. 

     The car engines are largely exposed, with the exhaust vented straight up, and most of the engines didn't run smoothly before they became derby engines in the first place.  The sound is raw and primal.  The engines growl, roar, hiss and rumble so loudly you feel as much as hear them.  The smell is also striking – a mix of churned loamy soil, oil, burnt rubber and raw gasoline, and sometimes an odd lemony smell that I think comes from stressed metal. 

     Spectators at the Calhoun derby are so close to the action that they (we) are commonly pelted with mud, stray car parts, and occasionally showered with radiator water.  When a car spins its wheels in a tight curve close to the edge of the pit, the crowd above it appears to be "doing the wave" as everyone ducks in unison with the flying mud.  As surprising as it is that the drivers are rarely injured, it is almost more surprising that spectators seldom are. 

     The action itself is fairly short, particularly when you consider the time and effort that goes into preparing the vehicles.   A typical heat lasts 10 to 15 minutes at the most (if the cars aren't disabled by crashes, the engines usually overheat by then).  Whatever cars are still running (four or so for a qualifying heat, or the last car left for a final event) are driven out of the pit, and the rest are dragged out by pull-off tractors.  I've noticed that nearly all of the drivers try to steer their cars while they are being dragged out of the pit, even when the steering is clearly inoperable.  Both tires may be gone, the front axel broken in two and skewed at a crazy angle, but the drivers will grip the wheel tightly and steer to follow the tractor.  Maybe this is the instinct it takes to enter into a derby in the first place?

Further Observations

     Just as each heat begins I wonder what the drivers may be thinking, and I worry that something may go wrong.  Demolition derbies seem to be one of the few remaining publicly sanctioned forms of entertainment that are honestly dangerous anymore.  At least they certainly seem dangerous – how could they not be?  Fire trucks and an ambulance are always on hand, but I've never witnessed a serious injury.     

    At every Calhoun County derby I've attended there is a point when a group in the crowd believes that a driver is seriously injured – either because of a particularly hard hit, or because the driver is pounding the steering wheel or hood, or is slumped forward and not moving.  The crowd begins screaming at the officials to stop the heat and attend to the driver, and occasionally this actually happens.  In all cases I've witnessed, however, the drivers have been perfectly fine.  Maybe they were momentarily stunned, or maybe they were just angry, but I have never seen a driver actually leave the pit due to an injury.  I feel as bad for the people in the crowd who believe the drivers are injured (who are usually friends or family members) as I do for the drivers themselves. 

     The Calhoun County fair is held late in the summer (usually in September), so many of the drivers have participated in other derbies throughout the county fair season.  Some of the cars are even recycled from earlier derbies.  Many of the cars are clearly new to the sport, however, and some of the drivers are too.  For the drivers, once the giant studded roller closes the gate to the pit, there is no safe way out. 

    Watching the derby is an odd form of meditation for me - as much a time for contemplation as it is a time to enjoy the sheer spectacle.  The noise, the smoke, the screaming, the sight of cars in crazy broken positions, all seem a background to the larger question: what in the world is going on?

Anthropological Analogies?

     As an anthropologist, I feel that I should be able to make some sense of the situation.  It is a raw, open, largely unscripted human spectacle clearly important to the participants and spectators.  It is also a fairly small-scale operation, so it seems to me sometimes (quite wrongly, of course), that it should be easier to understand.

     A demolition derby is something like a potlatch, where large quantities of material are sometimes destroyed for show.  In a typical potlatch, however, the show is put on by someone with a great deal of wealth to begin with, which is clearly not the case for demolition derbies.

     It is a little like a Roman gladiatorial spectacle, except that demo derby participants are all willing, and they don't stand to gain much money from the outcome.  The typical purse for a main event is $300 to $700, and of course that only goes to one driver out of a field of 50 to 60 at a typical Calhoun derby. 

     Possibly it can be explained as a form of 'costly signaling', whereby males demonstrate genetic fitness through a dramatic, public display.  In terms of cultural ecology, true costly signaling behavior must be 1) public, 2) cost more in resources or energy than it gains, and 3) an honest display of some genetic ability.  In the animal kingdom, peacocks' tails are often used as an example.  The larger the tail, the greater a detriment it is to the peacock (harder to escape predators).  Large tails are thus an honest display of genetic fitness: a peacock who survives to mating age with a large tail has demonstrated to peahens that there is nothing wrong with it genetically (or it would have been eaten), making it a more attractive mate.  In human terms, large-game hunting by males is sometimes explained in similar terms: hunting small mammals and gathering plant resources generally returns much more food for the energy expended than hunting large animals does.  Yet males often spend days on end in expensive, dangerous excursions to stalk big game, which is more often than not shared with so large a group that the hunters' families end up subsidizing a feast for a whole village.  Chris Parker, a friend during my graduate student days at the University of Arkansas, wrote his Master's Thesis on costly signaling and fly-fishing among men today.

     I'm not sure if any of these ideas apply directly to demolition derbies, though.  Individuals and families spend a great deal of time preparing cars for an event that will last but a few minutes, cause the destruction of the vehicle, and almost certainly end up costing much more than it returns.  Like many human endeavors, it may be that the process is more important than the outcome.   Modifying a vehicle for a derby is a fairly serious undertaking that requires quite a bit of time, a group of friends, and (I'm fairly certain of this, anyway), beer.  Aside from the time spent actually preparing the vehicles, there are countless hours spent discussing strategy, giving advice, and recounting past derby exploits.  Much of this, I think, is fun, engaging, high-quality family and friend time no less productive than most of our national pastimes.

      Honestly, I don't understand the human dynamics of a demolition derby.  I know that I am drawn to the spectacle and that cars crashing into one another is only part of the reason.  Why do they do it?  Are they crazy?  I'll try harder to understand next time.