Capn's Blog

[CapnAwesome]

Capn's blog, stardate 2010-2012

At age 26, I came to a revelation, you could do anything you wanted with your life. So I became me.

It seems like an obvious thing to say, in fact it's almost a steriotypical platitude at this point, to say that you can be whatever you want. It's strange when you ask a kid what they want to be when they grow up, the real question is "How do you want to sell your labor"

What I wanted to do with my life had nothing to do with working. I wanted to be an adventurer, an explorer, someone who saw and experienced as much as possible before they left this mortal coil.

That was not how I had been living previously. I had been living in Ellensburg, Wa, with post College blues and a useless liberal arts degree and a job I hated. So I came up with a plan, or maybe one just happened for me. I flew to Alaska.

There I worked in a fish processing plant and saved up money, I also was exposed to a new kind of person. The aimless traveler, people who weren't so concerned about work goals, but rather seeing the world. I met a dutch man who had biked there from southern Argentina, I teamed up with a communist named Bo and hitched around the state, my first hitching trip. I went to a random bluegrass festival put on by the hells angels.

This random traveling though, it wasn't going to be what I was going to do when I got back to the mainland. No, I had focus, and that focus was rock climbing.

When I flew home, I packed all my possessions into my ford bronco, gave away the rest to goodwill and drove down to Smith Rock in Oregon. I was going to live in the park, climb as much as possible and eventually find a job in Bend.

Life sometimes has other plans for you. Two things happened. One, the great recession. It became impossible to find a job in Bend. Instead I applied and started collecting unemployment, a surprisingly large amount of money when you are living out of a truck.

Two, my truck broke down.

It wasn't a hinderence. Emboldened by my Alaska experience, I packed all my climbing gear and a tent into a backpack, sold or gave away the rest, and hitchhiked to Bishop, CA. Another rock climbing mecca.

What I was doing, I discovered, was not an original idea. Rock Climbers had a long tradition of living on the road, spending no money and just climbing all the time. I met dozens of people like me that year. We call ourselves dirtbags.

I made that unemployment money last for the next two years. I adventured, climbing area to climbing area. I met friends and lovers along the way. Hitched to Mexico with a girlfriend, left her for another down there. Eventually my money ran low. I had dirtbagged my way through the recession. I was hardly the onlyone.

But that's where the secret to staying on the road comes in, seasonal work. There is more seasonal work than there are seasonal workers. A couple of months of work could keep me going for the next year, especially with the iron financial discipline I had developed. I did, on a west coast climbing circuit. Then one fateful day in 2012 a friend of mine, in a place called "hippy camp" in Squamish, British Columbia, asked me if I thought it would be possible to hitchhike to Argentina from the U.S.

"Sure" I said, "I bet it would be easy...."

*to be continued*

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Dirtbags in Squamish , 2010


Hitching in California, 2010


Climbing in Mexico, 2011

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Hippy Camp, 2010

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Dirtbags,
Living in the dirt, Mexico, 2011