Sometimes, the activities I find to help avoid my duties end up being more unpleasant than whatever task I'm avoiding. This is particularly true today, when in order to avoid cleaning the boat, I opened the Patagonia catalogue that for some reason appeared in my mailbox, addressed to me (or current resident).

I don't know why I'm on their mailing list. Any Patagonia clothing I own is strictly a result of finding it at a thrift store, and worn only for its waterproof qualities, and only when I'm sailing. I don't see the point in wearing technical clothes on the street, like the many women in this area who dress as if they are perpetually on their way to yoga class, or people in the grocery store and the bank, dressed as if they might be called upon at any moment to climb a particularly hazardous expanse of rock.

I find the tone of the Patagonia catalog very smug and elitist. Consumerism is consumerism, regardless of one's professed political or ecological stance, and the catalog's writers work hard to rationalize the necessity of, say, a skirt made of lightweight, quick-drying nylon with a waistband lined with "moisture-wicking mesh." I can see the rationale for pants made of such materials, particularly if one is sailing or hiking, but skirts aren't generally worn during periods of rigorous physical activity, so what's the point?

I had to close the catalogue after reading a little essay written by a man named Steve King, printed aside a full-page photograph of a young woman in Patagonia pants and tank top, painting the name "La Refrita" above the windshield of what appeared to be a blue schoolbus.

La Refrita, as I learned, is a schoolbus, or rather an "art studio/climbing road-trip mobile" that's been converted to run on recycled vegetable oil. Steve King and the woman in the picture, whose name is Emilie, travel around in La Refrita, filtering vegetable oil and climbing rocks. The bus, it is explained, allows the pair to "answer the call of climbing" and to "create art," which is not described, without what Mr. King describes as "compromising our environmental ethics." I assume that the bus contains standard transmission fluid and engine oil, and runs on commercially produced rubber tires, but it's fueled by vegetable oil, and that's good because it means that the 11,000 miles that Steve and Emilie have driven La Refrita in pursuit of "spontaneous adventure" haven't consumed diesel fuel.

I think that running a bus on vegetable oil is a fine alternative to using petroleum products, but I was puzzled by a sentence in the last paragraph of the article, wherein the author states that fueling his bus with vegetable oil doesn't "absolve all the guilt involved with being a modern human and caring for this planet on which we play."

Wherein lies the guilt of "being a modern human"? Is it the guilt of consuming resources? And if so, why is the author involved with a high-end clothing retailer that sells expensive and largely unnecessary products? Someone had to make the tank top that Emilie is wearing for the strenuous task of painting the bus. Someone had to make her pants. If a person felt genuine guilt over consumption of resources, he might drive that biodiesel bus to the Goodwill and purchase one of the thousands of pairs of used pants available there. I don't understand especially where the guilt figures into "caring for this planet on which we play," as the second half of the sentence reads. Maybe the author realizes that driving around and climbing rocks, even in a "low-impact" manner, do not actually constitute caring for anything but one's own affinity for self-indulgence.

I don't know what Steve King does for income. The catalogue mentions that he and Emilie have a book of "art and reflection" due out later this year, so perhaps that brings in money. I can't say for sure, but the whole enterprise smells like trust fund spirit to me. I have run across many people like Steve and Emilie, and the common elements uniting them tend to be:

• income derived from inheritance or parental indulgence


• a sense of guilt about consumption


• consumption of products marketed toward rich, quasi-ecological-minded suckers


• a marked sense of elitism and self-satisfaction over minor decisions like recycling vegetable oil


• near-complete ignorance of their actual impact on the earth they profess to love


• an affinity for giving their cars, pets, or living quarters colorful Spanish names, to distance themselves from upper-middle class Anglo origins


• humorless earnestness and total inability to perceive irony

I call these people "faux-hemians," and I avoid them like poison.

I contrast Patagonia-shilling faux-hemians with people I know like Tom and Sally, in Tucson, who ride their bicycles around town and to their jobs, grow their own food, irrigating it with recycled rainwater, and live frugally and well. Among other things, both are educators; Tom teaches people how to build affordable houses from straw bales. I have never heard either one speak of any guilt involved with existing on this planet. Instead, they make choices that have little impact on the earth, and actively encourage others to do the same.

Fueling a road trip with vegetable oil seems only to be a degree less bad than fueling it with gasoline, especially when the purpose of the road trip is to climb rocks and amuse oneself. There is no sin involved in amusing oneself, but it is vile and narcissistic to smugly announce one's superior choice of the fuel burned while doing so, or to think that such a choice would have any measurable impact on the world.

Star of the day. . .John Muir