When Trucks Fly

By Zach Helfand

A monster trucker is the kind of person who has a favorite type of dirt. I’ve heard drivers describe a track as fluffy, sticky, loose, tacky, grippy, greasy, slick, crumbly, powdery, bone-dry, baked out, dead, loamy, earthen, sandy, slidey, soupy, snotty, and marshmallowy. Everyone understands the distinctions. They obsess over them like vintners obsess over terroir. The first time I met an employee of Monster Jam, which sells millions of tickets to its monster-truck shows every year, the first thing she told me was that the company owns more dirt, she thinks, than anyone else in the world.

Monster Jam runs events in about a hundred and thirty stadiums and arenas annually, on six continents. This requires building a hundred and thirty elaborate, temporary tracks, with massive jumps and ramps constructed out of dirt, like sandcastles for a giant. Rallies, these days, are less demolition-derby crash-fests than aerial acrobatic shows involving twelve-thousand-pound vehicles. It’s expensive to source and truck in enough dirt to fill a stadium, so the company stashes a big pile near each venue, to be used year after year. For the Meadowlands’ MetLife Stadium, in New Jersey, which Monster Jam visited a couple of months ago, the dirt lives in a nearby Superfund site: a decontaminated corner of an old cologne factory. When I showed up on the Thursday morning before the event, a procession of dump trucks was shuttling between the site and the stadium.

“It’s so hard to find good dirt,” Daniel Allen, who’s known informally as Monster Jam’s senior director of dirt, told me. “And by no stretch is the dirt in this area great.” Allen, who is thin and wiry, got the Meadowlands dirt a decade ago from a housing developer nearby. “A Russian guy, Vlady something,” Allen said. “You could barely even understand this guy, but he had good dirt.” That first time, Allen’s crew had taken possession of about half of Vlady’s dirt when bad storms hit, and every construction pit in the area shut down. The show was in a couple of days. Allen had to improvise. “Our dirt in Philadelphia is stored behind Lincoln Financial Stadium, under I-95. I knew it was perfectly good and dry. So we took a night of hauling, and we brought over three thousand yards of clay at night, truck after truck, hundreds of truckloads.”

Every dirt is different. The U.S.D.A. has identified and named about twenty thousand types of American soil. Allen knows that Atlanta’s clay is red, and Glendale, Arizona’s stains concrete. Chicago has dark topsoil. New England’s dirt has rocks; Allen puts it through giant sieves so the spinning truck tires don’t launch stone missiles into the crowd. He likes a mix of seventy per cent clay, which is moldable enough to build jumps and durable enough that the tires don’t burn through to the floor below, and thirty per cent sand, which is strong, absorbent, and good for power slides. Sometimes finding that mix is impossible. “When they first told me we were going to take Monster Jam to Miami, I told them, ‘Well, you show me water in a desert, and I’ll show you clay on a beach.’ Because that’s essentially what Miami is. It’s just pure sand.” The company spent three hundred thousand dollars trucking in loads of clay from a vein near Fort Myers.

It’s surprising how easily good dirt can turn bad. Dirt that weathers too much can become the texture of baby powder. The pH balance matters, so Allen grows plants on his pile. He likes mixing in straw. “It keeps our dirt alive,” he said. A single teaspoon of soil can house a billion bacteria, along with protozoa, nematodes, and fungi. It’s the bacteria that makes dirt smell like dirt—the scent comes from spores released to ward off predatory nematodes. The old Nassau Coliseum dirt always smelled like manure—“literally like a cow pasture,” Allen said—perhaps because it hosted the rodeo, which borrowed Monster Jam’s stockpile. Elsewhere, there are dirt bandits. “They run around behind us trying to steal our dirt,” Allen said. In January, a motocross promoter lifted Allen’s entire pile in Kansas City right before a show.

On the field of MetLife Stadium, a fleet of heavy equipment was preparing the track. Big excavators, the machines with an armlike shovel, were unloading dirt. Loaders, which have plowlike scoopers, were sculpting the dirt into ramps. I went down to take a look. At ground level, a cloud of dust hovered over the track and made my eyes water. I grabbed a clod and sniffed, hoping for Chanel No. 5. It was closer to damp basement: eau de nematode. For each venue, the dirt crew hauls in as much as six hundred truckloads in about two days. It’s enough dirt to fill every car on the G train eleven times over. They take it out within twelve hours, and then go to the next city to do it again. The best loader operators can cup a ramp to within fractions of an inch of the proper radius of curvature. I watched them work for a while with Jayme Dalsing, Monster Jam’s senior director of global operations. He had gauge earrings, and an infinity-symbol tattoo on his left ring finger. He’d once worked on a dirt crew but never got great at it. As they smoothed and carved, he shook his head, marvelling. “It’s surgery with an immensely huge piece of equipment,” he said. Allen had told me that some of his guys could spark a lighter with the tooth of an excavator, “or take a beer-bottle top off.”

Two operators were on break: Bobby Hayes, who had a thick North Carolina accent, and a guy who went by Boston Rob, who sounded like you’d expect. (They joked that they sometimes needed a translator.) I asked about the beer-bottle trick. “We both could do it!” Boston Rob said. “We do screw with people. We’ll go up and scratch their backs with the excavator.”

Hayes said he sometimes follows the Cat-equipment rodeo, the Olympics of heavy machinery. “I have done a quarter flip on an excavator,” he told me.

“I’ve picked up eggs,” Boston Rob said.

Hayes went on, “The longer you’re in them, the more time you have to think of stupid shit to do with them.”

The thing that makes a monster truck is the tires. They must be at least sixty-six inches tall, which happens to be the height of the average American. The appeal has a certain timelessness: people have always liked really big stuff, particularly of the unnecessary variety. Stonehenge, pyramids, colossi, Costco. For perhaps obvious reasons, this is usually a male impulse. With trucks, it’s also an American one, which has a lot to do with excess time and income, and our collective imperialist leanings. Then there’s the land itself. We’ve had to carry lots of people and lots of mail over vast and varied terrain. Marty Garza, a monster-truck historian, discovered that by 1894 some guys in Rochester had built a carriage with nickel-trimmed details and enormous wheels which they called their “monster truck.” Two years later, Gottlieb Daimler invented the pickup.

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Like the wheel, monster trucks were conceived by multiple men, but the godfather of monster trucks is Bob Chandler. Chandler, something of an engineering savant (“I actually compare him to Einstein,” his daughter, Ann Trent, told me), owned a four-wheel-drive shop outside St. Louis. He liked to go off-roading in local creeks and mud pits. Over time, as he went looking for more things for his Ford F-250 to conquer—abandoned coal mines, slag heaps—the truck got bigger. Eventually, he added giant tires from a fertilizer spreader. (To accommodate them, he once used an axle from a military rocket launcher.) “My wife would say, ‘Why do you have those bigger tires?’ ” Chandler told me. “I said, ‘Because I can.’ ” He called the truck Bigfoot. He parked it in front of his shop, as advertising. “One day, he called me and said, ‘Hey, I want to crush cars,’ ” his former business partner, Jim Kramer, told me. “My exact reaction was ‘What the hell do you wanna do that for?’ ”

Kramer nevertheless filmed Bigfoot driving over a few junkers. The tape got around. People went crazy. In 1983, Chandler took Bigfoot 2 to a tractor-pulling show at the Pontiac Silverdome, in Michigan. In front of sixty-eight thousand people, he drove it onto the roof of an old car. The crowd’s reaction was almost religious. People wanted to touch it. Thousands rushed the floor. “My son was in the truck with me, and I said, ‘Roll up your windows,’ ” Chandler said. He was worried they might be crushed themselves.

Before long, monster trucks were everywhere. Upstarts used tires from Alaskan military transport vehicles, desert oil prospectors, and swamp trucks. Chandler put a set of ten-footers on Bigfoot. The truck, fully kitted, weighed about the same as a regional commercial jet. Variety abounded. There were monster trains, monster tanks, monster Vanagons, monster school buses, and a monster ambulance called the Whambulance. A truck called Mad Dog drove across the Lake of the Ozarks; sixty-six-inch tires are so buoyant that the trucks float. The trucks had names like 5 Ton Turd, Mt. Crushmore, Crush Socialism, Alcohaulin, Bad Pig, BlownIncome, Fat Landy, Jumpin’ for Jesus, DT-Maxxx, and Bobby Wasabi’s Wasab-A-Saurus. In Mexico, drug cartels have recently outfitted monster trucks with battering rams and machine-gun turrets to use in shootouts.

Monster-truck ads were often the ones in which a man screamed “Sunday!” over and over again. That’s because shows were often in the kinds of places where businesses were closed on Sundays. Jan Gabriel, who popularized the “Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!” tagline, did it originally for a drag race, but he later made millions of dollars selling monster-truck VHS tapes, and died on January 10, 2010—a Sunday. The industry attracted a particular crowd. One monster-truck pioneer kept as pets two black bears, which he named Sugar and Spice.

At first, crushing was enough. Soon, promoters added drag races, small jumps, and gimmicks like tug-of-war. Monster Jam used to ram trucks through R.V.s filled with flour; they’d explode like a powdery firework. Before my trip to the Meadowlands, I’d assumed that the whole point of a monster truck was to smash stuff, but my understanding was outdated. Monster Jam still likes wrecking a truck or two, but Dalsing, the global-operations director, told me that the latest thing is what he calls “technical, big-air events.” This involves launching vehicles that are about the same size and weight as an African bush elephant as high into the air as possible. Seeing this in person leaves an impression. Bari Musawwir, a superfan (“I used to make engine noises at the grocery store”) who became a driver, told me he witnessed the first monster-truck backflip landed in competition, in Jacksonville, in 2010. “I remember grown men hugging in the stands,” he said.

The day after the dirt was loaded in at MetLife, I met Matt Delsanter, the technician for a truck sponsored by a chain of hair salons, called the Great Clips Mohawk Warrior, whose roof has custom-cut broom bristles shaped like spikes of hair. Delsanter wears his hair in a nearly identical Mohawk, which he spikes on event days. When I arrived at the pit area, in the parking lot, he was buffing out the truck and conferring with a mulleted mechanic named Craig, who greeted me with “Mahalo.”

Monster Jam has multiple tours, and each of them competes weekly. The mechanics travel from city to city with the trucks, which are transported on big rigs. (One time, a mechanic rode in the back of the trailer, buckled up in the monster-truck seat.) The trucks always sustain some kind of damage, often catastrophic, and the technicians have to get them ready to go by the weekend. Delsanter tapped Mohawk Warrior. “I’ve probably sat in that seat more than I have on my own couch,” he said.

He continued, “I’m about to put the big tires on, if you’d like to see that.” The tires weigh six hundred and forty-five pounds each. He rolled one over and grabbed an enormous wrench gun. “Big tools for big trucks!” he said. Then he showed me around the trailer, which serves as a mobile auto shop. A modern monster truck has as much in common with a pickup as a pickup has with a golf cart. At its simplest, a monster truck is a steel-tubed roll cage sitting atop a drag racer. The engine supplies as much as two thousand horsepower. Trucks have gone more than a hundred miles an hour. Instead of diesel, the engine burns methanol, at a rate of three gallons a minute. The motor lasts only thirty hours before a piston explodes straight out of the engine block. The trucks sound as loud as you’d imagine, although, a few years ago, Chandler created an electric Bigfoot that didn’t make any sound at all.

Today, a lot of monster trucks don’t look like trucks. They have fibreglass shells that are molded into pirate ships, dragons, or zombies.“The trucks are built almost identically,” Delsanter said. The technicians’ magic is in adapting to the dirt. If the track is tacky, Delsanter balloons the tires. If it’s marbly, he likes them flat, for traction. On a sandy track, some mechanics tighten the sway bar. The right touch can make the difference in a race. Delsanter is very competitive.

“Matt, he’s ate up if we don’t win,” Bryce Kenny, Mohawk Warrior’s driver, told me. Kenny drives full time, but some drivers work day jobs. (Some across the industry make as little as five hundred dollars a show. A few stars can make six figures.) Brandon Vinson, who won the racing at last year’s World Finals—the sport’s Super Bowl—owns an earthmoving business. Another driver, Kayla Blood, works as a real-estate agent. Kenny grew up on a drag strip. He raced a dragster that was his grandfather’s. In 2011, after the Great Recession hit, he had to give it up. He found a job as a corporate headhunter to try to buy it back. “I thought, I’ll just go create wealth so that I can run it myself,” he said. When Monster Jam called, he decided to take a thirty-per-cent pay cut.

Kenny and Delsanter are unusually loyal. Delsanter says he’d refuse a promotion in order to stay on Kenny’s team. He worries constantly about truck safety. High jumps can carry more force than a highway crash. “It can get very violent,” Kenny told me. “Me, I got this big old giraffe neck. My dad’s a chiropractor, though, so that’s like the best thing ever.” Delsanter calibrates the shocks, which are filled with nitrogen gas, to the right stiffness. “It’ll knock your fillings out if you’re driving over a speed bump, but thirty, forty feet in the air you’ll feel like you’re on a La-Z-Boy,” Delsanter said. The machines tend to break down in unexpected ways. “These trucks are sentient,” Delsanter said. Sometimes he talks to his. When Mohawk Warrior won its first event, this spring, “I gave her a little pat,” he said. “I was, like, ‘You did it, girl, you finally did it.’ ”

I, too, worried for Kenny. Standing next to the truck, it was difficult to imagine it up above the parking-lot lights, airborne. The show was the next evening. In the afternoon, I hung around the pre-game “pit party,” where fans check out the trucks and get autographs. A tent run by Morgan & Morgan, “America’s Largest Injury Law Firm,” offered a raffle for a hundred dollars.

A typical Monster Jam event has three parts: racing, two-wheel skills (wheelies and other stunts), and freestyle, the grand finale. In the stadium, the dirt crew was manicuring. The track looked great—a spiral of ramps surrounding a huge tabletop of packed dirt. The biggest jumps were ten feet tall. The first two tiers of seats were full—nearly fifty thousand people. “We sell four million-plus tickets a year,” Dalsing said. “That’s more than Taylor Swift.” Monster Jam had appointed, as grand marshal of the event, Jason Biggs, the actor from “American Pie.” He’s a longtime fan. He took a microphone and announced, “This! Is! Monster Jam!,” and the racing began.

I’d heard some rumors that Monster Jam shows were rigged, but Dalsing was adamant. “We’re not W.W.E.,” he said. The company is trying to present monster-truck driving as a legitimate sport. Dalsing recently forbade drivers to call events “shows.” “I’ll fine them a dollar,” he suggested. (He would donate the proceeds to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital.) It soon became clear to me that scripting events would be difficult. Trucks break down. Weird things happen on the dirt. Kenny, for example, won his first-round race, over Kayla Blood, by six one-thousandths of a second. He reached the finals, and then almost forfeited because of a balky battery. Delsanter had to run into the hot pits with jumper cables. Mohawk Warrior edged out Grave Digger, Monster Jam’s most famous truck, in a photo finish.

It was the freestyle that everyone had come for. Freestyle consists of a truck trashing as much of the dirt crew’s work as possible, in the span of two minutes. Trucks rampaged around the track, seemingly without a plan. Some wrecked. There was a special sponsored backflip ramp that obligated the event’s announcers to proclaim, “He looks to the Morgan & Morgan backflip ramp!,” over and over again. Kenny pulled one of the bigger backflips of the evening, then accelerated toward a giant kicking ramp. He popped into the air, terrifyingly high. It looked as though he was even with the stadium’s second tier. Most of the crowd roared; my reaction was a slack-jawed laugh. It was the experience of seeing something amazing and slightly ridiculous, something you’d have never thought of yourself, like a dog juggling knives. I understood the hugging impulse. Kenny landed so hard that he bounced another eight feet on the rebound. Freestyle scoring is determined by fan voting. Kenny’s score was good, but he was defeated by a truck called Bakugan Dragonoid. He finished third in the over-all standings. The crowd booed itself.

I headed down to the dirt. “I definitely was not happy,” Delsanter said of the scoring. Still, it was a good night. “Want a souvenir?” he asked. He grabbed a knife and cut off a five-foot-wide flag from the back of the truck. Kenny signed it for me. His inscription said, “Live like a WARRIOR!!,” right above giant lettering that read, “GREAT CLIPS.”

Humans move about ten times as much dirt and rock around the planet’s surface as all geologic processes combined—earthquakes, landslides, rivers, wind. That’s impressive, when you consider that those processes carved the Grand Canyon. As you might expect, we do this heedlessly. Civilizations tend to start in river valleys where fertile soils can support an abundance that seems divinely wrought; the name Adam comes from the Hebrew word for earth or soil. For dust thou art. As the population booms, farms creep up the hillsides. Erosion follows. Crop yields falter, famine spreads. Civilizational collapse tends to coincide with plummeting soil productivity.

It was this pattern that helped inspire Elkanah Watson, a dirt aficionado whom I like to think of as the other godfather of monster trucks. Plump, restless, and intensely patriotic, Watson came of age in Plymouth, Massachusetts, during the Revolutionary War. He was obsessed with agriculture. During the war, he rode from Providence to Charleston, with twenty-six thousand Continental dollars sewn into his jacket. On the way, he asked so many questions about local farming that he was detained as a suspected British spy. He was apprenticed to a merchant, who sent him to Europe. He charmed Benjamin Franklin in Paris. He befriended John Adams in Holland. In London, he stood in the House of Lords and watched King George III proclaim the colonies free. “Every artery beat high, and swelled with my proud American blood,” Watson wrote in his diary.

Of all that Watson saw in Europe, he was moved most by the agricultural societies. Yeoman farmers and landowners had discovered that their ancestors had been miserable stewards of the land. They organized to reverse the trend, led by men like Jethro Tull, Charles (Turnip) Townshend, and John Evelyn, a soil evangelist who advocated identifying a soil by, among other things, tasting it. (He also advocated enriching it with manure.) Watson noted how the agricultural societies were sharing their findings at local get-togethers. This, Watson decided, was what America needed, and when he returned to the States he created the country’s first-ever agricultural fair, in 1811, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He hoped to reverse soil depletion, but he knew that people wouldn’t show up just for farming tutorials. A Barnumesque promoter, he brought in “innocent recreations,” such as a carnival ride called the Fandango, which offered healthful “dizzy pleasures to the youths and maidens.” A few years later, organizers introduced plowing matches, in which farmers raced to till an even field.

Before long, fairs had such attractions as cudgelling bouts, bearbaiting, and something called gouging. Later on came carnies, who brought tightrope walkers, learned pigs, and head-on railroad collisions. (Watson’s own neighbors once pranked him by offering up a so-called potato hen, which could pick potatoes four times faster than a man.) The plowing matches evolved into tractor pulls, in which a team of oxen dragged a sled filled with heavy objects—often the fairgoers themselves. Eventually, oxen were replaced by motorized tractors, and then by purpose-built pulling machines. One team put an aircraft motor in a tractor called the Honker, which blew a gasket and lit an entire oat field on fire. For a long time, monster trucks were the sideshows at tractor pulls and local fairs, and often they still are. If you overlay a map of soil productivity with a map of monster-truck hot spots, they align neatly.

It turned out that people who went to fairs liked to see stunts in which there was a credible chance that someone might get killed. These were called thrill shows. Invented at the Lucas County Fairgrounds, near Toledo, in 1923, thrill shows were daredevil acts, like Evel Knievel’s. At one point, America had two hundred and fifty of them. Stunt drivers would jump chasms, hop in exploding coffins, or crash planes. There were no airbags; they’d stuff their cars with mattresses. A lot of monster-truck promoters got their start as thrill-show promoters.

In the eighties, some of them joined Truck-O-Rama, a company that did tractor pulling and mud racing. ESPN did bogside broadcasts of the mud races, during which you could hear reports such as “The hole is pretty soupy right now.” Later, Truck-O-Rama became Monster Jam. In the nineties, it had a falling out with Chandler’s Bigfoot company. “They wanted to own us,” Chandler told me. Bigfoot stayed independent. It now runs on Monster Jam’s rival tour, Hot Wheels Monster Trucks Live, which is geared more toward kids. Chandler views Monster Jam as wasteful. He said, “They’ll destroy a monster truck on purpose just to excite the crowd.”

These days, the fair circuit and the daredevil stunts are the domain of independent promoters, who put up their own money. Ed Beckley, who has been an independent promoter for five decades, can clear almost a quarter-million dollars in a good weekend. Throughout his career, Beckley has performed in thrill shows, and he still does at his monster-truck rallies. His most famous act involved jumping a motorcycle over two helicopters with the rotors running. He called it the World’s Largest Human Veg-O-Matic. He once jumped seven cars with his ex-wife on the back. “She wasn’t my ex-wife at the time,” he told me. Sometimes it seems as if his job is just brainstorming entertaining ways to kill himself. The closest he came was a bad crash in Hobbs, New Mexico, in 2014. “I died three times in the helicopter,” he told me. “I saw Jesus.” From his hospital bed, he posed for a photo for a local newspaper, flashing a thumbs-up. Asked by the reporter how he was feeling, he said, “Rockin’ and rollin’, struttin’ and strollin’, man.”

Safety standards at monster-truck shows are much higher now, but Beckley’s theory is that people want to witness forces so vast and strange that they awe, or even terrify. The shows can be a forum for contemplating oblivion. There is the low end of this kind of American sublime, and there is the high. In the sixties and seventies, the earthworks movement used dirt and stone to produce art that could be beautiful and unsettling. Walter De Maria filled a floor in a building in SoHo with topsoil. Michael Heizer’s “City,” in the Nevada desert, is a mile-and-a-half-long sculpture that he carved using the native land. Visitors have described how its immensity and its enormous earthen pyramids can elicit visions of death.“Dirt is at the center of everything,” Heizer told me, when I visited him in Manhattan, at his downtown loft. He talked about his earthmoving equipment, which he’d piloted personally. He pulled up a photo of a road grader. “It tears the fuck out of the ground,” he said. Another photo: “That’s a hammer for smashing things.” A loader: “That thing alone is a civilization builder.” He said that he still remembers happening upon a monster-truck show at Madison Square Garden years ago.

Monster Jam’s biggest show of the year, World Finals XXII, was held in July, in Nashville. I’d heard it described as a carnival of carnage. “World Finals is basically job security for mechanics,” one employee told me. I got into town just in time for a monster-truck parade down Broadway. On a city street, the trucks looked much bigger than on the dirt. As they rumbled by, grown men yelled at the top of their lungs, and a bachelorette party in front of Nudie’s Honky Tonk took videos.

Since 2008, Monster Jam has been owned by Feld Entertainment, which produces travelling shows: Disney on Ice, Marvel Universe Live!, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The company claims that its headquarters, in Tampa, is Florida’s third-largest building, after NASA and an Amazon warehouse. Before the circus got rid of animal acts, employees could encounter an elephant or a lion.

The Nashville event was at Nissan Stadium. Inside, I caught up with Tom Meents, the best driver on the circuit. He has won more World Finals titles than anyone else. He is six feet three, broad and sturdy, like a mini version of his truck, Maximum Destruction, known as Max-D. He drinks Mountain Dew constantly, including at breakfast, and rides around the parking lot before events on a bicycle. On multiple occasions, he told me that he was put on this earth to drive monster trucks. He has flipped, double-flipped, corkscrewed, long-jumped, moonwalked, sky-wheelied, and gone so high that it looked as if he might not survive. He’s had back surgery once and been knocked unconscious twice. Meents has a keen sense of what fans want: “They want to see you go over the edge, and then bring it back when it’s almost certainly not going to come back.”

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These days, Meents also runs Monster Jam’s training facility, in a dug-up cornfield behind his house. He calls it Monster Jam University. For the previous several weeks, he had been working through a stunt with his stepson, the driver Colton Eichelberger. For World Finals, Eichelberger would try to jump over nine monster trucks. Meents said that they hadn’t landed the jump in a practice session yet. “I’m way more nervous than I am when I’m driving,” he told me. “When I’m driving, I have a calmness. I know what I need to do. I know what the risks are, I know what can happen. With him or anybody, I don’t know if they’ve really thought about all the risk.”

The weather in Nashville was not kind to the dirt crew. Heavy thunderstorms alternated with searing heat. Allen, the director of dirt, dispatched his crew to a hardware store to buy what he called “cordless mudsuckers.” “We have a whole lagoon trapped by the high jump,” he said. Puddles the color of Yoo-hoo dotted the field. A sloppy track is a nightmare for drivers. “On mud, the truck is like an elephant on ice skates,” Krysten Anderson, who drives one of the Grave Digger trucks, told me. Allen used significant amounts of quicklime, a chemical powder, to boil the moisture from the dirt. After the quicklime was applied, I walked the track. It had dried into a hard mass, crisscrossed with tire prints. It was like walking on a giant peanut shell.

Complicating matters for the dirt crew was what Monster Jam called an “elevated start”—a towering ramp, cascading down from the first deck of the grandstand, constructed out of enough sand, clay, and asphalt tailings to nearly fill two Olympic swimming pools. At the beginning of each season, Monster Jam officials meet in a conference room and brainstorm new track layouts. For visual aids, they sometimes use toy trucks. They also consult with a couple of brothers from England who test the ideas using a computer game. “Ethan and Ash,” Dalsing said. “We started working with them when they were teen-agers. They came to some of our international events saying, ‘We love Monster Jam so much, here’s something we designed.’ ”

Another lightning storm delayed the start of the show. Finally, it got under way, but because of the mud the two-wheel competition, which requires precise handling, was a washout. Even Meents had difficulty. In the racing, Kenny made it to the quarterfinals but had a breakdown on the first turn. He looked devastated. Meents’s long-planned jump went better. Eichelberger, in a truck named ThunderROARus, zoomed down the elevated dirt ramp and flew so far over the row of nine trucks that the vehicle rammed into a barrier at the edge of the field. Eichelberger was fine—he got out and saluted the crowd. Meents looked elated. I couldn’t help but feel a little underwhelmed. I’d seen a version of this a few times now—a big truck flying high and far. How quickly we desire more. This was Monster Jam’s trap: a never-before-seen trick can happen only once. Awe is a hard thing to maintain.

Maybe it was the premeditation. During the freestyle, a driver named Todd Leduc, who drove Megalodon, a truck that looks like a shark, took off for a ramp without warning and pulled the biggest backflip most people had ever seen. He went maybe fifty feet in the air. He seemed out of control. This wasn’t entirely true—when airborne, drivers can speed up their rotation by spinning the tires, or slow it down by pressing the brakes. “If we had wings, we’d fly out of the building,” Kenny told me. When Leduc reached his apex, I thought he would over-rotate and crash into the ground roof first. But he tapped the brakes, and slammed down flat on the tires. A guy in the stands turned shrill: “WHAT?!? HOLY MOTHERFUCKING SHIT!” This was what we’d come to see: we’d spent an entire day in the heat and the rain, a little bored, in the hope that a twelve-thousand-pound fibreglass shark might briefly ascend toward space. Who in the crowd could imagine what it felt like to be in Leduc’s seat?

I arrived at Monster Jam University, where I had a seat in driver tryouts, on a hot, dry day. Monster Jam runs tryouts every year in Paxton, Illinois, Meents’s home town, with a dozen or so candidates. Typically, three or four get contracts. My wave included a few women who raced professionally. One had graduated high school the previous weekend. Another, Lauren Partin, had grown up on a dirt track in southern Ohio. “My mom runs the concessions stands, my dad does the track stuff, my brother’s the announcer, I race and do the paperwork,” she said. “We have the ninth-biggest fireworks show in Ohio.” She reported that Meents’s dirt was “a little more nutrient” than the clay at home.

Meents, whom everyone at M.J.U. calls the Professor, volunteered to show me around town. I swung by his farmhouse in a rented Nissan Rogue and ceded the wheel. He adjusted the seat. “Gotta have lumbar when you’re driving monster trucks for thirty years,” he said. “Ahh. Ooh, yeah, there’s the lumbar.”

Paxton is a corn-and-soybean town, with roads so straight you could drive with your eyes closed; as Ed Beckley unforgettably described the region, it’s as flat “as your third-grade girlfriend.” Meents has lived there since he was three years old. The Meentses didn’t have much money, but Meents’s father, Bill, a fix-it guy at a Ford dealership, was a mechanical whiz. When Meents was thirteen, they bought a 1975 Ford F-100 that had been repossessed, and fixed it up with spare parts. Three days after Meents got his license, he totalled it.

Meents crashed a lot. When it rained, he and his friends would find the muddiest road and drive until they got swamped. “Then you would drag Main,” he told me. “You’d drive your truck down there, and, if you had the most mud on it, it made you really cool.” His truck had an eight-track: AC/DC, Bob Seger, Ozzy Osbourne. One time, Meents stopped in front of the police station. He revved the engine and spun the tires, but, before he could race away, the driveshaft dumped onto the pavement. “The police never even came out of the police station,” a passenger during the incident recalled. “They just stuck their finger out the door and waved him on in.”

Meents took me to the main drag. On weekend nights in the eighties, kids would drive their trucks to Paxton from all over. “It was a highlight of your life,” he said. “This whole entire thing would be bumper to bumper.” Meents remained enamored of old trucks. I’d been told that he still had one, which he’d modified with fifty-four-inch wheels; one of the drivers said that, when he visits M.J.U., they drive to the bank in it to get lollipops.

We drove to a storage garage across town, and there it was, a 1972 Chevy Blazer. “I did all the modifications to it, just got a little crazy,” he said. “It’s hard to get in, it’s kinda hard to see, it’s hard to maneuver. It’s illegally wide and obviously illegally tall. But fortunately I know all the policemen in this town.” (“He definitely dropped me off at school in that,” his daughter, Hannah, told me.) I asked him what the appeal is—he can drive the real machines anytime he wants. “Joy,” he said.

There was no easy way up into the cab. Meents grabbed hold of the wheel well, wedged himself against one of the tires, and swung in. He waved down at me. “Hey!” he said. He was smiling like a kid atop a playground slide.

Driving the trucks, he said, was almost an act of tenderness, or surrender. “It’s kind of like dancing with a big girl,” he said. “You can’t really lead her, but you can kind of whisper in her ear.”

My own monster truck was waiting for me in Meents’s garage. “There’s your chariot,” a driver named Camden Murphy told me. Murphy, who drives the truck Bakugan Dragonoid, was apprenticing with Meents as an instructor at M.J.U. “I’m helping the Professor as a kind of teaching assistant,” he said. He had blue eyes, a panama hat, and a gentle patience that seemed incongruous with some of the terrifying wrecks I’d seen him in. He was the one who’d outjumped Kenny at the Meadowlands.

Drivers auditioned in groups. My buddy for the day was Matt Dummer, a twenty-five-year-old mechanic with a scruffy beard. He grew up in the woods in Oregon. He is a lifelong Monster Jam superfan. “I tried to sleep last night and didn’t do very well,” he told me. “It’s too cool to be here. I don’t feel deserving of it.” I felt a little abashed; I’d slept fine the night before. I was strangely unafraid. Maybe by now I’d seen too many drivers walk away from crashes. Dummer and I chatted with Murphy about his big jumps. “There’s a moment of peace,” Murphy said. “It takes longer than you think. You’ll experience jumping today. You’re gonna get maybe like three feet off the ground. But you’ll know what I’m saying.”

Before I could drive, Murphy needed to do a preliminary seat-fitting with me, so I climbed into the cab. Up there, I felt imperious, like an orchestra conductor. The interior was low-tech. There was a steering wheel, a handful of switches, and one seat, meaning I’d be solo. Logan Schultz, my chief technician, was working away at something with a drill. “Anything mechanically wrong that you’re noticing, just call it out to me,” he said.

“I will!” I said. Short of an explosion, I wasn’t sure how.

Murphy strapped me into full-body harnesses. “They should feel uncomfortable,” he said. He began cranking with a ratchet. I could no longer take a deep breath. When it was time for driving, my head and neck would also be immobilized, with a safety restraint called a HANS device. I’d heard that the setup induced claustrophobia. Murphy continued ratcheting. “Are they uncomfortable?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“They’re not really tight yet,” he said.

Meents strolled over with a Big Gulp of Mountain Dew. “It’s getting real now, isn’t it?” he said.

After the fitting, I got out and inspected the track. It was literally in Meents’s back yard, cut into the cornfields. Crop dusters occasionally interrupt practice. Meents had supplemented the farm soil with dirt from the excavation of an irrigation pond, next to the track. He’d trucked in about fifty loads of additional dirt. “Paxton dirt is unique, man,” Murphy said. It’s silty and hard-packed and swings between extremes. “When it’s dry, it’s wicked slick. When it’s wetter, it’s really, really tacky.” The wet dirt has so much grip that trucks attempting to turn sometimes cartwheel.

Murphy brought over the fire-resistant driving suit and helmet that I would wear. He reminisced about his own tryout, seven years ago. “I remember being so nervous,” he said. He’d driven in Nascar races and said that the two machines could not be more different. “With Nascar, you can control down to the inch where you want the car to be,” he said. “Here you’re hanging on. You’re going for a ride.” I told him that my motorsports experience consisted of driving an A.T.V. once. (I flipped it.) “Some people in the program have no motorsports background whatsoever!” he said. “We have some other drivers that were performers with Disney Live and the other Feld properties. Honestly, you never know.”

I suited up and we walked back to the garage. Murphy called out, “What time does the ambulance get here?” I thought he was joking, but he wasn’t. Meents gathered everyone for a safety meeting. He’d communicate with us over a crackly headset, as if we were fighter pilots. “If we have a rollover, the best thing for you to do is stay in it,” he said. “You’re gonna feel the blood rushing to your head if that happens, but you’ll be fine.” He stopped and stared me up and down for what felt like a long time. He continued, “I don’t expect any issues like that, but you never know. We’ve had it happen in auditions. Have fun!”

Here are some of the things that Meents said to me over the headset during my run:

  “There’s a thousand things that could go wrong with this right here, and really only one that could go right."

  “Over here, over here! Not over there, over here!”

  [A brief scream.]

  “Zach, whoa! Talk to me.”

Before we’d fired up the trucks, I’d harbored certain daydreams. There was a part of me that fantasized about flipping over. Statistically speaking, driving a monster truck is safer than crossing a busy intersection, and I was unbothered by the prospect of a little head rush. Then we began. The sheer power of the truck provided a certain clarity. Specifically, that I was very scared.

Meents had us begin with simple laps around the track. Monster trucks are so wide that regular turning is impossible. To compensate, they use something called rear steering. As I navigated the oval, my left hand controlled the steering wheel, and my right hand manipulated a simple joystick. The steering wheel moved the front two tires. The joystick moved the rear ones. We started off very slowly. Suddenly, Meents yelled, “HIT THE FLOORBOARD!” I stomped on the pedal. Previously, I’d never understood what horsepower actually meant. Now I got it. The truck bucked. My vision blurred. It was an incredible feeling. It was also unsettling. I was driving, I was responsible for the vehicle, but I wasn’t really in control, like a parent whose kid is having a temper tantrum at the supermarket.

Next up: tight ovals around two old monster-truck tires, followed by some figure eights. Dummer aced it. I turned so wide that I almost crashed into the side of a giant ramp. Then I nearly collided with a concrete barrier. The safety officials shut off my engine. (As a safeguard, all monster trucks come with a Chandler invention known as a remote ignition interrupter.) Apparently, I’d also run over both of the old tires. They’re roughly the height of a moderately large child.

Meents delivered a pep talk—“You’re doing everything right, but none of them are at the right time”—and I began again. This time, I engaged the rear steering earlier. I pumped the gas around the turn. My back end drifted. The truck whipped around. Somehow, I ended up facing the wrong way, and was now continuing the figure eight in the wrong direction.

Meents called a break. Dummer and I got down from our trucks. “It’s rougher than I thought,” Dummer said. “I can feel my eyeballs vibrating.”

Then it was time to go airborne. We strapped back in. The ramp wasn’t that mean-looking, four or five feet high. A baby jump. When the starting light turned green, I lifted my foot off the brake, mashed the throttle, and punched into second gear. And then suddenly I was in the air. This was the whole point, of course, but, when it happened, it still astonished me. I understood what Murphy meant by the jump taking longer than expected. I looked around, or as much as the HANS device would allow. I was in a farmer’s field that had been tilled up—probably, if history is any guide, recklessly so. I’d burned through who knows how many gallons of methanol. Someone had dug a pond, trucked in fifty loads of dirt, and gathered dozens of gearheads, mechanics, safety officials, heavy-equipment operators, and E.M.T.s in the hope of launching people like me just a little bit skyward. It was quite possibly the most pointless thing I’ve ever done. I think it was the most fun I’ve ever had.

Later, I asked Meents for an honest assessment. “I could see going forward with you,” he said. I asked him how many training sessions I’d need to be ready for a show. He thought for a moment. “Twelve,” he said.

Afterward, I joined some of the technicians at a diner. We swapped videos of wrecks while we ate. Then I hopped into my Nissan. Kayla Blood, the driver who moonlights as a real-estate agent, had warned me, “Be careful when you get out and get in your personal car.” After a training session, she’d said, it’s easy to plow it through a fence. I drove very carefully back to my hotel. This time I didn’t have much success falling asleep, so I lay there on the sheet, picking the silt out of my ears. ♦