Trail Tales: Social Distance on the BRT

The Outside & The Internet

“What are you thinking?”

We’d been walking in silence for a while, partly because we spend most of our time together and it’s easy to slip into a comfortable silence, and partly because the trail required most of our attention.

The Border Route Trail runs 65 miles along the Minnesota/Canadian Border, over ridges and through the rugged Boundary Waters. It’s a well known trail among the people who already know it, known for being hilly, overgrown, hard to follow, and frankly a little treacherous.

My experience on the trail has been a little less harrowing than some of the tales I’ve heard and read on the internet. It’s more difficult than any state park trail, and probably the second most difficult I’ve travelled, but it’s by all means a walkable trail for anyone in good shape, with backpacking experience and good judgement.

We weren’t out to do the whole trail, just a quick section with the time we had.

One of the things I like most about the BRT is the forest you travel through. This is a quick iPhone pick on a ridge over East Pike (?) Lake. The moss on the ground, the old spruce and pine felt very boreal.

But I wasn’t thinking about the trail.

For me, one of the best parts about hiking long hard trails is the physicality of it. When my whole body is busy climbing up gnarled tree roots with a heavy pack on my back, my head gets caught up in other things completely.

I was thinking about social distance.

Do you remember in summer of 2020 when everyone posted and shared a photo of them in the outdoors with the caption “social distancing done right”"? When due to the onset of COVID-19 every person flocked to the outdoors for respite, to escape the cloud of pandemic anxiety, and then shared those outdoor photos on the internet?

I was thinking about social distance and all this because of this post I made on Instagram, and some of the responses to it.

This one particularly:

I really don’t generally let people’s comments bother me, and it wasn’t this person or their comment specifically that was following me on trail— it was my reaction to it.

I immediately read the first four words, screenshotted the comment, blocked the person, and shared the comment on my story with the persons name and a backlink to my DM Hall of Shame. Mature? Maybe not.

Andy enjoying a sunset at Pine Lake.

Prior to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, I was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Armenia. On March 17th, 2021, the US Government issued a mandatory evacuation order for PC worldwide, and I came home to the US a year sooner than I had expected with no job, no real plan, completely culture shocked, with my friends scattered to different corners of the US.

I was outdoorsy before the pandemic for sure, but in April I moved to Northern Michigan with my grandparents, and threw myself back into photography. I went back to guiding on Lake Superior over the summer, still hoping to live abroad again soon, and started using social media more and sharing my experiences outdoors.

When we’re forced inside except to be alone outside, social media can be a meaningful way to still have social connections with other people while maintaining mandatory social distance.

Morning fog on Pine Lake.

I was thinking of that. I was thinking about how even seven miles in, pulling my body up the rugged Border Route, social media and the connections I have with people are still a part of my experience outdoors.

The connections I’ve made online through social media have translated into incredible real life friendships, and helped me move from an aspirational writer to an independent writer and photographer as a career.

Social media has done a lot of good for me, and I wouldn’t be here, writing to you, without social media. But it’s also ripped into my self-esteem, and I’ve been on the receiving end of terrible messages, and unsettling encounters with people who “know me from online”.

People, real people like you and me, aren’t made to be on the receiving end of so many opinions about themselves.

I’ve been a writer for much longer than I’ve been on social media or been a photographer, and I learned early on that you aren’t responsible for what people do with your words. You write them, you re-read them, but how people hear them is their responsibility, not yours.

Beautiful camp in old-growth Red Pines (perhaps why it is called Pine Lake).

In traditional writing, that is abundantly clear. You would never email, or call, or direct message the author of a book or article you read to tell them you disagree with what they wrote. (Okay, some people definitely would and do, but those people write in stuff that is so obviously bonkers it’s funny and a treat to read).

Social media blurs that line. There’s a perceived ease of access with social media, the idea that you can and should tell a writer or creator what you think of their work and words.

Personally, I encourage that in the comments section. That is what the comments are for; sharing your opinions and interpretation in a public space where I can choose to what degree I would like to engage.

When you direct message someone instead, you’re asking them to engage privately with you in a space that you cannot be held publicly accountable for the way that you speak.

* This isn’t to say don’t DM me! It’s just to say be nice when you do, and respect that I receive about 25 DMs every day!

Which brings me full circle to the DM I shared above. Traditionally, when I share a piece of writing, it is common sense that if you do not know me (and often even if you do), you will not contact me personally about the thing that I wrote, especially to disagree.

Leaving a comment is appropriate, or even posting a rebuttal on your own social media is appropriate; coming directly into my life to attempt to force me to hear your thoughts through DM, or email, or phone call (all have happened) never is.

On social media that line is understandably blurred. Still, it is not so blurred that the intent of the message above isn’t clear to me.

This person came into my DMs as a stranger to condescend to me, to call me/my words dumb, and exercise a perceived right to access and engage with me. To the people who messaged me to say “he’s just jealous”, you’re right.

This DM was a power move. It’s an attempt to weaponize that perceived right to access granted by social media, and to exercise control over a person (woman) with a career in the outdoors.

Wouldn’t that make someone pathetic feel powerful? The ability to access and control someone (a woman) successful in the outdoor industry and make them feel small, wrong, remind them that they don’t belong?

If you could fire off a message to belittle a stranger, then lick the Cool Ranch Dorito dust off your fingers before you meet your only (drug dealer) friend to sit by a lake and leer at woman who are too young for you, would that make you feel a little better?

(I guess I’ll let you have it then.)

But this is the cognitive dissonance that exists—

I am clamoring up hills, sweating. I am having a cup of coffee surrounded in swirling and beautiful fog, with a person I can sit in perfect silence with. And being outside and writing is part of my job— how lucky is that?

All of this, and I am still thinking of how bad I feel for blocking that person and sharing their name, because I don’t want to be the sort of person who stonewalls people who disagree with me, but I cannot be expected to personally engage with everyone.

In the wilderness, I am thinking of all of the men throughout my time in the outdoors who have condescended to me in person and online, who have harassed me, who have tried to intimidate me out of the space I am in.

Even in the wilderness, where I am strong and smart, where I have social distance from those horrible sorts of people, where I am almost certainly more competent than they are, my own reaction to their messages, words, and harassment follows me.

I’m not perfect, far from. I’m so imperfect that I don’t really know where I’m going with this. I don’t want to let it bother me, but I am human. I am human, and it does bother me. It’s better to admit that the way I have been treated (not always but definitely sometimes) in the outdoor industry bothers me than to let it blindly color everything that I do.

This isn’t so much an apology for the undercurrent of absolute rage that accompanies much of my writing about the outdoors, more so an agknowledgement of it.

I will let it bother me. But I will use every scrap of that rage, and I will not be intimidated off the trail, or off the internet.