ROCK BOAT
HITCHING A RIDE BACK TO REALITY. PHOTO: VIRGINIA MARSHALL
YOU’RE RICHER THAN YOU THINK The kayaker dirtbag image is dishonest and a disservice to the places we love
I’M TIRED OF THE JOKES. What do you call a kayaker wearing a suit? The defendant. What do you call a paddler whose van is in the shop? Homeless.
Kayakers are often portrayed—and we portray ourselves—as the aquatic equivalent of itinerant ski bums. Every outdoor sport has its stereotype of impoverished, scruffy, mildly Kerouackian vagabonds: surfers mi- grating between beach parking lots or climb- ers squatting in Yosemite’s Camp 4. Fitz Cahall’s popular podcast, The Dirtbag Diaries, renewed the old myth for the Internet age. It’s time to ditch the dirtbag image. First of all, it’s not true. Like most outdoor recre- ationalists, paddlers are relatively rich. And I
don’t mean the “rich in spirit” sort of rich. I mean fat stacks of greenbacks rich. Second, and even worse than being false, the dirtbag stereotype is actually hurting us, and hurting us where it counts.
According to a recent analysis by the Out- door Recreation Industry, $646 billion was spent on outdoor recreation in the US in 2012 alone. That’s billion with a b. It’s a phenom- enal amount of money, as much as Americans spend on cars and gasoline combined. Outdoor recreation is larger than the total economic activity in Switzerland, where wealthy Europeans vacation in St. Moritz and Mafiosi and kleptocrat dictators stash their money in numbered accounts. Outdoor
recreation even approaches the GDP of Saudi Arabia. We dirtbags are as loaded as an oil Sheikh.
The outdoor industry also creates six million jobs in the US, ten times more than Apple, the darling of Silicon Valley. In corporate terms, we’re twice the total assets and revenue of General Motors and Chrysler combined. They got an $80 billion bailout when times got tough. Now who’s “too big to fail?”
Kayakers are also individually wealthy. Most are professionals with college or advanced degrees. Fifty-five percent of kay- akers make over $75,000 a year. Time is a bigger barrier to
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