Desert Rattler: Dirt Track Date
By Ken Layne
Walking off a dubious dinner, I’m just in time for another ridiculous widescreen August sunset with its gusty winds and hordes of jackrabbits and cottontails running for their lives, my crazed dog close behind. Some dude on the public radio this afternoon, a Buddhist (from Germany?), was talking about appreciating the Present, the NOW, because our past only exists as NOW, and our future will only exist as NOW, etc. And then there was a pledge drive and a segment about the new iPhones.
This isn’t such a terrible NOW, hiking up here in these desert hills, mourning doves spastically flying away as I trudge up the trail, lizards diving for cover.
And then I hear the distant rumble of the Japanese bug fart, coming closer, an idiot with undescended testicles, his pear-shaped body bouncing atop a Honda or Yamaha or Suzuki, a cloud of dust rising behind the buzzing vibrator. I watch him crest a little hill, crushing whatever innocent ground squirrels or gopher snakes are burrowed beneath his pointless path. He glances my way and wobbles a bit.
“Crash, you sonofabtich,” I hiss, unheard above the ruckus. “NOW.”
No such luck. These dull cretins are my nemesis, the parasites of the desert, the motorized chlamydia of the American West.
I’ve gone to a lot of trouble, again, to move far away from traffic and smog and cars and malls, and once again I’m disgusted to find that some of my human neighbors – who presumably moved this far from civilization to get some peace and quiet and space – are tearing up the land and the silence with their aluminum-and-plastic masturbation gadgets. Never mind that it’s technically illegal, even in this arid right-wing utopia of government land and government jobs. It’s asinine.
Living in these last open chunks of the Southwest to ride exhaust-belching noisemakers is an infinite loop of Fail, like joining the priesthood to meet girls. You want to hear engines rumble night and day, then move to El Segundo on Imperial Highway across from LAX. Yet bouncing around in Asperger dirt circles is the last “outdoor activity” anyone will pursue, out here in the Mojave.
A few months back, I was walking these same foothills when a cartoon parody of a pickup truck – raised three feet off the ground, a dozen consumer bumper and back-window stickers professing rebellion, corporate hip-hop blasting from the stereo – bumped up the trail and parked, a pair of “dirt bikes” strapped upright in the bed. The driver got out, a pale kid of maybe 16 or 25, who knows? The other one stayed in the passenger seat and nervously glanced back.
It struck me that they’d probably never seen anybody walking out here, so they automatically assumed I was in charge, of something. I walked over and nodded toward the motorcycles. “You can’t ride here,” I said. “Private property.”
“Uh, we,” the driver looked back at his buddy for support. “We, uh, always ride up here. The ... the owners said we can.”
“What’s the owner’s name? Parcel number? Where’s the letter saying you can ride on this property?” I’d read about the county ordinance finally giving people some weak protection from these mooks using residential areas as dust-bike race tracks.
The kids gave up and left, without argument. I haven’t seen them since. These motocross losers are on the defensive, guilty as child molesters, finally getting used to the idea that after 40 years of ruining public and private land with their stupid toys, the free ride might be ending. Who knows what will be left of the American West before these things are completely banned as an insult against everything good and human – the Bureau of Land Management is currently planning to open the Grand Canyon’s North Rim to the slobs. The Bush administration’s version of the Interior Department still has a few tricks before it (hopefully) vanishes forever in January.
But I need a better strategy than barking at a few dumb exurban kids now and then, when I happen to catch them before they unload their erosion machines and zoom away in a cloud of stinking smoke and torn-apart desert crust. It’s supposedly wrong to shoot at them. These new off-road motorcycle tires are even impervious to roofing nails accidentally planted upright on these eroded trails. What to do?
The foreclosure nightmare is destroying what little community and economy exists out here. Everyone claims to love the American Family and Home Ownership, especially now that both are becoming so rare. Oh, and look how about 100 percent of the vacant foreclosed houses were bought on subprime credit by debt-ridden jackasses with shaky jobs. And look how about 100 percent of those vacant short-sale new-construction granite-counter foreclosures out here have a fresh dirt-motorcycle track running around the property.
Headed back to the house, I have a brilliant idea: I will become a defender of the American Family and Desert Communities, by writing hysterical Opinion Columns against the off-roader losers, for the thin local newspapers of Real Estate Auction ads and week-old George Will columns. Real estate agents will stop selling empty houses on two acres to the dirt-bikers and dirt-trikers. Peace will be restored. There is no way this plan can fail.
(TO BE CONTINUED)
Published: 08/27/2008
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