Nasty, Brutish, and Loud (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine April 2002

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Nasty, Brutish, and Loud (Cont.)

I NEEDED BOB. I needed his gentle ways, his serene guidance. Early the next morning I met him at his house outside Man for a purifying ride. We were bound for a nearby strip-mined hilltop where, Bob promised, "it's so pretty you can talk to God and you don't even have to call long distance." Bob's preacher, David Fisher, was coming along. Fisher, 49, is pastor of the Claypool United Methodist Church in Man. He has a white beard and wears wire-rim glasses. When we met, he'd just come from Hardee's, where he'd partaken of his "daily biscuit."

We started our quads, then whirred along the quiet streets near Bob's home and through the clear eddies of a creek before beginning to climb Wylo Ridge. It was steep, and the trail was awash in loose golf-ball-size rocks. "A lot of weight on the front of the vee-hi-cle now," Bob said, "and go slow."

We crawled, but the trail became steeper and steeper, and my sense that I was safe in a warm cocoon spun by Bob's wisdom began to fade. The fear that I'd felt on my night ride with Jamey jittered through me anew, and I remembered what can happen when you flip a quad on a hill: It pitches back. It lands on you. It snaps your spine. I became so terrified of flipping my quad that, in fact, I did flip it. I hit a rock, halted, then hit the gas a bit too abruptly. The front wheels lurched skyward. I bailed off the back, and as I ran, the quad reared up on its haunches. It tipped backward and slammed into the earth, first with its handlebars, then with its black, ugly tires. It rolled a full revolution before bashing into a sapling. There it stopped, its engine thrumming, its handlebars mangled.

I waited for Bob. When he arrived, he stood there puzzling over the damage. "Well," he said finally, "it'll still drive. You just gotta kind of point the handlebars to the side a bit."

I let Bob drive my wreck. I climbed onto his, and the rest of the ride was quite pleasant. The ridgetop was lovely, a vast field of vetch grass bending in the soft breeze beneath a cloudless blue sky. I felt so happy to be there, so happy to be breathing exhaust in the mountains. I knew what the preacher meant when he patted his quad and said, "These things are a blessing. You can get back to nature with them, and God created nature for the enjoyment of the people." Jesus Christ himself might have benefited from an ATV, he added. "He would've gone 35 miles an hour across the desert on one of these. He could have evangelized the known world!"

Perhaps. But when Bob called me a few weeks later with the inevitable question, I had come out of my ATV reverie. "So," he said. "Do you think you're going to buy yourself a four-wheeler?" "Maybe next year," I said. I was being polite.

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