Last weekend I went land sailing at a dry lakebed out by Hachita, New Mexico. It was a regatta, of sorts.

I left Friday evening, with a slight fever, in a rented economy car. I had planned on playing hooky from work on Friday, but when I woke up I was really sick, so I didn't get the chores done I had planned to do. Still, despite my illness, I managed to slay a few dragons and I let the rest run free.

I took a wrong turn and ended up on one of those 70-mile-an-hour dirt roads that get graded pretty regularly out in the desert. I pulled up to a ranch house to ask directions, but no one came out when I honked and yelled from the gate. I could see the TV on through the glass door, but I figured walking up to the house was an invitation to get shot out there in the high lonesome. They might be cooking meth. And I wasn't strapped.

I drove around enough to convince myself I was really lost, and then backtracked to the highway.

I got lost twice more before someone from the camp came out to get me. I had the pork chops and they were hungry.

Jaime cooked the meat while I drank tequila and grapefruit juice and tried to set up my new tent. I bent the aluminum tent stakes driving them into the lake bed.

Harder than the back of God's head, Jaime said.

We ate pork chops and apple sauce and drank tequila and beer and told stories till the RV's turned their generators off, and then we went to sleep under a still full moon sky.

It got warmer even before the sun came up, but I stayed in my tent till full daylight.

The campsite stretched out for a quarter mile. There were campers and trailers. Jack brought a pop-up. Mark and Sharon brought their RV with the leather interior, big screen TVs and a mess of kids. Noonie slept on a lawn chair in the back of a rental truck.

We drank cowboy coffee, and threw the dregs out across the lakebed. The wind still didn't blow. Noonie tinkered with his open-class racer. We heated water on the propane stove and splashed our faces. We ate pastries and drank more coffee and sat around and told each other all the old lies, and some new ones.

A breeze started coming in from the south, but it wasn't enough, and then it was. A few cars got out into the middle of the lake bed and stalled. But the stillness was just the wind catching its breath.

Tead said take out that car, it's pretty stable.

I said okay.

He said, you need some help?

I said I'll watch you.

The wind started to blow. The car sailed fast, knots and not miles per hour, but lots of them. I tried to pull a tack into the wind, and the cart got up on two wheels, and then everything happened at once. The hammock seat ripped, and I got punched in the kidney, and then I was standing up inside the pipe frame of the overturned sail car, still strapped in by the seat belt.

J.T. came out and sailed the broken sail car back into camp and I drove his quad. My kidney hurt, but two hours later when I finally peed, it was only orange and not pink.

The sun went down and Tead fired up his mesquite smoker and we cooked all our meat, steaks and pork chops, and drank more tequila, and told the same old lies, but they were funny now.

We ate beans.

The full moon tried to burn off the clouds. The wind picked up, again, and Noonie took his boat out, and then rolled past in the dark like thunder.

I crawled into my tent, and slept in the fine grit that had seeped in through the cracks.

Breakfast was cowboy coffee and blueberry scones. The wind blew, gentle but steady. I took the boat out again. Noonie had sewed the hammock seat back together. I drove across the lake bed, and tacked into the wind. At the other end I made a gentle downwind turn and then back out, a couple of runs across the wind.

In front of Tead's trailer I turned the boat into the wind and dragged my Flintstone brake to stop the boat. Tead was out front with a couple of friends.

Do they have events like this all over? I asked.

They got some in Nevada, but they're not like this. Too many rules. Class 5's till 10, and then maybe you rec racers. Here we only got two rules. Haul out your trash, and have fun. Oh, and don't be an asshole.