camping
I don’t remember the first time I went camping. I was a baby. I don’t remember the experience but I remember the photos with a vivid intensity. My family ate well on these trips. When my dad was a boy scout, he remembers grilling a steak on a fire made in a Folgers can. He brought that spirit to our camping trips. I remember my dad’s breakfast tacos, a coleman propane stove and an enamel blue percolator. I remember my mom’s peach cobbler cooked on a fire in a cast iron dutch oven. The flanged lid that held the hot embers. I remember the heat, the cicadas, the fireflies. I remember being older and helping to pitch the tent on a hard dirt platform. I remember feeling the nylon’s clammy slickness from dew when helping to pack the tent in the morning.
Camping is an inexpensive family activity. My family hiked and relaxed at several parks in California and the Texas hill country. I now remember only a small percentage of the camping trips we took, but the feeling of those days stays with me. As an adult, my husband and I moved across the country to live in a temperate rainforest, our favorite biome. Even though I’m out of practice now, even for car camping, I have always felt at home in the outdoors.
the outdoors
Dominant culture has painted the great outdoors as the home of rugged explorers. But these explorers are white in our history books. The Hollywood image of white geriatric cowboys ignores the reality that most were young Black, Mexican, and Indigenous men. White dominant culture paints Lewis and Clark exploring virgin land headed out west. They ignore the people who lived here for millennia.
White dominant culture calls John Muir the father of the modern naturalism movement. But whose nature was he in? Muir saw as untouched the wilderness groomed by Indigenous people who lived there. He saw the tribes with many centuries of history as simple features of the environment. The natural beauty that Muir fought to preserve was the result of years of their careful tending. Racism exits in that we remember Muir and honor him for what he fought to protect. Dominant culture ignores the work of the people who taught him.
the stars
When I was in college, my friends and I camped at Lost Maples State Natural Area in Texas. I had upgraded from car camping at the time, and we were about a mile and a half from the parking lot. My friend Jesse and I volunteered to hike our leftover food back to the car. We left well after sundown, but the moon was full enough that we could see the roots in the dark. Near the end of the walk to the car, we reached a clearing in the woods. In the clearing I looked up and saw more stars than I had seen since I was a kid. I gawked and spun, only looking up, at the billions of stars that are visible from earth. It remains one of the nicest memories of my life.
We have an obligation to disrupt the expectations of a white dominant culture. It’s easy to look at capitalist culture and imagine that nature only belongs to the people in the ads. It belongs to everyone. It belongs to us.