COLUMN – OHV, ATV: It’s all bleak to me
About seven seconds after the cheer went out from the NASA space geeks acknowledging that their Spirit and Opportunity landers were talking back to them from Mars, a concomitant roar could be heard at a crowded bar in southern Utah
“Duuuude! Check it out. They put two ATVs on Mars! Look at all the red rock.”
In a languid coffee shop across town, 12 people looked up from their French roast and copies of Utne Reader and sneered “If they can put two ATVs on Mars, why not all of them.”
Caffeine and alcohol are the yin/yang of my mental health so it’s hard for me to take sides. I’m just standing at the corner of damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t trying to figure out the acronyms – ATV, OHV, it’s all bleak to me. I guess there are All Terrain Vehicles and those that are simply Off Highway Vehicles just looking for a place to raise a little dust. Slightly quieter than snowmobiles but with the same raison d’etre, these beasts are starting to cover the West for everything from farming to hunting.
This first hit my radar last year when I was standing on a similar corner on a Wednesday night in Richfield, Utah. It was October and I witnessed the homogenized and airbrushed version of the famous Sturgis ride-in for Harley riders. The streets are full of ATVs and the motel lots are full of trucks, trailers and a few bewildered foreign tourists wondering where the horses and Indians were. The entire town was an ATV orgy.
Southern Utah is not supposed to look like this. How it got this way is an ugly bar-room brawl of taxes, tourist councils and a lard-butt culture that feels it has a right to go everywhere and see everything without putting any effort into it.
I don’t think this is what Woody Guthrie had in mind when he wrote “This land is your land, this land is my land.” Whenever I see a pickup truck with a couple ATVs balancing precariously from the truck bed I think of a mother possum carrying her babies or maybe some sort of internal combustion equivalent of a lifeboat. “If the truck breaks down, at least we won’t have to walk,” I hear the occupants say.
The problem is also about the folks who want to get back to a population density of one. I’d like to ban the Republican Party, reality TV and decaf coffee, but I can’t. The people who ride them pay taxes and are probably here to stay. ATVs are not going to be banned on the basis of safety because if we did that we’d probably also have to ban bikes, skis and Mt. Everest.
Just as in theory cross-country skiers and snowmobiles can share a trail, in theory mountain bikes and hikers could share an ATV trail. In theory, the universe exists on several dimensional planes, but I remain unconvinced.
Dennis Hinkamp’s column appears every Friday. Comments can be sent to dhinkamp@msn.com.