Nasty, Brutish, and Loud (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine April 2002

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Nasty, Brutish, and Loud (Cont.)


	A man of reason: ATV Sensei Ben Johnson takes in the view atop Wylo ridge. His mantra? "go slow"

AND SO INTO THE HELL ZONE I RODE. Midway up Blair Mountain, Bob and I encountered a guy who'd just rolled his quad and tumbled headlong into a ditch. He was Steve Green, 33, a machinist from Butler, Pennsylvania. He wore a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt that blared, "If you can read this, the bitch fell off!" He was limping. I asked if he was OK.

"Didn't hurt at all," he said. "Loosened me up. Just got a few nice scratches on my helmet, that's it."

Steve had come down for the weekend with two of his older brothers, Tom and Ron. Both were standing off to the side, chomping on venison jerky as Steve hobbled around. Tom offered Bob and me some jerky, and we killed our engines and listened as the Greens

"Freedom!" Jamey shouted. "It's just you, your machine, and your friends!" He grabbed a fresh beer and looked over at me. "If you wasn't here, we'd be flying," he said. "I'll tell you straight out, Bill, you suck."

related the joys of ATV riding. "This is what guys who work in the mills do to unwind," Ron said. "It keeps you from driving the wife crazy." They spoke of touring back roads in search of taverns, of scouting for wild boar, of a friend who busted his CV joint deep in the woods. "He had to ride the rest of the day with his back wheel strapped to the quad with a bungee cord," marveled Steve.

Bob remained silent, but he apprehended the manly tenor of the conversation. After a while, he broke in, offering a little West Virginia hospitality. "I don't know what y'all are looking for," he said to the Greens, "but there is a boobie bar in Logan."

Giddy schoolboy laughter wafted through the forest. It was time to mount up. Bob and I headed back down to the trailhead as the Greens rampaged away, heading for one of the Hatfield-McCoy's ugliest obstacles, a three-foot-deep mud bog that had been sucking riders Grendel-like into its muck all afternoon.

Ron got stuck almost immediately, he told me later that night in his room at the Logan Super 8. "The bike disappeared underwater," he said. "All you could see was the front rack. I had to get my buddy to winch it out." Ron was so disgusted that that very afternoon he traded in his 2000 Polaris Magnum 325, with only 200 miles on it, for a 2001 Polaris Scrambler 500, a lightweight banshee of a racing machine. The new vehicle glowed beneath the lights in the Super 8 parking lot. It was candy-apple red, with a needle- nose front end and the aerodynamic lines of a midget Corvette. It had all the attributes of a superior ATV: four-wheel drive, hydraulic disc brakes, automatic transmission, and a burly suspension system featuring thick red 10.5-inch Fox Shox. All in all, with the trade-in, it cost Ron $1,700.

When I caught up with Ron, the Brothers Green were between visits to Sheer Fantasy III, the boobie bar. Ah, but they had tales to tell. There was in Logan a certain stripper named Rose, who for a small tip would pluck the hat off a customer's head and rub it in her crotch. "When we go back," Steve assured me, grinning, "I'm wearing a hat."

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