Nasty, Brutish, and Loud (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine April 2002

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Nasty, Brutish, and Loud (Cont.)

I SLEPT IN MY CLOTHES that night. When I awoke, the Sunday-morning sun stung my eyes. I assumed that the day would, in time, offer some mercy from my hangover, some softer splendor. But I found no reprieve. I meandered into Uncle Sam's pawn shop in Man, the next town over. On the glass counter there was a curt one-sentence petition to "stop the Hatfield-McCoy Trail from taking the local trails that have been used for the past 30 years." Another petition, signed by 30 people, demanded that the Hatfield-McCoy be closed during hunting season. Neither bore any hint of an author or organization, and neither voiced any criticism of ATVs. When I asked the clerk standing by the gun case who was behind the petitions, he refused to say.

This laissez-faire attitude toward ATVs is what makes the situation in West Virginia so idiosyncratic. In almost every other region of the country, hikers, kayakers, and climbers are intent on silencing the loud motors of the ATVs, jet skis, dune buggies, and snowmobiles that shatter their Thoreauvian reveries. They wage their anti-ORV campaign in part by citing a host of grisly statistics. In 2000, 218 Americans were killed in ATV accidents and 95,300 people were sent to the emergency room. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, more than a third of those injured were 16 years old or younger.

American flora and fauna have come in for harsh treatment, too. According to the Natural Trails and Waters Coalition, jet skis dump a gallon of gas directly into the water for every four gallons they burn; swamp buggies have carved 23,000 miles of muddy trails into Florida's Big Cypress National Preserve; and in Yellowstone National Park, 66,000 snowmobiles invade each winter, belching carbon-monoxide-laden exhaust and drowning out the steamy gush of Old Faithful with the whine of their engines.

The word that environmentalists use when discussing ATVs is "damage." The word that many West Virginians use is "horsepower."

After I left Uncle Sam's, I went to the Hatfield-McCoy inaugural pig roast and met some of the disgruntled folks who'd signed the petitions, among them Roger Morrow, a 51-year-old tattoo artist and auto mechanic from Logan who'd been riding the local trails since the late eighties. Morrow had come to commune with kinfolk (his wife is a McCoy). "They're making us pay to ride the trails," he said. "Twenty-five dollars a year—and we built half those trails. We pulled the logs up and threw down rocks to fill in the ditches. And you can't drink on the trails now, and you can't camp and you can't build yourself a fire pit. If you want to sit around and tell stories at night, you can't. You gotta go to a state park and be packed in with all these...strangers."

Others complained about the ban on double-heading, the practice of two people riding on one ATV. But it was 90-year-old Robert Seay who posed the most cogent rebuke against the Hatfield-McCoy. Seay was bone-thin, with a stooped back, white hair, and piercing blue eyes, and he carried a freshly cut sourwood cane, which he occasionally raised—either to pantomime the beating he wanted to give a certain Polaris dealer (Seay's a Yamaha man) or to add emphasis to his hoary pronouncements. He pointed it at a distant hillside. "They're calling that hollow up there Browning Fork," he said, alluding to the official trail map. "Now, I was born and raised here, and I worked as a coal miner for 42 years. I knew [Hatfield patriarch] Devil Anse's grandson. I put electric heat in his house! And I'm telling you, I never heard that name in all my life. Browning Fork? That hollow's Rockhouse. Where did these people come from?"

The cane was whitish-yellow and crooked, with a small triangular handle Seay had carved out of a deer antler, and when he finished his speech, he just let it hang there in the sky, quavering.

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