No, not the kind you might
think. I’m not talking about extreme hunter-gatherer dumpster
diving, like the Rainbow People do behind Burger King in Boulder,
Colo. Mine is sartorially oriented. I’m talking about raiding the
“unsalable” clothes bins outside of the Bargain Box and the Senior
Center Thrift Store here in Cody, Wyo. I seem to have attained a
consumer Zen state, where even Wal-Mart is to be shunned whenever
possible as too upscale.
I like to refresh my wardrobe
seasonally. I’m always on the lookout for clean, untattered caps,
sweatshirts and T-shirts — reasonable political messages or
sports logos on front and back OK — and souvenir shirts
acquired during somebody’s exotic foreign travel.
Jeans
are problematic because they’re mostly full of holes or worn out by
the time they hit the bins. Also, many Wyoming guys like those
jeans with the button-up flys that are impractical for anybody who
doesn’t have the hands of a musician. Footwear is also a challenge,
and it never seems to fit properly anyway. Besides, I’ve always
been skittish about wearing anonymously discarded shoes or boots;
you don’t know whose feet have been in them. Same goes for, uh,
underwear, which I don’t find much of anyway. My theory here is
that women — who make most of the donations — don’t
want the world privy to a husband’s or boyfriend’s unmentionables,
so they just throw them out.
I’m sometimes teased by
members of my local weekend hiking club about this necessary hobby
of mine. In the past year I’ve outfitted myself with a day pack,
two pairs of khaki shorts, a sweatshirt, a pullover windbreaker, a
half-dozen caps, a pair of “Thinsulate” wool gloves and —
oddly — two perfectly good plastic “Nalgene” water bottles
and three cigarette lighters, the latter useful not only for
emergency fire starting, but also, once I’ve wrapped a couple of
feet of duct tape around each one, for ersatz band-aids and
moleskin to cover minor lacerations and blisters.
There
seems to be a feeling in our amenity-driven New West that it should
cost a lot of money to enjoy the outdoors; if you’re going to do it
right. Forget the gear-obsessed mountain bike-kayaker-rock climbing
thrillheads. I’m talking about hikers. In the increasingly upscale
Rockies, a walk in the woods is becoming a fashion statement.
Regional retail outlets from Cabelas to Patagonia to REI continue
to drive this point home in their advertising, as they hawk
everything from titanium walking sticks and $200 hiking boots to
fancy pedometers and Global Positioning System gizmos, not to
mention the latest in de rigueur hiking togs.
I have a
hard time picturing the late Edward Abbey clad in bright-colored
Lycra, resting in the shade of a giant saguaro and sucking water
from his bladder pack, while consulting his GPS thingamagig as to
whether it’s 3.1 or 3.3 miles to that next pretty little canyon. As
for me, I’ve so far resisted the urge to buy a genuine Australian
bush hat.
George Orwell famously wrote in the essay,
“Politics and the English Language,” that the decline of a culture
can be seen in the debasement of its language, by which he meant,
in part, its political discourse. This is true, and self-evident
today. But I believe this decline is also visible in ways Orwell
could only begin to comprehend 60 years ago. At the expense of
civic virtue — such as voting and volunteering —
America is slowly becoming an exclusively consumer culture. The
world’s greatest debtor nation sure loves to shop.
This
in turn means that the closets of McMansions — and in our
contemporary West that includes log trophy palaces — must be
periodically cleaned out, filling up Dumpsters with deliciously
durable and sometimes new and useful items. What would somebody
like me do without the “throwaway” society?
Bill Croke is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). He
writes and dives in Cody, Wyoming.
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