Dirtbagging - Not a Glamorous Career Choice

So, kid, you think you’ve got what it takes to be a dirtbag? You think that bumming around someone else’s country in a beat up van, sleeping in car parks or tents and climbing rocks is easy? You think a life of poverty and leisure is easier than regular work for regular pay? Well, you’re probably right. After all, I’d much rather dirtbag my way around than get a job - those things are horrible. But if you think you’re up to it, be prepared for the following:

1) You had better like body hair.

If you’re going to live in a van, let alone a tent, and you have any hair on you at all, you’d better get used to finding it everywhere. And I do mean everywhere.

The logic is simple. Most people think they do most of their eating, sleeping and cooking in the same place – at home. Well, as a dirt bag, you can expect to eat, sleep and cook in literally the same place. While living in the van I used to wake up in the morning, push my sleeping bag into the corner of the van, sit on my sleeping mat and start boiling water for breakfast. If it was raining and there was no climbing to be done, I would move my cooking gear into a different corner of the tent and read magazines (either free or liberated) in exactly the same place.

That means that all the hair that falls off you ends up in your bed, your food, your lounge room. And you don’t have any worthwhile means of cleaning your van/tent. Vacuum cleaners are no longer a part of your world. The closest thing you have to a sweeping implement is your toothbrush, and you do NOT want to touch the floor of the van with your toothbrush.

As a fairly hairy human being, I have become intimately acquainted with hair on my stuff. Think about places and times and types of hair that should never come together. Yep, those have happened. All of those things. Do you really want me to say “pube in the eye”? Because I’ll say it. I’ll go there.

2) You had better like rain.

When you live in a house, rain is a pain in the butt (or a godsend). When you live in a van or a tent, rain is an existential crisis. The whole point of living in the van/tent is to trade off comfort and respectability for more time climbing or skiing or whatever your thing is. Rain both cancels that thing and confines you to your living pod. Of course, you could go outside and get wet and pretend that you were OK with that, but then you’d be wet and your stuff would be wet and you live in a van with no way of drying it and it will probably never stop raining in BC and life is miserable. So you stay in the van. It’s theoretically possible that you’re dirtbagging somewhere dry and living under a picnic table and everything is fine, but the big challenge of this lifestyle is that great places (like mountains) tend to come with terrible weather.

How much rain are we talking about here? Well, Rohan flew to BC with around 25 days available to climb. We had five sunny days, and two of them were wasted when Larry (the van) died. In the Bugaboos we spent seven days out of ten getting rained on, and of the three dry days, one was bitterly cold and windy (we climbed anyway, but it was not pretty). On those rainy or snowy days, we were confined to our tent for most or all of the day, and once stuff gets wet, the only way to dry it in your tent is to wear it. Wet socks? Wet gloves? Wet undies? Prepare to lounge around in discomfort folks.

3) You had better like sitting and/or lying down.

This really builds on point 2. If you’re stuck in your van/tent/cell, you probably can’t stand up. If there are two of you in a tent, you probably can’t even both sit up properly at the same time. In a recent storm in the Bugaboos, Rohan and I probably spent a collective 15 minutes outside the tent between going to bed one night and waking up two days later. That’s something like 35 hours and 45 minutes of sitting or lying down. Feel like going crazy? Don’t mind if I do.

We did this all day. All. Day.

4) You had better be able to laugh at farts.

Farts are a natural part of life, but for dirtbags on diets that are challenged by lack of funds, lack of 

refrigeration and/or the need to be light enough to carry into a campsite, farting is a common and potent experience. And if you’re stuck in a tent with another person for 35 hours and 45 minutes, they necessarily become a shared experience. And when a storm is blowing ice and snow through any openings or vents in your tent and you have to keep them closed at all times, farts become a lingering experience. Get used to farts. Learn to love fart humour. Avoid curry.

5) You had better be OK with smelling bad.

Farts are bad enough, but at least farts come and go. If you’re getting serious about your dirtbaggery, body odour will be your constant companion. While staying in the van in Pentiction I had to keep my elbows down whenever I wasn’t climbing. Ideally, I would have kept my elbows down while climbing as well, but at least on the rock there was no one but me to endure my stench and I could just grimace and keep moving. And once you’ve built up a steady reserve of body odour, washing yourself has less effect. You might clear the air for a little while, but your body is now firmly invested in producing and maintaining whatever it is that makes you smell so bad, so it’s not long before you are announcing your ripeness to olfactors across the land. Smelling this bad in a confined space with another human being? Well, let’s just say it’s not very charitable. With that sentiment in mind, good luck to the people sitting near me on the plane.

6) You had better like two minute noodles.

I must admit that I eat extremely well for a dirtbag. I don’t dumpster dive, I insist on actual fruits and vegetables in as many meals as I can get, I take the time and the fuel to cook better meals on my camp stove, and I devoted an inconvenient amount of space in the van to keeping condiments and spices and all that stuff. But I pay for that in both cost (which is low but could be much lower) and weight if I ever need to hike to a campsite. Rohan and I had an whole orange each on the third last day of our Bugaboos trip, a full 9 days after leaving the car, but in return we both hiked in with packs so heavy that we couldn’t individually lift them and it took both of us to heave each pack up before the unfortunate bearer could actually shoulder the load.

But even I, a veritable gourmet of the dirtbag world, occasionally stoop to two minute noodles. In fact, after a sufficiently horrible/awesome day of climbing, I rather enjoy two minute noodles, especially if I mix different varieties into exiting fusion recipes (on this trip we combined spicy chicken and beef – a delicate barnyard melange). For those of you who just can’t stomach two minute noodles, or its ugly, deformed half-brother Kraft Dinner, be prepared to abandon those boundaries should you choose the dirtbag life. There is no place in this world for such standards.

7) You had better be a sound sleeper.

No matter where you stay, something will try to keep you awake. The most feared opponent is the Snorer. It is a law of nature that in any occupied hut, at least one person will snore. In a hut where no known snorers are staying, a normally silent sleeper will fire up the midnight chainsaw just to keep the universe running smoothly. If you’re me, that snorer will probably be related to you, but rest assured that your diligent author is more of a snuffler than a genuine snorer.

Less feared than the snorer, but a no less serious opponent, is traffic noise. Trucks, cars, novelty horns or, for special occasions, trains will roar past your resting place with gusto. The Bugaboos was the first place I’ve stayed since my share-house in Rossland where I couldn’t hear traffic. And if you’re remote enough that you can’t hear cars or trucks, get ready for helicopters in the morning.

But with hard work and a little imagination you might be able to find yourself somewhere where there are no other folk to keep you awake. Rest assured that even if there’s no one around to snore or rev their engine, nature will fill the void. Perhaps the wind will hammer your tent, flapping the fabric around and clacking the poles together. Perhaps rain will pound your campsite and reverberate around your car. Perhaps rodents will rummage through your stuff and gnaw loudly on your shoes. Mark my words, something will try to prevent you from sleeping. Prepare for long nights spent with uncomfortable earplugs and growing anxiety.

As a dirtbag, one comes to not just tolerate, but to embrace such things. Once the initial hump of dirtiness and smelliness is overcome, the world is your cheap unrefrigerated oyster (and yes, I have eaten unrefrigerated oysters, and yes, I did puke them back up later that day). And I can tell you that that oyster is delicious (the figurative one, the literal ones tasted pretty wrong, but I was very hungry). After all, when the rain clears and the snoring stops, you get to do this:

 The sun comes up on another day of horrible/awesome climbing.