The Unexpected Appearance of the Collective Creative Spirit

How a NASCAR race became a creative experience

It’s a Sunday, Father’s Day, and my husband, Matt, and I just finished setting up camp at the Iowa Speedway in Newton. We pulled apart his Hawkeye tent, unfolded the lawn chairs, plopped down his Hawkeye camping table, and cracked open a couple of beers before waiting for the first NASCAR cup series race in Iowa to begin. The air is thick.

He was positively giddy when NASCAR announced this race. He was less than giddy when the tickets immediately sold out in presale and then went for over $400. My brother came to his rescue on Friday with two free tickets, and I was the lucky winner to tag along.

Matt is obsessed with racing (he is not the stereotypical race fan that you’re probably imagining—though we did see plenty of those in Newton). He can tell you exactly which lap Jeff Gordon crashed during a race in 2004. Whenever we go to Wal-Mart, he stops in the toy aisle to search for new the diecasts of his favorite drivers. He had a 20 minute debrief phone call about the race Monday morning with his dad and watched his recording of it that night.

On the other hand, racing is decidedly not my thing. The closest I’ll get is reading my book in the same room when Matt has the race on. But that often leads to me moving somewhere else when he yells too loudly about someone driving faster than someone else.

My feelings about racing were cemented when we attended an Indy Car race at the Iowa Speedway in 2019, about a year into our relationship. A severe thunderstorm popped up and we had to hide in the bathrooms. The race started three hours late with a rain delay in the middle. The day that started humid and 90 degrees quickly cooled as the race started at 9 pm, and my future mother-in-law and I shivered under our thin ponchos. I looked the wrong way and missed the one crash of the night, the only part of racing I find exciting, and we got back to Davenport at 4 a.m.

This race’s crisis was a gust of wind that snapped our tent in half, 5 minutes after Matt told me he didn’t need a new one because this one would last a few more races. At least we still got some sun protection out of it.

I had little to no interest in returning. Matt appeased my discomfort by promising not to bother me if I brought a book to read and letting me drive separately in case I wanted to leave early. Marriage is compromise, right?

It’s hard for me to fathom how my husband finds such beauty in racing, just like it’s hard for me to fathom how billions of people see this beauty in a billion different things. Finding something that speaks to me in this way is such a visceral feeling—my lips float, my feet grow airy, my stomach pops up to meet my heart. It’s the deepest sense of aliveness I experience. A feeling so intense that it seems wrong it doesn’t manifest in the same way for everyone else.

His compromise was that he had to be a good sport about taking pictures with me.

A few months ago, I wrote about how the Iowa Women’s Basketball team evoked this feeling for me. I knew it might be a stretch to say this team was creating art together on that floor every night, but I felt it. It’s one of my most popular pieces because I was able to make legible the creativity I saw among these women—the inventiveness, the wit, the surprise, the fervor. Everything that makes my favorite art.

As I felt the rumble of the engines in my chest and smelled the burnt rubber and soaked up the pure speed, struck with the knowledge that a human was in that machine pushing his body to the limit to control the uncontrollable, I began to understand why why my husband feels that spark of creative aliveness when watching this sport. It almost felt like a concert—everything was so loud and big and overwhelming in a good way. I felt the velocity inside my body. The collaboration of all of these sounds and movements enveloped me on a level that felt much bigger than me, a level that superseded a normal every day experience.

I saw an innocent joy in his eyes as the announcer spoke “the most famous words in racing,” (Drivers…Start! Your! Engines!)—it’s the same joy I get from a great book or listening to a Chappell Roan song. It’s the joy you get from connecting with a beauty you understand fundamentally, a beauty that runs you 200 mph around a track and shoots you straight into the moon.

He couldn’t contain his excitement.

I told Matt I still won’t be watching races with him and to hold off on buying any future tickets. But at least I can understand better why it matters to him so much. There’s something unmistakable about how our deepest passions elevate our existence, even just for a little bit.

We plug into a collective experience when we allow ourselves to be moved into this way, an existence where we stand with one foot in this physical world and one foot just beyond, where beauty is limitless and feeling is magnified and humanity becomes just a bit clearer.

It’s the place where we finally understand the intrinsic value of creation and intense devotion to a craft. The value of our very reason for living.

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June 28 is the last Friday of the month, which means the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative is holding its monthly lunchtime Zoom meeting for paying subscribers—the Office Lounge.

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