"Freedom is a psycho-kinetic skill. - Hakim Bey "
Dolores LaChappelle, July 4, 1926 - Jan. 21, 2007
“Everything is connected. The real self is part of the whole and thus does not end with death.” - Dolores LaChappelle, Earth Wisdom
“I wish you could have been with her on the morning after a new powder snowfall as she was hurrying out the door of our home in Alta to embrace the day. She had little use for niceties as a most important appointment was to be kept: the exhilaration and free fall of dancing with millions of ice crystals under the sun in the mountains. This embrace of motion, mountain and life swept my mother into a deep affirmation of the world of the spirit, obvious in her delight and excitement at being able to once again turn her skis down the mountain and let go.” - son David LaChappelle, Silverton Standard and The Miner.
You know the bum. Ski bum, surf bum, river rat. Island bum, fishing bum, bar fly. Wandering walker, backroads roamer
and neighborhood-savoring front-porch bum.
When we think of bums, we think of those somehow odd, somewhat indolent, often impoverished and generally
unproductive people who are found loitering around the places we often like to visit: the ocean, the mountains, the
deserts, the funky little nook-and-cranny towns scattered about out in the hinterlands. They come in both male and
female, and their ages can run from 18 to 80. (Silverton's Dolores LaChapelle, author, Tai Chi master, and the patron
saint of skiing, recently passed at 82 - still every bit the ski bum as any college-dodging late-teen lift-op.)
Laggards all of them. But they might know something you don't.
Look again: What binds bums of all configurations and in all locations? It is having opted to focus their attention
less on making a good living and more on the good living itself. They might have chosen to not be worldly, but they
are nonetheless active and involved in their immediate world, whereever that is.
That logic, of course, is a bit circular for the square hole inhabited by the mass of "normal" adults in our present
urban/suburban corporate/career producer/consumer culture - hence that image of laziness and frivolity associated
with bums. And by most folks' standards, they're right. Bums are loafers. Proudly so. Deliberately so.
Hence, most bums' careers begin as travelers. At some point, each proto-bum hits the figurative and literal road,
driven out by what they perceive as the over-mediated and mundane mediocrity of the median modern lifestyle. And
they're right, too, by the traveler's figuring of things.
Traveling, of course, is at the heart of the bum. I mean "traveling" as opposed to mere tourism. The true traveler
goes to places seeking authenticity, tangibleness, challenge and spontaneous beauty rather than comfort, convenience,
ease and itinerary. And they're willing to put in the time it takes to reach those deeper places hidden inside mere
locations. A traveler is someone who heads out into the world - be it wilderness backcountry or urban frontcountry -
deliberately, consciously and conscientiously, to be in a place rather than just to see a place, and to meet the
inhabitants as they are rather than watching them perform like on some TV reality show.
That's the traveler. And it's a good life, for a while. But after a while, even a traveler is called to venture into
that human wilderness: family, community and places of their own to become inhabitants of. These are ancient,
primordial, irresistible travels, too. But they're places the road doesn't go. They're only found by standing still.
A bum, then, is a traveler who has settled down. Sort of. Not "settled" in the sense most people live it - like the
settling of concrete at the base of a dam - but more "settled" in the sense of having settled on a permanent
base-camp from which to practice one's traveling. And "down" more in the sense of having traded the wide-breadth of
road-traveling for a depth of traveling - to turn those traveler's talents and skills and curiosities about the world
inward, to the "nearby faraway," as author and hunting bum David Petersen calls the world right around us that we are
too often too distracted and too numbed by routine to see.
To really see - as a traveler sees the world, with that traveler's style and spirit and sensibility. But at home.
That's the bum.
And that's why bums have made the mysterious choice - mysterious to those on the
school/work/career/investment/retirement-fund adventure in life - to settle in some remote town where they struggle
to get by, so they can regularly, ritually and religiously pursue their unprofitable passion or passions of choice -
skiing, surfing, paddling, casting, hiking, biking, walking, wandering, sitting and staring at the prettiness all
around, or any other number of means of getting out of the indoors and into the great big real "real world" out
there. And so they can hang out among a community of others who share the peculiar priorities and those
unprofitable, uncivilized and illogical proclivities that get them labeled "bums" in the first place.
Look again: That's the unique art of the bum - let's call it Bumism: to transform traveling into a lifestyle.
Not "lifestyle" like that one we work so hard to earn and build, but lifestyle as life with style. Because if the
ultimate wisdom is to know that, regardless of our big ideas and plans, life really only exists in the flash of the
moment - Whereever you go, there you are - then the bum has turned that into action, reminding us that the
real trick is to remember that our life is really only the living itself.
Whereever you are, there you go.
That's what the bum knows.
Ken Wright is a parenting bum and anti-career counselor based in Durango.
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