Hey everybody, Dylan here. We are back with our weekly collaboration with Off assignment.

Every Tuesday we are airing one of off assignments essays and these essays are incredibly

Transportative they take you to another time another place another way of seeing the world. We're actually running two short essays today.

Each one will give you a snapshot of a specific place at a specific time and they're well they're a little different than what we normally do.

They're incredibly immersive experiences. It's like the Sonic equivalent of running

and diving into an ice cold pool. It is surprising and refreshing and you feel really nice afterwards.

So Atlas Obscera is going off assignment and we're going to begin at a racetrack in Pennsylvania.

Here's that episode. 845 p.m. at the Seelens Grove Speedway is a wall of sound rising up from the sprint cars racing around the half mile track of clay and dirt.

A wall so impenetrable and absolute, it feels like nothing could live inside this ceaseless thunder of agitation.

A month ago my wife and I moved into our house in the old park downtown Sillens Grove, a small

burrow along the banks of the Susquehanna River in Central Pennsylvania. We are newcomers to the area. the

Newhanna River in Central Pennsylvania. We are newcomers to the area, though our American four square with the sagging

front porch is older than the 1946 Speedway standing on the southern edge of town.

I have heard the cars from a distance. I have smelled the burning gasoline and clutches and rubber.

I have listened to the sound of roaring engines, the distant turbulence equal

parts familiar and indecipitable from the comfort of my bed a mile and a half away.

But it's only on the last race of the that will end up coated in a layer of dirt from the cars that lean too hard on the outside

turns of the track. The pit, he insists, is really where you want to be. The pit lies on the inside of the track, forming an oval island of grass and muddy earth.

In the beginning, I feel like I am marooned there.

The car is circling on all sides in a continuous loop, one sustained for Tissimo Cota of oil and horsepower and steel.

When my neighbor says something to me, when his mouth makes the shapes that would generally produce

something like words. All I can hear are the engines. I nod, I gesture, I say nothing. When the sun is halfway gone, and the sky is burnished by smoke and fumes,

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