This Offbeat Life
New Economy Cooking
Backpacking by Bus

Dumb-Ass Trips
Looks at Adventures in Recycling.

text & photographs by Leslie Strom

This might be the ultimate in Dumb-ass trips so far. The small farming town of Lind, Washington (named for the singer Jenny Lind) holds an ambitious rodeo weekend every year in June that draws thousands of people from all around Eastern Washington. There are two days of rodeo events, a dance Saturday night, a big breakfast Sunday morning. The whole thing is launched Friday night with the highly weird Combine Demolition Derby. You know. A demolition derby. Except with wheat combines.

This year I take my friend Tory along because, as he put it, it's a guy thing. Engines and destruction. To me it's absurdist theater, performance art, and a fusion of entertainment and recycling.

If you get there early, you can watch the teams of mechanics with baling wire, duct tape and more baling wire, getting the machines to run. Simply running often puts a combine ahead of the game. The dry grasses in the back lot occasionally catch fire and a tanker truck puts it out. Business as usual.

The Combine Demolition Derby traditionally starts out with a beauty parade. The combines, which must be inoperable for harvest and at least 25 years old, are dolled up with paint and crepe paper and driven (I use the word loosely) into the rodeo arena. The most popular machine is determined by applause, and wins a $250 prize.

I notice quite a few returning combines from a few years ago. There is the Shepherd to Lost Sheep (with a wolf head and light-up eyes and a crowd-pleasing horn that brays out the first bar of "Dixie" that starts "I wish I were in the land of cotton".) The all-girl entry Raisin Cain is decked out with fringe and purple grape-like balloons with "Crush me, Squeeze me, Make me Whine" on the front. One newcomer is a humble little grey Allis Chalmers combine that looks like it might have once been steam driven.

This year there are two heats of nine combines each. A brave soul drops a flag and the machines all start lumbering around the dirt arena. All the drivers wear helmets and heavy shoes, and a combine must turn off the engine when it's considered out of the running (which means it won't start up again even if all of Utah prayed over it)

Halftime entertainment includes watching the tow vehicles drag the disabled combines to the back lot (where, once again, the grasses catch fire), the crews collecting winged-off combine parts, and some kids from a dance school who clog on a portable dance floor. I go for a $1.50 hotdog, and am consoled by the fact that all proceeds are sheer profit for them, since they don't waste any time or energy on heating it up.

For the derby a combine doesn't need a front scoop, wheels, a back cowling or much of anything else. If it moves, it's in. Kiss Me is still in the game because of what seems to be a better engine and a reinforced scoop on the front that protects it from the other combines. The driver of Kiss Me is grandstanding, smashing the Cascade Potato Chips combine repeatedly. The driver of Cascade is looking a bit annoyed, since he is sitting there dead as a doornail and Kiss Me keeps at him just because he can. Finally on the eighth whack, the referee makes him stop. Then he looks around for someone else to bash, and there is only one left.

The little old Allis Chalmers is running on just an engine and a single front wheel, and has actually managed to debilitate a few other bigger combines by sheer will, while Kiss Me is busy showing off. The Allis Chalmers driver is at that moment carefully trying to get the thing moving out of the deep dirt by rocking it, ready to give that bully showboat Kiss Me a lesson in old age and treachery. (I believe this machine had the fewest remaining parts on it of all 18 entries.) The old grey thing starts to drag its carcass toward Kiss Me. Kiss Me makes a giant slow showy swath around the arena, all ready to send the antique to the Happy Threshing Ground. I'm holding my breath, hoping for a David and Goliath finale, waiting for the old thing to show the glossy bully what a real combine can do. They get closer, closer, and... the Allis Chalmers driver's shoe catches on fire. He kicks the flames off, a few more flames come out of the exhaust. The referee signals him to turn off his combine.

The driver curses and protests, totally unwilling to lose with a whimper, and we all feel badly for him. He has been on the brink of something so heroic it would have been legend for decades. So the youngest, beefiest combine wins. I'm going back next year to see the comeback of the Allis Chalmers, assuming they find enough of it in the dirt to put it back together.

Leslie Strom thinks that in every lifetime a person simply must go see a tractor pull, a demolition derby, a quarterhorse race, and a bagpipe parade.