The Firewood 011: Unwritten rules
Outdoors access remains a problem for anyone who doesn't feel like they're in-the-know, but "in-the-know" comes with some baggage. Also, some horny javelinas.
Hello, friends.
Well, we’ve landed! Temporarily, at least. After passing through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, Minerva and I are currently in northern Arizona for a bit. We are slightly perturbed by the fact that we ran off to the desert in favor of better weather but pretty much the moment we got here it started raining. And then we got a snowstorm. And I have to admit — snow in the desert is pretty gorgeous.
I’m also very thankful to my longtime friend Colin Nagy for featuring me in Why Is This Interesting’s Monday Media Diet last week; a bunch of you reading this are new here, so thanks for coming over. Hope you stick around for a few beers and cat pics. Oh, and some musings on outdoors access and shared knowledge, because that’s what you’re getting this week.
What you know and what you don’t know
No one told me that you aren’t supposed to leave ski boots in the car overnight. I nearly had a meltdown over this when I got to the parking lot of Taos Ski Valley a few weekends ago, dizzy from the altitude and frustrated that I could not get my feet into my ski boots. While I’m not a novice skier, this is my first winter since high school actually owning ski equipment rather than renting it whenever I got to Park City or wherever. So I hadn’t been aware that ski boots temporarily shrink when left in a car or otherwise cold environs overnight, and there I was deeply frustrated and disoriented in a parking lot trying to get my feet into my boots while effortlessly cool snowboarder kids gave me side-eye. God bless the parking lot attendant who realized I was in a state of misery and humiliation and suggested I take my boots to the shop at the base of the mountain so they could warm up and expand in a boot heater for a few minutes.
(Then I got so dizzy I almost fell off the mountain and had to call it a day, but that’s another lesson — don’t ski over 10,000 feet less than 24 hours after getting to altitude.)
The world of the open road and the outdoors is full of unspoken rules. I wouldn’t have known, for example, that if you drive a Jeep Wrangler (or a vintage Jeep, or a Gladiator, but definitely not a Renegade or a Grand Cherokee) it’s customary to wave to other Jeep drivers when you pass them on the road. Technically, any wave is fine, but the classic “Jeep wave” is two fingers up off the steering wheel like a peace sign. I learned this last May from a WhatsApp group I’m in that consists of women who had been weathering the pandemic alone and wanted to be able to check in with one another. And I posted a picture that was captioned, probably, with “I have a Jeep now!” and another woman in the group told me that I now had to do the wave.
That said, that Jeep was not the Jeep that is now my own, which is now decorated with mud from a dozen and a half states, a window decal of the Jerry Garcia Band album “Cats Under The Stars,” and a bumper sticker that my stepsister gave me that says “I BRAKE FOR CRITTERS.” Rather, I had rented a (much newer, much nicer) Wrangler over the summer when I left New York for Maine for a few months because I needed enough space for a cooler’s worth of quarantine food in the back and the local Avis priced an “adventure vehicle” much lower than a “standard SUV.” I still did the wave. I still got the wave in return. Jeep etiquette does not care if you rented or bought or stole (OK, maybe they would care if they knew you had stolen it). You just do the wave. But they don’t tell you this at the dealership. Someone else has to tell you. You have to know. Or you have to get enough waves before you clue in to the fact that, OK, this is a thing.
The question: Who tells you this stuff? On the internet, you’re supposed to be able to find anything. But as I’ve mentioned before, online hiking and trekking resources are a mess, the trail guide sites with the best SEO are rarely the highest-quality ones (shocker!), and reviews of hikes and outings are frequently full of conflicting information and arcane slang.
No wonder people think the outdoors are off limits to them.
The toxicity of IYKYK
I think about barriers to access in the outdoors a lot, particularly because of my own experience being a middle-class kid in a town where many of my peers were far wealthier, and “being outdoorsy” meant they had parents who shelled out for Outward Bound or NOLS over the summer while I was serving ice cream sundaes or tutoring middle schoolers in the art of the five-paragraph essay. Pricey outdoors trips were supposed to be “character-building,” but let me tell you, I think I built some character learning how to not completely blow my lid the fiftieth time a preschooler had a screaming meltdown because my employer’s mint chocolate chip ice cream wasn’t green.
For real, though, you could’ve asked me what the cost of a pair of hiking boots was and I would’ve probably said $500, because clearly they were a costly item if only the rich kids at school were into outdoors stuff.
But it’s pretty absurd of me to be talking about access and unwritten rules as they relate to my own experience, because ultimately, I’m a reasonably athletic white woman who can figure her way around things pretty well, can now afford the equipment needed to stay safe in the wilderness (and hiking boots definitely don’t cost $500), and thanks to a career in digital media I can sift my way through internet bullshit well enough to give myself an idea of “the rules.” If I found it difficult to break through, imagine what it must be like for people who really do face barriers.
I find myself thinking, a lot, about last month’s NPR story by Chandra Thomas Whitfield about Black women’s hiking groups and the reception they get in the wilderness — spoiler alert, it is often very unfriendly. The group at the center of the story, a Denver chapter of Vibe Tribe Adventures, an organization that aims to get Black women involved in outdoors pursuits like hiking and snowshoeing, encountered a hostile reception in an area park when a group of white women riding horses (I am so tempted to make a horse girl joke here, but I will refrain) called the cops on them.
It turns out, they had broken a rule, technically speaking: the group was so large (much to the surprise of the organizer) that according to regulations a permit for the state park was necessary. But, seriously. Having navigated many states’ parks department websites — which generally look like they haven’t been updated since the ‘90s — to try to figure out campsites or hiking trails, I do not blame anybody for not realizing they needed a permit for headcount alone. (The Vibe Tribe group was also followed by drones because a TV crew was filming a segment on them, which allegedly elicited alarm — that’s the responsibility of the TV crew, not the hiking group, to know whether drones are permitted in a given area.) Judging whether people belong somewhere based on whether they “know” all the hidden rules and codes can turn into outright bigotry pretty fast.
So, about that feral hog orgy
Earlier today, a friend offered to show me the way to a hidden landmark outside Sedona because she said the trail’s pretty obscure and the last time she tried to hike it she got lost and came across some javelinas having sex. I suppose that makes for a good story, but the fact of the matter is, not everyone has friends who know the area and can point you in the right direction and help you avoid running into a feral hog orgy. I mean, maybe you want to see a feral hog orgy. I don’t. You do you.
One of the uncomfortable things we have to confront about outdoors access is that so much of outdoors culture’s knowledge is shared in something close to oral tradition, in face-to-face anecdotes over beers or pizza about secret trails, in the “SAW A MOUNTAIN LION AT SUNSET” notes shoved into a summit canister, in the park ranger telling you that maybe you shouldn’t take a certain trail due to rockfall even though nothing on the state parks site indicated it. Sometimes it develops an accuracy problem of its own. What was probably a raccoon sniffing around the outside of your tent at night becomes a bobcat when you retell the story to a bartender the next weekend and by the time your college reunion rolls around it was definitely a bear.
The importance of in-the-know storytelling for a select audience rather than the masses is clearly rooted in the crucial sense of cameraderie that outdoors culture fosters, but also more recently it’s become about digital disconnection and the sense that we don’t have to put everything online. This has gained a new sense of urgency with the reality that if too much information about vulnerable outdoors destinations is readily available on the internet, people without much care for the environment will flood those places to catch the perfect Instagram. With regard to the aforementioned Sedona landmark adjacent to the pig orgy thunderdome, it’s become a popular site for devil-may-care Instagrammers with little regard for the surrounding environment (or, based on some of the pictures I’ve seen, their own safety), and locals don’t want a clear trail to be maintained.
Honestly, I get that. But that stories are shared with the few rather than the many poses a challenge for the access problem that no amount of implicit bias or sensitivity training will directly solve. When marginalized groups want to claim the outdoors as their own — as they should, because it’s there for everyone who will respect and appreciate it — they shouldn’t feel like they have to create their own set of stories and traditions. The ones that are already there should be open to them too, and we need a better way to open that channel of communication than just expecting them to sift through the muck of crowdsourced trail reports and GeoCities-era state park websites.
I’ll continue to dive into this if y’all want to keep reading about it. There are some pretty cool initiatives out there, but as always, more is needed.
Stay wild,
Caro
PS: A couple of weeks ago, while I was in Taos and badly suffering from altitude sickness, my brother randomly called me at midnight to talk about coyotes, or at least I think he did, but I might have hallucinated the whole thing due to the altitude.
This led to a recommendation of Dan Flores’ book Coyote America, which is absolutely fascinating. Did you know that when coyotes show up in Central Park, they’re not returning to an ancestral homeland — they’ve totally expanded their range alongside humans? Sneaky little bastards.
(Anyway, I might write about this next week.)