Tent Living

When you stop bathing, you become progressively dirtier for about seven days, and then your body attains a sort of equilibrium where it stops producing sweat and gathering more dirt. I found this out when I didn’t shower for two months. I was living in a tent in a forest in New Mexico on an archaeological dig. I spent days carefully troweling the ground until I was sitting in a hole deeper than me. I woke up at dawn every morning and fell asleep before dark every night. Hard labour made for peaceful slumber, interrupted only by the incessant calls of magpies in the early morning that signaled it was soon time to pull on the clothes you had kept warm at the bottom of your sleeping bag and crawl out into the cold to see the sunrise.