As I searched vainly for a seat at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, where former N&O reporter Liz Clarke was to read from her book "One Helluva Ride," I thought, "What am I doing here?"

My lack of appetite for stock car racing ranks right up there with my dislike of loud jazz, caviar and priming tobacco. I attended my one and only stock car race decades ago during my bachelor days. I spent the weekend with friends Ed and Eva Wood in the mountain town of Andrews near the Tennessee line.

Looking for a way to entertain me, Ed announced to my dismay that he would treat me to a stock car race near the community of Brasstown. Before departing, I discreetly tucked a paperback in my hip pocket as a firewall against the anticipated boredom.

After a half-hour of watching six or eight souped-up cars race in circles, plowing up great clouds of dust and filling the little valley with the roar of grinding motors, I reached for my book. As the race fans whooped and hollered, I was soon lost in the words of Faulkner, Wolfe and Welty.

It wasn't long before Ed, noting my inattention, snapped, "A.C., for Pete's sake, put that dern book away! You're embarrassing me!"

The ensuing hour and a half droned on like an eternity during which my neck ached from constant turning to follow the cars' course as they roared around the dusty track.

We rode home in near total silence. The speed at which the car screeched around the hairpin curves had me cowering on my seat, just punishment for my insensitive behavior.

Growing up in the foothills, I was well acquainted with the lore of stock car racing, which had its birth in nearby Wilkes County. There, farm boys, weary of raising tobacco and corn, turned instead to producing corn whiskey, a far more lucrative crop. They honed their driving skills by outrunning federal agents during moonshine deliveries to thirsty patrons in Winston-Salem and Greensboro.

Race car king Richard Petty grew up not far from my wife's home in Randolph County. She remembers her father coming home at lunchtime and saying, "Well, I just drove by the Petty place, and those boys are still out their tinkering with those old automobiles. They'll never amount to a hill of beans!"

But as Liz Clarke noted, they amounted to considerably more, financially and professionally, as stock car racing eventually became one of America's top sports.

Why, I'll never understand. With due respect to race car fans, I view the sport as skeptically as a friend who said recently, "Frankly, car races remind me of mice spinning around in those wheels in the research labs. Unless the wheel goes off and the mouse goes into orbit, one lap pretty much looks like all the others."

At Quail Ridge, without meaning to, I became totally absorbed for a full hour by the author's talk and follow-up answers, due, in great part, to her instant rapport with her standing-room-only audience.

And later, I found myself captivated by the book itself, thanks to Clarke's writing skills. She, almost lovingly, depicts the spirit of the unique sport and the colorful personalities who midwifed and nurtured it from infancy to the rich, robust and somewhat raucous industry it is today.

On the book's last page, Clarke, currently a Washington Post sports reporter, answered the question I've pondered for years: "Why do they do this? Risk life and limb in hours-long orgies of sound and fury, weaving in and out of a maze of vehicles moving at speeds up to 200 mph?"

"The point of racing," she explains, was not the destination. It was the ride itself. It was the sheer exhilaration of hurtling into a corner with total commitment. Racing was the ultimate leap of faith, trusting the machine beneath you and every instinct inside you, even when you didn't know what was around the next turn."

My purpose in purchasing "One Helluva Ride" was to mail it to my late friend's two fine sons, in memory of their father and of the deep bonding that developed as for years the three traveled to NASCAR events all across America. This I have done.

But, personally, hearing and reading about stock car racing is a "helluva" lot better than watching the real thing from the stands.

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