(Oh Powers That Be, please accept this humble offering and consign it to a time slot of great worthiness, such as Wednesday evening.)

You’d think that living in a one room off-the-grid cabin at the end of a dead end road in North Nowhere Vermont would be weird enough, but no! I take it to the next level because I do it without a car or a driver’s license. I’ve never had either. I attribute this to half atypical psychology and half atypical neurology. I’ve never had any interest in cars and my only time behind a steering wheel was a disastrous session of Driver’s Ed when I was 17. My mother signed me up for it without telling me. It lasted two days.

Not that I eschew motorized transportation entirely. For 20 years I tooled around in a series of Recreative Industries Max 2 six-wheel amphibious ATVs:

https://maxatvs.com/max2/

They’re tons of fun but have two drawbacks:

  1. They’re not very fast and can’t keep up at group ATV riding events.
  2. They’re so unusual that no-one knows how to fix them. I had to do all my own maintenance and while I can do all my own maintenance I’d really like to have the option of not having to do all my own maintenance.

My last Max 2 broke down about 10 years ago. The bearings in the skid-steer transmission are shot and my resolve to extract the transmission from the chassis wore out. The mostly disassembled vehicle has been in my little garage ever since and I had no interest in obtaining a replacement.

So began a period of pedestrianism. My cabin is four miles out of town and it takes me an hour and 20 minutes to hike the distance. I almost always got a ride however and it was an interestingly social time seeing my generous neighbors. I could collect an item of town gossip in the morning and pass it on in the afternoon.

But time has passed and the hike, while still not difficult, sometimes seems increasingly trying, and some of my neighbors have moved away while others have retired and don’t drive into town every day any more. I decided it was time to go on the road again.

But I wasn’t going to get another six-wheeler. Nor was I going to get a Polaris side-by-side UTV like all my neighbors have. My objection is that the Polaris has a Continuously Variable Transmission:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuously_variable_transmission

Which my six-wheelers also had. My Polaris-owning neighbors say CVTs are robust but they don’t put on the miles I do and I had constant problems with them. I wanted a real transmission so I ordered a Honda Pioneer 700:

https://powersports.honda.com/sxs/recutility/pioneer-700

And decked it out with a full cab and a heater:

 

The proud owner taking delivery.

There’s a switch to go between automatic and manual shifting and flappy paddles on the steering wheel. The paddles work even in automatic mode which is convenient when the automatic system gets confused by steep hills. The engine is right behind the seats which a Polaris-owning neighbor says means better weight distribution for going down steep hills when they’re icy. Once he learned I was getting a UTV this neighbor did nothing but rant about the perils of icy steep hills, so much so that I actually considered getting another Max 2.

The six-wheelers have a hand throttle and tank-like skid-steering. My first impressions of the Honda were that the foot throttle was trigger sensitive and the steering wheel like mush. I’ve gotten used to them since then. The six-wheelers aren’t rigged to have one side of tires go forward and the other backward so you can’t swivel around the vehicle center but you can lock one side and power the other which still gives a very tight turning radius. The Honda’s turning radius is huge in comparison. It won’t traverse the path to my little garage so the vehicle is going to have to live outside under a cover for the Winter. I’m planning on building a new garage next Summer.

Also next Summer my mother will get to fulfill her dream of seeing her son behind a steering wheel. It took only 60 years.