Nope.
When I came to the U.S. from El Salvador, I wasn’t expecting to fully fit in. I predicted that despite my best efforts to assimilate, there would be cultural gaps that I would never be able to fill in. Cultural quirks my background never equipped me to understand, some having to do with language (like, if you were going to pronounce it “woostuhsheer” why would you spell it Worcestershire?), others having to do with customs, like singing at arbitrarily specific moments during baseball games. I just never imagined camping would be one of them.
See, everyone around me seems to love camping, an activity I can’t even feign interest for like I can for other universally loved but personally despised affairs like The Bachelor (I speak The Bachelor at limited working proficiency levels, thank you very much). But not camping. And while my aversion for nights outside isolates me from what seems -- unscientifically -- like a majority in urban enclaves, I still don’t get it.
Other things that were absolutely foreign and exotic to me at first have now become less so. That’s how assimilation works: it slowly corrodes the premises lived experiences mold into what you come to understand as your culture, changing it unnoticeably but permanently, in the same way that relentless waves licking the shore forever change the shape of coasts. And suddenly, before I noticed, self-checkout in stores stopped seeming Jetsons-like and my eyes must’ve lost the wondering awe from wandering in a new place, since I now get approached in the street to give directions. Most nights now I dream in English. But there are premises too solid and experiences too ingrained, and those stand unmalleable in the face of assimilation, codified so deeply in our cultural DNAs that they resist even the most intentional of code switches.
For me, that’s camping: the pull that surrendering comfort somehow has over people that, perhaps, have never had to be uncomfortable, shall forever remain inexplicable to me.
Sure, I have given it a try. That’s how I know that even in the most merciful conditions, every human-made scent that’s already gross is only amplified under a tent. And while the amazing National Parks Service does an incredible job preserving all the wonderful open spaces in the land and making them available to all of the people -- a brilliant, truly democratising idea -- camping is not necessarily affordable. The price for the gear you need to camp in conditions adjacent to comfort can climb up to amounts comparable to rent money (which is only ok if you meant for that tent to be your new residence). But this is where the culture clash happens: “Do you want to spend the night outside? Get really far away from it all and rough it?” No. You see, I have a bed. I don’t know if it’s the best bed, but it’s an ok one. One does not exactly immigrate to “rough it” on purpose. That’s the height of privilege, when you can choose whether you want to have a shitty night.
Theoretically, I get the magnetism that nature exercises on urbanites. I’m a sucker for sunsets and enjoy sitting by a fire as much as the next person. I find peace in creeks and think stargazing is humbling and magical. I just don’t need my experience with nature to be as immersive as other people’s and it wasn’t until I really had to think about it -- after years of truly not getting it -- that I realized my differences stem from having a very disparate relationship with nature.
Where I come from in Central America, nature is a force, an entity you fear and revere in almost equal parts at the same time. It’s alive and restless; it’s voracious and wild. It makes the earth dance beneath our feet capriciously every so often, faults shifting like shuffling merengue feet, while swallowing buildings whole. Earthquakes are immediately followed by nights outside in a tent until the tremors and aftershocks are gone and peace of mind allows you to let your guard back down and go back inside. Where I come from, nature knows no middle ground: when it rains heavily and for days, it floods in ways that make circulation impossible. Our landscapes feature a number of peaceful-looking volcanoes, but our people know the tales of the devastation that has sprouted from their craters, sometimes leaving beauty behind -- like lakes inside of craters -- and sometimes wiping out entire cities. I have never argued against the beauty of nature: I just learned early on that beauty can also hurt. That mosquitoes are the price to pay for the lively humidity of our beautiful tropical forests and jungles (mosquito-transmitted diseases are like Pokemon, some of us catch them all). Growing up in the aftermath of the Salvadoran civil war meant getting used to arbitrary power outages, so relinquishing power, an internet connection and running water on purpose? Hard pass.
So let’s all agree to enjoy our privilege in our own way: me, from the comfort of a warm bed, under a roof, with a decent internet connection -- a tiny fraction of the many freedoms that many like myself come here to attain from our work -- and others, by intentionally seeking subpar sleep. While aware that my bold refusal to not test my survival skills may rightly brand me as a garbage human who can’t appreciate the sublime gifts of nature, I will, for the most part and not at all reluctantly, opt inside. All I ask from avid campers is to realize that the fact that we both get to opt (you outside and me inside) is in itself a huge privilege. So that actually makes us the same. We just have a different frame of reference.