Nasty, Brutish, and Loud (Cont.)

Outside Magazine April 2002

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	My chassis's bigger 'n your chassis: the inimitable Jamey Thompson, foreground, spins his wheels at the tug-of-war

I DECIDED THAT it would probably not be a good idea to show up in West Virginia wearing my Birkenstocks and humming "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" I went instead with an open mind, as a novitiate in search of an ATV guru.

Luckily, the Specialty Vehicle Institute of America hooked me up with a brilliant instructor. Would it be too much to call Bob Johnson, the 47-year-old West Virginia native who guided me through the fiery hoops of my ATV initiation, my moral compass? I think not. For amid the perils and surging testosterone of the ATV universe, Bob showed me how to ride and play safe—and he did this without ever uttering anything sharper than "Now, you're a-takin' to this four-wheeling like a duck to water, aren't ya?"

Bob is six-foot-six and balding, with a ruddy face that often eases into a grin. He rides just about every day, wearing a Valvoline windbreaker and a baseball cap with a little pin that reads "God Loves You And So Do I." He has exquisite poise. A retired West Virginia state trooper disabled by a spine-torquing car crash, he pilots his Honda 300 with his back gracefully still and erect. He glides over trails with magisterial slowness, rarely exceeding 15 miles an hour. He is, at all times, cool. When I asked him what he did for a living, he said, "I'm an artist. I'm just a-settin' on the porch, drawing a check."



	Steve Green rests before doing battle with a vast mud puddle.

Bob gave me my first lesson a few days before the Hatfield-McCoy officially opened. His instructions were spare. "This here," he said, pointing at the handlebars on the $6,500, 500cc Polaris Sportsman a dealer had lent me, "is your gas. This here's your brake." I turned the key, rotated the throttle, and kick-started my quad into gear.

I drove in a straight line through the parking lot at the Bear Wallow Trailhead, then over some gravel bumps, then in huge, sweeping, undulant turns. I felt the mad spattering of rocks under my wheels. I felt the handlebars vibrate. I felt a deep surge of confidence, rooted, I think, in the fact that my tires were brand-new—pegged, still, with those little black, stringy nubbins. After ten minutes, I found that it was extremely fun to do donuts, to whirl in tight circles so that a cyclone of dust rose around me. I whirled six or eight times, then hit the gas and whipped sharply out of the cloud. I felt like a badass mofo. I was ready.

Riding into the Hatfield-McCoy can be an uneasy trip into Appalachia's hard-bitten past and not-so-bright future. To begin with, the name comes from the bloody late-19th-century feud between the Hatfield and McCoy clans, who lived and fought along the Tug Fork River on the nearby border with Kentucky. And no sooner had Bob and I left the trailhead than we came upon the crumbling, kudzu-covered remnants of Ethyl, a former mining camp abandoned about 50 years ago. Bob looped left, up a hill, and I followed. Now we were on Blair Mountain, the very ridgeline where the two-year-long West Virginia Mine War reached its ignominious end in September 1921, with President Warren G. Harding calling in more than 2,150 U.S. Army troops and the 88th Light Bombing Air Squadron. Ever since, the coal country of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky has been an inland colony dependent on out-of-state corporations.

In recent years, this region—which forms the heart of Appalachia—has waged a desperate campaign to make money. In 1991, for instance, McDowell County, on the southern edge of the state, flirted with Capels Resources Inc., a Philadelphia company that proposed to fill 800-acre Lick Branch Hollow with 3.5 million tons of garbage from New York City and New Jersey. (The plan never got off the ground.) Since then, the region has become the world leader in a super-efficient, super-reviled form of coal mining known as "mountaintop removal." Coal-rich peaks are simply blasted apart, denuding and leveling thousands of highland acres at a time, and the rocky wreckage is then dumped into local streams.

It sounds perverse, but in such a landscape, the Hatfield-McCoy represents a relatively clean source of cash. Leff Moore, who works in Charleston as a lobbyist for the Specialty Vehicle Institute of America, calls it "environmentally friendly, an improvement to the flora and fauna." If anyone can be called the Father of the Hatfield-McCoy, it is he. A husky, ebullient 57-year-old, Moore first envisioned an ATV trail system in West Virginia in 1989, when he suggested to the Forest Service that it open the Monongahela National Forest to ORVs. The Forest Service didn't cotton to the idea, but Moore was undeterred. "I realized that well over 50 percent of southern West Virginia is owned by a handful of land companies that lease to coal and timber extractors," he told me. "I thought, 'What if we got their permission to ride?"

The SVIA and the Motorcycle Industry Council thought Moore was onto something, so in 1991 they hired him to make the Hatfield-McCoy a reality. Moore began by approaching the Pocahontas Land Company and the Dingess-Rum Land Company, southern West Virginia's largest landowners. His sales pitch was fairly simple: Since the locals were already careening all over their corporate turf, swilling beer and attempting Evel Knievel-style leaps over downed logs, they constituted a liability suit waiting to happen. If the companies allowed these rough-hewn paths to be cleaned up and transformed into a trail park managed by some form of state recreation authority, well then, the authority would become the liable party. Moore also reasoned that a world-class ATV park might actually lure tourists and businesses to southern West Virginia, in which case Pocahontas's and Dingess-Rum's tax burden would drop.

The land companies bit, and Moore was soon able to find some allies in the state legislature, especially when he called its attention to a 1996 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers report. Noting the popularity of the West's two premier ATV havens—Utah's 260-mile Paiute Trail and the Silver Country Trail, a 1,000-mile snowmobile and ATV network straddling the Idaho-Montana border—the Corps projected that the Hatfield-McCoy could potentially create 3,200 new jobs and pump an estimated $107 million annually into the West Virginia economy. A case of irrational exuberance? Perhaps. Nevertheless, the legislature was impressed. In 1998, it pledged $1 million to develop the trails. Two years later, the Hatfield-McCoy Recreation Authority was up and running. The state, through the clever use of private land, had created an ATV safe zone peripheral to the larger eco-war.

Still, environmentalists shuddered. Jim Sconyers, former staff director of the West Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club, sardonically calls the Hatfield-McCoy "somebody's brainstorm—a way to fuck up the environment and get away with it." Scott Silver, executive director of Wild Wilderness, a Bend, Oregon-based backcountry advocacy group, and a man who has been fighting ATVs for over a decade, was a little more grave. "They're looking to sacrifice southern West Virginia," he told me. "They want to turn it into a Mad Max hell zone."

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