An Encounter by Brian Brown

An encounter It’s a motorcycle, and it doesn’t belong there. We’re 100 yards or more from the entrance of a sweet little slot canyon; cool, shady and mysterious, and there’s a large lime green dirt bike parked in front of it. As we arrive at the narrow entrance, a young man emerges. He is tan with long blond hair, an athletic build, and an army Colt 45 pistol displayed prominently in a shoulder holster. It’s a big, brutal gun that shoots a large slug, specifically designed to knock the recipient off his feet as it plows through the body, shattering bones and emulsifying organs and tissue along the way. Well, this changes things. 

We greet each other cautiously. On our side we are two middle aged couples, well into our forties, out for a walk in the desert. He is a young man, half our age, with a big gun and a big bike and a puffed out chest, and he is a little nervous. Though I’ve been in it a hundred times I ask him about the slot canyon, and he assures us that it is beautiful and well worth exploring. He doesn’t look at us when he speaks, staring down towards our feet and focused in the middle distance somewhere. I ask him casually why is he carrying the gun. He looks up at me and smiles smuggly and says, “ it’s a visual deterrent “. He is five miles illegally inside of an area of critical environmental concern that is closed to vehicular travel and he knows it, and he knows that we know it. This place is for hikers and horseback, and specifically not for lime green dirt bikes.

 There is a beat of awkward silence here; This is the place to have the needed discussion or for an escalation to happen, but a calculation cannot be be made. He is clearly armed and we are clearly not, and it’s a fine day not to get shot, we silently decide. He walks around us and gets on his mount, we wish each other a good day, his bikes roars to life, and in seconds he is gone, leaving a scar that will take years for the elements to erase.

 Thus it is, the seemingly unavoidable conflict between those who walk into the landscape and those who ride over it. The hikers versus the motorheads. Granola versus the goobers. There seems to be no workable answer. As for us, it was indeed a fine day, we had a great visit into this mysterious hidden place, and then followed the motorcycle tracks out.