By Jeremy Markovich/NC Rabbit Hole
A moonshine cave! I was not aware that this was a type of cave. But a few weeks ago during tire testing at the North Wilkesboro Speedway, the operations team noticed a crack near Turn 1. When they drilled down into the concrete to see if the ground had softened beneath, they found…a 700-square foot chasm, the size of a one-bedroom apartment, where there should have been dirt.
If you don’t already know, Wilkes County has a reputation for being a place where people made a lot of moonshine. And how convenient that this story dropped now: North Wilkesboro Speedway is hosting the NASCAR All-Star Race next month!
So, is this really a moonshine cave? For answers, I drove out to North Wilkesboro to have a look for myself.
The hole stretched from Row 1 to Row 12 and was fairly wide. There was some sort of wall beneath the ground that ran parallel to the track. There were some columns as well. “There were things underneath there that you wouldn’t normally see underneath a dirt-filled bank,” said Steve Swift, Speedway Motorsports’ head of operations.
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Notably, though, there wasn’t a still or any bottles down there. There also didn’t appear to be any way in or out.
Some quick history here. The speedway opened in 1947, and it was fairly crude in the early years. The 5/8 mile oval was dirt, and it had an uphill and downhill stretch because the speedway’s builder apparently ran out of money when he was grading it.
Consequently, there have always been drainage issues at the track, most notably in 1979. That’s when the fall NASCAR race at North Wilkesboro was called off. Because of worms. (Basically, it rained for a week before the race, and millions of earthworms crawled out of the soupy infield muck and sought refuge on the pavement.)
That history is why Steven Wilson, founder of Save the Speedway, thinks that time and hydrology are the real culprits behind the cave. “The more sober explanation could be that it’s just a bunch of water that eroded this away,” he says.
But there was one more clue that something different was up. While renovations were going on, Paul Call got a little fidgety. Call had worked for the speedway for more than 60 years and lived in a trailer across from the ticket office. For more than 26 years, he was the track’s only employee and served as its caretaker. He saw NASCAR return to the track just before his death last November.
Swift says that during the renovation process, his crews were working on the suites that sit above the grandstand and tried to pull some heavy equipment up on top of the berm. “Paul, as fast as he could move, came up here and stopped us,” Swift says. “He said, ‘Do not get over this section. There’s stuff underneath here that you might fall through.’” Call never said what might be down there, exactly. But he knew something was up.
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People love moonshine stories for one simple reason: They’re fantastic. Reporters find them problematic for another simple reason: they’re almost impossible to fact-check. The only time they cross over into tangible reality is when people get busted for it.
Hence, the moonshine cave story will always live in the chasm between fantasy and reality, which is where legends are born.
In this case, there wasn’t much time to be sentimental. By the time I got to the track, workers had already pumped six truckloads worth of concrete into the hole to shore it up.
As I watched some local television reporters grabbing footage of the hole and doing standups, I chatted with a man in a yellow construction vest. We talked about some of the past races he’d seen here and all the work he had ahead. At one point, he looked at the hole. “Moonshine, huh?” he said. “How could it not be here?”
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Jeremy Markovich writes NC Rabbit Hole. Subscribe at NCRabbitHole.com. Beacon Media syndicates this column, please contact info@beaconmedianc.org.
The following article is an expression of opinion and does not necessarily represent the opinions or policies of the Enlace Latino NC organization. This article aims to generate discussion and exchange of ideas on the subject matter. The author is responsible for the opinions expressed in this article, which are based on his/her knowledge, experience, and subject analysis.