White Open Spaces

Wei Tchou is a Brooklyn-based writer and former non-camper working on a book about her family and the cultural history of ferns.

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“I know you can do it,” said Salem, smiling at me with encouraging eyes, even though I didn’t know the first thing about building a campfire. It was meant to be a gesture of sweetness that he wanted me to build a hearth for his younger siblings on our first campout together. But I couldn’t read it as anything but an act of inscrutable emotional terrorism, doled out to a devoted girlfriend whose only crime was being accommodating enough to come on this stupid camping trip in the first place. I covered my face with my hands to hide my tears.

A part of me had hoped I would take to camping as if the woods were my true home all along. Like a captive platypus released back into her highland waterways, my real self would shake off such earthly superficialities as shelter, safety, and lumbar support as I became just another creature of nature, flowers weaving through my hair as sparrows sang overhead. Instead, my first experience of camping found me crying next to a gaping pit of ashes in front of my boyfriend’s family.

I thought of my Chinese immigrant parents, who would likely shudder at the thought of me sleeping on a dirt floor and getting my vagina so close to the ground while peeing that something might plausibly climb in. My parents did not immigrate to this country for me to have something crawl into my vagina! I thought.

How could I have ever been so delusional as to think that I would tolerate, much less enjoy, a life in the woods, when very little in my 32 years of life has indicated an ease with anything less than the cool breeze of an air-conditioning unit, four bars of LTE, and good Chinese takeout just around the corner?

The answer to this question is most likely the same as yours “in these unprecedented times,” or ITUT, as a friend of mine likes to refer to the narrowing of life since COVID-19 spread to our coast. I was sick of being cooped up in the city but anxious about making the pandemic worse by contracting it, spreading it, or putting service workers at greater risk with my selfish longing for a cappuccino.

And also, I recently finished a partial manuscript of my book, which is in part a personal history of my interest in ferns. It’s hard not to spend, say, four years of one’s adult life writing about the wonders of ferns and nature without feeling like an abject phony for being suspicious about any immersion in wilderness beyond just, like, looking at it from the car.

So, when Salem’s younger sister, Pearl, and younger brother, Hazel, who are both outdoors enthusiasts, proposed that we all go camping together up in Maine last month, I felt uncharacteristically enthusiastic. Camping! A way to safely spend time with loved ones somewhere other than Zoom. Camping! A way to prove that I could be as much of an expert on ferns as some unkempt white dude in Chacos. If I could learn to camp, it seemed to me, then maybe I could also be free.

Julia Cameron, the author of the cult ’70s-era workbook for creatives The Artist’s Way, would call this confluence of desires with opportunity a synchronicity, which is just a woo-woo term for coincidences that fall in your favor, she asserts, when you thoroughly believe in your art. Back in March, I roped Salem, who was quarantining with me in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and his sister, Pearl, who lives in Maine, into tackling the self-help classic, whose “spiritual path to higher creativity” winds through a tidy 12 weeks — enough time, I reasoned, that the lockdown would be over well before we finished. It was a welcome distraction from the aching distress of watching the daily death toll tick up and washing our hands until they were raw. Our group expanded to include Salem and Pearl’s mother, Betsy (who actually is an artist), Pearl’s partner, Alec (who is an artist, but for ice cream), Pearl’s best friend, Peyton (who works on behalf of environmental justice), and finally Hazel, after he graduated from college over Zoom.

It alarmed me at first that I was an outsider in my own self-help group — the new girlfriend in a weekly video chat of Salem’s family and friends, and, just as acutely, the only nonwhite person. But I grew close to them as we completed tasks that encouraged our childlike sense of wonder: wandering outside to gather leaves and flowers, collaging our dream lives. One writing exercise asked us to name activities that we wished, as children, we’d had the freedom to try. I found myself absentmindedly listing mountain biking, rock climbing, hiking, and, surprisingly, camping.

What the fuck, I thought, immediately troubled by what appeared to be a repressed desire to become woodsy. In my mind, woodsiness conjured images of beautiful, sunned white people looking inexplicably chic in technical gear and tangled hair, unbothered by the elements — the kind of person whose insouciant athleticism and confidence in using the terms “suffering” and “challenging” interchangeably did not belie a childhood of Suzuki method and Saturday school and the lifelong condition that every decision you make must justify the sacrifices your family made for you to simply be alive.

In my predominantly white Appalachian hometown, I had felt alienated by how casual and insistent people were about outdoor recreation. (Talk to my family about spending a stretch of time in the woods and they’ll assume you were exiled for doing something very bad, like owning land or refusing to become a doctor.) Unlike turning the radio on to learn pop songs or begging your mother to buy you a pair of sweatpants with “JUICY” written on the butt, learning to camp was impossible without someone to show you how. And the only people who might show me how were the same assholes who rejected me, even if I could sing along to every ’N Sync song, unconvincingly shaking my hips in baby-pink terry cloth. Along with how I looked, it was just another obvious way of understanding that no matter what I tried to become, I would never really belong.

After I moved to New York City, I was proud to be able to finally reject woodsiness entirely. Here, I found belonging with people who, like me, found “camping people” to be perplexing and objectionable. I left behind the fear of being patronized for simply wanting to sleep in a bed with central air blowing on my face for the rest of my life. It was devastating to have to admit to myself, and then to my Artist’s Way group, that I had always secretly dreamed of seeing myself out there in the wilderness — tending a fire and drinking a tin cup of coffee in the foggy, crisp morning — strong enough to shoulder a pack over rough, pastoral terrain.

Call it another synchronicity that after Salem and I met on Tinder (an app that literally runs on synchronicities), we discovered that we were from two towns hugging opposite sides of the same Appalachian mountain range. Yet Salem had grown up camping, even if he had later diverged from his woodsy siblings, fleeing the mountains for the city. As we drove north for our camping adventure, I contemplated the cruel joke that now, as an adult, I was off to assimilate to the white hobby I’d rejected with fierce vehemence all of my life, with my white boyfriend and his white family who were from the same white part of the country I’d spent my entire life attempting to escape.

Any self-worth I’d managed to cling to evaporated as soon as Salem, Pearl, Hazel, and I — in preparation for our trip — walked into a camping store, whose floor was marked all over in blue tape to indicate where customers might stand to stay six feet apart. In part, my insecurity had to do with the fact that I’d poisoned myself the day before eating dried apricots, forgetting that apricots are a stone fruit, which I am allergic to. (Another synchronicity?) But really it was my intimidation about entering a store that said it was for camping, yet seemed only to sell racks and racks of long metal thingies and neon fabric bags attached to larger neon fabric bags. All the products were puzzles to solve, rather than recognizable pieces of equipment — a tent, for instance, that I might look at and think, Wow, that’s a great tent! My reluctance to touch things in stores since the pandemic began only made the process worse. Like, I knew I needed to buy a sleeping bag but felt stupid trying to choose one by staring as hard as I could at various lumpy sacks of nylon.

Sensing my panic, Pearl asked if I’d like to go take a look at tin cups in the cooking section, and I was relieved. I know food, I know cooking, I thought, puffing out my chest as we walked. But to my bewilderment, anything I might recognize in a kitchen was again abstracted to pieces of plastic, or sinister-looking canisters of gas and gadgets that promised to boil water in under 30 seconds (but, why!).

“Wei, look,” Pearl said, as I stared into the abyss of a collapsible plastic bowl. Grinning, she presented me with an enamel tin cup printed with a graphic of a lantern, and I sighed in recognition as she placed it in my hands. For drinking coffee out of! So sturdy! So cute! I thought. It was $20 and I threw it greedily into my basket — had it been $200, I still would have wanted it, for its familiarity, for its having the decency of looking like exactly what it was.

If the allure of camping evokes a certain rugged minimalism, the reality is strikingly fussy. You need a lot of stuff; the stuff is very expensive, and without experience, it’s hard to figure out what kind of stuff you’re even going to need. And none of it is going to make you feel woodsy, really — mostly it will just make you feel broke, staring at a two-foot-long receipt, registering that you’ve blown $650 in less than half an hour on the bare minimum of supplies.

It can make you furious to think about, especially during a pandemic when there are few options to escape the city, and the one that seems easy and cheap and safe turns out to be so psychologically and financially demanding that I, for one, would have given up upon entry at the store if I wouldn’t have felt even worse to let Salem and his siblings down.

I was still fuming about all of this when Salem suggested we camp out in Pearl’s backyard to test out our new equipment. Though I was feeling defeated, I followed along as he pulled out tent rods and began assembling them over a plastic tarp. I found that assembly was surprisingly intuitive — not puzzle-like at all — and before long, we were straightening out another piece of tarp over a modular mesh structure. We took turns staking its corners into the dirt, and in spite of myself, I couldn’t help but feel proud, admiring the neat little orange tent before us.

That night, I fell asleep in my new sleeping bag listening to rain drum the fabric over my head. All of my frustrations unexpectedly melted into a sweet, peaceful feeling that this small space, with its sounds and its funny mesh pockets and zippers, was mine. I was suddenly a child overcome by wonder, the anxieties and paranoia of the past few months dissipating as I observed little spiders scurrying in from the rain under the fly. They parachuted around on their silks as Salem snored softly, far away already in a distant dream.

Our campsite was situated on a farm nestling an ocean bay — salt breezes rolled through the open windows of our car as we puttered along a long path of RVs, campers, and tents. The first thing I noticed was that very few people were wearing masks — we’d all been required to prove we’d been tested for COVID-19 before we booked. I marveled at the fact that it was the first time in almost half a year that it seemed okay to observe the noses and mouths of so many strangers, going about their days uninterrupted by obsessive ritual sanitization of their bodies and possessions.

The next thing I noticed was that I didn’t have to carry anything more than a few feet from car to campsite, which, by the way, presided over a spectacular waterfront view, no walking necessary. It turns out there are degrees of camping, folks — a fact I was a little mad to find out. There was even an organic ice cream stand on the premises (which did, for the record, observe social-distancing protocols) where Pearl, Hazel, and I would circle back later to share a cup of s’mores-flavored ice cream, studded generously with marshmallow fluff and graham cracker crumbles.

Have camping people selfishly stoked the conspiracy that you have to strap on 50 pounds of gear and scale K2 every time you go camping to keep non-campers from their delicious ice cream stands? I contemplated this as we drew closer to our site, but my attention was drawn toward several figures playing on a swing set.

“Asians,” I whispered urgently, pointing them out through my window.

One privilege of being a journalist is the shamelessness with which I feel I can approach strangers, and Asian strangers in particular, to ask about their experiences, because, well, it’s my job. After we set up our tents, Hazel humored me by coming along as I stalked across the field toward several preteens at the campsite’s playground.

“I’m going to wait over here,” Hazel told me, stopping tentatively by the swing set, as I approached two of the older kids, introduced myself as a writer, and asked if I could chat with them.

“So, like, I’ve only seen white people out here,” I told them, trying to make my eyes smiley rather than threatening above my mask. They giggled and looked at each other. “Are you guys from around here?” I asked.

“We’re from Brooklyn,” they said, and I laughed, because of course they were. They told me that they normally vacationed in Japan this time of year, to visit family, but given the pandemic they had to stay in the States. Camping was popular in Japan, too, they said, pointing in the direction of their campsite, which featured an impossibly chic yurt flanked by a large shade sail. I knew just by glancing at their complicated-looking pour-over device that they were drinking excellent coffee.

I couldn’t help but feel a little bit of pride and relief in registering that the most beautiful campsite of all was made by the only nonwhite people I’d seen, and Asian Americans to boot. By then, Hazel was making his way up to me, and I waved at him gleefully as I introduced him to the kids.

“Our parents are Asian, too!” one of them told us cheerfully.

“We’re Asian, dummy,” the other responded, rolling his eyes. “So obviously that means our parents are Asian, too.”

“I mean, not necessarily,” I said, trying to be helpful. “You could be adopted!”

“Yeah, we could be adopted,” the other said, blowing a raspberry at his friend. Hazel and I grinned conspiratorially as we hurried back to fill Pearl in on what we learned about the Asians, taking turns recounting the details.

Later, we all drank sake out of our tin cups as we watched the sun set pink over the bay at low tide — clam diggers worked their way through the glistening mud as the siblings told me stories about growing up together, their disastrous road trips, the pets they had loved. As dusk settled, we hurried back to make dinner, at which point my pleasant, dreamy mood was shattered as Salem heartlessly attempted to press me into building that fire — the one on which our comfort and dinner depended.

“Oh no, oh my god! Wei! You’re getting so upset!” he said, as soon as I hid my face with my hands. He pulled me into a hug.

“Wei,” Pearl said gently from the fire pit, using the same tone she had at the camping store to coax me out of my manic state, and I wiped my face on my sleeves and crept down next to her as she explained how to start with pine needles, leaning larger and larger sticks over the fire as it grew. “People like to say there’s a right way to do it, but there isn’t,” she said, swatting Hazel away as he tried to offer commentary. She leaned in to blow on the fire, and the embers lit up with her breath.

Soon the fire was crackling and the siblings jumped into cooking, enthusiastically clashing about what they wanted to eat and how best to make it. Hazel established himself as the gourmand, dressing a steak with rosemary and butter and showing me how to gauge its doneness by pressing on different parts of my fist. Pearl roasted a hot dog on a stick while Salem fussed over an aluminum packet of potatoes and mushrooms. As they cooked, they debated new ways to construct a s’more — wrapping the entire thing in foil to place on the grate, dumping the chocolate and marshmallow in a pan to approximate something like s’more fondue.

Listening to the siblings bicker and tease each other about their different ways of cooking, eating, and being, I was encouraged to find my own way, too, to see my camping ignorance as an opportunity to do exactly as I felt. (I’d even discovered, by then, that, just a little hike away, there was a cabin of gloriously pristine bathroom stalls, for those of us with overactive vaginal imaginations.)

I ventured to throw a hot dog and a bun on the grate. When they were both black with char, Hazel doused them in butter for me. I hate it when people say that food tastes better when you’re camping, as if there is glory in deprivation, but at that moment, there was no better hot dog in the entire world than the one dripping with butter and ashes in my hands.

The next day, Salem and I decided that we would camp one more night on our way home to Brooklyn. We stopped midway to have lunch with some friends, who graciously took our elaborate order, in advance, for what I like to call salad sandwiches — tomato, cucumber, sprouts, onion, avocado, cheddar, dill pickle, and mayonnaise on seven-grain bread. After picnicking and horsing around in a river all afternoon, the thought of setting up a tent again started to feel arduous.

“We could just drive straight home to Brooklyn,” Salem suggested, as I merged onto the freeway. I told him no — I was a camping person now, and that meant I needed to camp. Who even was I anymore, without the sun on my face and a patch of grass to curl up on?

We grew quiet, and I reflected on our past few days, on his family, on him. I thought back to earlier in the year, during some big fight, when I’d shouted at him to stop treating me like I was white, fed up with what I felt was his disinterest in my individual experience, while simultaneously seeing that I hadn’t exactly shared the reality of that experience freely, for fear that he would reject me like the camping people of my youth.

Until that fight, I had too often conflated belonging with acceptance. I thought that in order to be accepted, I needed to keep my nonwhite perspective from my white boyfriend and his white family. That I needed to face the wilderness unafraid to be taken seriously as a nature writer. That I needed to camp like “camping people” — like white people — in order to camp at all. But I grow more certain each day that my fixation with belonging only ever backfires. If I’m not honest about who I am, how can anyone figure out how to accept me in the first place?

Salem listened when I fussed at him about not being white, and I got a little braver every day about expressing the ways that I am different from him rather than the same. And now, a year into dating, his brother tags along when I feel moved to approach strangers at swing sets just because they are Asian, even if it makes him nervous. And his sister has identified how to tell when I’m so embarrassed I want to die, as well as the exact tone of voice that will calm me down. We often talk about assimilation as if it were a one-way street, but it isn’t. It shouldn’t be.

I glanced at Salem as he stared into his phone and struggled to remember what I thought of him when we first met. Now, when I look at his face I feel the collapse of distance, the familiarity of a kind of home that you can’t buy, or drive to, or set up with tent poles.

“Hey,” I said. He looked at me. “You were right. Let’s go back to Brooklyn.”

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