A2 Shopping Cart Race VI

Posted by tomo at 05:48 PM in urban . | 1 Comments

Ok. A couple weeks ago at the end of Ann Arbor Punk Week, there was a shopping cart race. This race, along with Punk Week, has become a tradition here, this being the 6th one so far. I neglected to bring my camera that night, failing to understand the magnitude of the event, which has made me resolve to never leave home w/o it. The 'official' site hasn't been updated in ages, but Firteen finally put up their video capture of the evening!

Before the race, everyone met up in front of the Fleetwood Diner. Here, people made last-minute preparations on their carts and whatnot. The most notable one I can remember was the Abe Lincoln cart with Abe as the driver. Ok, and there were a lot of pregnant chicks with hairy pits, but they weren't racing. At some unknown signal, the crowd started heading towards Main Street. When most of the carts had gathered at the starting line, a police cruiser magically appeared behind them and turned on its blinkers which was like an unofficial start signal causing everyone (who had made it to the start line) to go. As the carts started to race an ambulance pulled out right in front of them with its lights on and so the scene now is an ambulance being chased by a crowd of shopping carts followed by a police car.

The race itself was pretty uneventful. A lot of people trying to catch up on foot. Some carts flipping over. One guy shooting flares out of his cart..

The fun starts at the end of the race. At the finish point there had amassed a pretty sizeable crowd which had taken up all four lanes of the road and started dancing. Traffic was blocked in either direction. And not everybody was happy about it. The entire Ann Arbor Police Department had shown up, but mostly remained at a cautious distance. Only two officers entered into the crowd, mostly to try to get people off the street and let some cars through. The crowd was having none of that as they chanted "Punks Fucking Win". As the cops got people off one side of the road, the other side would leak and fill up again. And when a cop attempted to clear the road by slowly driving through it, he was foiled when the crowd moved from being in front of to being behind the car. The antagonism escalated to the point where the cops were walking around carrying cans of mace. Eventually, it had gone on long enough and people started returning back up town. But the fact that the police had very little control of the situation was in no doubt when I saw a car tire in the middle of the road slowly rolling towards the police line like urban tumbleweed in this wild Midwest.