Regardless, I got in my Japanese four-banger close to midnight and made tracks from Los Angeles to Boise, Idaho for its Nightfires, so as to watch drag racing for a couple of nights before button hooking down to Bonneville to catch a day or two of the mother of all maximum velocity time trials: Speed Week…
But I am getting ahead of myself: In Boise, the first round of Top Fuel was at 6 pm on Saturday. On Friday night at 11 pm, I caught the I-5 out of Los Angeles to Route 14 through
the desert and then hit the back roads into Trona from the aerospace graveyard of Mojave…
My eyelids were as heavy as the national debt. I could have died from lack of sleep. I had a thermos of espresso, but at one in the morning it stopped have any real effect. The night was still and quiet enough to hear the sandstone hidden by darkness moan. All signs of life were dormant. And then as quick as you could say Pink Floyd or Syd Barrett or Astronomy Domine, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a streak of fire blazing across the sky. It was the first salvos from a very severe calvacade of shooting stars.
My eyes popped liked a money shot. The sky was on fire and was throwing pyromaniacal punches like Sugar Ray Leonard with two glovefuls of Molotov cocktails. Zip. Ping. Ding. Bong. Shooting stars continued ad infinitum as on this lonely summer night, I had driven into the Perseids, the most outrageous meteor shower to grace the planet… My entire windshield was a wraparound pair of 3-D glasses… I drove and drove and drove 
and gunned the accelerator and pulled over and slept on a park bench sometime around dawn. And as my eyes closed, the frequency of the meteors dimmed and abated, but didn’t stop until after my eyes were closed.
Yes, the bing-bing-ricochet came a night early that trip. The Great Almighty ran Top Fuel 18 hours before I got to Boise.
And when I got there, the more terrestrial form of Top Fuel wasn’t bad either. And neither was Bonneville two days later…
| (Cole Coonce is the author of INFINITY OVER ZERO, as well as the forthcoming TOP FUEL WORMHOLE...) |  |
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