Pictures from White Rim Trail Mountain Biking with Rimtours (www.rimtours.com)

And the trip to the White Rim Trail begins. I was meeting the Polak in Moab, Utah the night before the trip began. He flew in from Brooklyn, I was flying in from Oakland. I flew to Denver then connected to a Buddy Holly plane from Denver to Grand Junction, CO. From there, I rented a Dodge Intrepid to drive to Moab, Utah. That's a 110 mile (or so) trip. I made that trip in under an hour.

I arrived in Grand Junction about sundown and wanted to get to Moab ASAP. As soon as I got out of Grand Junction, I floored the gas pedal in that gutsy Dodge and didn't let up until I hit the outskirts of Moab. First of all, that Intrepid, while powerful, drove like a San Francisco faggot...i.e., it pulled hard to the left. I think the car had been in an accident before I rented it and they never bothered to fix the alignment. To get the car going straight I had to have the steering wheel cranked over the right right about half way. It got tiring, especially since I never had the car going under 100 mph. At a certain point I realized that a picture would be appropriate. So with the sky dark and me on an empty two lane high desert road in a rented car that pulled hard to the left, I took out my camera, wedged my knee against the steering wheel (as it tried to pop back to the left and pull the car off the road), steadied a cigarette in my mouth and got the car going right under the speed governor (which was 118 mph, I think, at which point the gas shut off)....and then I took this picture.

It probably should have been the last picture I ever took, as I forgot about the flash. The flash went off, shocking me enough to drop the cigarette into my lap, which then led to me releasing the streering wheel from my knee. Since the car was pulling hard left when not being controlled properly, it quickly darted (at 115 mph or so) towards the center median. By the grace of the good lord I was able to get my wits about me and yank hard to the right and get it back under control.

The first thing I thought of was the look on my wife's face when the cops showed her this picture, recovered from the wreckage of the car, and speculated as to how I died. I imagine her last words to the police would have been "What a fucking moron."