On the Road
On a sunny afternoon this past January, I got a text from my friend Carter: “Hey I am going to drive and pick up Will from Noah’s in Colorado! You wanna come?”
Instantly, I felt an impulsive urge to go. I called my Dad.
“You’re gonna just drive there and come right back? Why? That sounds pointless,” he challenged me.
“I don’t know, it sounds fun…I’ve got a lot to think about, and I want to get to know Carter better,” I answered. Truthfully, the trip didn’t make any sense. It still doesn’t. But my dad let me go, and fifteen minutes later, I was on the road. This was my first dirtbag experience.
Carter at the Great Sand Dunes National Park. Photo Credit: Austin Salter
“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
- Jack Kerouac, On the Road
For centuries now, mobility and the utter freedom of the open road has been central to the American identity. Be it Manifest Destiny, the American Dream or Transcendentalist philosophy, this nation is obsessed with free movement and discovery.
Why do I drive past 15 coffee shops in hopes of finding a new place to study? Why do some families take road-trips simply out of principle despite cheaper flights? Popular culture fixates on the limits of quarantine, our growing restlessness and lost freedom, even now as the nation shelters in their homes from a deadly pandemic
In July 2011, Foster Huntington, a designer and avid surfer, moved out of his New York City apartment and into a van. The following November, he posted an Instagram photo with the hashtag #vanlife and the caption: “ I’m starting a photo project called #vanlife...It’s a celebration of ships of the open road and the notion that ‘home is where you park it.”
With this post, Huntington unwittingly created a cultural movement.
Countless #vanlifers have followed his lead, moving into vans and embracing the notion that home is where you park it. Almost nine years later, nearly 7 million posts use his hashtag and “van-lifer” accounts boast hundreds of thousands of followers.
Popular Van-lifers Abbi and Callen Hearne in Alaska. Photo Credit: Abbi Hearne
Vanlife promises a minimalist’s existence, full of adventure and free from cookie-cutter suburbia and consumerism. Alex Honnold, a professional rock climber and the subject of the popular Oscar-winning documentary Free-Solo, famously lived out of his van. I often get the question: “Are you gonna live out of your van like that Free Solo guy?” when I tell people I like to rock climb.
Rock climbers have long been associated with a minimalist lifestyle, earning their own, unique term--dirtbag. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, climbers left everything behind and flocked to Camp 4 in Yosemite Valley, inspired by the writers of the Beat Generation like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The dirtbag climbing lifestyle has been the subject of several popular documentaries: Valley Uprising, Dirtbag and 180 South.
“Because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars.”
- Jack Kerouac, On the Road
The Beat Generation in the 1950s championed a pleasure-driven, free-spirited lifestyle in reaction to the stable and prosperous post-war America. They saw the open road as freedom from social constraints and an avenue for spiritual and personal discovery. Yosemite dirtbags took a particular liking to Kerouac’s novel Dharma Bums, where Kerouac and friends unsuccessfully attempt to climb Matterhorn Peak in Northern Yosemite. A conversation between the main protagonists Japhy and Ray on Matterhorn Peak beautifully summarizes the dirtbag mantra:
“Pain or love or danger makes you real again, ain't that right, Ray? When you were scared on that ledge?...That's why frontiersmen are always heroes, and were always my real heroes, and will always be. They're constantly on the alert in the realness...see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume.”
- Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums
The Beat generation, however, never ditched everything to live on the road. In fact, Jack Kerouac died at 47 from heavy drinking in the comfortable St. Petersburg, Florida. While inspired by the beatniks, dirtbags seek something different. They don’t see the road as merely an escape or excuse for debauchery and exploration, though they participate in their fair share of both. Dirtbags live on the road frugally in order to pursue rock climbing and the danger that comes along with it. John Long, one of the leaders of a group of dirtbags in the 70s called The Stonemasters, dubs the encounters with death and suffering inherent in a lifestyle fully dedicated to climbing “impossible moments”:
“[These are moments] when our need to escape smallness and boredom crash into suffering, fear, and sometimes death...Experienced hands are seasoned through their struggles with impossible moments. No expert mountain biker has not crashed so hard they wished the wheel had never been invented. No long-distance thru-hiker, humping a spine-bending pack up a slushy draw in a hailstorm, has not asked herself a thousand times: What was I thinking? When first encountered, impossible moments are violently disorienting because our secret sauce has suddenly gone toxic.”
- John Long
Many find the vanlife, dirtbag lifestyle appealing because it sounds fully authentic: to live every day without the cushions of suburban life and experience a raw adventure, unlike a typical camping trip or hike. It taps into a common desire to truly live and experience the world. Jack London once insisted, “The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”
The writings of transcendentalists like Jack London and Henry David Thoreau represent a different side of dirtbagging: genuine reverence for the wild. Dirtbags are not common drifters. They are, as Joseph Taylor put it, “pilgrims of the vertical”. They voluntarily choose to live in the dirt and eat out of a bag in order to see and experience the most magnificent places on earth.
The ultimate degree of independence and self-sufficiency is treasured and sought after in dirtbagging. It's a proving ground. The dirtbag is, as Jack London puts it in The Call of the Wild, “suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial.” The longer they live on the road, the craftier and more resourceful they become.
The Call of the Wild tells the story of a domestic dog from California that is taken to work in the Alaskan Yukon, becoming undomesticated in the process. London describes this un-domestication: “the dominant primordial beast was strong in Buck, and under the fierce condition of trail life it grew and grew. Yet it was a secret growth. His newborn cunning gave him poise and control.” A lifestyle climber [in this way] becomes a dirtbag. It’s an art.
James Lucas, a professional climber who used to live as a dirtbag in his beat-up Saturn for many years, confesses, “old habits die hard, and I still have some dirtbag tendencies. I pilfer food from the office kitchen whenever I can and push the vending machine to get free popcorn. I skip dentist and medical visits, even though I have insurance.”
The dirtbag approach to becoming a world-class climber, the stonemaster way, seems to have fallen by the wayside. Professional rock climbers are now first and foremost professional athletes, and the dirtbag route to climbing success is seen as far less efficient than dedicated training at the local gym.
So do dirtbags still exist? Are van-lifers dirtbags? Some would say wholeheartedly no. Cedar Wright, a professional rock climber for North Face, spent years living as a dirtbag in Yosemite in the ‘90s, stealing food from plates at the cafeteria and sleeping among the boulders at night. He proclaimed in a controversial 2014 Climbing Magazine article that dirtbagging is dead, and in a 2018 Outside Magazine article he tells the van-lifers and weekend warriors to give their Sprinter vans to real dirtbags. This poses an interesting question: Are dirtbags and van lifers compatriots or philosophical opposites? Is it sacrilegious to call van-life dirtbagging because of how expensive and glamourous the rigs can be?
Check back next week for the remainder of the article!