HITCHING A RIDE BACK TO REALITY. PHOTO: VIRGINIA MARSHALL
ROCK THE BOAT
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
migrating between beach parking lots or climbers squatting in Yosemite’s Camp 4. Fitz Cahall’s popular podcast, The Dirtbag Diaries, renewed the old myth for the In- ternet 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
28 PADDLING MAGAZINE
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
Outdoor Recreation Industry, $646 billion was spent on outdoor recreation in the US in 2012 alone. That’s billion with a b. It’s a phenomenal amount of money, as much as Americans spend on cars and gasoline com- bined. Outdoor recreation is larger than the to-
tal economic activity in Switzerland, where wealthy Europeans vacation in St. Moritz and Mafiosi and kleptocrat dictators stash their money in numbered accounts. Out-
YOU’RE RICHER THAN YOU THINK
door recreation even approaches the GDP of Saudi Arabia. We dirtbags are as loaded as an oil Sheikh.
The outdoor industry also creates six mil-
lion jobs in the US, ten times more than Apple, the darling of Silicon Valley. In cor- porate 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 ad- vanced degrees. Fifty-five percent of kayak- ers make over $75,000 a year. Time is a big- ger barrier to
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