The Class Aesthetics of Roughing It
I first moved to Seattle in 2017 as an intern. As is tradition when bringing a sundry group of college kids together, I got to know my new colleagues over a series of icebreakers. And I was ready to come in hot with the fun facts - I had just finished a ten year competitive career in Irish dancing, had spent most of 2016 living in the UK on an exchange scholarship, and had my whistling skills locked and loaded for any secret talent prompts. I thought my facts were fun, but my offhand responses to others' generated more interest. What did I mean I'd never been camping?
In popular Pacific Northwest discourse, roughing it - by which I mean electively spending time outdoors without the creature comforts of modern urbanity - is the great equalizer. The cybersecurity engineer and the social media manager might be at odds on First Hill, but in North Cascades National Park, they're just two guys in Patagonia quarter zips trying to light their respective camp stoves. Camping and hiking are safe, generic topics of conversation on the order of temperature and humidity. It's a nice, folksy thought that we're all connected by our collective love for the natural world -- but the commonalities are more surface-level than even that quarter zip everyone seems to have.
Seattle tech workers are largely upper-middle-class and white. In my upper-middle-class, predominantly white peer group, having the time and money to drive to the forest and sleep on the ground is a sneaky status symbol. It's a way to show off your material (REI membership, reliable car, heavy duty hiking shoes) and temporal (fitness to climb mountains, time off work) wealth while engaging in an activity that science and society pretty much unilaterally agree is a highly respectable form of self care. I certainly feel good when I finish walking a hard trail, but I admit that I also feel good when I can share with others that that's how I've chosen to spend my time, and that I've been able to make that choice. It's a way to subtly flaunt one's broader success in the context of a minor victory. Outdoor adventure as understood by young, urban professionals offers a level of unpretentiousness only available to those who have achieved sufficient pretense in the rest of their lives.
Upper-middle-class white people do love to walk a hard trail and end the day with sleeping on the ground. A simple Google image search for "hiking" returns a plethora of well-outfitted white folks on remote, manicured trails. From a purely monetary perspective, outdoorsmanship as the domain of the wealthy makes sense. A basic, small tent with no weather protection will set you back a couple hundred dollars, and a tank of gas to get out of the city is non negligible (not to mention the irony of burning fuel on your way to feel closer to the rapidly warming planet).
The racial lines along which camping and hiking appreciation seem to run are impossible to ignore. In a series of interviews for the Guardian, British journalist Homa Khaleeli found that many Black and brown would-be campers in the UK were put off by the perceived whiteness of not only outdoor activity, but the rural parts of the country they'd have to travel to in order to engage with nature. In the United States, only 20% of visitors to our remote national parks are non-white. It is an inherent privilege of whiteness to move through unfamiliar territory with ease.
Culturally, generational attitudes about consumption and leisure often clash with the ethos of roughing it as relaxation. When I'm asked why I don't have a favorite climbing wall or snowshoeing spot, I usually rattle off something about having never taken to the outdoors because I grew up in the infamously freezing cold Buffalo, New York. Truthfully, New York State has beautiful summers, and I've lived most of my life within a day's drive of perfectly nice state and provincial parks. Spending leisure time roughing it was simply never something on my family's radar. I grew up in a middle-class, white household with two working parents, both of whom were raised by steel mill families in Western Pennsylvania. I had a comfortable childhood (which set me up for my comfortable adulthood), but my parents worked hard and often for it, and understandably wanted to spend their time away from work with their families. I have a physically disabled parent, another hard barrier to trekking out into the woods. Owing in part to the expense of existing as a disabled person in the United States, my parents also just did not like to spend money. Tents, sleeping bags, camp stoves, firewood, camping permits, hiking shoes - none of these low use items were necessary enough to our well being for us to buy. If we were going to go on a trip at all, it was going to be to an aunt's house, where we could see family, relax, stay in a guest room, and enjoy the privilege of travel all at once.
As a college student being exposed for the first time to other kids who'd been on countless outdoor adventures, my lack of stories to share made me feel excluded and admittedly a little resentful of a life spent on asphalt. As an adult who has achieved a measure of class mobility I'm sometimes not sure how to contend with, I've stepped into my parents' shoes. When working to achieve your standard of living consumes most of your waking life, taking a breather to enjoy that standard of living sounds a lot nicer than using a tree as a bathroom. Even as I climb the tax bracket ladder, I can't get into the headspace that climbing a mountain is more relaxing than seeing the same mountain from afar, daiquiri in hand.
I'm never going to enjoy going to the climbing gym the way a kid who spent a week in the Adirondacks every summer does; the great outdoors are simply not part of my cultural context. Even though hiking and camping are perfectly accessible to me, engaging in these activities feels like a step out of line with what past generations of my family would do.
This is not criticism of outdoorsmanship as a pastime. I think we'd all be better off touching grass a little bit more often, and I cannot discount the mental and physical health benefits of exercise and fresh, rural air. I like going outside. I've even been camping now (it didn't go very well, but I still had fun). However, that doesn't absolve us of remaining critical of the barriers, financial, temporal, and cultural, that keep our neighbors in the city.
How can we bring the benefits of outdoor activity to those who don't have a clear access point? How do we make the natural world a welcoming place for our Black and brown neighbors? How can we change the way we talk about engaging with nature to de-center consumption and ostentation? I don't have the answers, but I want to start asking the questions aloud.
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