While I am congenitally not the type of person who, say, hikes on glaciers, I want to be the type of person who does this. This wanting is rippled with many emotions: yearning for natural beauty; a mild shame that this doesn't come naturally; a sense of dread about being off-grid and all the disasters that might befall me; a deep sense of my proficiency gaps in things like fitness, survival, and resilience; a desire to borrow the aesthetics of outdoor adventure; knowledge that I haven't "earned" it in any way.
A case study: my only "real" wilderness excursion came in 2011, a few brief months after I started dating my now ex-husband. On paper, it was a lot: eight days of backcountry camping and canoeing, seven different sites, three couples and three singletons. In reality, it was way, way worse. My boyfriend's dad had died the month before and he was grieving. I had never canoed as an adult. We were both hideously sunburned by day two. There were real spiders and the threat of venomous snakes. During a pivotal entry into a river mouth, my boyfriend and I got caught on the shoreline rocks and it took 40 minutes to push ourselves out enough to move on. I had no close friends on the trip, and I felt like an outsider, a rube, and a burden. At one point, as we were squelching through the underbrush, my shoe came
off and I had to reach into elbow-deep mud to retrieve it; it was the only time I laughed on the whole trip. It's easy to list all the things that sucked, but the overarching memory of that trip was one of deep loneliness. I was not cool, I was not outdoorsy, and to be exposed in this way for an entire week made me miserable.
It was formative, and deeply bad. I had zero fun and I didn't really want to ever go back into the wilderness. And certainly not on a canoe!
But again, I would like to be the type of person who has these experiences. My strain of outdoorsiness is a spiritual cousin to that quip about writing ("I hate writing, I love having written"): I hate adventuring, but I love telling self-deprecating/congratulatory stories about having adventures. (And, upon reflection, I've hiked on at least two glaciers, so make of that what you will.)
A different case study: when I was in the eighth grade, I started ordering the Patagonia catalogue. This was before the internet, so you would have to call a 1-800 number and give them your address, and four to six weeks later, a paper catalogue would arrive at your house and confuse your parents. The 1998 Patagonia catalogue—which I still have, archived in my magazine collection somewhere—was a treasure. It promised silky base layers and boxy windbreakers, with colours like chili and pansy and a print called p'op. The gear has always been wildly expensive—snowpants that retail for $559 today would cost $265 in the late '90s, a comparable price once adjusted for inflation—and I never ordered so much as a headband.
But the clothes weren't really the point. The catalog was, in those pre-online times, one of the few places were I could see people engaging in outdoorsiness. Along with the flatlays of the clothes themselves, the catalogue included pictures of the garments in the wild—and I do mean wild. There were candids of people eating tinned beans in high-altitude camps, and long shots of women in hardy sports bras rock-climbing up a sheer face. There were high-powder ski photos, featuring those mortgage-payment snow pants, and even, for a few promotional cycles, a Patagonia Kids catalog, showcasing the same hard-wearing outdoor gear in the same wilderness, but in miniature.
My family camped, sometimes, when I was a kid. Then we cottaged, more often. We were certainly not the family who was on the trails, the hills, the slopes. Outdoor activity was a day trip, then back to our cozy beds at night. Which is great, but maybe, judging by the Patagonia fetish, I was looking for more.
This summer, I devoured William Finnegan's surf memoir Barbarian Days and I can say wholeheartedly that he 100% percent deserved the Pulitzer he won for it. Finnegan received his first surfboard as a tenth birthday present, and spent his late adolescence and early twenties heading around the world in search of the perfect wave. He camps on a snake-infested island (the snakes, quick in water, are laughably slow on land, which doesn't make them any less venomous), pores over reef maps in Fiji, drives across the middle of Australia in a car with a broken water tank, and is hospitalized with malaria in Thailand. He hitchhikes, lives in bug-infested bungalows, works under a fake name but somehow receives a real tax refund, buys and trades surfboards depending on the local conditions, and drives his travel companion to distraction. Full of surf patois and technical descriptions, large
sections of the book are borderline incomprehensible to a landlubber
like myself, but still, I loved it. I laughed out loud when young Will, at the age of 20 and
newly dumped, wrote a thousand-page apocalyptic novel to cope; I groaned when he ran over his surf companion in choppy
waters.
And so why didn't I, like Finnegan, learn to surf when I was ten (where?
On the Rideau Canal?), and then spend my 20s sleeping on snake-infested islands (or maybe I did, on that wretched camping trip) before coming home and becoming a journalist for The New Yorker? Well, I get nervous when I go into our local hiking area, which contains natural features like trails and, uh, a water treatment plant. And of course, Finnegan's trip, on paper, is romantic, hard-nosed, thoughtful,
and funny; in practice, large swathes of it would be monotonous and miserable. So few people really live the lifestyle that Patagonia
sells, of backcountry canoe trips or the competitive rock climbing, or of big-wave surfing. I hate adventuring; I love having adventures.
However, big news! I'm going camping again! This summer! This time, I'm going on easy mode: with my cousin and my mom, with electricity at the sites, with a paved road allowing us to drive right in. We're going to pack bikes and card games and string lights, and despite the fact that we'll be sleeping on the ground, I imagine it will be pretty fun. And if this is fun, maybe next time we do a camping trip where there's no hydro. And after that, maybe we add a little hike in to start. (But I certainly don't want to get back into a canoe, thanks.) I have a limited number of easily mobile and outdoorsy years left; I have a kid who seems interested in sleeping on the ground, and I have, finally, a number of Patagonia garments I can wear as unironic camp clothes. I am trying to heal something from that first miserable camping trip; I am also trying to figure out what it means to be outdoorsy, with anxiety, later in life. I will have an adventure.
Image by Anna Syvertsson
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