Forest Grove’s Damian Lindberg is a young man on the move.
“I grew up around stock car racing. My grandfather Grant Powers has been racing for about 20 years,” the 17-year-old said.
Damian, who is the son of Hud and Amanda Lindberg, races at the Merritt Speedway.
“I was 14 when I started. The closest to my age was two years older. I started off driving a ‘78 Malibu.
“Before a race they give us two qualifying laps for pole position, slowest at the front and fastest at the back. It really doesn’t matter where you are.
“The hardest thing to learn was to keep your own lane, to hold your line. Your main concern when you’re driving is that no one will spin out and hit you or that you’ll spin out and hit someone else.
“In my final race this year, I got hit a couple of times. The body of the car was kind of mangled and torn off, but the frame was fine. We’ll re-build the car.
Whenever I have free time, I’ll go up to Prince George and give Grant a hand.”
Damian races an American Racing Club Association car.
“ARCA cars are a step down from NASCAR cars. We usually run a 350 small-block Chev. Within one race, we can do 46 laps in a day.”
He has won an impressive collection of trophies. In his first year, he won two championships and came in second overall. When he was 15 and again when he was 16, Damian took first place in his class, although he was far younger than the other drivers. The oldest driver in his class this past season was 66.
In May, Damian raced against his grandfather in the main race in Merritt. He came in first and Grant came in second.
Although he has been racing only a few years, Damian has won the prestigious Most Sportsmanlike Male Driver of the year three times. This award covers all the classes run at Merritt. It is a tribute to his skill as a driver and to his sense of responsibility to the other drivers.
Damian credits his success to his grandfather. “I would like to give special thanks to Grant for keeping me out there and for having a car for me to race.”
He also expressed his appreciation to his many sponsors, especially 100 Mile NAPA, Davis Leather and the Missing Links Band.
A catastrophe
One night, the temperature dropped to below freezing.
A bitter wind blew against the back of our house. A faint meowing sound came from somewhere nearby, but nothing could be seen.
In the morning, a small black cat, little more than a kitten, lay bone-thin and frozen, huddled below the dryer vent where it had crawled for a bit of warmth. The next afternoon an even smaller cat sat at the edge of the field.
There are cats and kittens wandering all over the Grove, searching for shelter and food. Some struggle to survive, abandoned at the dump. Cougars and coyotes may take some, but the rest have only starvation and cold ahead of them.
This is a problem that will not go away until we put a stop to the number of feral cats in the Grove.