YellowGreen

Go ahead, say it. YellowGreen. Say it fast, fast as you can. Run the "w" in yellow smack into the "g" in green. Make the space between the two letters tighter than a tubby wrassler's leotard.

That's the space Dan Runte and his foot are waiting for. Runte is 8 feet off the ground, strapped in a molded seat that grips him like a groupie. His right foot is poised on a specially-designed accelerator pedal that wraps around his instep, cradling the foot front and back. If Runte looks past his feet, through the clear, bullet-proof Lexan floorboards and firewall, he can see the massive front tires of his ride, nudged to the very edge of the starting line.

But Runte isn't looking at his feet. His eyes are locked on a pole with two parallel rows of lights: the top three lights in each row are yellow; the bottom pair are green. Racers call this pole a Christmas tree. When the tree turns from yellow to green, you go after your presents. But don't dilly-dally; first one across the finish line gets all the goodies, and Runte is likely to get there in about 4.6 seconds.

Runte's view is trisected by a cage of padded roll bars. The roll bars work. Runte found that out up in Canfield, Ohio, a few weeks ago. He came off the last jump sideways, counter-steered in mid-air, thought he had the wheels back under him. Might have, too, but he dropped over the edge of a horse track circling the infield. "Here we go," he remembers thinking. When it was all over, the tailgate was still bolted on, but that was about it. Now someone has painted two blue arrows on either side of the cockpit. They point straight up. Just a reminder.

A yellow light at the top of the Christmas tree flicks on, indicating Runte's opponent has staged. Runte brings the idle up, the tach trembling at 3,000 or so. He might as well be the only person in the stadium now. You can't get much more alone than this, no matter how many people are watching. Any nanosecond now, those lights will jump, and you'll have one chance, one fraction shaved at the speed of light to stab that foot to the floor, turn loose a hurricane of power, twist those giant wheels like you're spinning a lollipop, blow 10,000 pounds of monster truck off the line like a scalded rhino out of a cannon. YellowGreen.

You're too late. Dan Runte is gone.

Creating the Monster
Back in the '70s, a construction contractor named Bob Chandler owned a Ford F250 pickup. Chandler liked to take the 4x4 off-road, and these trips often resulted in a broken truck. Parts and service were tough to find, so he and his wife started their own four-wheel-drive business.

To promote the venture, they put all the latest 4x4 gadgets on their F250. It kept getting bigger and better, and soon it had attracted enough attention to be featured in truck pulls. And then, in 1981, Bob Chandler decided to see if he could drive his tricked-out truck - which he now called Bigfoot - over a pair of junk cars. A promoter got wind of the stunt and booked Chandler into a stadium show. The crowd went crazy, and the seeds of monster truck racing had been sown.

Today, Chandler oversees a fleet of 16 monster vehicles, and the monster truck scene has evolved from simple car-crushing exhibitions to sanctioned racing events. Of these events, the Penda Point Series has emerged as the premier circuit, and Bigfoot driver Dan Runte has just wrapped up his second Penda Points championship. YellowGreen. You're not the first person he left at the line last year.

The one person who got the jump on Runte more than anyone else over the past 12 months is his teammate and Penda Points runner-up Eric Meagher. Meagher's truck is owned by Bigfoot Inc., but, in a match made in Jeff Foxworthy's heaven, it is sponsored by World Championship Wrestling (WCW). Meagher's ride is called the "WCW Stinger" in honor of wrasslin' superstar Sting; the bed is fashioned in the shape of a scorpion's tail, which flips up, and a genuine Sting action figure rides the grille.

Tag Team Truckin'
On a miserable wet dawg of a rainy day in Indianapolis, I meet both drivers. They're in town for the 15th Annual Big A Auto Parts Fall 4-Wheel Jamboree Nationals - the final event in the 1996 Penda Points Series. We're on the infield of the Indiana State Fairgrounds race track, in one of two 48-foot semi trailers that hauled Team Bigfoot to town. Half of the trailer consists of living quarters; the other half is a rolling garage. Each trailer is hitched to a Ford AeroMax. Meagher and Runte sit across the table from me, and talk about this business of monster truck racing. Turns out, it involves more than one kind of truck.

"Part of the criteria it takes to get into this group ..." says Meagher, "... is drivin' one of these," finishes Runte, pointing a thumb over his shoulder toward the AeroMax. "It's different than basically any other motor sport," continues Meagher. "A lot of people are intrigued that not only do we drive the race trucks, but we drive the semis down the road, to and from the show, and when we get back to the shop, we unload the trucks, and we work on them ourselves."

"We clean 'em, we work on 'em, we maintain 'em," adds Runte. "Exactly," says Meagher. "You stop by the shop and you'll see the guy you saw racing over the weekend cleaning a 66-inch tire out back with a scrub brush and a pressure washer. Of course, we're not the only ones. We have a number of crew guys." The crew members help split time on the road, as well. "We run teams. On a long run, we'll drive five, sleep five," says Meagher. "It's not like we're out sightseeing. We're just like your over-the-road trucker. We're on a time schedule. And as anybody who drives over-the-road knows, sometimes we leave St. Louis and go to San Diego, that's a 30-to-32-hour drive, and then after we finish that drive, it's not like we pull in and we're done. It's time to get the trucks out of the trailer."

"And now you're another driver," chuckles Runte. "You run all the way to California, you might do a one-night show which consists of five or six passes, each pass consisting of perhaps five seconds. So you've got a minute of racing for a 64-hour trip." Both Meagher and Runte laugh. "Everybody says, 'You must love this,' " says Runte, "and we do, but you've also got to love runnin' up and down the road."

Taking the Learning Curve
Dan Runte first came into contact with Bob Chandler when Runte and a friend were competing in truck pulls. He joined up as a crew member eight years ago and worked his way up to a driving position. Eric Meagher ran a "mud car" on the East Coast, drag racing the mud-bog circuit. "I kept running into these guys from Bigfoot, but I wasn't interested in crushing cars. When they started racing side-by-side, then I got interested." Like Runte, Meagher spent time "crewing" until a seat opened up.

I ask the two racers what the monster truck learning curve is like. They look at each other. Then Meagher says, "Straight up!" Runte chuckles. "It's learn as you go," says Meagher. Then Runte adds, "You're really never done. If you think you can climb into one of these and it's not gonna teach you something ... it will. The only way you learn is by getting what we call 'seat time.' " And seat time is limited. You can't just take a monster truck out behind the shop and practice. "Beyond cost," says Runte, "the hard thing about practicing is that no two tracks are ever the same."

"Ninety percent of this sport is reaction," says Meagher. "You have to see what's going to happen before it happens. You have to know your truck has done this or that on a particular dive, so you react long before it happens. A good driver is setting up for his landing on the way down."

And that takes us to the question everyone asks: What's it like? How does it feel to hit that second jump at 60 miles an hour, grab all that air? Meagher looks at Dan before speaking. "It's really hard to relay to somebody who's never done it. It's almost like taking off in an airplane. I mean, when it pulls you back in the seat, and then the seat just lifts up, and basically launches you in the air, and as soon as you're in the air, I don't hear the motor or anything. It's just perfectly quiet. And then it's like, just as fast as you got up in the air, you're coming down, and then it's crash! and your job begins right now!"

Calling Miss 4-Wheel
The sun comes out, and I take a stroll around the grounds. A steady parade of muscle-bound 4x4s winds through ranks and ranks of their strapping cousins. One truck stops. A man jumps out, polishes madly, then edges back into the flow. Every bumper seems aimed at the bridge of my nose. The air trembles with the petulant grumble of huge engines at idle. Every now and then someone stamps the foot-feed; an angry blat! raps out across a forest of raised hoods.

Striped tents and trailers with flip-down sides overflow with lift kits and suspension systems. A man hawks a 10-by-20 foot wall of videos of every spectacular crash you could ever hope to ogle. A woman shoulders past me, and I read her T-shirt: "Girls Kick Butt." A couple has matching T-shirts. His says "Joe." Hers says "Jomama." A man's voice drones on the public address system: "All Miss 4-Wheel contestants, please report to the main stage ... you are going to be shown where your dressing room is."

I cannot begin to imagine.

In the end, I spent most of the weekend on the roof of Bob Chandler's RV, watching the monsters play. Heat after heat, they paired off. The Christmas tree would flash, the hurricane would hit, and the earth would shake. The trucks pop across the first jump, barely brushing the cartops, and touch down in no-man's land. The four tires - so big they would make a fine hot tub - mill into the dirt and fling the truck forward over the second jump and up against the sky.

This isn't about crushing cars anymore. This is about speed ... power ... flight. Bigfoot driver Sky Hartley - a man has a name like that, he's got to race - is on the roof with me. Hartley, who used to run a semi hauling freight, now runs WCW's skeletoid "Dungeon of Doom" monster truck. He's off this weekend, but is along in reserve.

We watch Runte blast off the line, and later Hartley explains: "That's where the race is: the starting line. You got the power, you might make up some ground in no-man's land, but once you hit that second ramp, the race is over. You're in the air, there's nothin' you can do about it, you just go for the ride."

Late Sunday afternoon, Meagher is doing an interview for WCW. When he finishes, I shake his hand, bid him good-bye. He and Runte will be recognized for their one-two finish at a year-end awards banquet that evening. And then? Meagher points to the waiting AeroMax and says: "Tomorrow morning that rig will fire up, and I'll be the one behind the wheel."

Come morning, he's just another truck driver.

After the show, Michael Perry headed home to Wisconsin for deer season. With his freezer full, he completed a collection of short stories, Why They Killed Big Boy, and a live-performance tape of humorous tales from Foggy Crossing, Wis., called Never Stand Behind a Sneezing Cow. For more on monster trucks, visit the Truck World homepage at http://truckworld.com.