I keep moving, taking cover beneath a tree.

 I keep moving, taking cover beneath a tree. 

Across from me, the entrance to the barracks is full to the gills, attendees peering out nervously, looking like prisoners on a POW train. Back at my camp, I’m drenched. This is no longer a game—things have gotten real. I open the back of my camper shell and notice water is dripping in over the windows, which, after all, are just plexiglass rectangles slotted into two plywood sheets. Digging through my tool box, I find some yellow electrical tape. Draped in my poncho, I pop open the umbrella, towel down the edges of the windows, and lay the tape down. Not ideal, but it’ll have to do. Sitting in my driver’s seat, I watch people fleeing: four cars exiting for every car entering. The scene is suddenly hilarious: Dudes in safari hats easing their Four-Runners and Wranglers outta the site, their custom headlights flashing in the rain.

When the worst of the storm has passed, I venture over to the tent of The Overland Journal, a magazine that chronicles this scene. There I meet a guy also named Chris, a cyclist who once won the Tour Divide, a race that traverses the length of the Rockies, from Canada to the U.S.-Mexico border. This, too, was a form of overlanding. A lot of contestants ended up getting snowed out, he tells me, but he was prepared. “People try to go the lightest they can go,” he says. “Try to keep going when they’re all rained out and wet. Then they get miserable, lose morale. People don’t realize you gotta stop to take care of yourself.”

It turns out a huge part of the expo is storytelling, a kind of mythologizing of our adventures. On Sunday I attend a drone videography class in which the instructor, a fox-like man in a safari hat, keeps emphasizing that his drone—this exact model, a Mavik 6, he tells us, is “being used all over Ukraine”—is simply a storytelling tool. You do a shot of nature on its own, no one cares. But if you have a little Jeep, or, I don’t know—he looks around the room knowingly—a Toyota [laughter], then boom! We want to see you!