When I was 20, my friends and I re-enacted The Lady of Shalott on the Cherwell River in Oxford. We rented a punt, bought a loaf of crusty bread and a bottle of Buck’s Fizz, made flower crowns and began a faltering cruise down the river, crashing into the banks and stopping at intervals to read the Tennyson poem aloud. “Willows whiten, aspens shiver. / The sunbeam showers break and quiver.” The line about aspens thrilled me; I hadn’t seen any since landing in England. I had been at Oxford for the year, and I missed my Wyoming home. I found all the green and the trees claustrophobic. I had never been any kind of athlete, but that year I took to running around the University Parks, as that was the only place I could feel some open space in that ancient, crowded city.
I was that kind of English major, the kind that read poetry and felt deeply. I memorized Shakespeare and recited the first lines of the Canterbury Tales with glee. The spring before I came to England, I read Wordsworth and Coleridge with the kind of reverence usually reserved for religion. I deemed the Romantics the best writers and loved their love of nature and rejection of industrialization. I felt these dead poets were the only ones who could see and name the sublime in the world. During my first week in Oxford, I was crushed to see a McDonald’s within walking distance from the pub where J.R.R. Tolkien drank. I wanted to float down the Cherwell not because of old Victorian Tennyson, but because of Anne of Green Gables. Anne and her friends have a dramatic episode in which they float in a broken boat while reciting Tennyson. I thought it was the most thrilling thing I’d read — and the only way to float down a river. You had to do it romantically.
BUT FOR ALL my love of nature, I actually spent very little time doing things in nature. When people find out I’m from Wyoming, they always ask, “Do you ski?” No. “Climb?” Nope. “Mountain bike?” Never. I tell them that I like to sit and look at things. Look at the mountain, not climb it. When asked what kind of outdoorsperson I am, I answer: A poetic one. I just like to be.
Neither of my parents grew up in America. My mother grew up in India and my father in post-World War II Ireland. Even though I was raised in Wyoming, we didn’t camp, bike or rock climb. My father fishes and occasionally cross-country skied, but during my childhood, he was always in the oil and gas fields. He missed Christmases and birthdays. I learned that the depth and operation of an oil well could mean the difference between him being able to stay home or having to head to a man camp to work. Culturally, being outside was not our thing. My mother sent me off to Girl Scout camp with a jar of curry powder and told me to smell it if I missed home. I spent the nights in a borrowed sleeping bag, opening the tiny jar, inhaling spice. I held my compass in orienteering and tried to figure out how, and whether, it was possible to walk home.
When people find out I’m from Wyoming, they always ask, “Do you ski?” Nope. Never. I tell them that I like to sit and look at things.
I did end up on the cross-country ski team in high school. I was the worst person on the team, and to be honest, I only joined because I had a crush on a boy. I wore wool knickerbockers and bought used skis at a garage sale. After sitting in a classroom all day, I drove my creaky VW Rabbit up mountain roads to spend the hour before sunset gliding between lodgepole pines and crystalline snow. I was lucky to have a coach who didn’t care that I was slow, who didn’t mind that I would stop mid-race to look at the view. I coasted across the finish line after all the others with a dreamy look on my face, gushing about how skiing through the falling snow was like being inside a snow globe.
I was talking once with another person who was raised in Wyoming, someone who seemingly did every outdoor sport. He had even climbed Mount Everest. When I told him how I like to spend time outside, he said, “But you can’t really understand what being outside is like. You don’t do anything.”
I am not sure when being outdoorsy was equated with being sporty. When I was growing up, many outdoor ventures were just too expensive. And if it wasn’t in your family’s cultural DNA, how were you to learn? Some of the best outdoorsmen I have known are ranchers or friends who have hunted since they were small. They don’t need any fancy paraphernalia to be able to experience nature more profoundly.
The truth is, a lot of brown people I know feel uncomfortable outside, as so many of those spaces are not welcoming for us. I remember trying to buy a jacket in high school, flipping through a catalog where everyone was tanned and golden and nobody looked like me. When I left for college, I went to buy a bicycle with my graduation money so I could ride to classes. I left the store empty-handed, intimidated because I didn’t know what kind of performance I wanted, what weight or wheel size. The outdoors suddenly felt technical and beyond my grasp. I ended up buying a used bike from a friend. It just seemed easier.
I WANT MY DAUGTHER Juniper and her sister, Marigold, to be comfortable in nature. To be able to read the night sky and know the stories of Orion and Cassiopeia. I want them to know that they don’t have to do a 20-mile hike with 4,000 feet of elevation gain to know nature. I want them to be competent outdoors, but to also know that they don’t need a lot of equipment to enjoy it. They can just sit in our backyard in the grass, looking at the sky, and that alone has value.
Last summer, while I was under deadlines, I found myself handing my girls a tablet while I tried to work. Juniper, who can’t yet read, sat with the iPad and, after I was done working, said to me, “I still have to work,” and then she looked back down at her screen. I immediately scooped her up and took her outside. We caught crawdads and floated paper boats down the ditch in our backyard.
I have friends who float down the Grand Canyon in high-tech rafts: a far cry from my adventure on the Cherwell in my little wooden punt. But that’s the great thing about nature. There is no right way. You can be poetic. You can scale Everest. It all feeds your soul. It all makes you feel sublime.
Nina McConigley is a writer and professor at Colorado State University. She is the author of Cowboys and East Indians. In her “Township and Range” column, she writes about the intersection of race and family in the interior rural West.
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This article appeared in the April 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Isn’t it romantic.”
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