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The Big Dog Bulldog Bagger wasn’t meant to be a dirt bike The diet that made it happy consisted of concrete and blacktop, and it wanted to be admired for its sleek aerodynamic lines and custoedness and ability to slah wild landscapes with aplomb

Nevertheless, I went off-road They say that necessity is the randhas raised about two feet above the land through which it passed, and I left the shoulder at such speed that the bike was airborne for ato the earth with a jolt that briefly lifted my butt off the seat and made my feet dance on the floorboards

Hereabouts, the desert wasn’t a softscape of sand dunes and dead lakes of powdery silt, which was a good thing, because crossing ground like that, the Big Dog would have ed to a halt within a hundred yards The land was mostly hard-packed by thousands of years of fierce sun and scouring winds, the igneous rocks rich with feldspar, treeless but in soly plants less easily identified

Jacked up on oversize tires,overland than was hway in ing escarph to conceal et out of sight of hts, slon significantly, travel by ht, and try as quickly as possible to put one turn in the land after another between ht find a place in which to shelter, shut off the bike, listen, and wait

Suddenly a greater light flooded across the land, and when I looked back, I saw that the Escalade sported a roof rack of powerful spotlights that the driver had just now employed The desert beforelaency prepared to welcon extraterrestrials and their mother ship Instead of scientists and aliens, however, there was so me with bad intentions

In those harsh and far-reaching strea, inky shadow The pale land was revealed as less irregular than I’d hoped, an apparent plain where I was noplace than I would a McDonald’s franchise coround for the tots

Although my nature was to be optilooh the entire world was death row and that my most recent meal had been my last one

I continued north into the wilderness rather than angle back toward the highway, assuring myself that it wasn’t e ahead My destiny was to die thirty ht but tomorrow or the day after, or the day after that Furthermore, I wouldn’t die by Cadillac Escalade;so quick and clean Having argued ht in ht air

As the SUV gained on ain This tinized the title notes of “Karma Chae The song seehter would have buoyed me if it hadn’t sounded just a little insane

The nitrogen-gas-charged shocks, the rubber-isolated floorboards, and the rubber handgrips all contributed to a smoother off-road ride than I had anticipated, but I expected that I was headed for one kind of mechanical failure or another, or for a collision with an unseen thrust of rock that would dis into the air in the

I was suffering a brief remission in my characteristic optimism

Ahead, a long but slight slope led to a narrow band of blackness before the Escalade’s lights revealed a swath of soe I couldn’t be sure what I was seeing; the sight was no less baffling than an abstract painting coe and black, but in case it ht be what I needed, I accelerated

I had to weave arass—that were half dead from too little water, their narrow five-foot recurved blades perhaps sharp enough to cut s of surrender

Evidently the nutcase pursuingto the Sierra Club, because the Escalade barreled through the pa a path of crushed and shredded vegetation, gaining fast on me

The ceaselessly repeated signature notes of “Karine were so loud, I knew that it lance back

With but three or four seconds to ht move, I saw thata hard right just before the

brink

The Big Dog fishtailed, the rear tire chewing away the lip of the abyss for a ot traction

Whether the driver’s attention suddenly shifted to the land ahead, whether he remained intently focused on me, in either case the Escalade had too much mass and momentum to come to a stop in time, and it was far less e swirled dust and dry bits of desert vegetation overSUV launched off the ri “Karht

With its four-piston billet calipers, the Big Dog could stop on a dollar if not a di off and stood at the brink as the spotlight-equipped Caddy, now dropping nose-down like a bomb, illuminated its terminal destination

Carved by millennia of flash floods and Mojave winds and seismic activity, the crevasse appeared to be about thirty feet wide at the top, less than ten at the botto SUV tested the bedrock at the bottom, and the bedrock won The last title note of the Culture Club tune cahts went out, and in the sudden darkness, the SUV shed pieces of itself, which rattled and clattered across the rocks

I said, “Wohich isn’t witty enough for ue, but it’s what I said I’m no Tom Cruise

After a few seconds of darkness, the fire bloo flahter The ravine proved to be a trap for tu its bottom, and the spherical e, apparently the direction in which gasoline spilled from the ruptured tank

The walls of the ravine were steep but navigable on foot The stone shaled away treacherously as I quickly sidled doith all the grace of—I don’t knohy this unlikely iuin on stilts Tooold Warner Bros cartoons by Chuck Jones can instill in you a silliness gene by proxy

Perhaps equally silly—I was in my Good Samaritan mode The driver had tried to kill ht have been the consequence of inebriation, and he uy when he was sober I couldn’t let him bleed or burn to death just because of his idiocy behind the wheel of the SUV So a moral code, but I have it nonetheless, like a burr under the brain, with no way to pluck it out