I’ve never understood people who actually enjoy being outdoors. I understand you can’t exactly avoid going outside. I admit I leave my apartment for ten minutes every day to retrieve sandwiches and cookies to drag back to my lair. But I certainly don’t have fun doing it. Outside is where the sun’s piercing rays sear my skin. Outside is where spiders breed and plot ways to penetrate my kitchen. Outside is where bears live. Like actual bears that roam around waiting to rip your arms and legs off and eat them like stale chicken wings. If I didn’t need nutrition or occasional sunlight to survive, rest assured my apartment door would stay permanently bolted.
My distaste of nature began as early as I can remember, during one disastrous weekend my family spent RVing in Wisconsin. In their youthful naiveté, my parents not only enjoyed being outdoors but actively sought time to be outside exclusively, like some kind of forest animals, content with only the trees and a bonfire and a fully equipped RV. I was never on board with the concept of the RV, even as an infant, when I still regularly shit my pants. If you’re putting an entire house on wheels just to drive it into the woods, why don’t you just stay in the fucking house? You can call it a recreational vehicle all you want, but an RV will always be the vehicle you don’t want to drive behind on the highway because there’s a 100 percent chance that an infant child is giving you the middle finger from the rear window. I was that infant child. And that middle finger was my cry for help. I like to point out this fact to clarify that I myself was never an RVer, simply the child of RVers and an unwitting participant in the culture of RVing. And yes, RVing is not just an activity, but an entire culture, with a rich history of camping in Walmart parking lots and dumping buckets of piss and shit on the side of the American interstate highway system. It’s a beautiful culture, respected by many, and disrespected by many more.
My parents never owned an RV, but our family friend Sue owned one, and that was good enough for us. Sue was an old, sprightly woman who worked with my parents years earlier at the department store where they met. (Yes, my parents met working at a department store. I am a child of coupons and cheap garments.) By the time I was born, Sue was already widowed and retired, and spent her free time driving out into the wilderness to enjoy nature. I loved Sue. She had a nasty sense of humor—most of the time, I didn’t know what she was laughing about, but I laughed along with her anyway. She had a bunch of cactuses in her house that were taller than I was and a full basement with a pool table and a bunch of paintings of clowns that when the lights were turned off I’m pretty sure sprang to life to feast on cubes of beef and carrion that Sue flung to them from upstairs. She was a quirky old broad who would do stuff like that.
“The camper,” as it was affectionately called, was always parked in Sue’s driveway. We were never allowed inside of it when we were at Sue’s house—just like we only got to go to the basement while the clown paintings were sleeping—but I’d always wondered what happened inside of it. I was probably only four or five at the time, but I remember being fascinated by the idea that someone would actually want to fit an entire house onto a big old bus and take it into the wilderness for fun. But of course, we soon got invited to go with Sue on a camping trip, and I would discover exactly why fitting your entire house onto a bus is perhaps not the most ideal arrangement.
This was before that fucking Tiny House Hunters show on HGTV fetishized the idea of living in a cardboard box. No offense to people who live in cardboard boxes, but I prefer to sleep in a bed that’s more than twelve inches away from the toilet, and I resent the entire Home and Gardens Television network for suggesting I should want otherwise.
So one weekend, my mom, dad, brother, and I drove for what felt like an entire day to get to Sue’s camper in Wisconsin (I’m sure it was only four hours, possibly less), and parked in a campground near a lake. I remember the excitement I felt when I got out of the car and the immediate disappointment I felt when I saw where we had parked.
The “campground” was nothing more than a patch of dirt no larger than a strip mall parking lot, next to a lake so overrun with tree roots and algae, you could barely tell where the shore ended and the water began. Even if you wanted to jump in, there’d be no way to return without climbing through bushes and muck.
You’d think, as an infant, I wouldn’t have had the worldly experience to distinguish a bad outdoors experience from a good one. But I knew this was shit. “At least there’s a swimming pool on the campground,” my mother tried to assure us. But when we walked by the pool to investigate, we discovered a hole full of green, cloudy water and a single used diaper floating listlessly in the center, crushing all of my hopes and dreams.
When we got inside the camper to clean up after our daylong journey to Wisconsin, we discovered that the water supply along this particular lake was apparently high in hydrogen sulfide gas, causing what is otherwise known as “sulfur water,” or water that smells like someone shit out a dozen deviled eggs and then sprayed it with the blood of a dozen other deviled eggs that had been freshly killed earlier that morning.
They say smell can be the strongest trigger for memory, which is perhaps why I remember this weekend so vividly over two decades later. Because it smelled like death the entire time.
Honestly, I don’t remember why we didn’t turn right around and drive back that minute. I’m sure I used my limited vocabulary to advocate for that very action. But being an RVer means never saying no to a challenge, so apparently we spent an entire weekend bathing in boiled egg water and just dealing with it. I asked my mother years later why the hell we didn’t turn around and go straight back home when we turned on the faucet and the cursed souls of egg demons poured from the tap, and she said we stayed to “enjoy each other’s company,” because apparently some people are satisfied by nothing more than conversation with other humans and are willing to overlook the minor inconveniences of tainted water and diaper pools. And yet the sulfur water was hardly the only terrible thing about that weekend. It was all terrible. There were bugs. It was itchy. We spent the whole weekend sitting by a campfire, where I learned that my body is extremely allergic to mosquitoes, which is a thing you can actually be allergic to, because every one of their tiny clawing bites turned into a giant welt. My only toy that weekend was a fly swatter, which I used to great effect, but still. I was being literally eaten alive in a tiny house car with nothing but egg water to soothe my wounds. On top of all that, I had the distinct privilege, as the youngest camper that weekend, of sleeping on the breakfast table. In true RV fashion, the surface of the kitchen table was detachable and, with a few maneuvers, turned into a bed. Imagine a restaurant booth, but take away the supporting leg and put the tabletop flush between the seats, and voilà, you got yourself an RV bed. At least that’s how they sold it to me when they told me I was sleeping on a breakfast table. Once you get over the initial excitement of getting to sleep where you eat your Froot Loops, you realize you’re sleeping on a literal table, which is perhaps the least appealing of sleeping surfaces. I was a kid, dehydrated from a scarcity of egg-free drinking water and sapped of all my blood from thirsty mosquitoes, so I’m sure I passed out.
When we finally escaped on Sunday evening, the rest of my family apparently content enough with a weekend of one another’s company, I spent the entire car ride home scratching my mosquito bites into bloody gashes and cursing the outdoors forever. Nature, I knew then more than ever, was nothing more than an itchy, putrid adventure into hell itself.
• • •
The older I got, and the more time I spent ignoring the outdoors, the more my distaste for nature evolved into genuine fear. Do I wish I could’ve grown into one of those burly men from the Discovery Channel who can make his own venison jerky and chase hurricanes and put out forest fires? Sure. But only because they get to spend a lot of very intimate time with other burly men in scant clothing, and I’m about that life. But alas, I grew into a true nature sissy, terrified not only by being outside but by what nature could do to me while I was indoors.
The very earliest dream I can remember was a nightmare I had when I couldn’t have been more than a few years old. I was playing outside when, in seconds, the sky turned violently gray and then pitch-black and I woke up in a pile of snot and tears and probably urine if we’re being honest, and it took a few packages of frozen waffles to console me.
There were no tall buildings in the suburbs where I grew up, so anytime there was bad weather, you could see the angry dark sky for miles and miles and it always made me feel so small and defenseless. We lived on the periphery of the tornado belt, after all. Every year at school, we’d have tornado drills, where we’d crawl into the hallways and roll into balls against the wall, and sometimes, if you didn’t get into the hallway quick enough, you’d have to start forming a row behind the kids who were already against the wall, so your tiny face was up in some other kid’s butt—but that was the price we paid for staying safe. I’d seen The Wizard of Oz enough times to know that tornadoes weren’t fucking around. I mean, sure, a tornado flung Dorothy to a land of tiny dancing homosexuals, which I wouldn’t have been opposed to, but also, her house literally killed someone! I wasn’t about to be the next person with fabulous shoes to get killed in a tornado.
And yes, that’s an entirely normal fear to have. Long before I was born, my mother’s cousin was killed in a tornado in the next town over, and perhaps it was my mother’s constant repetition of that story, or perhaps it was something deeper, but every summer, my fear of storms got worse and worse.
One summer, my mother was mowing the lawn with an electric mower that was plugged into an outlet with a long, winding extension cord. It started pouring rain and she didn’t stop mowing, and I went outside and stood next to her literally screaming my eyes out over the claps of thunder because I was sure she was about to be electrocuted to death. (Which is a concern I would maintain today. Not the brightest idea on her part.) I was sobbing convulsively, convinced that if she weren’t electrocuted, she’d definitely be struck by lightning or swept up by a tornado that was obviously headed directly to our house. She finished the job, which I’m sure I made ten times more difficult by standing in her path, and somehow she was never electrocuted to death. But it remains possibly the most scared I’ve ever been.
There was one storm in particular, probably around 1998, that struck while we were at a public pool. And yes, before you judge us, we went to public pools. We didn’t get a fancy aboveground pool in our backyard until the 2000s, so we were forced to go swimming in public like animals. It was a balmy, cloudy day, but otherwise storm-less, and the entire family went. About halfway through the day, a lifeguard spotted lightning and made everybody get out of the water until the storm clouds passed over, which was perfectly fine, because it was lunchtime, and I was hungry.
While we sat unpeeling our peanut butter sandwiches from their damp plastic wraps, I looked up and saw a sinister cloud billowing toward us, a plume of green-gray smoke. I’d seen plenty of storm clouds before, but no cloud moved as menacingly as this one, like a thick snake uncoiling rapidly above us. Suddenly, the winds whipped violently around us, the rain came down like bullets, and everybody was running in a different direction. “This is the big one!” my mother screamed. A sign from the hot dog stand came loose and flew down and hit the person next to me in the head. I stood up, threw away my entire sandwich, and ran for the closest structure: the women’s bathroom. We all darted inside and clung to the concrete walls, which shook against the wind. I turned to find my older cousin sobbing uncontrollably with a hot dog in his hand. His body was convulsing, but he kept eating. It remains the most hilarious, yet terrifying moment of my childhood.
Eventually, the storm passed and we all survived. But a giant tree was literally ripped from its roots and thrown into the shallow end of the pool where we’d been swimming a half hour earlier.
So to anyone who says that my fear of nature is unfounded, that I’m a grown-ass man who lives in a city where the most dangerous wildlife are dog-sized cockroaches and rat kings, that your chances of getting bit by a radioactive spider or swept away in a tornado, especially in New York City, are far less than the chances of slipping in the shower as a result of dancing too hard to a Spice Girls song and trying to finish my sub sandwich, know that my terror is well-rooted in a history of what I consider dramatic near-deaths, and I’m lucky to be alive. You can take your outdoors propaganda to the next fool unfazed by the presence of vicious cyclones and bloodthirsty bears, and when he gets ripped apart and thrown to another state, I’ll be inside, under three layers of sheets and blankets, whispering over and over, “I told you so.”