Asphalt ghosts

Little by little, the old thunder fades now. In too many places across America, only the ghosts of ghosts remain, and sometimes if you listen hard enough you can hear them in the wind that moans through the abandoned bleachers and faded soft drink signs and aging ovals of asphalt, darkened by years of oil and the black ribbon of rubber that marks the old racing line.

Which is to say, the owners of Baer Field Motorsports Park are closing the place down and putting the property up for sale.

Also, Junior Johnson died the other day.

Those two are somewhat related. As we shall see.

Junior Johnson, to start with, passed Friday at 88, and if you've never heard of him, you've surely heard of NASCAR. If so, Junior Johnson is a big chunk of why, because so much of what NASCAR has become is because Junior Johnson, with his eighth-grade education, was smarter and more visionary (and, yes, sometimes craftier) than a lot more people with a lot more letters behind their names.
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He came up in NASCAR's squalling, scruffy infancy, when the best drivers ran 'shine through the piney woods during the week to pay for racing on the weekends. Junior Johnson was the most notorious of those bootlegger hotshoes, the man the revenuers never came close to catching on wheels but finally nabbed one night when he was traipsing through the woods on foot.

And so off Junior went for a stretch in the big house, and when he came out he gave us a lot of what you see now on Sunday afternoons and the occasional Saturday evening. When you tune in to see the boys drafting at Daytona and Talladega, for instance, you're tuning in to see what Junior Johnson first discovered. When you tune in to see the massive corporate selling machine NASCAR has become in the new millennium, you're tuning in to see what Junior Johnson got rolling way 50 years ago, when he was the go-between that put NASCAR and Winston together.

That gave birth to the sport's first mega-sponsor, and launched what is commonly known as NASCAR's modern era.

So what does all this have to do with Baer Field going up for sale?

It has to do with a particular time and a particular breed of individual who gave American motorsports its lifeblood, and did so in places such as Baer Field and, say, North Wilkesboro, N.C. That's the thread that runs between Baer Field and the passing of Junior Johnson, because North Wilkesboro Speedway sits almost literally in his backyard, and it's the kind of place that birthed the  generation that saw NASCAR through its growing pains.

NASCAR got too big for North Wilkesboro almost 25 years ago, and now it's one of those places where the wind moans and the ghosts of Saturday night features are the only inhabitants. Just weather-warped stands and fading paint and a scoche over a half-mile of sun-bleached asphalt, that's all that's left. There are places like it all over America now, their abandonment as ancient-feeling as Aztec ruins.

There are also, it should be noted, enough local bullrings that still thrive to hope Baer Field will never be one of those ruins.

So much history clings to the place, after all. Bobby Unser once held the track record there. Over the years, the likes of Johnny Rutherford and Gary Bettenhausen and Mel Kenyon ran there, and a whole pile of NASCAR guys: David Pearson, Bobby Allison, Buddy Baker, Darrell Waltrip, Tiny Lund, Dick Trickle.

Mostly, though, Baer Field was a wellspring for local legends, your Moose Myers', Tom Wibles, Larry Zents and Steve Christmans. And, of course, generations of Coes and Stovalls and Cooks, Minichs and Setsers and Wallaces.

It was a place where racing and family finished in a dead heat every Saturday night -- a place where, beneath the smoke that hazed the lights and the blatting rumble of muscled-up engines, mothers and grandmothers kept order while children and grandchildren went looking for mischief.

It's all too special to just go away as it so often has, to become a place of ghosts and depthless silence. And yet, as with North Wilkesboro and places like it, it looks like it has.

A handful of miles north of Baer Field, for instance, there used to be another oval of asphalt. It was called South Anthony Speedway, and a lot of the same names that ran Baer Field ran there, too. It stood a mile or so west of where I grew up, and on summer nights, with the windows flung open, I used to lie in bed and listen to its blare, waxing and waning as the leadfoots got hard on the gas coming off one corner and then lifted slightly as they barreled into the next.

And then one year it, too, was shuttered. Not long after, with my cousin and uncle, I hiked through the woods to the old site. Nothing was left of it but cracked pavement and brown patchy grass and an abandoned, sagging grandstand. And, of course, the ghosts of raucous, long-dead Saturday nights.

Another Aztec ruin, in other words.

In time, naturally, they tore the place down and built something over it. Today, not a trace of it remains. Even the ghosts have departed.

Like Junior Johnson. And Junior Johnson's time.