A burly man approximately the size of a yeti in a jacket the color of caution tape made a ski cut across the convex roller. He applied the full weight of himself to his ski edge in order to make a line in the snow, releasing a mini avalanche below us. We watched that slab of white wall whumpf its way down like fresh icing sliding right off a still-hot cake. Buddied up for this lap, we locked eyes and clinked our poles like champagne glasses. Go time.
Like that famous line from Albert Camus: “In the middle of winter, I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.” But for me the summer wasn’t exactly within. Skiing was the summer; it was external. I liked that menthol burn at the top of the throat that arises from cold air quickly consumed. I liked that striated pulse of the quads. It made me feel things: competent, at ease, alive. Happy, even. I’ve wanted to be an adventurer, and to be recognized as an adventurer: one of the brave ones who carries pain like a pack to the ends of the earth and comes back to tell the story.
Camus also wrote that “When one has once had the good luck to love intensely, life is spent in trying to recapture that ardor and that illumination.” I have had the good luck to chase down that ardor and illumination of the outdoors like a dragon. “Forsaking beauty and the sensual happiness attached to it,” Camus continues, “exclusively serving misfortune, calls for a nobility I lack. But, after all, nothing is true that forces one to exclude.”
Somehow, people didn’t want to see me the way I wanted to be seen. There was some barrier to it. Something physical stood in the way.
*
Chris McCandless went into the wild and found himself a shelter structure. It was an abandoned bus, Bus 142, found along the Stampede Trail, near Denali National Park. Bus 142 is very similar in shape to Miss Frizzle’s Magic School Bus. It is white on top, and looks to have been previously yellow towards the bottom, but is now painted over in a mossy green. Just above the windows it says “142” in a stylish sans serif, and below it reads “FAIRBANKS CITY TRANSIT SYSTEM”.
Chris McCandless went into the wild. The wild was an old bus that had originated in a municipal transit system. It originated in a history that contained names like Benz and Daimler and Maybach and Ford. The wild was on the edge of a national park that was established in 1917. Denali was number 12 in a line of national parks, an American idea –– “America’s Best Idea” –– first conceived in 1872.
Chris McCandless was found dead in Bus 142 in September of 1992. He was found alongside his journal, whose last entry, tagged Day 102, read: “BEAUTIFUL BLUE BERRIES.”
Jon Krakauer wrote about Chris McCandless in his 1996 classic Into the Wild. Sean Penn directed a 2007 film adaption of the book starring Emile Hirsch. Guys like Krakauer –– and Penn, I suppose ––get to decide what a true and authentically rugged –– always rugged –– outdoorsman looks like.
Thanks to Krakauer, McCandless remains, in the collective imagination, as exemplar bar none of an outdoors person. Meanwhile, Krakauer remains the absolute epitome of outdoor writer. Never mind that McCandless didn’t make it out alive. Never mind that Krakauer had to revise his facts, again and again and maybe again.
The shelter was a bus, not a cave. It was the crumbs of civilization, not the treasure of the untamed.
*
Gear is a kind of treasure, and in many corners of the outdoors having old gear is a point of pride. The most embarrassing thing you can bring to the trail (or the crag, or the line up, or the river) is a brand new piece of equipment free of any scratch or blemish. New gear indicates unused gear, which can indicate a poser who has the money to buy the thing but not the marks of experience. The new gear becomes synecdoche, and the person holding it is assumed to navigate no farther than the REI parking lot.
Old gear is an indication that something has been used. The patina of a piece of old gear becomes proof of someone’s time spent doing an activity –– the ultimate source of authenticity in the outdoors. The seams of a wetsuit can only rip and the edges of a climbing shoe can only be rounded through use. Never mind that gear can be bought used by anybody at all.
*
When I was 11, I traveled to Connecticut for the first time. Every kid I met there asked, “You’re from California? Do you surf?”
One would think that you can’t surf in Connecticut, but actually you can, sometimes. That technicality had no relevance to these kids because they lived inland, and they had no access to the shore. They also lacked access to any profound concept of California. They could not imagine that the Northern California coastline is shockingly frigid and unfriendly. I do not mean “shockingly” metaphorically. Each time I dip even a fingertip into the ocean here my body goes into a light shock. The Connecticut kids could not imagine that there was a version of Californian culture that did not encourage scraggly brown girls to grab a board and paddle out.
Someone painted them a picture of California, but that place they imagine is myth. I must live in the real place.
*
In the summer of 2023, I am a brown girl entering the De Young Museum in San Francisco to see an exhibit on the works of Ansel Adams. Alongside his prints are more recent photographs from artists who came after him, printing works in conversation with Adams’ pieces.
One of those artists is Binh Danh, an American artist who had immigrated to the US from Vietnam. Danh’s work captures many of the same images Adams popularized in Yosemite, using daguerreotype on a reflective metal plate. The museum label explains to me that “For much of his early life, he felt little personal connection to this country’s national parks, several of which were located near his home… [the daguerreotype] makes it possible for him to create landscapes that reflect his own likeness back to him, literally situating him within those very American spaces.”
I use my iPhone to take a photo of my own face reflected back to me atop the surface of Danh’s image of El Capitan. My face is there, in my image, hair pulled back into a pony, gold earrings dangling down towards my olive green coat and the brown leather strap of my purse. My fingers, adorned with my rings and a peeling coat of silvery polish, grasp like claws against the white brick of my phone, just off to the left side of my face. On the other side, over my right shoulder, a white woman I do not know is reflected onto the granite face of El Cap.
*
When I found myself on the precipice of a convex roller with a burly man approximately the size of a yeti, I needed many things to get there.
Let me count them for you: A plane ticket to Spokane. A rental car to drive from Spokane to Nelson. A passport to cross the border. A lack of suspicion, a lack of DUI, also to cross the border. Money for accommodations. Money for access and guiding services, plus tip. A pair of skis and poles and boots. A helmet. Multiple layers of ski clothing. Warm socks, not too thick. The knowledge of what kind of socks are needed. A beacon, a pack, a radio, a shovel, a probe. A social connection for the invitation to be there. Years worth of ski and snow knowledge. Probably some other things I am forgetting, or have never noticed I had.
I find myself wondering if the burly man approximately the size of a yeti has done such an accounting, too.
*
On a recent trip to New York City, I waited for the C train at the Lafayette Avenue Station in Fort Greene. Three digital billboards hanging along the tiled walls flipped through public health information and ads for movies I will never see. Notice: the way our cities intersect with the outdoors is a product of design. Robert Moses built the highway overpasses on Long Island to be just shorter than a public bus. This was done intentionally, so that people who didn’t own a car –– people of a certain class, people of, say, a certain race –– wouldn’t be able to gain access to Jones Beach. In perpetuity.
Across the three billboards appeared three different images of local beaches. At the bottom of each poster was the MTA logo, the words “For directions to the beach by train or bus” next to a QR code and URL, and a tagline: “We can get you there.” The three beaches were Jacob Riis, Orchard, and Coney Island. Jones Beach was not part of this transit story. The ghost of Robert Moses still kept gates to keep people out. Or, rather, to keep people in. In New York, the wild originates in a municipal transit system.
Guys like Robert Moses constructed models of transportation that would define the barriers of nature and modulate access to it. Guys like Krakauer constructed narrative sketches that would define the archetype of who an outdoorsperson –– outdoorsman –– could be. Guys like McCandless dressed themselves in the signifiers of the archetype. But still he slept in a city bus. What would he have done, in that wilderness, if he hadn’t had the resources of civilization to fall back on?
*
Until recently, I was using the same sleeping pad for camping that I have had since I was a wee tween. I had bragging rights, but no restful nights of sleep. The old pad had all but lost its ability to inflate. When I finally did buy a new pad, I was astonished by the rapid improvement sleeping pad technology had acquired over 20 short years. Whenever I spoke of my new sleeping pad, I would casually mention how long I had gone before replacing the last one. I was making a claim, a claim that I had grown up camping and I was not like these newcomers to the parks who did not know how to put a stake in properly.
When I first learned to pitch a tent, I didn’t know any other Indian kids that camped –– frankly, back then, I didn’t know a lot of other Indian kids at all. My father and his best friend used to go on trekking trips across Northern India when they were in college. Everyone thought they were insane. But because I was astute enough to select this man as my father, I got to share in his love for, and knowledge of, camp life. I got to inherit round canteens wrapped in fleece and Tevas and plastic plate sets. I got to inherit authenticity.
Outside, old is honorable. Mileage and experience and scuffed gear means being part of a special club that hates taking new members. The inner circle of the outdoors is closed. Access is given through birthright. The area of the circle stays necessarily homogeneous.
*
The day I visited the De Young to see the Ansel Adams exhibit was a free entry day at the museum. You did not need to pay any money to see the permanent collections, and you did not need to pay any money to see the Kehinde Wiley exhibit that was also showing. The only exception was the Ansel Adams exhibit, which still required an entry fee.
It will cost you, to get outdoors.
*
Many of the women in my family were never taught how to ride a bike. I think they would’ve liked to have learned. Who amongst them could’ve transformed into the perfect archetype of an outdoorswoman?
The wild lives on without them.
I go outside myself. I can’t say why I’ve thought I might belong where McCandless and Krakauer have gone. But sometimes I do feel I belong in this rarefied world. And other times I feel I don’t. And still others I feel myself belonging, and feel the pang of guilt at having left behind so many others.
And other times I notice: the gentle flutter of a patch of aspen trees, shimmering like glitter; a heron in flight, looking like a pencil with wings; thickets of algae, translucent like a psychedelic; a marmot, waking up to spring like a hungover frat brother; mint snowflakes, sprinkled atop a pine branch like a benediction.
And I notice that beauty can make the wound of exclusion more painful.
But the world doesn’t care what I noticed: Structures will keep being built that let some people out and keep some people in. Yarns will keep being woven that convince you of a man’s rugged individualism, that teach you to idolize his ability to get out there and stand on a solitary pair of feet. He will be lauded for his self-sufficiency, celebrated for his ability to overcome harrowing barriers to reach puffed summits. His name will go down in ink.
The express bus that took him to base camp will remain unseen.