I Just Don't Like Nature All That Much

“What do you do for self-care?” my future coworker asked me, with my future boss grinning expectantly into the camera from an adjacent Zoom window. This was 2018. I had never “hopped into” a virtual meeting before. “Pandemic” was merely a board game my husband and I played in our tiny San Francisco living room on Friday nights, using a two-tiered IKEA side table as a combination coffee-gaming-dining surface.

I love job interview questions like this. Love asking them, love answering them. There are a handful of solid responses that will work for (or on) basically anyone, and I had my version ready to go: “I go hiking with my dog in the East Bay! She loves running in the hills, and I can’t get enough of the trees out there. It’s so peaceful.”

The other universally correct answers to this question are: yoga, baking, gardening, or a niche sport like pétanque or paddleboarding. Depending on your industry and geography, you can get away with an interest in craft beer, wine, or romance novels. Obviously golf is going to play well with a certain crowd. If you can really read the room, card games or the fiber arts will go a long way with the right people.  

But hiking? Hiking is the hobby for people who want to convey that they are fun but not raucous. Introspective but not pretentious. Adventurous but not reckless. Hiking says: I am rejuvenated by fresh air, cowed by the majesty of nature, and often reminded what gloriously insignificant little soul-specks we humans are, dotted all across this big blue marble spinning through space. A hiker does not sweat the small stuff. A hiker doesn’t just see the big picture, they go looking for it. And a hiker with a dog? Well! That is a person you can depend on to file pristine expense reports and join the birthday committee.

I got the job. And I was lying about the hiking. Mostly. 

My dog did love running in the hills. It was very peaceful. But I did not go walking in the woods for self-care, and I could absolutely get enough of the trees. It’s not that I didn’t want to like hiking, or that I didn’t like anything about it. Watching my dog lose her one tiny and precious little mind bounding up and down gullies and hopping over and diving under logs and bushes was a true delight. Northern California is beautiful in a deeply obnoxious way, just absolutely lousy with fairy-tale bullshit: stunning vistas, babbling brooks, and entrancing, eucalyptus-scented copses. It was on one of these hikes that I, a fully grown thirty-something woman, first understood what it meant to be literally dazzled — by sunlight streaming through a canopy of redwoods, rendering the forest floor into a stereoscopic reverie of colors and textures. It was a truly incredible, life-changing experience that I was fully the fuck done with almost as soon as I’d had it.

I just don’t like nature all that much. This is not a thing a serious person should say. Those of us who do not love the outdoors are not in great company, pop culturally speaking. We, especially we weenie-ass girls, do not behave like the precocious and brave female characters of literary import, carelessly scooping up toads or venturing blind into caves in search of hidden treasure. We are the vapid baddies consumed with worry over our pristine manicure or our elaborate hairdo or our impractical footwear. We are the prissy children in the scouting troop who fall into a puddle of muddy sludge during the Tomboy’s Journey Montage. We are comic relief at best, villain at worst.

But I can’t help it. My hairdo is very cute, and precious to me. Ditto my pretty hands and snazzy outfits. I mean, I can craft a look for being outdoors, but inevitably the outdoors has a different idea about the endurance of any given style decision that is not, at its most essential, practical. Being a woman who in theory likes being outside but who in practice would prefer to not be outside is a whole production. And I am not a high-heels-wearing, Aquanet-bouffant enthusiast; I simply prefer to be among a load of people, or a load of things that people have made, and nature is notably: not that. On purpose. Not being on purpose, in the way that we humans understand the concept, is pretty much nature’s whole-ass point.

Give me a department store, a Pep Boys, a strip center with a vape shop and a bridal boutique. Give me an outlet mall. Give me a string of Loves travel stops and a cornball roadside attraction, ideally featuring a locally record-setting literal cornball. In these places, I can lose myself. I can log 6,000 steps between a Dillard’s and a Cinnabon and savor every minute. But those same 6,000 steps between trailhead and campsite? Will take any and everything out of me.

I love cities and suburbs and small-town Main Streets with historic courthouses. I love questionable public art and shitty cell phone stores and the sleepy-stoned guy selling scarves and used books on the sidewalk. I love subways and buses and elevated trains and two-story IKEAs with the shopping cart escalators. We all understand that people have life-changing experiences at Big Sur and Yellowstone, but it blows my mind to wander the aisles of a really good Target.

I need you to understand that I have tried to not be this woman, because it will make me feel better in case I have offended you and/or your love of nature, which I both respect and oppose. Thus, I offer a curated collection of my genuine, good-faith efforts to do outdoorspersoning:

• 1990 or thereabouts: My father takes me on a special father-daughter bonding canoe trip in Beaver’s Bend, Oklahoma. I have no information other than “You bawled the whole time.”

• Fall 2007: I join a group of cavers, for journalism. I have a claustrophobic meltdown mere minutes into crawling through a muddy tunnel and am forced to retreat aboveground in a mess of dusty tears. I am comforted by a man who once spent 13 days below the surface mapping as-yet unexplored parts of Oaxaca’s Sistema Huautla.

• Spring 2010: I drive to the only West Texas campground I can find that offers WiFi in hopes of finishing my master’s thesis among the desert scrub, like a real Texas writer with real deathless prose running through her veins, prose that can only truly flow forth as I listen to the something-something waters of the something-something creek as the something-something sun sets behind the something-something mountains. A thunderstorm begins just as I put up my tent, which is not as water-resistant as the copy on the Academy Sports and Outdoors website would lead one to believe. I give up around 10 p.m. and drive many hours back to my apartment in Austin. I file my thesis in a caffeine-fueled frenzy from the sufficiently verdant Flightpath Coffeehouse patio.

• Independence Day, 2014: I agree to an overnight canoe journey through Central Texas organized by a trio of my dudeliest, outdoorsiest friends from high school. My husband comes, which makes this a safe and good idea. We mostly drink whiskey (“to minimize weight”) and sometimes paddle, which means we miss the island where camping is allowed and gamble on sleeping overnight on a riverside beach surrounded by rusty NO TRESPASSING signs. I use special biodegradable toilet paper. We are not shot.

• Winter 2016: I suggest driving a rental RV from Texas to California with my husband and our pets in lieu of moving the animals by airplane to the West Coast. I spend six terrified days convinced my elderly tabby will disappear into a KOA dumpster, even though we establish an elaborate checks-and-balances system for keeping the cats’ travel crates shut when we leave the vehicle. My dog nearly jumps into the Grand Canyon. I am so anxious that I forget not to brush my teeth with water from the RV’s stale, bacteria-ridden tank. I spend my first month in the Bay Area mainlining probiotics and contributing more than several people’s share of liquid waste to the Alameda County Water Authority.

• August 2017: My husband and I go tent camping in Southern Oregon with friends to witness the solar eclipse. Apart from horking and snorting days’ worth of wildfire smoke, this experience is lovely. Donald Trump looks directly into the sun.

• February 2019: I am holed up at my family’s lake house deep in the Piney Woods of East Texas, waiting out a bathroom remodel at our house in Austin before we can move back in. One morning, our dog discovers catfish. Dead ones. I bathe her in my mother’s decadent jacuzzi tub and then drive six hours to Austin to drink beers with my friends at the Posse East. I sleep on a cot in a house with no electricity and no toilet and pee behind a tree in my own backyard at 4 am.

• Spring 2022: I spend three glorious days in a sprawling Texas Hill Country ranch home with my girlfriends, writing and drinking wine and talking shit. On the last night, a scorpion appears in the bathroom. The toughest among us traps the scoundrel under a cocktail glass, and she breaks the news before we pour our coffee. We leave quickly and with a minimum of hollering. 

I feel I’ve made the effort to understand why people who have clear, unimpeded, and fully funded access to indoor plumbing and central heat and air conditioning and Door Dash nevertheless prefer to, as Mark Twain put it, “rough it.” I have an REI membership. I enthusiastically enjoy a weekend of car camping if there’s enough alcohol involved. I adore the beach and spending the day on the lake and tubing my way through Don’s Fish Camp. I paddleboard, for fuck’s sake.   

But nature just never hits for me the way it does for other people, or the way other people say it does. The humorist Bill Bryson’s account of hiking the Appalachian trail, A Walk In The Woods, is one of my favorite books. It’s devastatingly relatable to this indoor kid, no moment more so than when Bryson is fed up with all that walking and buys himself a six-pack of beer and a night at the local motel. My favorite scene in a whole book about being outside is about drinking beer in a shitty hotel.

The dichotomy of misery and comfort is fascinating to me; I love imagining misery and already having comfort. If you find me hungover on a Saturday, you will find a woman binge-watching documentaries about ultra-athletes and their phenomenal mental and physical feats of strength and endurance. The more horrifying, the better – there’s “The Alpinist,” wherein climber Marc-André Leclerc documents his solo ascents to a terrifying conclusion, or “Running for Good,” wherein vegan marathoner Fiona Oakes runs across Antarctica on a shattered knee, or my all-time favorite, “The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young.” I own a half-dozen books written by, for, and about participants in the famously brutal Barkley, a 60-hour trail race in Tennessee, and hope to spectate one myself, someday. But I don’t want to be, as the Barkley bunch call it, “out there.” Obviously there’s a world of difference between running a grueling ultra-marathon and feeling kind of lonely in a big house in the woods. But I have trouble reconciling my gawking interest in the former with my practical dislike of the latter.

I don’t have any of the usual good excuses for not liking the outdoors. For example, mosquitos generally leave me alone. I can spend an evening around a fire pit and come away with one or two light nibbles, while my husband will be herded indoors by a cloud of tiny, bloodthirsty aggressors within minutes. When I moved to Austin in 2008, I was swiftly warned by everyone I encountered that soon I would succumb to Central Texas’s notorious smorgasbord of irritants both seasonal and perennial. Every doctor I’ve ever seen here, including a doc-in-a-box orthopedist and my gynecologist, has this chart or a version of it prominently displayed throughout exam rooms, as if mountain cedar might play a role in sprained ankles and cervical dysplasia. But the year is now 2023 and I only sometimes notice that my eyes get kind of sticky when mold is high. And I don’t think it’s about being isolated from technology, either. I can survive – nay, thrive! – for many hours without my phone in a pub or a bookstore. There aren’t a lot of truly off-grid places left anywhere, anyway.

Lately I’ve been working through Debbie Millman’s excellent Remarkable Life Deck, a package of illustrated cards meant to guide a person into imagining new possibilities for the next five or ten years of their life. The prompts ask all kinds of questions – Where might you live in ten years? What might you do there? What are the sights and sounds and smells? I got halfway through the deck, scribbling responses about an A-frame cabin in Pecos County and my idyllic mid-life as a crotchety hermit novelist, before I realized that I am still giving old answers – job interview answers – to these questions. I am still telling myself that I could, or should, be a person who goes hiking, or disappears into a rural sunset with notebook in hand. It is really hard not to respond to questions about my life with answers about someone else’s. I have resolved to finish the deck with these wrong answers, review them, and acknowledge them as a kind of necessary purge. And then I will start the deck over again, knowing the old answers are always already there as ever-present options for another version of myself.

I am excited to find out what the new answers are.