Paul Dana was always more than my dear friend–he was a real-life literary figure. When you spent time with him, it didn’t matter what you were actually doing–being typical college kids biking drunk around Evanston in search of pizza, driving to Milwaukee to go bowling, sitting on the couch debating environmental policy–because Paul had a way of observing people and telling stories, sometimes as they were happening, that made routine events feel like chapters in a novel. And he, more than anyone, knew they would keep coming. At the end of each adventure, instead of simply saying good-bye, Paul had his own way of telling you he’d see you again. “Down the road,” he’d say.
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People keep asking me how he ended up on the racetrack instead of in a newsroom. I’d tell them Paul always said he was a writer who didn’t write. This was an exaggeration–he did write, and he wrote well. His articles and stories and sketches were full of vivid characters, colorful quotes, and hilarious epiphanies, all of them true. Like the night we went to a pub in Lincoln Park where two underage guys could get some pitchers, and many hours later ended up dissecting Catch-22 and the Cowboy Junkies, arguing about God and evil, and finally agreeing that some good force exists in the world. It suddenly seemed significant to Paul that we were actually just sitting in a northbound el train stalled at Jarvis.
And there was the time he and his brother decided to drive from their family’s home in Saint Louis to see the mountains of New Mexico and a girl his brother missed; they listened to R.E.M. the entire way, all of the albums in chronological order, until at some desperate point in the desert they concluded that the girl wasn’t worth it, that they should probably get back before the holidays were over, and that Green sucked so bad it should be yanked from the rotation.
Paul performed well in his races. Just as important, he figured out how to promote himself, and eventually how to persuade the ethanol industry that sponsoring him in the name of environmental activism would be good business. It was a brilliant move for his racing career, but for the first time in years he was also thinking about life beyond the track. Environmental issues–particularly among the environmentally disinterested racing crowd–were the right kind of challenge, once he couldn’t go further as a driver. But that was the stunning thing: at 32 he was still going further. Last weekend’s race at Florida’s Homestead-Miami Speedway would have been his biggest. He was on a team sponsored by racing legend Bobby Rahal and David Letterman. His teammates were Danica Patrick and former Indy 500 winner Buddy Rice. He had qualified in his best position ever.
