My First Flash "Flood," part I

Camping in popular places and times is something to avoid. Places like Moab UT. There is very little dispersed camping still left there thanks to its overuse and misuse and mass popularity. But I had a couple reasons to be here.

So I rolled into a dispersed camping area close to sunset, in order to assess the neighborhood before committing. Gee, it was rather uncrowded and quiet at the end of the road, where I found a nice flat spot. Maybe people were scared off by the oncoming rain and windstorm?

How foolish I was to think that everybody was already there by sunset: I was projecting the travel habits of a full-time RVer onto time-constrained mass tourists. An hour after sunset I heard some vehicles outside. One glance out the window at the height of the running lights identified them as toy haulers, and I knew that my paradise of one hour was lost. They didn't even wait until morning light to start the madness. Suffice it to say that camping neighbors like this are the reason that RVers should not own guns.

After feeling a wave of anger at my bad luck, I started imagining opportunity in vague outline. Any experienced traveler knows that "adventure" is really a misnomer, because it is the misadventures that we will remember five years from now. There is a dialectic pattern of Ecstasy following Agony -- and vica versa! A big part of playing an apparently-losing hand to advantage is patience -- but how can you be patient with something that you despise? It certainly helps to have been around the block a few times, and be able to see an opposite future as being real. Vagueness of the imagination is the enemy at this point in the game.

Besides, there is a beauty unique to the right kind of torture. Chronic, low-level irritation is draining on a person. But when the Agony becomes intense, and is handled artfully, the victim can experience a cleansing catharsis. Think of Puccini operas, Thomas Hardy novels, or tearjerker songs sung by a moody Celtic lass.

I was only vaguely aware at the time that I was handling the Agony artfully. At first this seemed like another example of practicing the skills needed to reduce pseudo-emergencies into merely sticky situations that you dig yourself out of, one step at a time.

But in fact, one of those practical steps is to visualize the situation as a great drama in which you get to play the hero. The great drama puts Good versus Evil. From William James, in his classic Varieties of Religious Experience, page 49/521:

"In the Louvre there is a picture...of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there...The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck." 

More concisely, people in the movie biz would say that it's the villain that makes the movie.

Non-motorized bigots (like me) tend to paint the motorsporters with too broad of a brush. ATVs are four-stroke engines. They are noticeably quieter than they used to be. Most adult ATVers operate them as you would want them to, and they are sensitive to the need for good "public relations." An ATVer might even rescue a non-motorized outdoorsman. I appreciate how their wheels kick off rocks and pack the dirt. 

And then there are the boys on two-stroke motorcycles, endlessly revving the engines, and buzzing everybody in the camping neighborhood. Your camping area is literally turned into a noisy motorized rodeo for kiddies! Sometimes they will come ten feet from your rig. Their parents won't let them head off on the trails alone; and for some reason, the adults won't lead them out on the trails. If they looped around all day, their victims might become inured to it, or use white noise in their RVs to block the sound. But no, the boys do a hundred loops over a half hour; and then they rest. Their victims start to lower their guard, and start feeling hopeful. Then the little bastards come out and buzz you for another half hour. Perhaps they have special training to increase the psychological impact of this torture.

All in all I get along with adult ATVers, in part by being pro-active. I imagined a religious metaphor: Jesus or Gandhi presenting the other cheek to somebody who has just struck the first cheek. You might criticize this as ridiculous moral posturing. But who cares?! As long as it works, and 'work' it did. I walked over to another large coven of motorized zombies. Except that they weren't zombies. They weren't bothering anybody. They were normal, sane people. We had a friendly conversation while our pooches had a frolic together.  Watching them play, the pimple burst and the hatred oozed away. 

Perhaps the reader is wondering why I didn't just leave. I couldn't. Have you ever heard of wet Mancos shale? This post is getting too long. It is the miserable preamble that created the chance to see my first flash flood.
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There are probably licensing issues with motorsport machines that might keep the kiddies off the roads that are needed to get to the trails. One of the readers  probably knows about that. Motor-sporters probably think, "Well, you won't stop restricting and licensing us, so now all the damn kid can do is turn the campground into a noisy rodeo. Too bad. The people that that bothers are probably the same people who support endless restrictions."