American Dirt

Monster trucks, the stars a the modern thrill show, sell more tickets than Taylor Swift

- By Zach Helfand

A monster trucker is the kind of person who has a favorite type dirt. I've heard drivers describe a track as fluffy, sticky, loose, tacky, grippy, greasy, slick, crumbly, powdery, bone-dry, baked out, dead, loamy, earthen, sandy, slidey, soupy, snotty, and marshmallowy. Everyone understands the distinctions. They obsess over them like vintners obsess over terroir. The first time I met an employee of Monster Jam, which sells millions of tickets to its monstertruck shows every year, the first thing she told me was that the company owns more dirt, she thinks, than anyone else in the world.

Monster Jam runs events in about a hundred and thirty stadiums and arenas annually, on six continents. This requires building a hundred and thirty elaborate, temporary tracks, with massive jumps and ramps constructed out of dirt, like sandcastles for a giant. Rallies, these days, are less demolition-derby crash-fests than aerial acrobatic shows involving twelve-thousand-pound vehicles. It's expensive to source and truck in enough dirt to fill a stadium, so the company stashes a big pile near each venue, to be used year after year. For the Meadowlands' MetLife Stadium, in New Jersey, which Monster Jam visited a couple of months ago, the dirt lives in a nearby Superfund site: a decontaminated corner of an old cologne factory. When I showed up on the Thursday morning before the event, a procession of dump trucks was shuttling between the site and the stadium.