Steamboat Springs – Was that a cow? I’ve never seen a cow move that fast. Wait, was it moving, or just blurry? I sure hope there’s a fence connected to all those posts.
Posts! Oh man, I just met this dude. I seriously hope he knows what he’s doing. Why is there a harness strapped to his arm? No, no, no – don’t think about it. This is insane.
The crackle of a voice coming through the earphones in my helmet momentarily interrupted the speed-induced trance: “It opens up some here, so we can go a little faster.”
Faster? I deliberately moved the microphone away from my mouth so the driver couldn’t hear me, just in case I shrieked like a little girl.
I honestly didn’t know what sound might come out of me. Or if I was even capable of making one. In the frenetic delirium, I briefly imagined myself experiencing some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder that rendered me mute for years until a brilliant psychoanalyst recreated the experience through hypnosis and left me curled up in a ball in the corner. Remember to breathe, I reminded myself. And for God’s sake, blink.
It was no use. I might as well have been an experiment from “Clockwork Orange.” I used to like driving fast on these country roads. Or at least I thought it was fast. I believe I’ve just been scared straight.
I’m not really sure what I expected when I drove out to the desolate dirt road somewhere between Steamboat and Hayden and agreed to be strapped into the passenger seat of Travis Pastrana’s rally car. But it certainly wasn’t this. There was no handshake, not even a formal introduction that I recall, just a couple of sideways glances as I crammed my 6-foot-5-inch frame through the roll cage and into the tiny seat like an oversized square peg into a round, carbon-fiber hole, plugged in my headset and looked for something to do with my hands.
I asked a crew member about the handle, which is standard in many four-wheel-drive vehicles, that people grab while uttering an expletive during a harrowing stretch of road.
“I don’t think there is one,” Pastrana shot back.
Thanks, Travis. Pleasure to meet you too.
Over the flatulent sputter of the Subaru’s engine, Pastrana proceeded to tell me how much more successful he was in the rally car world now that he quit crashing at every race. He wouldn’t bother mentioning the nearly nine rolls he put the car through in this race last year until after our seven-mile drive. He left it up to me to figure out the inspiration behind the harness on his window-side arm.
In fact, after prefacing the early stages of our little ride with, “We have to take this first corner a little slow,” he left it up to me to figure out a lot of things. Like that “a little slow” to Travis Pastrana is roughly 60 mph, sideways. That’s when my reality overwhelmed me.
After surviving the first turn, it never occurred to me that there might be a second, and then a third, a fourth and so on, each one faster than the one before as we got up to race pace of just more than 100 mph where the course “opens up.”
By the time my mind came to terms with the chaos, we were sideways again, sliding into a 90-degree turn with one foot on the brake and the other on the gas. I wished I’d never watched the movie “Talladega Nights.” The image of Will Ferrell hurtling upside down through the air fixed itself in my brain as I muttered the words “This is not good” silently to myself and began babbling in prayer to the little baby Jesus. Or at least I would have, if I wasn’t temporarily mute.
“Well, what’d you think?” Pastrana asked after skidding a 180 across the finish line.
“I’m not sure if I can think,” I confessed. “But that was awesome.”
“Glad you liked it,” he replied as the engine slowed. “Did you see that dog?”
