The Anthropocene Reviewed(46)
But I do think car racing accomplishes something—it takes both the person and the machine to the edge of possibility, and in the process, we get faster as a species. It took Ray Harroun six hours and forty-two minutes to drive the first five hundred miles at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway; it took 2018 winner Will Power just under three hours.
That’s his real name, by the way. Will Power. Nice guy. Once I was standing by a valet stand next to Will Power, and when the valet showed up with my 2011 Chevrolet Volt, Will Power said to me, “You know, I am also a Chevrolet driver.”
But the Indy 500 isn’t really about going fast; it’s about going faster than everyone else, which reflects one of my top-level concerns about humanity: We cannot seem to resist the urge to win. Whether it’s climbing El Capitan or going to space, we want to do it, but we also want to do it before anyone else, or faster than anyone else. This drive has pushed us forward as a species—but I worry it has also pushed us in other directions.
* * *
On the day of the Indy 500, though, I don’t think about what the race means. I’m not considering the ever-diminishing distinction between humans and their machines, or the Anthropocene’s accelerating rate of change. Instead, I am merely happy.
My best friend Chris Waters calls it Christmas for Grown-Ups. My race day starts at 5:30 in the morning. I make a cup of coffee, check the weather, and fill my backpack cooler with ice, water, beer, and sandwiches. By six, I’m checking my bike to make sure the tires are properly inflated and my patch kit is ready. Then I bike down to Bob’s Food Mart, where I meet up with friends and begin the beautiful early morning bicycle trip down Indianapolis’s Central Canal Towpath. Some years, it’s raining and cold; other years, the heat is overwhelming. But it is always beautiful, riding and joking with my friends and their friends, many of whom I see only once a year.
We bike down to Butler University’s track, where every year two of our friends engage in a one-mile footrace at seven in the morning. The IndyCars get faster decade over decade, but the footrace slows down. We place bets, and one or the other of them wins, and then we get back on our bikes for a couple of miles before stopping again outside the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where we meet up with more people, until we are a traveling band of a hundred or so bicycles. Everyone waves as we bike by. “Have a good race,” we say to one another, or else, “Safe race!”
We’re together, you see. We bike until the trail dead-ends at Sixteenth Street and then begin the long trip west, merging with the cars that are already stuck in traffic even though the race won’t begin for five more hours. We bike single-file for a nervous-making ten blocks before turning into the town of Speedway. People are sitting out on their porches. Occasionally, a cheer will erupt from seemingly nowhere. Everyone is selling their front yards as parking spots, shouting out prices. The noise level is rising now. I don’t like crowds, but I like this crowd, because I’m in an us that doesn’t require a them.
We make it to the Speedway, chain our bikes to a fence near Turn 2 and then head our separate ways. Some of us like to watch the race from Turn 2; others at the start/finish line. There are more traditions to come: the singing of “Back Home Again in Indiana,” some second-tier celebrity saying, “Drivers, start your engines,” the parade laps, and the race itself. Tradition is a way of being with people, not just the people you’re observing the traditions with now, but also all those who’ve ever observed them.
* * *
I’m able to write all of this in the present tense because these traditions function as a kind of continuity—they happened, yes, but they are still happening, and will go on happening. The rupture of that continuity was part of what made May of 2020 so difficult for me. As the pandemic took hold, I felt as if I was being unmoored from what I thought was reality. So much that had recently been extraordinary—wearing a mask, being conscious of every surface I touched or every human I walked past—was in the process of becoming mundane. And so much that had recently been mundane was becoming extraordinary.
The Sunday before Memorial Day of 2020, I packed my backpack as usual, and Sarah and I got on our bikes as usual. Near Bob’s Food Mart, we met up with our friends Ann-Marie and Stuart Hyatt. We wore masks as we biked down to the Speedway, where the gates were locked shut. It was so quiet, so impossibly quiet as we sat in a vast and empty parking lot. When the race finally did happen, in August, it was held without fans for the first time. I watched it on TV, and found it interminably boring.
But I’m thinking back to 2018. Dozens of us are locking our bikes to the chain-link fence and scattering about to our various seats in the crowded grandstands. In four or five hours, we will meet back at the fence, unlock our bikes, and repeat the rituals on the way home. We will talk about how this happened or that happened, how we are happy for Will Power, who is such a good guy and finally got his Indy 500 victory. I’ll tell my Will Power story, only to learn that many of my friends also have Will Power stories. Speedway is a small town after all, even on this day, and we are in it together.
I give the Indianapolis 500 four stars.
MONOPOLY
WHEN MY FAMILY AND I PLAY MONOPOLY, a board game in which the goal is to bankrupt your fellow players, I sometimes think about Universal Paperclips, a 2017 video game created by Frank Lantz. In Universal Paperclips, you play the role of an artificial intelligence that has been programmed to create as many paperclips as possible. Over time, you produce more and more paperclips, until eventually you exhaust all of Earth’s iron ore, whereupon you send probes to outer space to mine paperclip materials from other planets, and then eventually other solar systems. After many hours of play, you finally win the game: You’ve turned all the universe’s available resources into paperclips. You did it. Congratulations. Everyone is dead.