This evening I took an outdoor shower. My Rpod camper has a shower head on the outside and it came with a little fabric pop-up shower that springs right up when you take it out of the bag—surprisingly roomy enough for 2-3 people if I can find some adventurous campers around.
And if people aren’t around you don’t even need it, but since I’m at a campground I figured I would do any passersby the favor of acknowledging that I’m no longer a young man with 7% body fat and hair in all the right places.
At national forests, you can basically camp anywhere you can find a reasonable spot to camp, down any service road, and it’s free. Most, if not all national forests have established campgrounds which cost a little bit but are discounted compared with national parks. And if you get an America the Beautiful Pass ($80 for 1 year, free for your limited life if you’re a senior), you get into national parks, forests, monuments, and more for free, plus you usually get a 50% discount on camping.
At Big Bend I stayed for two weeks for around $9 a night, and the pass paid for itself within 8 days. Here at Tonto National Forest I actually have water and sewer hookup right at my site and it’s only $10 a night with my pass, otherwise I could easily camp just a few miles from here on the edge of a mountain for free, but this is easier and while the view isn’t as nice, I like to people watch and chat a bit with travelers from around the country and world who are coming through. But if you want near total solitude and have 4-wheel drive, you don’t have to go far.
As I was showering outdoors I was thinking about how I’m basically living the life of the ultra-wealthy on a (significantly) less than six-figure income. After all, I have an outdoor shower. At Big Bend, I had a hot tub sized to hold more than 30 people in the form of natural hot springs, nestled in a river running through a valley. I have 40 foot saguaro cacti in my backyard today, and if I get tired of them, I just move to a new location of my yard, one that has 100 foot loblolly pines, or 350 foot redwood trees. And totally different animals. Yesterday I saw a ringtail cat; I didn’t even know they existed, and here my yard has them. That’s how big my yard is. It’s a burden sometimes, being so wealthy.
And while my camper has a bathroom, sometimes I like to use the campground restroom—often nicely tiled for easy cleaning (cleaning that someone else does for me, of course) and probably on average 200 square feet—that is a big damn bathroom that probably rivals Elon Musk’s, but he is indoors all day peeing into a catheter to save time while yelling on Twitter about how $56 billion isn’t enough salary, while I’m washing my buttcheeks outside in the foothills of my own personal 2,000 foot yard-mountain while the sun dips behind the peaks and I towel off and give the local birds a little peek of their own. Their happy chirping is affirmation that I’m not looking too bad just yet.
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