Flipping the Dune Buggy

On the white sand dunes of Lake Michigan’s spectacular shoreline, Bobby Mars flipped our rental buggy and nearly killed us.

Silver Lake State Park is a dune field. Quartz sand (sometimes called sugar sand) gives that tan-white color. Because there isn’t much quartz underground in the bedrock of Michigan, it’s understood that ice-age glaciers moved massive rocks containing quartz from elsewhere. Then, once the glaciers melted, becoming what are now the Great Lakes, the water eroded the big rocks into sand. The quartz was deposited on Michigan’s shoreline by the pounding surf, and the wind blew the sand into layers, which built up higher and higher, becoming dunes. It supposedly took a couple million years.

The Silver Lake State Park is also known for attracting people who collect fulgurites or “petrified lightning,” formed when lightning hits the dunes. Grains of sand melt and weld to each other in the shape of something like a miniature thunderbolt. Fulgurites are rare, and people come to look for them here. They’re turned into trinkets, such as earrings, to be sold online.

But the ORV Area attracts a rural sensibility, which was obvious from the parking lots, where off-road trucks had towed off-road toys for a weekend of fuel-injected fun. Rural men love American trucks but lust after Japanese playthings.

Bobby and I visited a rental store. The town was almost vacant, like a seaside surf resort in the offseason. The guys inside were what you’d expect: farmer big, unkempt beards, neon clothing, and Pit Vipers.

It was all numbers inside: for $250 we acquired a 999cc off-road 4×4 that allowed us one hour of fun on 500 acres of massive dunes. We signed waivers without reading them and watched a two-minute safety video. Our guide even discouraged us from listening to a segment of the recording, in which the vehicle’s driver enters a deep donut pit—a depression made by the spinning and drifting wheels of buggies going in circles—because others have become trapped inside and then require a costly tow truck.
Bobby paid for the rental along with the $500 damage deposit. We weren’t given helmets. Head protection isn’t required in the state of Michigan for side-by-sides. “You have sunglasses, so you don’t need goggles,” our guide told us.

The vehicle was easy to operate with a steering wheel, a gas and brake pedal, and simple gears (park, reverse, and high). “You notice the ‘L’ gear has been removed” our guide pointed out, “because ‘Low’ is for losers.”

This dune buggy is technically called a side-by-side because a passenger can sit next to the driver. This version was a 2019 Honda Talon 1000R. Top speed 75 miles per hour. Roll cage made from carbon and alloy tubing. Inside are two sports seats with race-car seat belts, securing the chest, pelvis, and shoulders. It’s like putting on a backpack but with two extra horizontal straps. Ours were broken, but we were told it’s fine. The passenger has a T-bar to hold onto anyway. The tire pressure was lower than usual so that the weight of the machine could be better distributed on the sand, in the same way snowshoes suspend feet on freshly fallen snow.

I turned the key. Ignition. Shifted the gears. High. Pressed the gas and brake pedals like a car. Simple.

Bashing dunes is like sailing giant ocean waves if the sea was struck still and turned yellow. Only five or six vehicles were out there. I am told in the summer, these dunes can host over 50,000 people. But today, it was the first month of the season, a weekday, and cold. Each ORV has a long flag sticking out of it, so that you can see danger over the dunes. My sunglasses could barely prevent sand from entering my eyes, so I couldn’t see anyway.

Some of these magnificent dunes were over 150 feet high, and we climbed their summits without effort or strain.

There is a cost, however.

You miss nature’s details going full speed. Dune bashing leaves you feeling as though you haven’t earned the world. You cross large sections of staggering beauty with the ease and convenience of another man’s engineering. It doesn’t give the satisfaction of imposing one’s own will against resistance. And because you’re driving so fast, you also have no time to appreciate your surroundings. All that’s required is the tap of a credit card, and the approval from the payment terminal, and voilà.

Of course, it’s so fun to blast octane in an expansive desert that these spiritual concerns disappear in the breeze. I wanted a challenge and drove aggressively.

Bobby had been talking throughout our car ride about being an academic. He even described his perspective as “mediated through a prism of abstraction,” which meant that he had been deprived of a real education: of being shoved into a locker for speaking that way.