shit raft life lessons

Dumptruck to the Sun

There are two songs that have been on repeat in the mp3 player that is wedged in my brain ever since I first heard them. I listen to them, or some parts of them, almost every time I ride. And a lot of times when I’m not riding, to be honest. There are lots of songs that float in and out, but these two are perennially high on the shuffle. Not sure why. Bear in mind, I don’t actually ride with any sort of music plugged into my ears. There’s something disconnective about piping tunes into riding, speaking purely for myself here, so I tend to roll to the soundtrack of crunching dirt, clattering chains, the occasional squish and suck of suspension components, and the everchanging aria of brakes and rotors.

One of those songs is “Minutes to Midnight” by Midnight Oil. The other is “Sun Green” by Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Sometimes the two songs will even start to mash together despite their very, very different arrangements. One minute I’ll be grinding up to a ridge singing “driving that dump truck up to the sun/a sigh in the human heart” to myself, and the next I’ll be drifting into a loose turn and it’s all “hey mister clean, you’re dirty now too”. And for some reason, whenever Minutes to Midnight comes on in my head (which is a lot, as we have already established), I think of Dane Stark rowing the shit-raft through the Grand Canyon.

There’s an element of connection there because I was playing that album a whole lot back around the time I rafted the Grand Canyon with the Stark family. The Starks were campers and rafters and skiers and mountaineers, and all six of them had permits in to float the Colorado River. At this time, back in the late 1980s, there was a sort of rotating permit system in place and once someone got selected for a trip they would have to resubmit their permit and get to the back of the line, so to speak. The wait for private trips was about seven or eight years back then, but since every member of the Stark family held a permit they would usually have a trip running through that great big red and gold sandstone cathedral every couple years.

The time I lucked in as “friend of the family who knows nothing about rivers” ballast was also Dane’s first trip rowing his own boat. The Starks all rowed Avons, with one oarsperson and a couple other passengers per raft. The rules, as they were explained to me, stated the rookie or most rookie adjacent boat had the honor of carrying the groovers.

“Groovers” is the name given to the army surplus ammo cans predominantly used as toilets by rafters. The name came from the two grooves they’d leave in someone’s cheeks when making a deposit, or dropping the kids off at the pool, or whatever metaphor you need for taking a dump. Rafters took their shit seriously in this regard, pun intended. The Leave No Trace ethos ran strong in the community, and it was a note of honor to pack out every single piece of refuse, to respect the river and the canyon.

The Starks were pretty evolved though, and had rigged up a nice wooden toilet seat arrangement for their groovers, so they didn’t really leave grooves. Anyway, trips would start with the junior-most raft pilot captaining an Avon full of empty ammo cans. Then, as each ammo can would get filled, the brimful shit inside cinched tight, waterproof lid latched securely in place, the raft would, can by can, begin to float a little lower. 16 people on a two week float can generate a whole lot of shit, and at the end of the trip the shit-raft gets pretty hard to maneuver. There are some massive rapids, and, given all the preamble to the importance of packing it all out, flipping the shit-raft or in any way losing one’s shit in the river is just not an option. It is beyond unforgivable.

Dane was a big strapping lad, and he piloted the shit-raft with skill and confidence. He wore his role like a badge of honor, and we all treated him with the respect he was due. To this day, whenever anyone talks about “owning their shit”, I think of Dane and the shit-raft. And the line from Minutes to Midnight – “driving that dump truck up to the sun”.

There’s a lot of trash floating around in Baja. Crusty old desert rats sometimes refer to plastic bags flapping from thorny bushes as the state flower. To first-world observers used to curbside recycling and highly evolved sanitation services, it can seem dirty and careless. But beyond the surface skein of the plastic that is one way or another slowly engulfing us all, it’s anything but careless. The isolation and harshness of this place ensures a premium value is placed on any material that can actually be reused, repaired, or repurposed.

I was at the local bike shop a week ago, donating a couple sets of tires that had a few hundred miles of use on them. Some cactus spines here and there, nothing some sealant can’t handle, but plenty of life left. These tires were not ideal desert treads by any stretch, but judging by the look on the shoprat’s face I could just as well have handed him a sack of gold. Hanging on the wall, next to some bottles of sealant and a stack of patch kits, there was a hook. A wreath of patched tires hung from the hook. They sold for the equivalent of a buck apiece. The shoprat informed me they never sell tubes with more than ten patches, then made a joke about how times are changing, because they used to let them go up to 20 patches. There was a pile of junked bikes out back, waiting to be scavenged, boxes of used derailleurs and controls stacked against a wall, jars of nuts and bolts that had been plucked and repurposed from the bikes that came before the current donor crop.

A few days later I was crawling around in the dirt under a friend’s Toyota Tundra. He’d managed to shear a brake line at the caliper, landing from a jump on a dirt road, and had rolled 50 hilly kilometers into town with only creative downshifting and e-brake manipulation to slow him down. The guys at the auto parts store said they could order a full, correct, Toyota line and it would arrive in about a week. Or, they could sell us some generic straight tubes and a cheap little bender device, and we could then mate those to some other generic bits of brake hose, and either scavenge the old brackets or make new ones out of zip ties. This was all communicated through a solid language barrier, but they were invested in seeing us get rolling again. So, for somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 worth of generic parts and a couple skinned knuckles, we bodged together a functioning brake system, bled it in the parking lot, and my friend continued on his drive down the peninsula. The guys at the parts store were positively beaming as he drove away. I suspect they were stoked to see gringos rolling around in the dirt trying to fix something.

We live in a highly processed, highly consumptive world. This is not the first time I’ve mentioned this, or even the second, and it won’t be the last. Most of us are faced with a constant bombardment of media exhorting us to constantly buy more stuff. The programming behind this bombardment is that more stuff will make our lives better, will make us better people, will scratch whatever cosmic itch we all suffer from but can never really articulate. Buy more shit, and it’ll all be great. This messaging is so pervasive as to be basically inescapable. It is almost impossible not to succumb to it in some way or another, whether that means being seduced by the convenience of individually wrapped cheese slices or wooed by those new hot patches on this year’s Maxxis tires. We are not encouraged to contemplate points of origin, supply chain cost or complexity, industrial scale raw material extraction, engineered product fallibility, planned obsolescence, soup-to-nuts energy consumption habits, or right-to-repair legal battles. Shut up. Buy more shit. Be happy.

We throw away so much stuff. Individually, we all have our personal ideas about what is wasteful, what is recyclable, what is repairable, what constitutes treasure or trash. But collectively, we sure do stack up the empties and leave a comet’s tail of garbage in our wake. In the parts of the world where we have systems in place to make all that garbage, and all our literal shit, magically disappear, it’s easy to forget about our waste. “It’s recyclable”, we proclaim, mindfully tossing plastic waste into a blue plastic bin and then forgetting about it completely. We buy toilet paper by the pallet, and we purchase toilets based on their ability to flush a perceived number of golf balls at a time, the more the better. Flush after flush after flush, we forget.

It all hits differently down here. Without established garbage and recycling programs, our waste IS our waste. Our trash is inescapable, the consequences of our consumption unavoidable. Can’t hide from it anywhere. But also, the worth of everything usable is clearly evident. Everything from used metal road signs to old appliances, footwear to Ford Rangers, gets fixed, patched, mended, repurposed, reused. To do less would be wasteful.

Down here, people innately understand the cosmic message of the shit-raft. They know exactly what it means to own your shit. Buy your meat from the ranch where it grew, or from the store that got it from the ranch. Take that used paperback novel back to the bookstore you bought it from and let them sell it again. Buy beer in bottles, for the deposit value. Don’t flush your toilet paper, because the town’s sewer pipes by and large are not too good with a lot of paper. Confront your first world baggage on that one. Use less. Of everything. Use everything, for longer.

I’ve been wearing the same pair of bib shorts for the past two months. Washing them after every other ride, letting them dry in the sun. This was a pair that I left down here after doing the same with them last year, and the year before that. They are starting to come apart in places. The chamois is flattened and tired. Up north, I would have already exiled them to the trash a season ago. Down here, they’ve got plenty of life left.

Running these shorts until there is nothing left of them is a goal now. Repurposing tires someplace they’ll get used until they are egg-bald warms my heart. My hands filthy and stinking with brake fluid, I am happy, humming “Driving that dump truck up to the sun. Hey mister clean, you’re dirty now too…”