Tim Mathis - The Dirtbags Guide to Life: Eternal Truth for Hiker Trash, Ski Bums, and Vagabonds

The Dirtbags Guide to Life: Eternal Truth for Hiker Trash, Ski Bums, and Vagabonds

By Tim Mathis

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to my wife Angel, my editor Rob Danger Muffin Zimmerman, and Megan Myers, who designed the art for this project. Youre all a bunch of freaking dirtbags.

To everyone - thank you so much for reading the Kindle edition of this book!

For a note on how to use this document as a resource, Ive referenced dozens of websites and organizations throughout the text. In order to make it easy to learn more, Ive done my best to link to them (along with a bunch of other useful links) in the appendix at the end of this book. Most eReaders should allow you to click out through the hyperlinks to access outside resources directly.

Dear Reader

You might not consider yourself a dirtbag, and thats okay. But I want to make something clear from the start: if you do , I want to assure you that you dont need to feel threatened around me.

I see the way they look at you when you walk in the room (because you stink). I know the pain you feel when your friends dont invite you over anymore (because they cant get that stain you left out of their couch). I know how frustrating it is that your parents insist on you paying rent (because youre 34). I know because Ive walked in your shoes.

They assume that youre just some loser that doesnt want a job, or that youre going to shoplift their Cheetos because you still have a little orange dust on your lip. They assume that you just dont know what the hell youre doing with your life.

But they dont understand that youre the modern Shackleton, the woke Ed Abbey. And without people like you, no one would know what the top of a mountain looks like. They would have to skip their day hikes because there would be no trails. Oprah wouldnt be so inspired because Reese Witherspoon would have to go Wild on a sidewalk in Des Moines, and Endless Summer would just be about a sunburned Midwesterner at the Holiday Inn in Destin . The world would have no underwater photography, no X Games, and would care not a whit for fresh pow. Hell, without you no American kid would have bike toured around Europe, and none of your peers would know the possibilities of single payer healthcare or legalized pot.

What they see as signs of indigence are actually your badges of honor, your irrefutable evidence of commitment to the cause. If you live in your van, its because there are no apartments to rent at the base of the Dawn Wall. If your clothes are filthy, its because there are no laundry machines where you spend your afternoons, 30 miles from the nearest trailhead. And if you eat Meow Mix, its because surfing doesnt pay, and that stuffs cheaper than people food.

Youre keeping the spirit of the Dharma Bums alive: Grandma Gatewood and Yvon Chouinard, Wendell Berry and John Mother Fn Muir. Your works born the fruit of Greenpeace, Patagonia, and the National Park System. And those trust fund #vanlifers and their beautiful, sepia-filtered Instagram feeds - their art is imitating your life.

Youve turned their pejorative into a term of endearment. Youve taken the Valley Uprising and turned it into a revolution. Youve taken outdoor recreation and made it Universal Truth.

Youre the modern day explorer, and youre bound to change the world.

And this manifesto is dedicated to you, the highest proof distillation of modern adventure.

Dirtbag

A person who is committed to a given (usually extreme) lifestyle to the point of abandoning employment and other societal norms in order to pursue said lifestyle. Dirtbags can be distinguished from hippies by the fact that dirtbags have a specific reason for their living communaly (sic) and generally non-hygenically (sic); dirtbags are seeking to spend all of their moments pursuing their lifestyle.

The best examles (sic) of dirtbags and dirtbagging are the communities of climbers that can be found in any of the major climbing areas of North America--Squamish, BC; Yosemite, CA; Joshua Tree, CA; etc.

#hippy#bum#climber#surfer#backpacker#hitchhiker

by Shay (dirtbag wannabe) August 17, 2007

Urban Dictionary

Introduction

Hey people, welcome to the Dirtbags Guide to Life, your manual for living an adventure-filled life on the cheap. What youre getting into, at heart, is a manifesto outlining the philosophy that adventure is for everyone - or at least everyone who wants it - and that the good life can be had even for those of you with no inheritance, no skills, and no prospects. The best things in life are free, and the shit thats not you can buy at the thrift store. This is a book about how and why.

Im Tim, and Im writing this as someone whos been doing this stuff myself, in some capacity or another, for a couple of decades now. My wife and I are immersed in dirtbaggery personally as hikers, travelers, runners, and paddlers, but also professionally as co-owners of a business called Boldly Went that congeals the wisdom of the dirtbag masses through live storytelling events, interviews, and a couple of different podcasts.

My goal here is to distill as much useful information as I can, because I want to give you a handbook for living the good life of fun and adventure even if you cant (or prefer not to) spend a ton of money.

Before we get too far into any of that though, lets talk a bit about how we all got here.

Who cares about the humble dirtbag?

Once upon a time, in the 1950s and 60s, when countercultures were being born and postwar society was trying to get its act together, a group of young climbers set up camp in the Yosemite Valley. Out of some combination of social rebellion and love of the game, they chose to eschew jobs and traditional lifestyles in favor of scavenged food and a daily life of rock climbing and camping in the Valley for months or years at a time. They allegedly survived on cat food and thievery, and at some point, someone referred to them as a bunch of dirtbags, and the term stuck.

In all likelihood, dirtbag was originally intended as an insult, but as is sometimes the case with these things, the climbers, and those who followed them, took it up as a point of pride. They embraced their filthy tents and smelly-ass clothes as signs of commitment to the cause - signs that they were people willing to sacrifice for their passions, and to pursue them even as society rejected them for it.

As far as I know, there has never been a history written about the process of how the word dirtbag (both as a term and a lifestyle) has spread, but across the last 60 odd years, it has. And today, a quick Google search confirms that there are groups dispersed across the entire spectrum of outdoor activities that refer to themselves as dirtbags, all living a similar life of sacrificial devotion to the cause: trail runners, hikers, paddlers, skiers, climbers, world-travelers, mountain bikers, and more. Regarded as one of the best and most well-known outdoor-related podcasts of the current time, The Dirtbag Diaries has helped to popularize this term with its 9 million plus listeners. And a recent film backed by legendary outdoor clothing and gear company Patagonia that profiles the pioneering alpinist Fred Beckey was simply titled, Dirtbag .

The progression happened gradually, but somewhere along the way it became possible to identify dirtbags as more than just a couple of weirdos doing weirdo shit, escalating into a full-fledged counter culture embraced by thousands. In an article from her blog in 2014, ultrarunner, race director and social media influencer Candice Burt identified dirtbaggery as a growing social movement, and she was right. The books and film adaptations of Jon Krakauers Into the Wild and Cheryl Strayeds Wild made cult heroes out of people living dirtbag lifestyles, and a popular documentary called Valley Uprising was made about those original Yosemite climbers. While theres no central organizing committee, along with those popular artistic touchstones, dirtbag culture has developed its own identifiable dress code (flannels, trucker caps, cutoffs, body hair) and sacred places (Yosemite, Squamish, Patagonia, Chamonix), and is present in beautiful outdoor locations all over the world.