Okay, it's story time! I would like to point out ahead of time (for imagined legal purposes) that I did not write this, SuperHunky did. This tale begins on page 321 of Monkey Butt.
THE TRUE STORY OF THE PHANTOM DUCK
Did you ever sit around and daydream about taking on a big corporation that just wronged you? Or maybe getting even with a company that just ripped you off? How about the ultimate? Taking on the Internal Revenue Service! And winning! We'd all like to have the time, money, and energy to fight the Battle Royal, but, in the course of earning a living and just getting along, day by day, we somehow never seem to get up the steam to actually realize that dream.
One man did.
He goes by the name of The Phantom Duck of the Desert, and, single-handedly, has taken on the Mighty Bureau of Land Management, or the BLM, as we have come to know it.
If you ride a dirt bike of any kind, on any land other than a private park, anywhere, at any time, you are not doing it by the will of the Lord. Nope. You are doing it because the BLM, in their infinite goodness, has not yet closed that land down.
However, we must face up to the rather alarming fact that most of the people who ride, are riding illegally, most of the time, most of the places. Why?
Simple. We don't have any other places to ride. Here in the vast Southwest, we have literally millions of acres of wasteland that bears the name "desert." Much of this land is owned by the railroad, more by other private industry, but, by and large, most of the land is owned by us. That's right. Us. You and me.
"Hey," you say, "that makes it nice. It's our land. Therefore, we can ride cycles and off-road vehicles on it, right?"
Wrong, dead wrong. Standing between us and the rational use of our land, is the aforementioned BLM. The very name sends spasms of disgust up this writer's spine. The Bureau of Land Management.And I'll leave the story there for now and we can pick it up later. Perhaps tomorrow. I intend to get the entire saga of this thing written down here, right through to the '90s.