That’s what I love about crocodiles. They are the most powerful apex predators!
—Steve Irwin, The Crocodile Hunter, October 1991
When we rose the next morning and rubbed the sleep out of our eyes, I looked in the clearing and saw for the first time in my life a campsite full of black and Hispanic kids. While I would like to report how startling and inspiring this was, my actual reaction was a bit more prosaic. It just seemed like a bunch of young people in the woods having fun. I saw a girl whose parents had come from Belize, and another whose parents had moved from Puerto Rico, and another who hailed from El Salvador and told me that cities always got her down and hemmed her in “because I get these incredible urges to climb the tallest trees, and nobody can stop me.” They were eating French toast and playing cards. Miss Candice, the counselor from the nonprofit agency, who is part Brazilian, was painting temporary henna tattoos on the Puerto Rican girl’s hands and wrists.
Jaliyah had such a sour expression on her face that I could not resist walking over there and asking how she liked the campout so far.
She gave me the teenage eye roll. “Oh, it’s nice,” she said. “It’s been fun.”
She went on a bit of a rant when I asked about how she’d slept in camp. “Oh, it’s just ugly, the thought of being there in that thing.”
“What thing?”
“That tent,” she said. “There’s dirt in there! That’s where I lay my head. That just makes no sense to me. And there are no showers. And the bathrooms, they’re like two hundred feet away. I guess this is a survival trip. I’ll just have to survive, I guess. I hope I do survive. I am a survivor.”
Chelsea walked over and told me she’d gotten scared in the middle of the night. “Where am I? Why can’t I see anything? Why is it so dark?” The fear subsided, at least a little bit, when she saw the nylon-wrapped clumps of snoring sleepmates and realized she wasn’t on her own in a forbidding forest. Only Meena looked completely refreshed. I was starting to wonder if the slash pines and the swamp were her milieu.
The abundant food was a corrective against the expected first night of restless slumber. Karen understood the unspoken rule of camping: you might put the kids on the finest bedrolls, show them the highest mountain, show them a bottomless lake, but the food had better be great, because that’s what they will remember and talk about. Feed them slop, and they won’t forgive you. But now that they’d survived a night in a tent and had a good breakfast, the kids had yet another reason to be jittery.
The canoe trip on the gator-infested pond was coming up that morning. I’d decided not to remind the kids about all the armored reptiles in the water. Instead, I asked them, “How many of you can swim?” Only three girls raised their hands. Among the nonswimmers were Chelsea and Jaliyah. I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t the fact that they couldn’t swim that bothered me. What rattled me was the fact they couldn’t swim and yet they had agreed to ride around in flimsy metal boats on a pond with living dinosaurs. Suppose the boat tipped over and they fell in?
Karen and I drove out to the pond with Jaliyah, Crystal, and Ariane, who looked out the window at groups of retirement-age snowbirds standing next to their RVs. License plates read COLORADO, ONTARIO, and MICHIGAN. In 2015, a year after I went on the campout, the New York Times reported that the “vast majority” of national park visitors were “white and aging.” In the Long Pine Key Campground, the average age seemed to be sixty-five, and every camper, outside of my little group, was Caucasian. None of the girls muttered a word about any of this except Ariane, who saw a pink man with an impressive potbelly rising and falling beneath his white undershirt, which only reached down to his chest. “Oh. My. God,” she said as she looked at him. The man waved to the girls and smiled. The girls returned the wave but not the smile. I couldn’t help but wonder just what it would be like to camp in a park and see crowds of people who did not look like me. However, I made a point of not asking the kids the question, “Is it weird to be here with all these white folks?” If I had asked them this, I would have fallen into a trap of my own creation, making the kids feel self-conscious and freakish for visiting the outdoors, the problem that had brought me out here in the first place.
* * *
Though I didn’t interrogate the girls about feeling out of place, I’d been doing some digging about this issue. Around the time of the campout, I’d been corresponding with Audrey Peterman, a prominent Jamaican-born outdoors enthusiast and advocate who lives in Fort Lauderdale. She uses speeches, conferences, and television appearances to get the word out about the great outdoors while calling attention to the need for better national park outreach campaigns targeting nonwhites. She and her husband, Frank Peterman, went on a national parks camping odyssey in the mid-1990s and were dismayed to see so few people of color out there. “I felt really affronted because I knew the reason,” Peterman told me during a phone conversation. “When we told our friends and family that we were going to go out and hike and camp in the woods alone, they were really alarmed. Terrified, in fact. Some of my friends’ friends brought out their collection of guns. They said, ‘You’re going to arm yourself if you’re doing this crazy thing. White people are not going to expect to see you out there and you’re not going to be welcome.’ A lot of that fear and antipathy has been passed down generationally. Grandparents tell grandchildren of what used to happen. Many who had not experienced the aggression personally still had a cultural memory. [But] I felt affronted because this is our country and we all pay taxes. National parks belong to the American people.”
African Americans and Hispanics are not the only ethnic groups affected by the “participation gap.” Native Americans, the United States’ original campers, and Asian Americans make up only a small percentage of today’s campers. But African Americans are unique in the sense that a large body of writing and scholarship, much of it written by black people, has been building up around the issue, especially over the past two decades. One of the most outspoken voices is the African American environmental historian Dianne Glave, whose 2010 book Rooted in the Earth addresses the fraught as well as the uplifting aspects of black environmental history in this country.
The book is unflinching when it talks about the atrocities that brought about “a shapeless, lingering fear” that continues to haunt many urban African Americans. Wilderness, she explains, has troublesome connotations for the descendants of African American lynching victims in southern forests and of exploited workers in the mostly black labor force that toiled in the turpentine camps of the South for low pay and in unsafe conditions. During the first Great Migration, starting in about 1910, millions of black Americans fled the rural South for industrial careers in the Midwest, leaving behind a life close to the land that meant hardship and toil.
Other writers have pinpointed ways that certain ethnic groups, especially African Americans, have faced years of exclusion in the American outdoors, and some of the worst examples have taken place there in Florida, where segregated “separate but equal” state parks facilities were common in the 1950s and into the early 1960s. A few of the girls on the Everglades trip had camped on Virginia Key Beach, which used to be a “colored only” recreation area, starting in the 1940s. African Americans had to rally for the right to swim and sunbathe there. Even the national parks were not immune to Jim Crow. “Within the large Western national parks, established in the early twentieth century, African-Americans weren’t particularly welcome,” Slate magazine reported in 2013. In an interview, Terence Young, a geography professor and American camping historian, mentioned that early-twentieth-century park administrators had a “conscious, but unpublicized policy of discouraging visits by African Americans, [who were], in the opinion of administration, ‘conspicuous … objected to by other visitors … [and] impossible to serve.’”
Black camping families driving their cars to Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park in 1940 were confronted with an unsubtle hand-carved sign, mounted on wooden posts directing them to the LEWIS MOUNTAIN NEGRO AREA, with “separate but equal” camping, coffee shop, and cottages. This was the result of a jurisdictional quirk; the state of Virginia originally owned the land and, upon donating it to the National Park Service, it insisted that the NPS impose Jim Crow laws. The park was desegregated in 1942.
Yet there is another side to the story of African Americans and the land, as Glave points out. African Americans have a rich parallel environmental history that is every bit as valid and powerful as the negative connotations. During slavery, “African Americans actively sought healing, kinship, resources, escape, refuge and salvation in the land,” she wrote.
Brandon Harris, an African American independent filmmaker, film critic, and contributor to the New Yorker, referred to the survival issue in his essay for Talking Points Memo, published in December 2014, called “Why Is Camping a White Thing? A Few Wild Theories.” In his piece, and in a raucous and freewheeling phone conversation with me a few months after his story came out, Harris recounted several startling but little-known stories about black people camping in extreme situations.
“For many blacks in the antebellum south, camping skills were essential,” Harris wrote. “The faintest hope of freedom depended on surviving in the forests of the deep, still-wild south upon escaping from bondage, as some hundred thousand African-not-yet-Americans did between 1810 and 1850. Mentions of rock shelters and bluff tops, which were used as hideouts and improvised camp sites, course through many of the most significant fugitive slave narratives, from Frederick Douglass to Sojourner Truth and onward. The ability to manipulate fire and navigate was often the difference between life and death. The railways one imagines when first hearing the term ‘underground railroad’ were in fact swamps and streams, caves and rivers.”
Over the phone, Harris went into greater detail, talking about the escaped slaves who fled to the Great Dismal Swamp when it was a million-acre expanse of forbidding marshland overlapping southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. Somehow they dwelled there for years, using the scariest aspects of the land to their great advantage. “Slave trackers would try to retrieve their property, and this was a bridge too far,” Harris told me. “They were not willing to go there. ‘If you want to go live in the swamp, we will leave you the fuck alone!’ I think it is really remarkable. It’s like the stuff of a Dave Chappelle skit. But it’s real.”
While talking to Harris, it seemed to me that this counternarrative would be irresistible if more people knew about it. Gaze into the pages of camping history and you will find an African American mountain man named James Beckwourth, a former slave. Shelton Johnson, an African American Yosemite National Park ranger who grew up in Detroit, has pointed out that members of two African American U.S. Army regiments, known as the Buffalo Soldiers, were some of the first park rangers between 1899 and 1904. “This puts African Americans at the very beginning of national park history,” Johnson said in an interview with NBC News. “If you don’t know you have cultural roots in the parks, then you’re not going to feel a sense of ownership in them.” Black-owned and -patronized private campgrounds and lakeside resorts became popular in the Midwest after the Great Migration.
So why is it, I asked Harris, that there continues to be a participation gap? He mentioned black friends of his who love camping, and a few others “who really don’t give a shit about it.” When I mentioned to him the African American activists who are working hard to connect more black people to outdoor experiences, and who, like Peterman, remind us that national parks belong to us all, Harris said, “I can’t speak to those people’s feelings. I think that you are right to suggest we should all have access to these public grounds, for the commons. We have this wonderful bounty that we have all collectively stolen from the Native Americans, so we want to make that available to everybody, you know?”
Harris, who let loose with a mordant laugh, was right to mention this painful issue. The establishment of national parks such as Yellowstone and Yosemite coincided with those parks’ native populations being kicked out of their own territory. The history of American camping started off with a cruel irony; America’s first occupants were dispossessed of the land that belonged to them, only to be informed that they could visit it, and dwell on it briefly, but never make their home there again. “But in all seriousness,” Harris continued, “I do think the commons are important. People who live near Yellowstone National Park are going to have more access to it. I am happy as a taxpayer and as an American to pay for that wonderful space, which is our shared heritage. But, likewise, I am hoping that the same individuals [who support national parks with taxes] would also support high-speed rail and intercity transportation that allows us to limit congestion and pollute the planet less.”
Activists and scholars have given us a strong sense of the problem’s scope. So what is being done about it? Certain well-meaning Caucasian pals of mine have asked me whether I’m imposing the “white value” of camping on nonwhites. When I hear such criticisms, all I can do is point to the growing number of activist groups who are putting forth the strong message that the outdoors is for everyone. But my discussions with leaders such as Audrey Peterman, and with Jose González, coordinator of the outreach group Latino Outdoors, also make me wonder if I’m skewing the diversity issue a bit by focusing so much on the camping angle. González told me that when he’s engaging Latino youth in the outdoors, he avoids setting up a strict “continuum” in which one form of engagement with nature is considered better or purer than others. He sees value in bringing children out to suburban parks, just as he sees value in taking them out to the wilderness. “If they want to go to wilderness, we can build that for them,” he said. “But I’m not pushing them to say their real goal is to do a five-day backpacking trip.”
* * *
As we crossed the saw grass marshes, prairies, sloughs, and ridges and made our way to Nine Mile Pond, the girls hummed along with Rick Ross, Drake, Beyoncé, and 2 Chainz. The Everglades were nothing at all like the pictures I had in my head. I’d imagined impenetrable jungle, no visibility anywhere, but the Everglades, if anything, had far too much visibility. Its toasted-brown and olive-drab prairies were so flat they gave me a vertiginous feeling, as if I might fall off the earth. The open spaces looked featureless at first glance. Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote of a “vast glittering openness, wider than the enormous visible round of the horizon.” Every time I looked out the window, a new discordant feature revealed itself. Unruly tufts of trees and land rose from the saw grass in brown and green clumps. Wood storks hunched. Their skin was slack and baggy. Their pickled faces reminded me of apple dolls cured with salt and lemon and left in the sun too long. Sometimes the land broke into canals and pools. Alligators drifted. Snouts and eyes skimmed the water. Black tails swung below the surface.
In no time we’d arrived at Nine Mile Pond, where Winston Walters, an African American volunteer for ICO, was waiting for us near the water. That morning, he’d hauled out the canoes from Karen’s house in South Miami. I’d been corresponding with Winston by phone and e-mail for a few weeks. Winston had grown up on a Jamaican farm where he spent his days raising chickens, rabbits, and herbs, roaming green hills of mahogany and cedar, and searching for stray goats hiding in little caves. Nature felt like his living room.
Winston had a faint wisp of a mustache and carried one of the biggest survival knives I’d seen in some time. He was muscular and slim, which subtracted a few years; I took him for thirty-four, but he’s fifty. Winston was in love with camping and the outdoors and liked introducing kids to the wild, especially when they lived in concrete environments and didn’t have much money to get out there. He’d signed on with Miami ICO because the volunteers are mostly white and he wanted young campers to have more adult mentors who looked like them. He told me it had been a consistent struggle to recruit other black camping trip leaders, a fact that he attributed to “black people in America being tied historically to the land in ways they don’t necessarily want to be tied to.” In stating this, Winston was reiterating a point I’d heard other outdoor activists share with me. But Winston had a unique take on this subject. He told me that this cultural trepidation, while strong among many of the parents, didn’t necessarily have much of an effect on the kids on his camping trips, perhaps because their elders’ attitudes did not have the chance to set and harden, or perhaps because the oral histories that caused so much ambivalence and pain hadn’t been passed down to them yet.
Winston mentioned that all the girls on this particular trip had the food and the use of gear for free, but for most people, camping can be expensive, and economics can be a serious barrier. But he doesn’t think income is always the major deterrent to black Americans who dislike or fear camping. “Certainly, [cost] is a factor, but really, I see the same resistance whether they are low income or middle class. A big part of it is just exposure. Folks just have this sense that if you are outdoors, it’s going to be hard, tough, dirty, buggy. That’s all they’ve been exposed to through the media.”
The kids that camp with ICO are from different circumstances and neighborhoods. There is a mix of middle-class, lower-middle-class, and poor kids. Winston lives in Overtown, a traditionally black neighborhood that is home to many of the youth he’s camped with through ICO. When I typed “Overtown” in Google, I found some positive stories about revitalization efforts and neighborhood pride, but first I had to scroll through a list of Miami tourist warnings and exploitative “ghetto tour” YouTube videos first. Overtown has a striking mixture of vitality and blight, cultural treasures and menace. It’s home to the newly renovated Lyric Theatre and the work of the legendary collage artist and painter Purvis Young. It also has its share of random shootings and drive-bys and often makes the papers for all the wrong reasons.
Winston oversees a research lab that specializes in spinal cord injuries at the University of Miami. He lives within biking distance from his job. His handsome Key West–style condo is reasonably priced by Miami standards, but he felt conflicted when the home owners association got approval for funding to build a fence around the eighty-unit development, walling it off from its surroundings. “This development was initially conceived to elevate the neighborhood around it, not separate from it.”
On the other hand, he does not feel entirely safe anymore. “It’s complicated,” he told me. “As my seven-year-old daughter gets older, I have had to wonder whether I want to rent my place and live somewhere else until she can handle herself, because I worry that something is going to happen to her when she chooses to walk out the door and down the street. I am not suggesting that this happens all the time, but I fear it because I think something can happen. We hear gunshots quite often while we are here at home. And every once in a while, something happens in this little enclave.”
In the summer of 2014, one of his neighbors was on his porch, talking on a cell phone and not paying attention, when a couple of youths walked up to him, robbed him, and sauntered into the housing project next door across the street. That year, Winston and a few other home owners were meeting with a contractor, talking about where they might put up the entrance gate, when two cars sped past and the passengers shot at their rivals with automatic weapons.
“People have had bullets lodged in their walls,” Winston told me. “A lot of it is random, and a lot of it is just because of where we are. Who knows? Maybe a stray bullet meant for somebody else may find you.”
And though he sometimes calls the police because of incidents in his high-crime area, Winston said his relationship with them is complicated and a bit “schizophrenic.” He is alarmed by recent shootings of black residents by police in Miami. In 2013, the U.S. Justice Department, after reviewing thirty-three police shootings between 2008 and 2011, concluded that a number of those killings were unjustified. Among the dead were seven black men shot by police within an eight-month period.
Winston spoke of problems close to home. “There was a spate of police shootings in [Overtown] in the space of two years, and there was a huge uproar in the community,” Winston said, speaking of events that unfolded in 2013 and 2014. But he said the incidents were not well publicized because they took place before August of 2014, when a white police offer shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri, setting off nationwide protests.
In light of these tragedies, ‘‘I try to be very aware of where I am” when police are present, Winston said. “I walk with purpose, as they say, and make sure I look like I am going somewhere as opposed to nonchalant loitering or whatever.” Several campers on ICO-sponsored trips, and in particular the boys, have shared their fears of the police with him. “We talk to the kids about this and make sure they understand the things they need to do or not do, whether it is provoke or in any way precipitate an incident. We are all painfully aware that things can go south, things can escalate, things can get really, really bad in an instant,” he said.
The ICO camping trips are not just an escape for the kids, in other words. They’re an escape for Winston, too. Sometimes the campers don’t realize they’re safer here than they are in town, he told me. “It’s sometimes amazing to me: these kids are totally fine walking around after dark where they live, and when we’re camping in the dark in the Everglades, they’re scared. For me, it’s the reverse.”
Above all else, he just wants the kids to feel comfortable out there. But Jaliyah, as she made her slow way from the car toward the boats in Nine Mile Pond, looked anything but relaxed, and not for reasons that Winston could do anything about.
She walked to the canoes lined up near the water and paused to cringe at her reflection in a car window. “My hair looks ratchet,” I heard her say.
“Jaliyah,” I told her, hoping my reassurances would make up for my Jay Z/Kanye West shellacking. “Your hair does not look wretched at all.”
She gave me a look that could cut glass. “I didn’t say my hair looks wretched,” she said. “I said my hair looks ratchet.”
Jaliyah told me the fear of ratchet-ness kept many of her friends and her two sisters out of the woods. “My sisters would never do something like this because they all use flat irons to straighten their hair, and hair spray, you know. The air out here is just no good for hairspray, that’s all. I decided to go anyways because my friends are going. But then I come all the way out here and there’s no electrical outlet and no showers, and my hair. My hair!”
For the first time, Jaliyah, this bulwark of snark, seemed vulnerable. Then I remembered she couldn’t swim, and I thought, Well, damn, if she’s this upset about her hair, no way in hell is she ever going to get into that canoe. Even I wasn’t thrilled about going out on the lake, knowing Croczilla was lurking.
But I underestimated her.
Winston was her canoe partner, and his confidence was infectious. She got right into that wobbly boat without protest.
The excursion leaders took every safety precaution. All the girls and adults put on life jackets. Karen wrestled one of the canoes into the lake. She made sure every girl had at least one adult with her in any given canoe. Meena got in the middle of my canoe. On the one hand, I was delighted that Meena had, apparently, forgotten my thoughtless remark about the squashed dead lizard. On the other hand, I had to know one thing for sure: “Meena, can you swim?” I’d taken that straw poll so hastily, and the kids had raised their hands in the air so briefly, that I didn’t have a clear sense of who answered yes and no. Meena frowned at me. “Of course I can swim,” she said.
My fears assuaged, at least for the next few seconds, I took the front, Karen took the back, and the three of us pushed out into open water.
The four canoes creaked toward mangrove islands in the distance. If the girls were afraid, they did not show it, not even when the canoe flotilla wobbled single file into a dark mangrove tunnel with turns so tight and forest cover so dense I couldn’t see what was happening to the boats ahead of us. For all I knew, Croczilla was in front of us somewhere, overturning canoes, gulping volunteers and girls. My boat made a hollow thunk as it banged an underwater rock. It was way too quiet for a fleet of noisy girls. All I heard was the slow and steady slip-slop of warm pond water against the sides of our canoe.
I sighed with relief when the mangrove channels widened and I saw, at long last, Winston and Jaliyah making their way through the maze. Jaliyah looked ferocious and in her element. She was smashing water with her paddle. Every time she stroked it, the canoe surged forward, almost as if it had an outboard motor. It wasn’t clear if she was enjoying herself or if she was attacking that pond, trying to beat its face in.
There were hoots of encouragement and peals of laughter when one of the canoes, piloted by Miss Candice, the counselor from the nonprofit group in Miami that worked with the girls, ran aground on a muddy mangrove island. As comfortable as she was with the kids, she was not much of a canoeist and was getting her fair share of loud teasing, which she suffered with good cheer. Her crew members, including Ariane, tried desperately to extricate themselves from that mucky hillock, only to run aground again, provoking screams of laughter from other boaters. “Row, row, row yer boat!” shouted Meena to Ariane. “I’m trying to encourage you.”
“You aren’t helping,” Ariane shouted back.
The warm water was thick with periphyton, pulpy clumps of algae, microbes, and fungus in loose-knit mats of white, brown, and light green. Leggy spiders walked on the floating blobs. Meena reached in the pond, pinched some of the organic goop between her fingers, and showed it to me. It smelled like algae and looked like cat vomit. She scooped up a nice big handful. Water oozed out of it when she squeezed.
Meena alternated between entertaining, instructing, and frightening me out of my wits. Once, she pointed toward a clump of rock and vegetation. “Oh, my God. I see an alligator at eye level over there, a fat one, so close to us, coming toward us.”
I looked and saw nothing. Karen told me not to worry. “If you think an alligator is coming toward you, it is probably coming toward something else and you’re just in the way.” A low belching came from the lake. I felt a little zing down my spine, but Meena laughed and said it was only a bullfrog. “You’ve got to learn to hear the difference,” she told me. “That was only a croak. Real gators groan, you know. A groan is more like a brrrrr. It comes from the throat. Alligators aren’t everywhere. They only hang out in certain places.”
Meena wasn’t quite done unnerving me just yet. We left the mangrove islands behind and had just reentered a big stretch of open water, heading back toward shore, when she took her right hand off the paddle’s handle and let her pale fingers drift just below the surface of the water. I was horrified.
She wiggled her juicy digits. Our canoe drifted over a splotchy black shape maybe fifteen feet below us, probably just a shadow from our boat, a slimy rock, or perhaps a clump of underwater bladderwort.
But the shape was huge, and there was always some possibility, no matter how small, that it was Croczilla coming for his afternoon hors d’oeuvres.
Winston had told me emphatically that there had never been an incident involving crocs or gators on these ICO Miami outings, although “a couple of times folks have seen alligators and gotten freaked out and forgot the basic rule that they are not going to bother you unless you actually jump on top of the alligator or get between a mother and its babies. Otherwise, they don’t want anything to do with you.” Yet Winston, for all I knew, did not know about the monster croc. I just kept thinking, Meena, get your hand out of that water right now before something bites you. Air bubbles drifted from the pond’s dark bottom and popped one by one. I asked Meena, “Aren’t you afraid of alligators? Are you afraid of anything at all?”
She withdrew her fingers from the pond. “Actually,” she said, “I fear alligators more than anything. But I guess I’m the kind of person who embraces fears to get past them. You know who I admire? Steve Irwin. The crocodile hunter, may he rest in peace. He faced fears every day. Imagine. Hunting crocodiles, and then he got killed by some stingray! What I wouldn’t give to follow in his footsteps. What I wouldn’t give to have an Australian accent. What I wouldn’t give to have an underwater infrared camera to spy on the alligators right now.”
I looked down, uneasily, at the churning water, but now that she’d pulled her fingers from that lake, her peaceful concentration, and her skill as a boater, eased my mind. It was surprising and disconcerting to realize that Meena’s calm and reassuring presence in the boat was the only thing that kept me from surrendering to fear.
Meena seemed to pick up on this. “My point is,” she said, “you can acknowledge fear, you can name your fear, but you can’t let fear overcome you or rule you. I’ve always had personal fears of heights and the dark, but the fear of the wilderness is something different. You are basically traveling into the unknown. Everything is unpredictable. You could come across a predator. There is a chance of getting poison ivy, or stung by an unknown insect that can be poisonous. And for all we know, our canoe could capsize.”
“So why do you have faith that all those bad things won’t happen?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I have faith in the unknown.”
As we drifted toward shore, Meena spoke about her ambitions for the future. She enjoyed biology—though she said she was not so hot on math—and longed to be a croc tracker and conservationist, but such jobs were hard to come by, so she was thinking about becoming a forensic pathologist, warming up cold cases for the FBI. Still, it was hard for me to imagine Meena ever pulling away from her beloved reptiles. You could even say they consumed her. Sure enough, as we made our way slowly toward dry land, we saw a medium-size tubby alligator lollygagging on the shore, torso visible, eyes shut tight, and its tail below the muddy surface. Meena got out of the boat and rushed right over to it, as though she were greeting an old pal from middle school. She stopped when she was about fifteen feet away from the beast.
“I wonder how big that alligator is,” said Meena. “It looks like a six-footer. Maybe bigger. Or a little smaller. I’d love to go over there and measure it.”
“Please don’t measure it!” I said.
That afternoon a rainstorm swept the Everglades. All the kids took cover. I’d hoped the counselors knew what they were doing and that the tents they’d brought were seam-sealed and rain-proofed like mine. After all, I’d traveled thousands of miles with this tent, and it was built to withstand any condition. Then my tent flipped over and flooded with me inside it. I shouted and moaned as the water poured through my “sealed” seams as if through the holes in a colander. When the storm broke, the kids were treated to the spectacle of me standing in the mud, turning my tent upside down as I thrashed all the dirt and muck out of it. A steady mist was falling, and the campground was quiet. No one was out and about, except of course Meena, who tromped past my tent, looking straight ahead. Oh, no, I thought. What is she up to now? I called out to her. “Where are you going?”
“Rain brings gators!” she called back to me.
Lake-bound, Meena followed the path toward the shoreline. I worried the rainstorm would return and soak me, but I didn’t want her to do something rash and get gobbled, so I followed her. Meena’s prints led me to a muddy bank, where I found her among the slash pines, staring into the water. A juvenile gator, maybe five feet long, floated near the rim of the lake, its eyes on Meena, its green-black brow above the surface. For a while we stood there and watched bubbles form around the humps on its head and the scutes of its armor as it drifted closer.
“You are looking at an American alligator,” Meena said. “You want to know who gets hurt by alligators? Entertainers—alligator wrestlers. They stick their heads in the jaws and take their heads out just before it closes. The reason they always get injuries is because the sweat falls down and lands on one of the sensors in the gators’ mouths, which are very sensitive, so that signals the gators to clamp their mouth shut.”
“No way,” I said.
“An alligator’s bite has God knows how much pressure! It was tested. It had the highest, I forget; it had one of highest percentages of pressure of any other creature’s bite—the amount of speed, force, and power—and of course they have their deadly death roll. When they hold on to you and they start rolling, the only way to get out of that roll is to turn and roll with the alligator. The only way to not lose your arm or limb or anything is to roll with the gator. It takes at least four handgun bullets to penetrate an alligator’s skull because it’s said to be as hard as steel. At close range. It’s that tough.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, thinking to myself, This kid’s got some imagination. How do you roll with a gator?
“Seriously. The only way to kill an alligator is attack its underbelly.”
After a while, it stopped drizzling and the mist broke. The sun began to set. I nudged the conversation in another direction, asking what a normal day was like in the city, and how she liked living there.
“How would you even define ‘normal’?” she said. “I’m a teenager. When you’re my age, there is no such thing as normal.”
When she was through with staring at the gator, we made our slow way together across the squishy trail toward camp.
Then we looked back for a moment to see if the gator was still there. It was looking at Meena. The sunset left long and bloody ribbons on the water.
* * *
It was the last night of the trip, so I decided to stop trying to impress anyone, get their secrets, blend in, or have any more “bright ideas” to “help out.” Instead, I’d concentrate my full attention on building, and feeding, the best fire I could, and letting the flames do the rest. For once I achieved my goal, with help from Horace Kephart’s campfire recipe, printed on a piece of paper, and an assist from a female ICO volunteer with a strong German accent. Karen sat at the picnic table, where she squished flame-melted marshmallows between graham crackers and graded each kid’s s’more from A through F, with higher grades for maximum gooeyness, a system that delighted the girls, who turned it into a cutthroat competition. Chelsea got ready to heat up her marshmallow but she didn’t know how to do it.
“Roast it like a chicken,” Meena advised her.
After lancing her marshmallow on a pointy metal stick, Chelsea waggled it too close to the red coals. It caught fire immediately. She tried to put it out by blowing on it, but her dainty puffs only made the conflagration worse; in no time at all, the marshmallow was a full-on fireball. “I don’t want my plaits to catch fire,” I heard her say. She was laughing, but I detected panic.
She puffed on it once more. The marshmallow kept on blazing.
“Oh, come on,” Jaliyah said. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Don’t blow it out cute. Blow it out for real!”
By the time Chelsea got that marshmallow to stop burning, it was a sorry sight indeed. Imagine cinders with gooey gunk in the core. Karen still gave her a low A. Chelsea took her first bite and closed her eyes, and as she chewed she gestured wildly with her free hand. I asked how she liked it, and she just laughed and moaned.
Sugar and darkness made the evening wild. There was lots of gossip and small talk and random silliness and henna painting on people’s ankles, arms, and hands. When the kids at last got quiet, Miss Candice, the counselor from the Miami nonprofit agency, with square-framed eyeglasses and flowing garments and chakra stones in her pockets, commenced a fireside ritual. We were all supposed to take a fear or an obstacle we each had, write it on a slip of paper, and toss it on the fire. I didn’t want to take part; it seemed like a hippie-style rip-off of Rosh Hashanah minus the gravitas. Besides, I had no desire to embarrass myself anymore. Still, I joined in for the typical teenage reason: everybody else was doing it.
Crystal went first, and though she scribbled her words with an intense expression on her face, she wouldn’t share what she burned.
Then they got to Meena, and she said, “I need to stop living in a fantasy world.” Looking somber, she leaned over and dropped the paper into the flames.
No one said a word, but Meena in that instant went from the most revelatory of all the girl campers to the biggest cipher on the trip. Not that it was any of my business, but since she had gone public with her confession, I couldn’t help but wonder which part was the fantasy: the alligator she’d claimed to see in the middle of the pond but that I couldn’t, the dream of being a croc hunter, the fallback plan to be a forensic pathologist, or the list of alligator “facts” she’d told me by the pond? Not that it even mattered. I wished I could have told her that seventeen is no age to stop living in a dream world. Dwelling in my own personal Neverland was the only thing that prevented me from losing my mind when I was in high school.
Besides, I knew her love of nature was no fantasy. Winston had noticed it, too. Once, when he was helping to supervise a previous campout on Virginia Key Beach, he’d been sleeping in a hammock next to the water, heard a noise, woke up, and saw Meena looking out at the spreading sunrise. By her side were her sleepy friends. She hadn’t let them miss out on that beauty. I remembered all those crazy factoids that Meena told me about gators after the trip was long over and did some scientific sleuthing. Every one of her bizarre-sounding alligator “facts” turned out to be true.
As I waited in front of that fire, I didn’t have much time to puzzle over Meena and what she’d said, because it was my turn. I thought about how scared I was on the canoe ride and about the girls’ bravery. “I wish not to be fearful,” I said. I wrote “FEAR” on my paper, crumpled it up, and tossed it in the flames.
Then it was Jaliyah’s turn. She wrote something on her paper slip, frowning, and when she’d finished, she picked up the slip and held it close to her face. “Are you listening to me?” she said to the words on the paper. “You aren’t shit! You are never gonna be shit.” I did not look at the paper, but I strongly suspected it contained the name of a boyfriend, or other rogue male, who had treated her poorly. She dropped the paper on the fire, which flashed white and red. She shook her head and muttered, “I hate boys.”
Karen, the trip leader, went last. She faced the girls. “Now, I know I’m a lot older than you,” she said. “And some of you might think of me as an old lady, but I still fall in love, I still date, and I still get my heart broken sometimes. And there’s this man. He’s been in and out of my life for a while now. It’s been going on too long. So I think it’s time to reach over and put his name in the fire.”
She reached over and dropped the paper; it caught the flames, and the kids went wild. Karen received the loudest cheers of the night.
The girls on the campout had no Wi-Fi access, no Instagram, no WhatsApp, no Snapchat, no Tumblr, no Yik Yak. All they had was a couple of lanterns and a fading fire, so they sat and talked and played card games (including Go Fish and Cheat, which Jaliyah renamed Bullshit) until the moon rose. As the evening wore on, they gathered around the hot coals and told ghost stories.
Miss Candice told a long, confusing, creepy one and acted out scenes from the movie version of The Shining. Jordan, the skinny and androgynous thirteen-year-old with tight-clipped hair, told some spooky stories that stopped as soon as they began. “There was this guy,” Jordan said. “He walks through the forest, and he saw this bad thing that blocked him so he couldn’t go around it, so he says, ‘I need to go somewhere. Could you step out of the way?’ The thing slits his neck, and my mom told me that story so I’d never go outside. In Belize, where my family is from, they used to tell the children, ‘You have to come in before dark because this guy on a horse, he’s a ghost, and he used to steal little children.’ His feet are backward, though. He’s short and he’s from Mexico, and he has a sombrero and he always has his machete.”
“How funny,” Meena said. “Does he walk backward?”
“No, he walks forward, but his feet are on backward. When he was little, they chopped off his feet. Or something like that.”
At that moment, I had a memory jolt. A couple of days before, I’d chatted with Jordan’s mother, Samantha, in the Miami parking lot where the kids were getting ready to board minivans for the Everglades. Samantha, who’d moved to the United States twenty-five years ago at age thirteen, admitted she was glad to get some peace in the house for a weekend but was mystified that Jordan would want to camp.
“Camping just seems like going backward,” Samantha had told me. “That’s how we lived in Belize. We were housed, I didn’t live in a camp, but the river was down the hill, and there were no paved streets. When I came to America for the first time, I thought it looked like a big Christmas tree. I kept saying, ‘The lights!’ Imagine if you had to light a fire, not for fun, but that’s what you had to do or you’d go hungry, and before you finished you’d smell from smoke, the cooking smells were on you, your hair was singed. And having to walk to school no matter how far and having animals bother you. You carry the water. Carry the bucket. My daughter never had to do that for her family. It was a way of life for me every day. If she had had to live like that…” Her voice trailed off.
Yet here was Jordan, camping in spite of the history and scary stories, and not just camping, but camping like crazy. Jordan sang louder than anybody else when she led the girls in a rousing rendition of “The Campfire Song Song” from the SpongeBob SquarePants TV show, the one where you sing as quickly as possible and see who tongue-trips first. As Jordan clapped out the rhythm, I couldn’t help but think of the backward-footed monster covering his ears and beating a retreat to the swamps.
Next morning, in the final hours of the trip, Karen Kerr sat at a picnic table and talked about the environmental destruction of the Everglades and what the girls could do about it. She mentioned the draining of the swamps. She talked about the invasive pythons that were gobbling native fauna, including raccoons. Jaliyah frowned and glanced at the treetops for snakes. Her look of defiance made me snort with laughter.
During a break in the discussion, I turned to Jaliyah. “I want to thank you,” I said. “For making me laugh during this trip. I think you’re some kind of stand-up comedienne.”
“You make me very happy when you say that,” she said.
I asked her what she thought about the trip.
“Oh, I loved it,” she said, before clarifying that she was only referring to select moments of the experience. “I have never seen so many stars.” She especially liked the canoe trip on the lake. “I murdered it,” she said. “I did well.” She told me the campout was a nice escape from her usual life in Liberty City, her neighborhood in Miami. She likes going to high school in Little Haiti well enough. “I mean, it’s nothing bad for me; it’s just a regular place.” She likes her classes, especially math and science. Jaliyah wants to be a chemical engineer. “Chemistry’s such a stable subject,” she said. “Theories do change over time, but everything is there for you at any moment. In chemistry you will find predictable patterns. Chemistry is a central science.”
Then she returns to her neighborhood after school and it’s not so stable. The same month as the campout, the Miami Herald ran a story about three girls, ten, fifteen, and eighteen years old, who were caught in a drive-by shooting a few blocks from Jaliyah’s home; bullets grazed the teens, and one bullet hit the ten-year-old in the arm. “When I’m home, I don’t come outside; I stay in my home. I’m scared of the people, the thugs, the wannabe thugs, the guns, the gunshots, and whatnot,” Jaliyah said. “Nobody see your face, you can’t get killed. I just want to stay out of trouble. I don’t want to risk getting into any kind of problems. I don’t want to be in Liberty City anymore. Especially with my little brother. I want him to leave there, too, ’cause he can’t be with those boys. I’m not going to leave Miami, but if I can, I’ll move out to the suburbs. My little brother, my mom kept him in the house all his life. That’s good. I’m glad she did. And she put him in a private school in Little Haiti. That’s what he should be doing. During the day, I go out, but I don’t go out for fun, just to go to the park, walk around or whatever? No way. I’m not doing that with you.” Then she got quiet and looked away, which I took as a strong signal not to prod her any further about what she’d told me. So I decided to stay in safe territory and ask her something else: Given her difficult experiences in the city, wouldn’t she jump at the chance to go camping again and get away from all that?
“No!” was her sharp reply.
“Really?” I said. “Why not? You were just telling me about life in your neighborhood. It seems like it’s so much safer out here compared to…”
“Because I couldn’t use my cell phone. Because I couldn’t call my mom. No electrical outlet? That was just hell. That just made me want to fight. Not having use of a cell phone for that long? I mean, that was, by far, the worst experience of my life.”
* * *
The girls experienced the full potential of American camping on that one trip: enjoyment and frustration, fear and adventure, discomfort and s’mores. Their experience was all about engagement as well as preservation and ecology. Karen wanted the campers to experience the awe of nature so they might stand up and fight for it later on. That’s why, during the final portion of the trip, she put a special emphasis on the forces that threaten the Everglades. In doing so, Karen and the campers were following a long-standing American tradition: bearing witness to environmental degradation while sleeping under the stars. At the turn of the century, America’s quintessential camper, John Muir, had a similar strategy in mind when he traveled through Yosemite with an illustrious and influential camping partner.