Wind on the Palouse is relentless. It’s been that way since the last ice age, a million years or more. It’s the wind that made this place, and the hills that comprise the 19,000-square-mile region of the Columbia Plateau owe their soft rolling shapes and their silty fertile soils to it. The dryland farmers of eastern Washington who have called the area home since the 1880s owe their livelihoods to it. Mostly, the wind blows from the southwest, in off the Pacific and over the Cascade Mountains, but different seasons and different times of the day can dictate its direction and its ferocity. It can howl through these hills, though, up one side and down the other, sending elegant waves over entire fields of green winter wheat. In great gusts, it batters semitrucks side to side as it crosses U.S. Route 395, before heading into a shallow ravine and straight down State Highway 21, to the place where the road eventually becomes Second Street. Here, a tiny town begins.
On these outskirts sits the Lions Club Arena, where late on a Friday afternoon in early June, the wind seems to come together once and for all in the dusty center to whip up a fierce little devil that whirls 10, 20, 30 feet into the air before crashing against the catch fencing and falling to tiny gritty pings over the empty bleachers.
They won’t be empty for long. In an hour or so, there will be butts in seats, the day’s gales a memory, replaced by unmuffled horsepower and the spinning tires of beat-up old cars. In 24 hours, the big machines will fill the place, the main attraction that will kick this fine rich soil every which way into big ol’ clouds—to the delight of all who have paid to see a rare spectacle unfold. Welcome to Lind, Washington, home of the 35th annual Combine Demolition Derby Weekend.
For 20 years, on biannual trips to visit family in Montana, I drove 395 past Lind, which sits about 75 miles southeast of Spokane. Each time I read the sign near the exit, stylized like an old post card: “Greetings from LIND. Home of the World Famous Combine Demolition Derby, 2nd Weekend in June.” And each time I’d stare down 21 as I crossed over it, thinking I might see something, some evidence of combines in combat. I never saw anything, of course, but I always told myself I needed to go to this thing someday. That day finally came in 2024, when I headed up there to see what a combine derby was all about. Turns out it is exactly what you think it is—a dozen or so hulking old machines lumbering around in a diesel-powered battle royale, bashing into each other until only one remains.
It is about more than that, though. There are the support races Friday night, for one, because every main event needs its undercard. But more importantly, there are the people, those very same farmers who have weathered the wind and cultivated this land for nearly 150 years. They gather here for one special weekend before the harvest to let loose on ancient machinery they somehow manage to keep repaired and running, year after year, just for the joy of crashing into their good friends, their cousins, their brothers.
As I roll off the highway and enter Lind town limits, two things stand out: First is the row of old John Deere combines parked just off the road. There is tumbleweed stuck up against them, and each is for sale at $500 apiece—with a $400 rebate for entering one in the derby. The other is the town limits sign itself: Population 4372. It’s a lie; the town of Lind has held steady at 500–550 inhabitants for more than a hundred years, down from its 1910 peak of 800, when the Chicago, Milwaukee & Puget Sound Railway added a stop here and the place boomed. The sign is simply the local Lions giving a wink and a nod to the influx that occurs every second weekend of June, when thousands of derby fans roll in from all over Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and California.
With some time to kill before Friday’s races get under way, I drive ahead into Lind proper. There is no stop light, no fast food, no gas station—predictable for a town of this size, in what amounts to the middle of nowhere. No convenience store or motel—not a functioning one, anyhow. Many buildings sit empty, including the old Empire Theater and a long-ago Chevy dealer. But there’s a tavern—Haase’s—and an ex-tavern, Slim’s (for sale by owner). The Golden Grain Café and Jim’s Market, Crazy Quilter and the Adams County Historical Society Museum, where a mangy cat in no hurry scratches its sides along the brick. The senior center and the maternity store appropriately neighbor one another, and the elementary and middle schools are just up the hill. Beyond them, just north of town, is Lind’s newest crop, a 200-acre solar farm, the largest in the state. But this is a wheat town, and grain elevators dominate the architecture, the tallest buildings around: Columbia Grain at one end, Union Elevator at the other, both of them on the BNSF line that has existed here in various guises since the Northern Pacific laid the track through Lind in 1883.
At the western edge of town lies St. John Hardware, an old fuel station-turned-Case International Harvester dealership that services farm equipment from all over the area. The lot is full of modern combines in for service ahead of the harvest—big red half-million-dollar behemoths that will earn their keep a month from now. But business hours are over, and instead the work is happening on a motley mix of older machinery destined for greatness in the Lions Arena.
Jacque Laird is busy hand-lettering the names of loved ones on the bright red header—the broad “mouth” of the beast that eats up the grain and churns it into the combine’s guts for processing—on the front of a machine called The Extinguisher. Beside her a man rattle-cans the giant steel wheels silver. “It’s a family affair,” Laird says. “This is my nephew Tyran’s combine. Both of my boys and their combines are around the corner.” The Laird family, like most Lind families, are fixtures of the derby, if not in participation, then certainly in attendance. “I’ve been coming since the first one back in 1988,” she says. “Only missed one, the day I graduated college.”
That first one was the idea of the late Bill Loomis, a local who ran an International dealership at the east end of town, across from the arena. During intermission for the rodeo being held as part of Lind’s centennial celebration, a handful of old combines did battle. The event was a hit, naturally, and the Lions have been putting it on every year since—pandemics excepted.
Out in the open lot, exposed beneath an oppressive sun—another unrelenting part of this treeless place—I find Derrick, Jacque’s oldest boy. A large man with a cherubic face and thick dirty hands, he is staring at The Cavy, a combine painted the worst shade of tan. Its origin story is a simple one: “Well,” he says, “I had a little tan Chevy Cavalier, a 2005. Drove it all through high school and college and just beat the f#@% out of it. I knew I was going to beat the f#@% out of this, so why not call it The Cavy? All the locals know the car and understand the name on the combine.”
This is 30-year-old Derrick’s third year with The Cavy. He skipped last year for a friend’s wedding but made the finals the year before. He says he’s got a good feeling about this year, before he describes some of the changes he’s made. “For one thing,” he says, “I cut my air filters off, because they were in the way of my stacks.” He also did a little work to his intake, for entirely practical reasons. “I throw all my empty beer cans behind me into the bulk tank,” he says, before pointing up there with his thumb. “You should climb up there. It’s impressive.”
(Eventually I do climb up there, and it is indeed impressive; tomorrow more than one combine will pitch some empties into the arena on impact).
“Anyway, the hole in the intake’s about that big,” he says, at which point he constricts his thick thumbs and forefingers into an ever-decreasing circle until he arrives at the right size. “Turns out the diameter of a Coors Light can is the same diameter of a 6622 turbo. And if you shut off the air to the turbo,” he explains, then grins broadly. “Your motor don’t run.” It won’t happen again, he assures me.
He stores The Cavy here, along with his brother Bryden’s combine, called Pour Life Choices, and his cousin’s Extinguisher, for the 364 days they are not competing. The place belongs to Tyran’s dad Mike, who ran his own derby machine for several years. Now he helps organize the weekend with the Lions. All of them run Deeres. Everyone does, in fact.
***
John Deere was an Illinois blacksmith who revolutionized farming in 1837 when he converted a broken saw blade into a steel plow. He’d seen how the moldboards of traditional iron and wooden plows quickly became caked with sticky Midwest soil, and by changing both the shape and the material of the plow, he alleviated those problems.
Deere died in 1886, but the company bearing his name continued to innovate, and in 1927 the outfit introduced its JD No. 2, the world’s first combine, so called because it combined harvesting and threshing into a single operation. The 1935 No. 36 hillsider allowed farmers to harvest grain on gradients of up to 50%, while the No. 55 of 1947 was the first self-propelled combine.
Deere even had a skunkworks. Two-cylinder engines had sustained its tractor business for 42 years, but in 1953, company president Charles Wiman initiated a top-secret development program, based out of an old grocery store in downtown Waterloo, Iowa, that would turn this slowly evolving industry on its head. For seven years, Wiman’s select team of engineers prototyped and developed, in complete secrecy, several new models powered by four- and six-cylinder engines. Industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss (designer of the round Honeywell thermostat and the Bell Princess telephone, among many others) was hired to clothe the new Deere lineup, and on August 30, 1960, at Deere Day, in Dallas, the company unveiled its New Generation series of tractors to a 5000-strong assemblage of dealers and farmers, mouths agape.
New Generation combines arrived in 1969, led by the 6600, which was powered by either 303-cubic-inch six-cylinder gasoline or 329-ci six-cylinder diesel engines, each rated at 104 horsepower.
The first two years of production were geared exclusively toward flatland farming, and it wasn’t until 1971 that the dryland farmers of the Pacific Northwest got the machine best suited to their topography: the 6602. These utilized 362-ci gasoline or 404-ci diesel engines, with output for both rated at 121 horsepower, with a top speed on these 20,000-pound machines right around 15 mph. The extra oomph helped power the big hydraulic cylinders of these hillsiders, which could self-level at grades up to 45%. (The company also built a “sidehill” version of the 6600, for grades up to 18% in hillier parts of the Midwest). Deere continued to tweak the 6600/6602 through the end of production in 1978, when it was replaced by the nearly identical 6620—and the 6622 for navigating the Palouse.
No verified records seem to exist on how many 6600-series machines were built, but best guesses among the forums where such things are discussed peg production at roughly 5000 units per year, some fraction of which would have been 6602s and 6622s.
Back at the arena, it is time to kick things off with a bit of chaotic practice for the weekend’s appetizer—derby racing—before each entrant goes out for a flying lap to qualify for the heat races. This is not a large venue, it should be said, a few acres of open dirt with giant tractor tires marking the inside corners of each turn, and 10 or 12 cars fighting for space can get messy. “Who needs a horn when you’ve got a rev limiter?” says announcer Tripp Rogers over the PA system. He calls motorsport events all over the region and considers this weekend a huge honor. “There’s just nothing like it, and I’m really privileged to be able to do it,” he tells me. (Tripp is a master of motorsport dad jokes, I will come to discover.)
Qualifying is a one-lap warmup followed by a flyer, and before that car has exited, the next is beginning its warm-up. It’s a well-oiled machine, but with 74 vehicles to get through, it has to be.
I find a spot to watch beside the track’s entrance, just out of the way of a pair of volunteer rescue trucks—a 1980s Ford Ranger with airbags and trick four-wheel steering and a cut Bronco II, each sitting on 39.5-inch Super Swampers. Beside me stands Lind resident Taylor Kerr and his young son, Dean, who keeps foam plugs pressed into his ears. “When I was dating my wife, she brought me here,” Kerr yells in my general direction. “I raced a pickup a few times and drove a combine a couple years ago.”
Dean takes his eyes off the qualifiers just long enough to turn and shout up at me, “It’s toast now!” His dad dutifully agrees, though he’s here with another version of the family entry, Jaws. “I’m excited to see the turnout tomorrow,” Kerr says. “It’s been a few years since we had a warm derby. If people see rain or cold in the forecast, it keeps them from coming.”
The flying laps range from around 14 to 17 seconds, given the skill, luck, and lack of traction involved in navigating the tight track, though before long multiple cars start landing in the 13s. The thunder of straight pipes is everywhere, the whommmmp! of all gas no brakes, front wheels cocked, back wheels spinning in an endless drift around the dirt.
An orange Camaro goes 13.47. An Olds Cutlass goes 12.63. A guy named Ty Wister, in the #45, a car so unrecognizable to me it’s annoying, hits 12.35. It’s annoying because every other silhouette is obvious, despite their generally post-apocalyptic appearance. There are old Firebirds and LTDs and Malibus, Lincolns and Mavericks and Caprice wagons, a Fox-body Mustang. Hagerty insurance agent Michelle Larsen competes in her lumbering bright-orange Toronado battle cruiser, dual chrome stacks blowing from its hood. But #45 is beat to hell in such a way it’s baffling.
By 7 p.m., 50 cars and 24 pickups have put in their qualifiers for the heat races, and the track could stand a good grooming. There’s a 3000-gallon Peterbilt water truck and a Deere 4455 tractor on hand for that, both of which Tripp introduces to the crowd, before he gets into sponsorship thank yous: “Weed control is courtesy of McGregor Company,” he says. “Thanks for all your herbicides.” And important reminders: “Folks, don’t forget about those raffle tickets. The prestige! The glory! The chance to tell a story! You could drive a combine in tomorrow’s main event! Just ten bucks each.”
Over at the concession stand, it’s the usual fare—burgers, dogs, fries, popcorn—and as I stuff my face during the first couple heat races, I watch as more than one person, somehow oblivious to the ramifications of half a dozen cars sliding around on dirt just beyond them, gets blasted through the catchfence when the pack comes by. Here, have some grit with those fries…
The heat races themselves are a cattle drive at wide-open-throttle, obnoxious pandemonium in a place with no decibel restrictions. Every car and pickup circling the arena is externally fortified to spec, an ugly patchwork of protection that includes strips of steel bolted or welded over the doors and wonky cages of hollow section tubing built up around the front and rear ends, or not. “It’s smash’em bash’em out there, Tripp says over the PA. Wister, he of the quick mystery car, wins his heat and, cheeseburger sufficiently digested, I head off to find him in the aftermath.
The broad dirt paddock behind the arena is crowded and alive, commotion with purpose. The sun is far off in the west now, low and long shadowed and turning all the hills golden just before it disappears behind them. A barbed wire fence lines the grounds; cheatgrass and Russian thistle line the fence. The place smells like hot metal and sweet spray paint, and all around are the sounds of generators and compressors and impact wrenches. The heavy clanking of encouragement from an 8-pound sledge. Swearing and laughing, lots of both.
Wister is hard at work on the car, hammer in hand, pounding on the inside of the left fender, and as I approach, I notice he’s just a kid. “What is this thing?” I ask him by way of introduction.
“It’s a ’93 Ford Taurus,” he replies, then laughs. “This car’s been in my family for probably nine years. It’s been ran forever. I think it was a daily driver for a while then probably had some problems.” He looks around the paddock. “I know that’s how a majority of the cars are. They’ve been daily drivers, they have some problems, then we fix and race them.” He slaps the top of the fender. “This one went from one brother to another, to the dad to another brother—it was all over the place.”
Wister, age 16, primarily races motocross, but he’s entered the family Taurus in equally punishing events around Washington, with mixed results. The car is fitted with tractor tires up front to grab the dirt, courtesy of his sponsor, Tires West. “They’re really cool,” he says of his patron. “They told me if I won, I could keep them. If not, I gotta buy them. Their thing is they don’t sponsor losers, so …” The front of the car is heavily braced, and Wister did the welding himself. “They’re not my best welds, but they’ll hold.” He learned the trade this year at Columbia Basin Technical Skills Center, a trade school in his district that accounted for half of his school days. “They teach a lot of different trades, from engineering and welding to nursing and fire science.” This year he also took advanced manufacturing, and he’s looking forward to engineering classes next year, where he’ll get to play with engines. “I don’t know much about the inside of them right now. I just know how to do all the outside stuff.”
Still, even at 16, the utility of welding is not lost on him. “If nothing else works out after high school, I’ll know how to put metal to metal. Maybe a farmer’ll hire me to do something for him. It’s like my mega backup plan.”
Downtrodden as his Taurus is, it is adorned with the fanciest number plaque you’ll see racing around this place. “I made that, too,” he says. There is pride in his smile that reflects the joy of making things.
I let him get back to race prep, because although he won his heat (a $75 payout), he tells me he’s also entered in “the Aussie” and very much looking forward to it. Once he explains to me what exactly that is, I am, too.
The Australian Pursuit, I learn, is a timed race where six cars are spaced evenly around the arena. The green flag drops, and if you get passed, you’re out. You pass someone else, they’re out. And once under way, it’s easy to see why “the Aussie” is such a crowd favorite event. For starters, it begins after dark, and the disappearance of the sun makes it feel 20 degrees cooler, a welcome respite. More importantly, if ever it was possible for cars to play some combination of musical chairs and tag and even duck-duck-goose, then the Australian Pursuit is it. The will they/won’t they catch’em aspect lends extra bite to the nail-biting, though Tripp is quick remind the crowd: “You know this is only day one, folks. Let’s temper our celebrations.”
Still, the fans they cheer as one by one the cars get caught from behind and eliminated, and then the “oooOOHHS” build and build with each lap as the final two circle the track, circle one another, speeding for dear life but trying to keep it together, too, for there is no room to put a wheel wrong when you’re the hunter … and the hunted. In his race, Wister wins with four seconds to spare, overtaking the leader when its right front wheel falls off. Predictably, the crowd goes wild, a fitting end to the night’s action.
***
Saturday morning kicks off with the Grande Parade through town. The forecast calls for “only mid-80s,” but by 9 a.m. it feels as if we’re already there, and it’s certainly not going to get less sunny anytime soon.
The Lind-Ritzville High School marching band high steps down East Second Street before turning onto 1st, and behind them come rodeo queens and congressional hopefuls, a float for the Spokane Lilac Festival, a float covered in dragons and princesses. There’s a kid on a small tractor advertising his lawn care business, the local fire brigade, and a few classic cars—a weathered Model T pickup, a Beetle, a ’69 Mustang in Acapulco Blue and a ’71 Camaro in the remarkably similar Ascot Blue. Several of Friday night’s heroes rev their engines through the slow turn; there’s Hagerty Michelle in her mangled, wonderful Olds Toronado.
Then come a handful of combines, led by the white Lions Club raffle machine, followed by the black and neon green Grain Digger, Tyran Doyle’s Extinguisher, Derrick Laird, who seems to be hosting a party aboard The Cavy, and his brother hosting his own up on Pour Life Choices. Black smoke billows, shimmering confetti flies, and candy rains down. Then it is over, and the whole town shifts a few blocks east to the park in anticipation of the big Rollin’ Coal BBQ.
I take a pass, because the combines are headed back to the arena, and there are nine more out there, too, so lunch can wait.
In the middle of the paddock I spot Taylor Kerr standing beside a baby blue combine: Jaws. This thing has been in the trenches, and previous derbies have wrecked it good. There are dents all over, and the entire left rear bodywork is caved in, the ladder maimed. The tiny rear wheels are just that, wheels. Rear tires, it seems, aren’t all that necessary, with all the power driving the giant gnarled 30.5L-32VA (roughly 800/65R32) fronts.
Kerr is from southeast Oregon but now lives here, married into a wheat farming family. “I work with her dad and her brother. They had a spot open on the farm, and I’d never done it before, so … Plus I like running equipment.”
He tells me that unlike irrigation farming, dryland farming relies solely on the weather for its water, and here they get about 10 inches of rain annually—a far cry from the Olympic Peninsula 160 miles west, which averages 12 feet. To conserve moisture in the soil, farmers have their fields in summer/fall rotations, planting cover crop or else leaving fields fallow through the summer. “That’s why you’ll see dirt fields and fields with wheat. The rotation means it takes two years to get one crop.”
The conditions sound harsh, and they are, but hard red winter wheat and soft white winter wheat thrive in this breadbasket, and this year’s production will total about 144 million bushels, worth nearly $2 billion. Most of it gets exported overseas.
For Kerr, Jaws is a family effort, and this the third machine they’ve run over the last 22 years. And like the Lairds, like Tyran Doyle, like everyone else here, it’s a Deere hillsider, a later 6622 model. Case and International and Gleaner and Massey Ferguson built competing combines for this terrain in period, but you wouldn’t know it, so pervasive are the green machines. That’s changing, though.
“They were just so common and easy to get,” Kerr says. “But now they’re getting harder to get. There was a time when scrap prices were really good, so people were just scrapping them. And now we realize, ‘Oh, it’s getting harder to find combines.’”
Fortunately, combines are hardy machines. “Unless something bad’s wrong, getting them going again is pretty easy,” Kerr assures me. “We brought a couple home. One had been sitting for 20 years. A new battery and some starting fluid, and it fired right up.”
Hardy, yes, but obsolete. Most 6602/22s have headers 18 feet across; newer machines can span up to 40 feet, with capacity of their bulk tanks—where the grain gets stored once it’s been through the mechanical innards that literally separate the wheat from the chaff—about triple the size. A good-running 6602 is still perfect for a hobby farmer, but today’s commercial production demands simply require bigger, faster, more.
Bigger. Faster. More. That could be a tattoo somewhere on Bryden Laird’s long, lanky body. It would pair nicely with the one that says “Pour Life Choices,” which, as you’ve probably guessed, matches the name of his combine. Bryden, 27, is Derrick’s younger brother. This is his third year running a combine in the derby, but he’s been working on them since he was 11, and he knows a thing or two.
“Cut your header down,” he says. “There’s no reason to have one wider than your combine out here. And make sure you steering brakes work.” The steering wheel controls the rear wheels, but operators can brake the front wheels individually, which gives these combines surprisingly balletic maneuverability. Finally, he adds, most importantly: “Modify your rear axle. Mine’s cut down and short.”
There are two prime targets out in the arena. One is the rear axle, and on combines that haven’t been modified back there, those that still have full-size tires and axles in their stock location, it’s a huge, easy target. There’s no better way to cripple a combine than to flatten its ass end. The other is the drive system. These combines feature a hydrostatic transmission, with the engine sending its power through a hydraulic pump, which pressurizes fluid sent to motors on the drive wheels. The labyrinth of belts and pullies controlling all of this is exposed on the left side of the machine, below the driver and behind the front tire. A direct hit there can spell disaster. “Aim for the drive belts,” Laird says.
The rules allow for fortifications, of course, including 10 pieces of iron (angle, square, channel, or flat) of any length, mounted just about anywhere on the combine. Since the cabs are removed, a small cage must be built up around the driver as well, though this doesn’t count against the 10-piece maximum. Some teams remove the straw walker cover, essentially a giant box on the back of the combine, and then relocate the rear axle inward, effectively shortening the wheelbase and, more importantly, tucking the wheels up beneath the body, out of harm’s way.
Those are the regulations, anyhow, but just how well fortified and how thoroughly modified a combine is has a direct relationship to A) how much free time you have, and B) how long you’ve been at it.
“A lot of these guys spend all winter working on these,” says Dan Kulm, part of the outfit running The Bandit, with a terrific black-and-gold paint scheme entirely influenced by a ’77 Firebird Trans Am. “We start like the week before. It’s always a rush to get it entered, and then it breaks in the qualifier heat, and then it’s a rush to get it back out there. Then you say you’re never going to do it again. And then like a week before the next one, ‘Hey, we’re gonna do it again.’ Oh, alright.”
***
By the time the clock strikes 2 and the qualifier heats begin, the temperature is a lot closer to “only low 90s” and the air is remarkably still. No wind today, and no clouds, either. The top two finishers from each of the three 15-minute qualifiers will compete in the final, along with the top three from a consolation heat. Tripp gives us the lowdown on today’s attendance: “Melinda just did a headcount and said there are 400,000 people here today. Record-breaking crowd, folks!” That Tripp…
Five combines enter the arena: Cornfed Caddy, Search & Destroy, Grain Digger, Prom Queen, and the orange machine of Stumpf & Sons Farms. Officials in Day-Glo vests line them out around the space and each faces the center. Engines rev, the green flag drops, and 95,000 pounds of ancient farm equipment lumbers toward oblivion.
Search & Destroy and Prom Queen meet in the middle, header to header, then back up and do it again. S&D’s rear axle sports dinky little forklift tires, and the whole setup has been relocated so far up beneath the frame that the entire back end comes off the ground whenever it goes into reverse. This guy derbies.
There’s an element of sumo wrestling to the proceedings. Or bison rut, perhaps. Comically large creatures slamming themselves into one another, jockeying for dominance.
Grain Digger turns laps, waiting for the perfect time to dive in and strike, then joins Cornfed Caddy and PromQueen in a pile-on of the Stumpf combine. On it goes, metal to metal, dust clouds flying, helmeted heads snapping, until finally the driver on Prom Queen pulls down his orange flag—done—followed in quick succession by the immobile Stumpf combine and then, finally, the smoking, limping Grain Digger. Cornfed Caddy and Search & Destroy go through.
The second heat features both of the Laird brothers, along with Jaws and The Bandit, with its big, fragile stock rear wheels. They’re perfect, and so out of place in the arena, and Derrick and his Cavy are well aware. Bryden on Pour Life Choices has made short work of Jaws, and in fleeing the oncoming Cavy, The Banditmakes his escape turn too late and hooks the left rear wheel on the immobile Jaws, which wrenches the rear axle half off the frame and folds it up underneath the end of the combine. Cue David Attenborough: Weakened, slow, and unable to maneuver, it’s only a matter of time before the pack pounces on the fragile beast. Pour Life Choices attacks the back end from the right side, while The Cavy smashes into the left. It’s a crunchy Laird sandwich, to the delight of a crowd only slightly less than 400,000.
The brothers then square up to one another for a series of head-on impacts, the brunt taken by each combine’s reinforced header, until the heat ends and both advance. Just as they’d planned it.
Before the third heat can begin, a big orange JLG telehandler—half crane, half forklift—is deployed to lift the dead tail end of The Bandit and guide it out of the arena. In the paddock, a crane sets it on blocks. There is much work to be done if it is to make the consolation heat.
The final qualifier sees The Bully, Go Cougs, BBC, Corn Star, and Tyran Doyle’s Extinguisher square off. The green flag drops and BBC and Go Cougs collide, full-speed, head on. BBC is slow to recover, the big spiral auger in its header loose and dragging in front. Go Cougs takes the opportunity to circle around and swipes BBC in the rear wheels, knocking the big black machine sideways. The Bully, too, takes a shot at those back wheels, hooks its header up and over them, and the pair get stuck together, sitting ducks. Doyle puts his header right into to the sidewall of Corn Star’s front left tire then immediately takes a hit in his side by Go Cougs, which sends the red combine bucking and twisting in the dust. But revenge comes quickly, and The Extinguisher guns for Go Cougs in the near corner of the arena, building up a great head of steam on the unsuspecting combine. The door over the engine fan flaps and flails as Doyle drives, then slams shut when their headers collide, and Extinguisher, with all that forward momentum, drives Go Cougs back, back, back, into the concrete barricade, where the rear axle snaps on impact, and the barrier moves a good three feet in the process. Its rear wheels now useless for steering and cambered impossibly, they are dragged without spinning, and Go Cougs limps forward in a vain effort to remain competitive. But Doyle on The Extinguisher is relentless and hits him again, this time in the side. Still, Go Cougs stays running, and when the airhorn calls time on the heat, that machine and The Extinguisher advance.
The water truck takes to the track, and once its dust control duties are done, it turns its giant misters on the crowd, the cold water a welcome respite from the heat. “My cellphone! My cellphone!” Tripp cries on the PA.
Before the consolation heat, while the 1 ½-ton grain trucks race, the paddock comes alive one final time as derby finalists make rush repairs. Beyond the paddock is a combine boneyard, dead old derby entrants—including older versions of Jaws and Grain Digger—now lending parts to teams in need.
With all of yesterday’s cars cleared out, the level of chaos in the paddock is at an all-time low; with much of the dirt now visible, the place is dotted with hundreds of black spots, shiny pools of mystery fluid dumped unceremoniously in the last 24 hours by weeping hunks of crap.
Propped up on giant timbers, The Bandit is in dire straits. The entire rear end of its frame is torn, and the team will either need to replace the rear axle or weld on skid plates to drag around. Several members of the Kulm family are on the case, doing what they can in the limited time they have. One man takes a Sawzall to the header, slicing off a huge chunk that got bent into the ground.
The Kulms have been a part of the Lind landscape since 1915, though no one actually lives in town anymore. “I think it was about eight brothers who originally farmed here,” Dan Kulm says. “All our grandparents farmed here together, and then slowly all the farms kind of went away. There’s still a few of us that farm, but there’s just not a lot of options in town anymore, so you’ve got to go other places.” Now most of the cousins drive trucks or work in construction. “But we come back to do this.”
This, however, might be over; it’s not looking good for the consolation heat, though one cousin, the guy buried halfway beneath the belly of the beast, is giving it his all. “See how big those rear tires are?” Kulm asks. “It was a lot of leverage, but we’ve never really seen anything snap like that. So we’re trying to fabricate a little deal for it to ride on, because most of your steering’s on the front anyway. But we’re getting down on time.”
Kulm scans the paddock, taking in the competition. “A lot of these other ones, they carry them over year to year. They get those front ends so smashed there’s no give to them. And then once they put those little forklift wheels on them, it’s hard to take them out.” Like Taylor Kerr, like everyone who makes a go of it here year after year, Kulm understands that they’re running out of old Deeres to enter. Last year, he says, someone drove one down from Lamont, 60 miles away. “They’ve got to keep going farther and farther out to find them, because they’ve depleted all the ones close by.”
The scene over in the Grain Digger camp is largely the same as Team Bandit, with serious repairs and time running out to have a functional rear end for the consolation heat. But if those pits are the picture of hasty, scrambled efforts made under the gun, Derrick and Bryden Laird, each in broad sun hats and kicking back with beers atop their respective machines, paint a completely different scene. The brothers breezed through their qualifier and are riding a high on strong-running combines going into the final.
With the heats for the grain trucks over, Willie Nelson’s “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” serenades them on the way out, and they file past the line of combines headed back into the arena to fight for one last shot at the finals.
The Grain Digger team has managed to remount the rear axle way up underneath, just in time to fight it out alongside Prom Queen, Cornfed Cadillac, BBC, and Stumpf & Sons. Kerr and his family have thrown in the towel on Jaws, and The Bandit, sadly, is nowhere to be seen. It seemed an insurmountable task.
As they file in, white smoke billows from the tall stack of Prom Queen. “Don’t worry, folks!” Tripp assures the crowd, “that’s just pesticide!”
The arena fills up with busted metal as everyone scraps for a place in the final. Each big impact elicits Ooohsand Ahhhs from an appreciative crowd. A rear wheel falls off. The entire auger falls out of a mangled header. Cornfed Caddy sheds enough sheet metal to clothe a small car. “These John Deeres,” Tripp says. “They take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’!”
When all is said and done, that very same Cornfed Caddy, along with the orange Stumpf & Sons combine, advance from the consolation heat to join The Cavy, Extinguisher, Pour Life Choices, Search & Destroy, and the Lind Lions raffle entry in the final.
***
The eight machines lumber and dance through a cagey, attritional final, and after 15 minutes the airhorn sounds.
Derrick Laird collapses atop his hulking tan machine, filthy, exhausted, forlorn. As he slumps, his bearded chin comes to rest on the thick iron bracing, his big freckled arms hang heavy over top of it, and for a moment the look on his face suggests he might cry. Instead, he shouts an angry “F@*%!” Then again, “F@*%,” but this time quieter, plaintive, a desperate “why me?”. The Cavy is dead, the contest is over, and all that labor, all that Coors Light, all his hopes of victory in the 35th annual Lind Combine Derby, are crushed. “I think I spun the coupler on my hydro,” he says, referring to the piece that connects two shafts on a spline going into the transmission. “It was that last hit I made. It sucks.”
Bryden, too, has failed to triumph. “I was going 60 miles an hour across the center of the arena. I f@*%ing like it real fast.” He can’t say for certain whether he got hit in the drive belts or if it was simply the accumulation of impacts. “There’s a lot of moving shit that has to come to a stop,” he says with a big shrug. “And your belts take a hit every time you do.”
Despite the strength of their qualifier and their confidence ahead of the final, it turns out there’s no mitigating the violence of mechanized combat. After a quarter-hour of smash’em bash’em, what results instead is a three-way tie: The Extinguisher, Search & Destroy, and Cornfed Cadillac, all unstoppable, share the spoils. Tyran Doyle gets doused in celebratory beer, happy enough but irked, too, at the inconclusive end.
Drivers dismount and clap each other on the back. Friends and family file onto the dirt floor of the arena to offer high fives and hugs. There are smiles and laughter and emphatic hand gestures, as if they are recreating the event’s best maneuvers. Children and their parents come from the stands to tour the carnage. Interviewed on the arena floor, the raffle winner, still high on adrenaline from his chance to tell a story, can only shout: “That was epic!”
Tripp offers congratulations, offers thanks, bids everyone a safe drive home and a seeya next year. It’s well after 8 p.m. now, and in an hour it will be dark. Nearby, in the beer garden, the Fred Bauer Band takes up a cover of Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me,” which kicks off a party that will carry 400,000 sun-kissed, silt-covered derby fans, or even 4000 of them—brothers, cousins, and friends alike—into the cool, breezy night.