Your hands sink into the very foam of the wheel.  You want to claw your fingers into the willing life, to embrace it, to crush it against you.  Your eyes would clamp shut from the shudder if you didn’t need them open to negotiate the corner, and to consume the vastness of a thousand acres of breathing Iowa countryside, sailing high just over the crest of the bluff.

There is a moment, there, just beyond Tree Corner, when the laughter and the joy you’ve been firing off in full, round volleys since you left the track marshall suddenly crash back in on you like great waves filling a weak and temporary vacancy below.

But it’s too much, too dense and wide to fit in your stomach, in the car.  Too delicious for the confines of your palate.  For though it bears the character and color of the signal you sent, it has been textured and sharpened, because this is the laughter, the joy of God.

A man, a father, has great rapture in creating, but how much greater in watching his creation create?  Peals of jovial thunder erupt from God as he tunes his senses to his children painting new apexes, composing downshift chorales, sculpting a slipstream for the angels who strain to draft.

You caught all this today, out on Tree Corner.  Your manifolds stretched into their joints, your tread softened and gathered stones.  And you thought the compression would end you, that you’d detonate into a million steel shards, leave a long, blood-black streak on the fissured asphalt and roll to a silent stop.

But you didn’t.  Because though you’ve known this joy seldom enough to forget it with the very first Monday to wander across your path, you were built for this.  You were designed to take it, to open to all the fire and octane and oxygen the whole of the atmos could feed you- and exult in it.  You were forged for speed and laughter.