Illustrations by Barry Falls. Source photographs courtesy the author
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When we got to southern Kentucky, we were nine months into our pursuit, an apprenticeship to a dreamworld that we had stumbled upon. I had just expressed my amusement to Remy that our new friend Paul Brown—we had so many new friends—was smoking a cigarette as he casually poured gas from a jug into the fuel tank of his golf cart, a standard pit vehicle at drag strips. People like Paul Brown who…