Like all problems at Big Bend, Circus Tricks is a sandbag. It was rated “V4 MA” (V4 My Ass) years ago, back when I had shoulder joints that didn’t withdraw like a turtle pulling into its shell at the thought of recklessly hucking to jugs. I guess a few key holds have broken in the intervening decade, bumping the grade up to a solid “V5 MA,” which made me feel only slightly less pathetic when I didn’t send it recently.

Oh well. Climbing performance was second to escaping the Colorado snow and basking in the Utah sun with the kids, but still ….

A local Moab kid named “Julius” politely asked to join my sesh on Circus Tricks. He had handsome dark features, russet skin, and long dark hair that was pulled into a messy man bun. He was working the stand start, which is quite a bit easier than the full line. He’d been projecting the stand start for “literally two years,” he admitted bashfully.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Eighteen,” he said. I had to think about that. He had been born after 9/11. I noticed a few pimples on his skin. It had been so long since I’d hung out with someone with zits.

Together we made a breakthrough. Bumping the left foot up onto the higher smear and squeezing with your legs sets you up nicely to huck for the jug. Over the next few efforts, he nearly stuck it. “Whoa,” he said, sheepishly. “I think I can do this.”

Indeed, he did. Next try he stuck the jug at the lip of the house-sized Chaos boulder. “Holy shit,” he muttered.

Now what? He threw his heel over the lip and started flailing and sputtering.

“No, no! Use your toe!” I said. He switched the heel to a toe and starting pulling in, mantling up, his left leg kicking in fits through the air.

Suddenly he was on top. He turned to face down at me. He pushed his hair behind his ears, a smile spreading across his face. “I’ve literally been trying to do that for two years,” he said again, beaming.

“So cool, man!” I said. “Congrats, good job.”

Maybe it’s a sign of age or perhaps of being a father and learning how to re-center your own sense of meaning and joy in that of others, but I just felt really stoked for Julius. Seeing that face, zits and all, smiling and astonished at what he had just achieved, made my whole weekend. Look at that kid. The entire world was his.

History doesn’t always repeat itself but it does rhyme, or so we’re told. I wonder, then, how this next decade’s verse will pair with “Roaring Twenties”?

I’m not the first to point out the historical alliteration at play between our current moment and the events that unfolded a hundred years earlier, when a rager of a decade unfolded as a backlash to the harrowing events preceding it. The Roaring Twenties represented a political, cultural, and economic rebound to another pandemic in 1918. Also, we had just pulled ourselves out of the rubble of the first War. Let the bacchanal begin. It was a great opening of society, a period of sustained economic and cultural growth. Plus, there was a lot of drinking.

The question, then, as we stare down the waning days of this COVID nightmare and try to tone down the stakes of the culture war and sigh relief that the proto-authoritarian MAGA clown coup didn’t succeed this time—the question, then, is are we on the brink of the next Roaring Twenties?

Or will this be the Boring Twenties? More of the same, and nothing new.

I now think back to my younger dirtbag self, and consider what it would’ve felt like to be speeding headlong to Yosemite, my bank account flush with stimmy money. I knew climbers who could stretch $1,400 into a whole year—in fact, it was a point of pride to do so.

Dirtbag culture is alive in spirit in climbing, but perhaps not so much in practice—at least in relation to The Way Things Were. Things are easy now for climbers, who roam the Western landscape in their fine-ass vans. I sometimes wonder if I would’ve found the itinerant, dirtbag lifestyle more sustainable over the long run had I been living out of a Mercedes Sprinter and not a Nissan Sentra; had the ratio of women to men been what it is today at virtual parity; had there been more examples of “how to make this lifestyle work” for me to follow.

It’s kind of incredible to think about how things have changed. Just finding climbing areas is no longer a matter of wrestling a Rand McNally map while steering through bleak wastelands in a car with zero clearance. One merely needs to enter GPS coordinates that can be found on Mountain Project in two seconds flat, then follow Siri’s siren signals as she pipes in over the perfect curated Spotify playlist that entertains you with artists you didn’t need to spend any real time discovering on your own. Who might you meet at this crag? A climbing partner—hopefully something more? You’d never know until you got there and stood by the camp host kiosk, waiting for someone to walk by who looked like they also needed a catch—and it was almost never the person you’d hoped it would be. Now we know who’s where, doing what, and with whom at all times because of our addiction to social media. I know exactly who is climbing at the VRG this week. It’s like we have perfect knowledge. Now instead of meeting our partners through notes written on napkins and stapled to corkboards in campgrounds we find our partners online, chat them up in DMs, and have the benefit of reading their archive of posts that fills us in on 90 percent of who they are and how they think. What’s even left to talk about once you meet in person?

A more mind-boggling change is how these phones are not only the things that perform the basic logistical functions of arranging life on the road, but they are also the ways climbers seem to keep the money flowing their way. You can be an influencer. Make a podcast. Write a blog. Create a YouTube channel. And then all of a sudden a few hundred bucks will just appear in your bank account. And the good life rolls on.

It’s an easy motif to lament the days when things were harder, but I wonder if that’s because we Americans have a hard time shaking the Puritan’s mindset of equating hard work and suffering with moral value. The argument goes that the more you had to suffer for a thing, the more value it holds. Perhaps there’s truth there, something to lament.

On the one hand, it’s easier to be a “dirtbag” today than ever before.

On the other hand, it’s easier to be a dirtbag today than ever before.

It sounds pretty fun to me.