Kicked Out Like a Bum

My hometown of Canberra is notorious across Australia for being terrible. Add to this the tendency of those returning from international travel to scorn the worn and familiar places they left, and it would be natural for me to loathe returning to my home city. But, my return to Canberra has been quite the opposite. Despite chasing winter for the last twelve months, visiting a Canberra winter has been an exceedingly pleasant experience. Canberra winters are cool, rather than cold, and crisp clear days with open skies and mellow sunlight are the norm. They are the sort of days that make you want to plant bok choy.

That is not to say that everything about my return to Australia has been rosy. It seems almost traditional to sigh about how nothing has changed when you return after a few months absence, but in my case a whole bunch of things have changed, some for the worse. But you, dear reader, don’t care at all about changes in my personal circumstances. Staying with my folks because I broke up with my girlfriend? No one cares. None of my keys (from just twelve months ago) work? Boring. You all read this blog to hear about my embarrassing or unpleasant experiences. Have I had any of those in Canberra? A couple, perhaps, but nothing of notable quality. I haven’t been on any dates if that’s what you’re hoping for.

Perhaps the most telling change upon my return to Canberra was getting kicked off the climbing wall at my old high school. A few preliminary statements are in order to understand the situation. First, the climbing wall is on the outside of the school gymnasium. Second, it is excellent quality – really well thought out climbing, interesting holds, neat moves. It’s made from real rocks epoxied onto a brick wall, so the texture and feel of the climbing is way better than your average artificial wall. Third, to get to this wall you have to climb over a large and very easy to climb fence. Now, some people would take the presence of such a fence as an indication that the school did not wish for members of the public to use their bouldering wall. But to my mind the idea of putting such an easy to climb fence in the way of a rock climbing wall suggests a more subtle intention is at work. To me, a fence like that says "Climbers, it might look like we don't want you here, but in fact this fence is just to keep riff-raff away. Please, come in and avail yourself of our excellent facilities." In my mind (and perhaps nowhere else) there is a clear distinction between climbers and riff-raff.

You might think my opinion of the fence somewhat fanciful and absurd, but it has been borne out by experience. I have been noticed using the wall on several occasions by school staff who have either turned a blind eye to my presence, or (especially if they recognised that I was an previous student) struck up a friendly conversation. But this time, two staff members wandered past and one of them KICKED ME OUT.

First they asked what I was doing and I pointed out that I was bouldering.

Then they asked how I had gotten in and I explained that I had climbed over the fence.

Then they said I shouldn't do that and I explained that I had been climbing over that fence for ten years.

They made the valid point that it wasn't a public climbing wall, and I countered with the equally valid point that it was a very good climbing wall. Although this argument is strictly non sequitur I think that it was a reasonable rebuttal in what was essentially a comparison of competing values.

She clearly did not find my value claim convincing and rather indignantly pointed out that I should leave. I agreed to do so.

At this point, the other staff member (who taught me chemistry back when I used to learn things) said hello and we had a quick chat while I pulled off my climbing shoes and hopped back over the fence.

Getting kicked off the climbing wall is more that just inconvenient. It’s a sign that I’m no longer a welcome dirtbag in my own home town. In cities all around the world, there are dirtbags and climbing/skiing/mountain biking bums living alongside regular folk every day. Not long after regular folk have left for their jobs in the morning, these dirtbags and bums will wake up and face the prospect of choosing what they will do for the rest of the day. Their lives are intertwined with those of the hardworking decent folk who fill the offices and businesses of the town, but different in all kinds of financial, recreational and hygienic ways.

I was once such a person in Canberra. I was more of a skiing and Frisbee bum than a dirtbag per se, but I was still tolerated or even welcomed by the institutions from whom I leeched resources and opportunities. But it seems my absence, and perhaps my graduation from bum to dirtbag, has put a stop to this. Now the familiar and reliable haunts of my youth are denied to me. The lady who kicked me out doesn’t realise that I still know the sequence for traversing the wall off by heart, or that I can tell which holds (or bits of holds) have broken off or where new holds have been attached, or that my initials are written above the ingenious arête climb I worked out in 2002 (and then couldn't repeat after I replaced my ailing climbing shoes). In all honesty, I should probably have kicked her out, but she probably wouldn’t have been comfortable climbing over the fence.

Does this mean that any return to Canberra to live must be accompanied by a submission to the norms and expectations of a real job and a normal life? I think (and hope) not. Does this mean I will hide in the bushes at the Narrabundah College bouldering wall if I hear people nearby? Most certainly.

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.

Dirtbag Life

OK, this post is actually a bit out of date, but I thought you might like an insight into the dirtbag lifestyle, so I figured I'd still put it up.

Since the completion of the portrait, I have returned to Penticton to resume my parasitic ways at the Skaha Bluffs climbing area. Last time I was staying here there were cheap rates at a nearby campground, which served as a neat social hub to find climbing partners and meant I could charge my laptop and take showers. Having a functioning laptop and being able to take showers are the hallmarks of a civilised life. But during my absence, peak season started in Penticton, a summer resort town, and now the campsites charge an unholy $35 a night for site. So instead I have been sleeping in my van in the carpark at Walmart. I realise that Walmart is a large corporation, and is thus the embodiment of evil and greed and capitalist terror, but they have a North America-wide policy of allowing people to sleep in campervans and RVs in their carparks, which is pretty much the best thing ever.

But before you lose all respect for me because I'm sponging off a giant corporation, save a bit in reserve so that you can take satisfaction in abandoning it too when you discover that this Walmart has a built in McDonald's, and that I regularly steal their WiFi. Yes, I have sold out to our capitalist overlords in exchange for a free place to park my van overnight and heartbreakingly slow access to the Internet.

Sleeping in the Walmart carpark has its advantages (it's free), but there are definite downsides to the arrangement. The toilets (washrooms, for my Canadian readers) are only open from 8am to 10pm, which can mean that a late night call of nature has to be answered in some trees behind the building that are probably part of some one's yard. There is also no running water, so I have to refill my water bottles at a park near the Skaha lake. After several days of this practise, a maintenance person for the park informed me that I was drinking lake water. In a monumental feat of confirmation bias, I have managed to convince myself that he's wrong. There is also nowhere to charge my laptop, but I can use the local public library if it's open, or I can use a power point in the toilet block at the park where I get my water. Of course, actually using your laptop (or just hanging around waiting for it to charge) in a public washroom is off the scale of creepiness, so I have to plug it in, hide the laptop in a bag, and then sit at a picnic table outside and read a book while I wait to make sure the maintenance guy doesn't lock the toilets with my stuff inside. And finally, there is nowhere to shower. This is largely academic, because even at the campgrounds I was at before I didn't actually use the showers very often, but sometimes I wonder if my advanced personal odor might make it harder to find climbing partners.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, these petty hardships, living in a van at Walmart does give me unassailable dirtbag credibility. If I wasn't such a terrible climber I would be the complete package -an inspiration to foolhardy teenagers and a source of anxiety for parents. Indeed, I was once just such a teenager, dreaming of a life lived cheaply, where hygiene and a respectable place in the social order are given up in exchange for more climbing, more skiing, and a less financially secure old-age.Of course, living in a van in a city is only the tip of the dirtbag iceberg. But this small taste has given me hope that maybe one day I too can become a bearded eccentric living in a cave.