Free The Best American Travel Writing 2011 by Sloane Crosley

everything. I'm just so proud to have the U.S. Census on this car."
    Tony Stewart: "I just want to thank Office Depot and Old Spice."
    But Kurt Busch may have best captured the general mood among the fans at the track, and among those at home. When a mic was thrust in front of him just moments after his last-minute defeat, he said, "To lose to the 48 sucks. I'm sure everyone here wanted anyone but the 48."
    By the middle of August, the Sprint Cup season would see a total of eleven different drivers claim victory, with Denny Hamlin, a twenty-nine-year-old Virginian, winning as many races as Jimmie Johnson, and Kevin Harvick leading in overall points with the most top-ten finishes. It was, however, a season that was doing little to reverse NASCAR's fortunes; restoring the devotion of fans would require something far more elusive than rear spoilers and revised start times. NASCAR hoped to inject into the sport not only more action but also a greater sense of authenticity. Gaining speed on such slippery ground would not be easy. The New NASCAR, like the New South, is less culturally distinct from the rest of America than its votaries would like to believe. The sport still delivers on horsepower, but as a costume drama set in some imaginary Dixie, it is no longer as pleasing, or convincing, as it used to be. Every performance leaves the audience longing for some golden era when
The Dukes of Hazzard
played on prime time and the stars of the track were better stand-ins for the stand-ins for Southern manhood who had come before them.
    At Bristol, wandering about the grounds outside the track, I joined some tailgaters in a couple of rounds of cornhole, the beanbag-toss game. The rear window of the car they were tailgating behind displayed both the Red Sox insignia and the number of Jeff Gordon's race car. The owner, busy manning his portable grill, had moved from Boston to Charlotte years earlier, his accent still thick as a Kennedy's. He dropped his
r
's, broadened his
a
's. He went to about a dozen races a year, he told me, and had seen the steady declines in attendance everywhere. "The South built this sport," he said, pronouncing "sport" as two syllables and gazing wistfully at the giant billboards on the speedway's façade, one showing a snarling Dale Earnhardt Sr., another shoots of E-Z Seed grass sprouting from the center of a potted race tire. "It is regional. That's what it's all about. It started to go wrong with the races up North."

The Coconut Salesman
David Baez
FROM
The New York Times Magazine
    T HE COCONUT SALESMAN appears every morning in front of the tourist hotel in Jinotepe, Nicaragua. He stands there with his cart full of coconuts, his machete to hack the tops off, and his bag of straws. He is in his fifties, with a pronounced belly that strains the fabric of the old T-shirts he wears, and dark, wet eyes.
    Last year, unable to find work in the U.S., I came to Nicaragua to stay with a relative. Shortly thereafter I started drinking so much that I checked myself into rehab here for eight weeks. When I got out some months ago, I used to run into the coconut salesman near the market, and he would try to get me to buy coconut milk. I never really liked the taste, yet he was persistent, so one day I asked him why I should spend money on a drink that I didn't like very much. He told me coconut milk has a multitude of health benefits: that it cleans out the kidneys, for example. I asked him if it would therefore be good for a person who had a long history of drinking, and he said yes. So I decided I would try to drink coconut milk every morning. He sold it for 30 cents.
    Not long after, I came to live in the hotel in exchange for volunteer work. And so I saw him every day. One day he told me that he wanted to paint his cart red as a way of attracting more clients. His cart was functional, but some of the wood had rotted away, and the wheels were almost as close to square as they were to round. When I asked him if he