Can the Outdoors Save Guys from Themselves?

O tender youngster of but 6 many years: may this large motocross-design and style helmet, total with 14 consumption vents, in good shape and protect you, for I comprehend not the means of the on the internet sizing chart. 

I clicked purchase, and two months later on my son, Casper, and I had been roaring across a significant sage desert, darkness falling, canyons plunging, chunky rocks looming, frigid wind howling, expensive epic of cinematic masculinity unfolding.

What in the finish does a father want for his youngster? I required Casper to not get pneumonia on the initial fucking day of our trip. But in his infinite knowledge, the god of the utility terrain vehicle (or UTV) forsook windshields, windows, local weather manage, and, for that matter, an productive muffler. I draped my coat across the boy’s small lap. 

“Don’t permit this blow absent!” I yelled. 

“What?”

“Don’t permit this blow absent!”

“What?” 

Our dialogue might’ve continued in this vein had I not been so caught up in keeping upright. I’d been driving this bizarre vehicle—essentially a compact, significant-octane dune buggy—for an hour now and was steadily getting even worse at it. We had been in northwest Arizona, sloshing along a canyon someplace among the Colorado Plateau and the Mojave Desert. Yucca and scrub oak blurred earlier as we fishtailed wildly across gravelly BLM two-monitor. The purely natural issue to do would be to sluggish down, but the light-weight was fading, and we had a different hour, or probably 5, until finally we attained camp. So I gunned it, swerving into the lonesome western landscape, hunched dementedly over the wheel, an off-road, neon-helmeted Neal Cassady.