I watched them work for a while with Jayme Dalsing, Monster Jam’s senior director of global operations. The best loader operators can cup a ramp to within fractions of an inch of the proper radius of curvature. They take it out within twelve hours, and then go to the next city to do it again. It’s enough dirt to fill every car on the G train eleven times over. For each venue, the dirt crew hauls in as much as six hundred truckloads in about two days. It was closer to damp basement: eau de nematode. I grabbed a clod and sniffed, hoping for Chanel No. At ground level, a cloud of dust hovered over the track and made my eyes water. Loaders, which have plowlike scoopers, were sculpting the dirt into ramps. Big excavators, the machines with an armlike shovel, were unloading dirt. On the field of MetLife Stadium, a fleet of heavy equipment was preparing the track. In January, a motocross promoter lifted Allen’s entire pile in Kansas City right before a show. “They run around behind us trying to steal our dirt,” Allen said. 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. It’s the bacteria that makes dirt smell like dirt-the scent comes from spores released to ward off predatory nematodes. A single teaspoon of soil can house a billion bacteria, along with protozoa, nematodes, and fungi. The pH balance matters, so Allen grows plants on his pile. Dirt that weathers too much can become the texture of baby powder. It’s surprising how easily good dirt can turn bad. It’s just pure sand.” The company spent three hundred thousand dollars trucking in loads of clay from a vein near Fort Myers. “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. Sometimes finding that mix is impossible. 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. 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. Allen knows that Atlanta’s clay is red, and Glendale, Arizona’s stains concrete. has identified and named about twenty thousand types of American soil. So we took a night of hauling, and we brought over three thousand yards of clay at night, truck after truck, hundreds of truckloads.”Įvery dirt is different. “Our dirt in Philadelphia is stored behind Lincoln Financial Stadium, under I-95. “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. “A Russian guy, Vlady something,” Allen said. “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. “It’s so hard to find good dirt,” Daniel Allen, who’s known informally as Monster Jam’s senior director of dirt, told me. When I showed up on the Thursday morning before the event, a procession of dump trucks was shuttling between the site and the stadium. 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. 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. Rallies, these days, are less demolition-derby crash-fests than aerial acrobatic shows involving twelve-thousand-pound vehicles. This requires building a hundred and thirty elaborate, temporary tracks, with massive jumps and ramps constructed out of dirt, like sandcastles for a giant. Monster Jam runs events in about a hundred and thirty stadiums and arenas annually, on six continents. 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. They obsess over them like vintners obsess over terroir. 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. A monster trucker is the kind of person who has a favorite type of dirt.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |