On the Pleasures of Camping Through a Tornado Warning

re meant for the outdoors. There was a time people took photos of their vacations on film cameras alone, waiting for days or weeks after coming home to get the photos back. A singular experience, recorded and kept a mystery until enough time had passed to relive it.

Now, of course, 5.78 billion people (70% of the world’s population) carry phones containing all the information in the history of our existence. Our pocket encyclopedias also happen to be endless capacity, high definition cameras. Every moment is recordable, evaluated, and re-shot as needed to suitable perfection. Instant feedback hijacks the present moment. It steals time from us. Byung Chul-Han talks about the shift from top-down surveillance: an authority watching over us, 1984 style, to the present digital panopticon model of surveillance that we voluntarily participate in. We take our photos, feed them into our digital avatars, wait for the short-lived dopamine to hit while our faceless advertising and AI gods feast on the bones of our experiences.

Content creators live this everyday, sometimes every minute of every day. All of your life is an opportunity to repackage into Content. Everything is recorded and narratively pieced together afterwards in a neat structure: horizontal long-form video, short-form social video, carousels, Instagram stories. I am as guilty as anyone. Content creation is economic liberation. It is a viable pathway for a lot of people to avoid the standard full-time job pathway. It gives you control over your time, decisions and income ceiling. I have been trying for a long time to figure out how to make this work for me. I have spent most of my sentient hours alive pulled between the desire to remain present, to resist chasing the validation dragon, while being keenly aware of what I am potentially missing out on. It is ironic that one of the most accessible paths to entrepreneurialism and liberation is the same matrix that exists to exploit our attention.

Film photography, and writing has been a small way I am trying to reclaim autonomy over the way I create and reflect. Being outside is another, and I was really lucky to do so at a Usal camping trip this last weekend in Tannersville, NY. I have spent most of my life seeing the world through the viewfinder of a film camera, and there is nothing that remotely approaches the sublime like bringing a film camera into the outdoors.

Everyone brought their own food, and most people brought enough to share. We had coolers full of sausages, fruit and coconut water, and home-made cookies. Uncle’s, a Thai frozen curry brand owned by Brendan Charreon, blessed us with a big communal pot of green curry. Everyone contributed an ingredient to the curry, our “stone soup”. I had never heard this fable before this weekend. It’s a story about hungry strangers convincing suspicious villagers to contribute to a communal soup that feeds the whole town. I brought potatoes to add to the curry. I ate that curry three times, one of those times mixed with my shin ramen instant noodle powder.

On Saturday, it rained heavily all day. We hiked for three hours through a thunderstorm. My rain jacket proved not to be fully waterproof, and I was hiking with my camera, so I ended up using it to wrap around my camera for most of the hike. We had no service, so I left my phone in my tent. There was a stone quarry overlook with thrones built from stone, a section of forest that became so misty it looked like the beginning of a horror movie. We walked through creeks and kept walking, as though powered by an unstoppable ancient force activated by the rain in the forest. At some point we turned back, and made it back to camp in time for a few hours of sunshine, sprawled in the grass. We dried our drenched clothes, built a fire and played card games until it was time for dinner. Most of the night rained this way, and at one point someone got a bar of service, which immediately triggered a shrill beeping tornado warning. “Seek higher ground. Do not be outside,” someone read aloud as we sat huddled by the fire, blasted in the face with smoke that haphazardly changed directions depending on the wind.

Colossal thunderstorms are disruptive. In the city, it can ruin my day. They drench my dog in dirty subway puddles, make my socks wet, make the Ubers expensive. New York itself is frequently overwhelmed by torrential rain. Overloaded plumbing spawning subway waterfalls and knee high flooding. Outside, the same thunderstorm becomes a secret ingredient in the stone soup of an experience. Rain makes moss greener. It makes being warm and dry a sublime experience, rather than a standard function of being alive.

Many campers are city folk, and for a few days we are cosplaying being something else. Connecting with nature in this way is a radical act when we are so insulated from the natural world. Our food is sold to us faceless and unidentifiable, shrink wrapped and sold for $8.99 at Trader Joe’s. We have happy lamps and central air/heat. To sit directly in a storm without the protection of a building or a car to shelter in demolishes every artifice we live our lives upon. It narrows the world into basic functions: keeping warm and dry. Camping doubly so: life is purely about keeping each other entertained, contributing an ingredient into a communal soup to be warmed by after being caught in the rain. Camping touches a primal nerve rarely activated in modern life. Jill and I camped in Death Valley during the Superbloom earlier this year, and these two camping trips were the most relaxed I have felt this entire year.

In the evening, as I lay in my tent and the storm raged outside, I wondered if the tent would collapse or get flooded. If I unzipped my tent window and slid my hand under the rain cover, I could feel the full force of the storm pelting into the earth. It seemed crazy that just a thin plastic membrane stood between me and this calamitous, biblical storm outside. I felt deeply rested, weirdly safe, more than I do when I am in the comfort of my temperature-controlled bedroom at home. The comforts of modern life provide so much, and I am of course grateful for the conveniences of my life, but it is foolish to mistake the trappings of modernity as true luxury. True luxury is sitting outside during a thunderstorm by choice. True luxury is eating from a big pot of communal soup. True luxury is waiting a few days to see the film photos come back, because you forgot to take any photos on your phone.