No Pasaran!--Rage and ORVS

I admit it doesn't take much. Say I'm walking alone in the side-canyon behind our house and I see the fat-tire tracks of dirt bikes in the mud. My blood pressure shoots up, my eyes narrow, and I imagine the whine of two-stroke engines coming my way. The machines sound angry, and while I stand waiting in the trail, panicked mule deer and shrieking Steller's jays flee past me as from a wildfire. Soon the riders appear around a bend, semi-conscious cretins in plastic body armor and helmets that obscure their faces—it's important to hide the faces. They sit their bikes high, leaning forward like jockeys. The engines spew the usual burned-oil stink. Determined to give them the benefit of the doubt, I smile and hold up a hand, palm-away, in the universal signal for Stop, let's talk. If they give me a chance, I will politely inform them that the United States Forest Service prohibits the use of off-road vehicles in this canyon. But they don't slow, and they don't relax their aggressive postures. I sense in them a deep hatred of intentionally ambulatory Homo sapiens. They notice my hiking boots and binoculars, and they can tell I didn't vote for Dubya, and suddenly I am in mortal danger. The man-machines accelerate toward me, spewing curses in gravelly voices pitched to match their engines: tree hugger! prairie fairy! liberal! I know they are surprised when I don't run, when instead I drop my pack and sprint toward the lead biker. I am Nature's Dark Avenger, and my grinning face is the last thing he'll see. . . . ¹

I relate the above Walter Mitty-on-PCP fantasy for the limited purpose of illustrating my knee-jerk, visceral loathing of off-road-vehicles and their riders, the personal quirk—shared, I think, by others—that is the subject of this essay. But I'm not really a violent person. The only off-roader I have actually caught in the canyon wasn't wearing a helmet, and he was just a kid on a dirt bike, a big teenager with reddish hair and freckles. His shoulders slumped in a caricature of guilt as I walked up to him at a creek crossing he was trying to figure out. When I told him about the prohibition—I think I said something withering like, "You know, those things aren't allowed back here"—he looked defeated, like he'd known the rule but in his exuberance over his new machine he hadn't been able to help himself, just this once. And here he'd got caught.

"Well where can I go?" he asked. "There's nowhere to ride."

Nowhere to ride! Half the known world is paved and there's nowhere to ride! Of course, that's not what he was talking about. I tried to hit him with sarcasm, suggesting surely he knew the multinational corporations that make and fuel off-road machines sponsor a powerful lobby ensuring access to vast playgrounds for the motor-head minions, but my heart wasn't in it. Here was a decent-seeming kid, who wasn't listening to me. He wanted me to go away.

I live in the land of the gigantic pickup truck, where the internal combustion engine is not just technology but a kind of religion. ² People like cars in the South, sure, and there are plenty of ORVs there as well, but it's all kind of fun, like on The Dukes of Hazard. In the West, it's serious. When someone who identifies with the rugged part of America decides that big, wild country presents a challenge best answered with the aid of the internal combustion engine, well, he's just darn hard to argue with. He'll fight you over...