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Bum is not a four-letter word

By Ken Wright

"My life is my message."

- Ghandi

Snow on the ground. The mountains pearly and pretty and just a'beckoning me to come play. As I walk through the neighborhood, I'm searching for little scenic glimpses of the glistening La Platas through the leafless trees. When I'm driving around town and up the valley, I'm craning and scanning, seeking panoramas of the deeper and steeper crystalline San Juans.

All because I'm aching to go.

That's what this time of year does to me. Still. And I will go up and get out there. Soon. After work and school and the usual slew of daily demands, we'll head up there . . .

It's true, I do not fit the classic profile of the ski bum anymore. I'm no longer renting a cabin with five other ski-heads, or working nights so I can ski days, or hitchhiking to get around. Today, I got me a job (several, actually), kids (two), a house (one), and responsibilities and demands and a damned full Google calendar (much and many).

But that doesn't mean that those callings and cravings of the ski bum have dried up in me.

Far from it. When the year's first snow flies, I still start twitching and salivating and constantly glancing upward toward yonder hills . . . Because I know we will go. And I know we - "we" meaning my wife (who was a lift op when we met), and our two fully ski-addicted teen-aged bums-in-training, and our tribe of friends with similar affinities - will go because even though we don't look like ski bums anymore, we still have nonetheless built our adult-looking lives around making sure we can go, often and a lot, with great ease and little cost.

I'm here to tell you that the true heart of the bum runs much deeper than those superficial stereotypes. For those of us who have taken this whole "bum" thing a bit more seriously than most folks, we know that there are as many ways of applying "the bum way" as there are bums. But they all boil down to one axiom, on vision, one rule that marks the true Way of the Bum: Want less. Do more.

This is what the bum knows. Actually, more than that: This is what the bum does: Keep things to a minimum so the going can be kept at a maximum.

Circumstances change, of course. And as I, myself, progressed on my own nomadic forays in living - from aforementioned ski bum, to living-on-the-road traveler, to tent-dwelling river runner, etc. etc. - I at some point deliberately and whilst in full control of my wits chose to get married, settle down, buy a house, and work enough to pay for those not-so-nomadic forays into these other adventures in living.

But I went into those with my bum mentality fully intact. Those, too, I knew then and am still keenly aware of today, were and are also traveling, also going, also doing. They are also worthy bumming territory - as long as the doing is the goal, and the having of things is kept to just enough to facilitate the doing of things.

The true bum is a traveler, yes - but a stay-at-home traveler. Not an anchored traveler, but a deep traveler. What makes the bum a bum is that fact he or she has built his life around living in a specific beloved place, and doing and pursuing activities and adventures in that place. That's why the term "bum" is often preceded by the adjective form of some sort of activity or locale: Ski bum. Surf bum. Mountain bum. Desert or River rat (with "rat" being a colloquial variation on the term "bum," like how in New England a "pass" is also known as a "notch").

Which makes sense on the surface, because on the surface is how we think of a "bum" - the caricature of the traveler with few possessions, the wide-ranging wanderer, the responsibility-free loafer.

But I assure you: Even if I and my life don't look the part on the surface, I haven't deviated from the bum path. Call me a parenting bum. Or a writing bum. Or a middle-aged bum. Or - please, I'd be flattered - just Bum with no prefix. Because in whatever form, I still, even as a middle-aged working-man parent, wear the term proudly, as an honorific, like the title of some kind of lifestyle honor society: Beta Upsilon Mu. With "mu" also meant in the Buddhist sense . . . because them old traveling Buddhas, well, you know, they were bums, too.

My bumming right now, then, is having a landscape I call mine and a town to call home. Friends. A neighborhood. Kids, and getting those kids out in the mountains, along the trails, on the rivers, in the sun and under the stars.

In middle age, I'm still wanting just enough of what I have to have so I can do a lot of what I ache to do.

So even though I'm hard at work during the week and going home to the same house I've lived in for years on end, when that snow flies, or the rivers rise, or the tundra flowers, or the aspen light up in gold, you'll find me up there, still. Above my town. Overlooking my valley. Wandering the hills and deserts I've wandered many times before. And will again, with my family and friends and tribe in tow.

Just bumming.