Rugged Philosophy

B E I N G A N D N O T H I N G N E S S

~ By Ezra Dyer

Ru g ged Ph i l osophy

Land Rover set up a competition to school its dealers. We got a lesson in existentialism.

You go through the effort to set up a secret alliance with retired Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn’s team, but it’s for naught since your trucks are hidden among 4000 acres of North Carolina woods. So you spend the first hour of the day standing next to some sheep with your photographer while the other two guys on your team try to find the Defender so you can begin the Land Rover TReK off-road competition. They show up, and you try to attempt the nearest of a dozen challenges vaguely mapped around the property. But you get lost and end up driving repeatedly through the parking lot of a skeetshooting competition, where people with guns look increasingly annoyed. When you finally find a challenge, it entails driving slowly around pylons in a field, for an hour. The next one involves cooperating with a second team to use your winches to raise a beam, and their winch promptly breaks

“Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.” —Jean-Paul Sartre because its Bluetooth controller won’t pair or something. You waste valuable time airing down the tires for obstacles you never find. Land Rover people keep warning that exceeding 20 mph will get you kicked out. After building a bridge and driving over it—cool challenge—you get lost again. This program was designed for Land Rover dealers to test their knowledge of the product, and it might. Or it might not. You could conceivably drive around all day earning no points, and your team skates awfully close to that line. One page of your notebook reads, “Maybe the real lesson is about the punishing, relentless chaos and unpredictability of life itself, the futility of goals, the inevitable wasting of time as we shuffle inexorably toward the grave. Or maybe it’s that muddin’ is more fun with no dang rules and such!” Somehow, you place third.