The Cure-It-All Solution for All Your Existential Dissatisfactions
Many things confuse me about American culture, but none of them do it more than the love Americans have for camping.
Camping wasn't a thing when I was growing up in Barranquilla.
Nope!
We were thrilled to have a roof over our heads every single night. We celebrated being inside, something that took centuries and thousands of technological developments from our ancestors to accomplish.
We don't do that in any other area of human progress. We don't decide to go pantless with leotards once a month; we don't settle marital disputes using clubs, and we don't paint in caves with blood.
But every now and then, in order to find ourselves, we spit in the architectural marvel of the modern home.
I guess there is nothing like experiencing the joy of camping all at once, like being cold, sleeping on the ground, and wiping your butt with what could very well be poison ivy.
You know you are in the presence of a scheme when millions of dollars are poured into its advertising.
I'm not going to lie; I secretly love getting the flyers.
I love being pitched a life-altering experience meant to fix decades of trauma with a weekend in nature.
You know the ones.
They show a man or a woman holding a cup of piping hot coffee, sitting on a rock at the edge of a cliff, gazing into the horizon, and experiencing transformational bliss while wearing clothes that look way too expensive and will soon be covered in mud.
Isn't it fascinating that you need such expensive gear to go into nature?
Remember nature?
Our ancestors did everything they could to escape it. But while they were trying to escape it, they wore almost NOTHING!!!! Or maybe they killed an animal and wore the entire animal.
But you can't do nature like that anymore.
Uh-uh!
Now you need the expensive adventure gear.
How else would anyone know you are an adventurer?
Maybe we know something is broken in the way we currently live, but we don't know how to fix it.
So we search for it in nature and adventure.
But you can't go after "adventure" full-time because you are saddled with educational loans.
You must remain a lawyer because you might've become a lawyer to make Gram-Gram proud.
But now Gram-Gram is gone, and in her place is a frame with a piece of paper and massive, un-defaultable debt to prove that you did go to that fancy university nobody cares about.
Just to be clear, Gram-Gram is not dead; she is in Florida.
Although it is only a matter of time.
The year before I left Colombia, I volunteered for a non-profit organization that worked with a community in Las Flores.
Despite its beautiful name, which translates to "The Flowers," this wasn't an architecturally pleasant community. It was a community of extremely impoverished people living in poorly constructed cardboard shanty houses.
I like to think of the parallels between campers in the United States who like to "get away" in nature and the campers in Las Flores who can't get away from their lives.
The camper in the States, near a creek, looking out at a mountain.
The camper in Las Flores, near a creek, looking at a mountain that isn't a mountain but a landfill. Of course, landfill is a euphemism for land that is filled with trash. So, it's more of a trashfill.
The camper in the States has a tent made of ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene, which is flame retardant, UV-resistant, and translucent, attached to a frame of titanium poles.
The camper in Las Flores has a tent made of plastic bags attached to a frame of cardboard and empty political promises.
The camper in the States does not fear the inclemency of the weather, especially not tornadoes or hurricanes; that's what this tent was built for.
The camper in Las Flores prays for drought because a slight drizzle means that he will have to rebuild.
The camper in the States has a house, a lake house, a timeshare somewhere exotic, and two or three tents with enough room to house an entire family of twelve, even though he only has one kid and two furry babies.
The camper in Las Flores has a "tent" that can only fit one person. That doesn't prevent him from fitting in more people, which he does. He houses his family of five, three dogs, and one pig - or at least one of the ones I stepped into did.
And you want to know the biggest difference?
One of these campers is happy.
Let me give you a hint: it's not the person with the giant garage full of widgets, gaskets, and gizmos wearing black Patagonia puffy vests and oversized Columbia hiking boots.
No, sir.
It's not them.
It's the people in the structurally dubious shanty houses.
I talked to a few of them, and I asked them what they wanted most in life. Even though I knew the only thing I could give them that day was enough groceries to cook a meal on Christmas.
Still, I asked the question out of curiosity.
They didn't ask for potable water; they didn't ask for a sewer system; they didn't ask for the trashfill to be relocated.
You want to know what most of them asked for?
They asked for shoes.
The person who has two tents probably has 100 shoes, too. Most of them are still in boxes - boxes that are more structurally sound than the houses the people in Las Flores lived in.
Isn't it a fascinating difference?
Here are these people with no proper housing, no sewer, no potable water, no shoes, wanting some Nikes, but if they don't get them, they will still be fine.
And here we have these other people living a rich life, in one of the richest countries in the world, in a time of historically unprecedented abundance, but they can't be happy.
Maybe camping will fix that.
