When I invited my friend Sarah to join me in trying sensory deprivation tanks, as invented in 1954 by a so-called “consciousness researcher” named John C. Lilly, I saw a flash of understanding on her big-eyed face. She pulled up, on her phone, a vintage movie poster with the words: UNWITTINGLY, HE TRAINED A DOLPHIN TO KILL THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What?”

“This film,” she said. “It’s based on John C. Lilly.”

“We’re going to float in tanks that were invented by a guy who trained dolphin assassins?”

The film took some creative license,* Sarah assured me. But the short answer was yes.

The so-called Float Spa’s website didn’t acknowledge this connection at all, just promised stress relief and mental clarity, although it did credit John C. Lilly—not for his dolphin training, which came later, but for his research on consciousness, which sensory deprivation tanks are designed to explore. The concept, which trended big in the 1980s and has lingered in the cultural ether ever since, involves floating naked in a pitch-black room, suspended in saltwater �ٳ󲹳�’s the same temperature as the air, which is the same temperature as your skin, so it feels like you’re levitating. No sound, no touch, no vision for an hour straight. What’s it like to exist as just a body, just thoughts?

Basically, a float tank is forced meditation—and there’s plenty of evidence that �ٳ󲹳�’s helpful with about a million things, from and to . But is it worth $90 an hour to be forced to meditate? And is meditation even something that can be imposed from the outside in? I was skeptical, mainly because last month I tried cryotherapy, which involved standing for three minutes in a -200 degrees Fahrenheit freezer, and the owner of that spa—which literally specializes in discomfort!—told me she doesn’t offer float tanks because everyone hates them. “You’re in water, in the dark,” she told me. “Just think about it.”

Put it that way, and sensory deprivation sounded like a panic attack waiting to happen.

Anyway, Sarah and I got to the Float Spa in an Illinois strip mall almost late, because we’d stopped for McDonald’s on the way, figuring that the only thing worse than floating in darkness was floating in darkness hungry. The walls of the lobby were covered, weirdly, in plastic grass, apart from a bulletin board with post-its from clients that said things like “Let it BE to let it GO” and “Do ayahuasca. You won’t regret it.” By the ceiling, a television screen played footage of a river in Yosemite. At least I think it was Yosemite, based on the granite boulders around. I wished I were floating there, I thought, watching the screen. Somewhere important, and much more spectacular than this.

The owner gave us a brief tour—here’s where you shower, here’s earplugs, here’s vaseline, and a Q-tip to cover open wounds—and then directed me and Sarah to separate changing rooms. The air was thick, humid—like a pool locker room, but without the chlorine and BO. I showered, inserted the earplugs, and stepped into a private enamel-lined tank, which was about eight feet square with a foot of warm water at the bottom. The floor was intensely slippery; I dropped to my hands and knees. One hard push would have sent me sliding air-hockey style across the room.

Somewhere nearby, through the wall, Sarah was entering her tank, too. I wondered how she was feeling. It occurred to me, in the blue glow of a hidden light, that this was exactly the kind of bizarre situation in which one might have the idea to make dolphins into political assassins. Then I hit a button on the wall, plunging into blackness, and tried to float away.

It’s hard to relax every single bit of your body. Without the pressure of a surface below me, I kept finding micro-muscles that were tense, parts of my ankles or shoulders or butt. When I moved, the water lapped, little tongues all over my skin. When I melted still and took deep breaths, my whole body rose with each inhale.

Noticing this took some medium amount of time. If time existed. Which it didn’t, really. Not here.

Why did I think this was sensory deprivation? There was so much to observe in my head, my breath. I slipped into waking dreams, scenes drifting before and around me that dissolved like mist when I tried to think enough to describe them with words. I felt loved ones, gratitude, beauty, grace. I was simultaneously asleep and alert.

I developed, in the dark, a kind of entitlement to sensationlessness. At one point, I felt genuinely affronted when the edge of my pinky brushed gently on the wall. And when the hour was up, some expanse of existence later, and an instrumental version of It’s a Wonderful Life drifted from an unseen speaker, it seemed a great intrusion on my mind, which was now my home. Or maybe it had been my home the whole time, and this sound—this sensation—was an unwanted stranger at my door.

The dressing room had flattering lighting. I found Sarah on the other side, sipping a paper cup of mint tea. Her eyelids hung at half mast.

“That was great,” she said dreamily. “I was like, ‘I’m a baby! I haven’t even been born yet!’ I secretly believe �ٳ󲹳�’s the best part of human existence. But apparently even when you haven’t been born yet, you’re still confused about some stuff.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“What I mean,” she said, “is that there’s no fall from grace into consciousness as a person. I think you’re just dealing with consciousness the whole time.”

“That’s smart,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve gotten a lot smarter in the past hour.”

She made me a cup of tea, too, from a hot water dispenser by the grass wall. The grass didn’t strike me as weird anymore. It was earnest, and earnestness was beautiful. Just us little humans trying our best.

Some women emerged from the other tanks. They were friends, too. We all were. We felt great about each other. They said they came every month. “It organizes my mind like nothing else,” one reported; after learning to rest in a float tank, she didn’t need sleep aids at night anymore. But it wasn’t for everyone. “We brought another friend,” she said, “and she was crawling up the walls. Literally. We came out and she was like, ‘Whoa, did you feel around the whole wall?! I was like, no, I was in a �ٰ����Գ���.”

I watched the river on the TV screen. This was a different river now, the water a rippling snowmelt gray that flowed wide and shallow through pine. And while I looked forward to the many more times in my life when I would stand next to such rivers and cross them and swim and sit on rocks in the sun, I didn’t feel the same longing to enter the screen. I thought only: How nice that such places exist in the world. How nice to exist in the world myself.

*In real life, Lilly wasn’t training dolphins to kill people. He did, however, take LSD with them, attempt to teach them to speak English, and build a co-living house where dolphins and humans could room together as equals.

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I went to CryoEffect, a self-described “Cold Spa” in the Chicago suburbs, in the middle of the weekday, when I was told it would be pretty empty. The only customer was a guy in the back who had just gotten out of a full-body cryotherapy treatment—basically, three minutes naked in a -200 degrees Fahrenheit freezer—and was reclining in compression boots that went all the way up his legs. He was coming to daily as part of a fitness project, because, as an airplane salesman, he’d made a bet with a client that he could lose 30 pounds in 30 days. If he won, his client would pay him $50,000.

“What if you lose the bet?” I said.

“He’s not going to lose the bet,” said Miriam, the Cold Spa’s owner. She had a great smile and curly hair, and her wrists were adorned with crystal bracelets, which she made herself and sold at a table by the door. Each crystal helped with different things, like creativity and self-love. But most customers just bought them based on which colors they liked best.

The guy beamed. He was confident about the bet. “In two and a half weeks, I’ve already lost 27 pounds.”

“You should donate the money to the owner of CryoEffect,” said Miriam.

Did he feel, I asked, like time in the freezer was helping his goal?

“For sure,” he said. “You come out, and it’s almost like you’re crafted. Like, you’re shaped.” He sort of pawed the air, like he was patting a Greek statue. “Everything is tighter. It’s amazing! And my sinuses are better, too.”

Well, who doesn’t want to be crafted like a statue? That sounded pretty good to me, especially since I’d come to try out full-body cryotherapy myself. My reasons were simpler: I’m a long-distance dogsledder, a lover of deep cold, and I’ve spent a lot of time winter camping in 30 or 40 below zero—so I was curious about how the Cryo experience would compare. Temperatures in the walk-in freezer got down to—apparently—-260 degrees Fahrenheit, but some users described the sensation as that of standing next to a fridge with an open door. These things are not the same. How cold would it really feel? And would it scratch that cold-weather itch, even in summer? I felt uniquely qualified to evaluate.

Plus, the freezer therapy came with a bunch of supposed benefits—some of them even backed by science, like after workouts. And dozens of cryotherapy services have popped up in the Chicago area alone. Proponents argue that the cold decreases inflammation—picture an ice pack on an injury, but for your whole body—and causes your blood to redirect to your core, so that when it comes back to your extremities, it’s carrying extra nutrients and oxygen.

Do whole-body cryo fans care about the FDA’s statements that “ about its safety or effectiveness”? Not particularly. Search #cryotherapy on any socials, and you’ll find countless posts about pain relief, athletic performance, and improved energy. I gotta say, I believe it: regardless of direct physical effects, the intensity of three minutes in a deep freezer would make for a hell of a placebo.

Another man walked into the spa—clearly a regular, because he wasted no time slipping behind a curtain and changing into the spa-issued bathrobe, socks, and slippers before stepping into the cryo chamber, which looked like a cross between an upright fridge and a coffin. Lights flashed; white steam poured over the top. He spent the entirety of his three-minute treatment chatting with Miriam about his daughter’s upcoming wedding, even when a deafening fire alarm went off, which Miriam shouted was a false alarm from the office next door. I covered my ears; he ignored it. He seemed to be a superhero of ignoring sensory input. When his time was up, he stepped out of the tank like it was nothing.

Now it was my turn.

The inside of the freezer-coffin was lined with some sort of black quilted poly that was coated in frost. I opened the door and stepped onto a carpeted platform, which rose up until my head poked out an opening at the top. I wore a bathrobe over my underwear, but now that I was fully enclosed, I took off the robe and handed it to Miriam; no one could see my body, but I felt very exposed. The air already felt frigid. How much colder would it get? I started to get nervous.

A screen at the top of the tank read -97 degrees Fahrenheit, with 2 minutes and 54 seconds left. Within two seconds, temps dropped another 20 degrees. It felt like someone was pressing solid ice cubes to every inch of my skin. I had the urge to crouch down and make a ball, wrapping my arms around my legs to preserve heat, but I was afraid to bend at all and brush the frosty lining of the tank.

With a strong hissing sound, mist started to pour out around me, rising up to my neck. The temp dropped to -165.7 degrees Fahrenheit, which did not feel at all like standing in the open door to a refrigerator. It felt like I was standing in an oddly windless tundra—naked. I suppose, if I hadn’t seen the thermometer, I would have estimated the temperature to be around -40 degrees Fahrenheit, which is still very chilly to be naked. I guess �ٳ󲹳�’s what they call a dry cold.

“Your skin receptors are talking to your brain,” Miriam said calmly, outside the coffin, as if those words meant anything at all. “Your blood is rushing to your core to protect your vital organs. When you step out of your three minutes of torture, your blood will rush back where it belongs and fight inflammation along the way.” She started listing the conditions this would help: brain fog, stress, depression, anxiety, acne, rosacea, scarring… (Conversely, the FDA warns of asphyxiation, frostbite, eye injury, and burns.)

It was hard to focus on what she was saying, which was surely the point; she was well-practiced in distracting people from the pain of cold. Still, the sensation of cold won over. It felt like thick needles were stabbing slowly into my shins and arms.

“You’ll be amazed how well you sleep tonight,” said Miriam cheerfully.

With 53 seconds to go, I started laughing from the pain. Miriam recommended that I put my arms up above the tank. “That leaves the girls exposed,” she warned a few seconds too late. My forearms were covered with the biggest goosebumps I’d ever seen.

With ten seconds to go, she traded me the mittens for my room-temperature bathrobe, which felt unbelievably toasty, like it had been warming for hours in the hot sun.

Normally it takes me a long time to warm up after being in deep cold—a half-day inside, at least, for the bone-chill to go away. I can mush in the morning, sit by a fire all afternoon, and still want a hot bath to warm up fully for bed. But within seconds of stepping out of the freezer-coffin, I felt fine again, except that my legs were as numb to touch as if they’d been novocained. It was kind of fun to poke them. My clothes, when I put them on, felt balmy. I wanted to skip around. I stepped back onto the street and everything seemed brighter. Almost sparkling. I had survived!

Apart from a brief euphoria, I noticed no other effects of the treatment, though to be fair, most advocates of cryotherapy recommend a series of sessions in order to get the benefits. But it certainly gave me a feeling of accomplishment far beyond what I’d normally get from three relatively passive minutes of my day. Would I do it again? Sure—but I’m more likely to DIY it by stepping outside in pajamas on a winter morning before I drink a cup of coffee, or running out of a sauna and into a snowbank for fun. If I’m a believer in cryotherapy, it’s because I am, above all, a believer in the power of cold—to invigorate, to calm, and to cast the world in beauty that wouldn’t be quite as visible at other times. Sometimes winter really can cure what ails you—and if a freezer-coffin can help me glimpse that on a summer day, consider me sold.

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As a woman who hikes alone, I have a theory about creepy people in the woods. If I’m hiking on a trail where I can expect to see people every few minutes, �ٳ󲹳�’s mugging density. Someone might take my wallet or my gorp, but overall, I’ll be OK. If I can expect to see people once or twice an hour, �ٳ󲹳�’s murder density—it’s the worst option. And if I’m in serious wilderness, completely alone, �ٳ󲹳�’s bestie density. I see someone else, and we’re like, Hey, another human! Then we’re instant besties, at least for the few minutes until we part ways and never see each other again.

Normally, I spend my time in bestie-density nature. I don’t expect to see people at all, so when I do, it’s a pleasant surprise. But lately I’ve been living in the Chicago suburbs due to family illness, and the density is making me lose my mind. I’m not used to being around people everywhere, all the time. I asked a (lovely, suburban) friend how far I’d have to walk before I could pee behind a bush without getting arrested—not that �ٳ󲹳�’s a particular goal of mine, but it’s indicative, you know? He said worriedly, “I don’t think it’s ever legal to pee outside.” Which just goes to show the kind of crowd I’m hanging out with.

Not to mention that family illness comes with the kind of stress that makes me want to walk straight into the woods and stay all day (or longer). Which I can normally do from my front door in the Northwoods, but I haven’t been back in six months.

So I decided to make the best of the situation, and I gave myself a mission: walk straight out of the front door of the suburban house where I’m living and keep walking all day, until I found adventure or felt better—whichever came first.

9 A.M.

The morning started warm, breezy. I passed a goose on the sidewalk, looking for food in a crack, and I thought, man, we’re both lost. Which is how I’ve been feeling whenever I see wild animals lately, and as a sentiment, sure, it’s self-satisfyingly melodramatic, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

The roads were quiet: a few bikers mostly, and I followed them past a storage facility and a kidney care center toward a river I’d seen on a map. I like following rivers in the woods; maybe I’d like it here, too.

It turns out there was a bike path along the river, and a couple preteen boys fishing, which pleased me (kids outside!), plus an older guy with a fanny pack who caught—while I watched—a 13 inch carp. The best fishing around here, he told me, was anywhere the landowners might call the cops on you—particularly golf courses. “You can eat one golf course fish every few months before you start to glow in the dark,” he advised.

11 A.M.

A few miles up-river, there must have been a foot race, because suddenly the path was covered in chalk-scrawled encouragements. YOU GYATT THIS! The sidewalk told me. I’M PROUD OF YOU! You know what? I thought. I’m proud of me, too. This sidewalk wasn’t all wrong. It was getting hot out, so I swung through a gas station for an icee, which I drank in a park, then followed a footpath that opened onto a total idyll of bright and lazy river.

Just through the trees, cars zoomed by—but they had no idea about this perfect, hidden pool. If I jumped in the dirty river, would I glow in the dark, too? I slurped my icee and considered.

2:45 P.M.

I walked four more miles, passing through a charming downtown riverwalk that ended abruptly in an overgrown bush. A path extended past the end of the road, so I followed it, creeping through a chain link fence and some dense buckeye before finding a series of clearings behind apartments. At some point, pushing through neck-high grasses on a path that had dwindled to hopes and vibes, I realized two things simultaneously.

One: The grasses were full of stinging nettles, and my arms and legs were starting to hurt.

And two: The only way out, short of pushing back through the nettles, was by cutting through the yard of a house where I’d recently picked up a shelf from Facebook Marketplace, which belonged to a woman whose number was still in my phone. If you, an innocent suburbanite, found a self-proclaimed lost hiker in your backyard, would you feel better if you’d never seen them before, or if you’d met them exactly once, online, and given them your home address?

There was no way around it, I realized: at this particular place and time, the creepy person in the woods was me.

As I considered my options, something hissed right beside me, and I practically screamed. A goose ran at me—and stumbling back, I saw why. Here at the river’s edge, tangled in buckeye and nettles, she’d made a shady nest. Four goslings twisted their downy necks to stare at me hard. This goose wasn’t lost—not at all. She was right where her family needed her.

I backed away through the nettles, then retraced my steps to downtown. Across the river, kids were shouting and laughing, and as I wandered (creepily) out of the trees I saw they were at a pool, which looked damn good after a sticky, nettle-stung day in the heat.

I couldn’t disappear into the woods to cure my stress, but I could Uber home to get my swim suit, drive back, and enjoy a margarita after swimming a few laps. It wasn’t quite the same—but it wasn’t half bad, either.

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I’ve slept on glaciers, mountains, beaches, and—more than once—under roadside bushes mid-hitchhike to a trailhead. But few camps have required more preparation than my latest: one night in a backyard in a bougie Chicago suburb.

Let me explain.

In normal times I live deep in the Wisconsin Northwoods with a team of sled dogs. But for the past few months, due to a combo of family illness and my husband running the Iditarod, I’ve been staying in the city with my in-laws—and I’m starting to lose my mind. The place is completely jarring to me. You’ve never seen such perfect grass. There are no bugs (how?!). And while my in-laws are as kind, warm, loving, and funny as people can get (if they weren’t my family, I’d be plotting secret ways to make them my family) they’re also the kind of people who, when I wonder aloud if it’s stopped raining, turn away from the window to pull out their phones and check an app. Needless to say, I soon started feeling awfully disconnected from the natural world.

Luckily, someone I know well has spent years giving advice on how to connect with nature from the suburbs—and that person is me. Yup: over almost a decade of writing an outdoors advice column, I’ve counseled many a letter-writer about accessible ways to get outdoors, and one of my go-to pieces of advice has been to sleep in the backyard. Have I tried it? Well…no, actually. Not since childhood. But it’s not like sleeping outside is hard, right? You just grab some blankets and lay out under the stars. A night like that was exactly what I needed, and anyway I had access to a great yard, shaded with maple and pine. It abutted four other backyards, separated only by a low picket fence, but surely the neighbors wouldn’t care.

“Just wait,” said my cousin-in-law, with something like relish in his voice. “They will call the HOA on you.”

“For sleeping in your own yard?”

“This is the suburbs,” he said. “It is almost certainly against the rules to sleep in the yard.”

Challenge accepted. I dove into planning the mission like any good adventurer with bad cabin fever. First, I consulted the HOA bylaws, which were 28 pages single-spaced, and felt encouraged by what I found. They mentioned nothing about sleeping outdoors, but I could legally pitch a tent or canopy for 72 hours, after which I’d receive a written warning and have 14 days to correct the violation. By my calculations, this meant I could actually camp for 17 days before incurring my first $50 fine. That would bring my total cost to $2.94/night—considerably less than the expense of campsite rental at a national park! After the fine, I’d be invited to attend a violation hearing, which would presumably involve a light chat over free snacks. If the neighbors did call the HOA on me, at least now I was prepared.

As for the actual sleeping arrangements, I didn’t have overnight gear with me and wanted to keep things cheap, so I had to get creative. It was supposed to rain all week, so I bought an ($11.37) and four ($0.98 each), figuring I’d lie out on the grass. Temps would drop to the low 50s, so I’d be fine with household blankets and my fleece pajamas. Just as I was gathering supplies, I looked out the window and saw a plague doctor staring back at me—or, upon double-take, a green-uniformed man in PPE, spraying pale mist around the house from a stiff hose. The pieces came together: This was why the yard had no bugs.

I went outside and asked which pesticides he used; he didn’t know. So I called the company and spent almost an hour switching from one customer-service agent to another, all of whom seemed completely baffled as to why I’d care. I treat my own gear with permethrin—I’m not completely opposed to insect repellents—but I wasn’t loving the idea of sleeping on grass glistening with fresh toxicants. So, I bought a . I’d been wanting a hammock anyway, and at least this way I’d be off the ground.

By then it was early evening, and I was feeling decidedly cranky about the whole endeavor. Even with a ton of outdoors confidence and relatively low standards for comfort, I’d still put in a few hours’ effort and over 60 bucks for my supposedly free and easy campout. Plus, the weather was gray, the kind of endless drizzle that seems to come from nowhere and seep into everything all at once. Sleeping in storms is one thing in an expedition, but leaving a plush guest bed for a damp suburban yard felt entirely less enticing. Anticipating a stiff and soggy night, I trudged to the far corner of the yard to hang the hammock and pitch a quick rain fly. The tarp’s tie-downs would be at a better angle if I tied them to the shared picket fence, but that seemed like a provocation.

Every campsite has its wildlife, and this one was no exception. No sooner had I wedged myself into the hammock than the neighbors—a man and woman, mid-50s—came out and stood on their deck, just 20 feet away. I popped my head up and said “Hi!” but they didn’t respond. Abashed, I retreated, pulling the edges of the hammock over myself, peering through the crack with one eye. Were they calling the HOA on me? The man looked at his phone, then dropped it back into his pocket.

“The woman’s wearing a long dress that disappears against the beige siding of her house, perfectly camouflaged to her environment,” I texted my cousin-in-law.

“Why are you like this?” he texted back.

The neighbors seemed to be pointedly gazing at everything except me. They pushed a deck chair several feet to the right, considered, then returned it to its original position. They knew I was there. I knew they knew. They knew I knew. None of us acknowledged it. After a few minutes of angsty silence, they went back inside.

That’s the thing about most wildlife. They’re more scared of you than you are of them.

The hammock swayed, and despite my wariness, I felt relaxed. I heard a sound like flapping; it was, I guessed, a kid on a snare drum a few houses down. Nearby, something crackled. Was it insects dying? No, just leaves, blowing gently around me, and the porch lights flickering on next door. The dark sky, peeking through roofs and branches, was the most familiar thing I’d seen in a long time.

I slept lightly in the hammock, swaying in and out of dreams. There was that snare drum sound again. Maybe it was a bird; maybe it was both. The squirrels, the shifting branches, the windows opening and closing, all melded into one layered sound, and the abutting yards—which had struck me at first as structurally enabled nosiness—began to seem more like a communal watering hole, the exact kind of shared space I’d been missing. When the sun rose, through mist, another neighbor came out and stood silently on the grass.

Backyard camping wasn’t quite as easy or cheap as I’d preached. And I didn’t feel connected to wilderness. But I felt like part of a place again, and maybe that mattered even more.

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When Bre Kanak, an art teacher in northern Wisconsin, was invited to join a nine-day sea expedition to Antarctica, her husband Dan stayed home to watch their snakes and chickens. He felt a bit of FOMO, he admits, but mostly he was excited for her—especially because he got to follow along vicariously. Dan remembers keeping a close eye on Antarctic weather as Bre’s ship crossed the infamous Drake Passage, a stretch of circumpolar ocean known for having some of the roughest waves in the world. “I remember being so proud when I got a text during the passage,” Dan told me over the phone. “Bre was standing outside in the wind, vlogging for her students. If I’d been there, I’d want to be the guy out on deck with a cigar, chatting it up with the crew. And minus the cigar, that was Bre.”

“When you choose your person, you think, ‘This is my adventure partner,’” Bre told me. “The whole trip, I kept thinking how much he would have loved it.” But every adventure partnership has limits, and the more adventurous a couple, the more likely that each partner will have to negotiate doing big things solo—or, sometimes, being the one left behind. If one person encourages their partner’s adventures but feels unsupported on their own, that gap can undermine or even end a relationship. But when the support is mutual, it sets up both partners for adventures they never would have managed otherwise.

It’s a dynamic I know intimately. My husband and I are both long-distance dogsledders, and while we train our team together, we race separately, taking turns embarking on multi-week solo expeditions while the other keeps the home fires burning. This past winter, he raced in the Iditarod while our kids and I stayed with my wonderful in-laws in Chicago. I felt incredibly proud, excited, and worried all at once, and flip-flopped between wishing that I, too, was on the runners in forty below—and relishing the joys of eating takeout in a climate-controlled suburban house. More than anything else, I knew he was embarking on something extraordinarily difficult, and I wanted him to feel unequivocally supported and loved.

How do you have your partner’s back when they’re doing something big without you, whether it’s embarking on an expedition, running a marathon, or pursuing some other private dream? What if it’s a dream you can’t relate to—and what if you wish you were doing it, too?

Put everything else aside: first, you have to believe in them. Believe in their preparation, their dedication, and their ability—even if the journey doesn’t go as planned—to integrate what they’ve learned and move forward stronger regardless. �����ԹϺ���s can go all kinds of ways. Your partner might fare far better than they hoped, or they might get injured, homesick, or caught in a storm. But believing in them doesn’t mean expecting a certain result; it means trusting their intention, their heart, and their hard work. Let them know you’re proud to bursting, every step of the way.

If you’re not familiar with their adventure or their sport, learn the language. You don’t have to be an expert, but if they’re, say, attempting the Appalachian Trail, you should know the difference between a thru- and section-hike, and understand terms like zero day, bonus mile, and blaze. Care enough to read a book about what they’re doing, or watch movies with them, even if it’s not a passion you share yourself. Is Dan specifically interested in Antarctica? Not really. He’s more into machinery and heritage apples. But you can bet that after Bre’s trip, he knows more about penguins than he ever expected to learn.

Part of the beauty of a public adventure—whether your partner’s on an expedition they’ve advertised on social media, or running a big-name marathon all their training partners know about—is that you can be a container for other people to support them, too. If they’re out training for a race, buy some markers and poster boards and invite friends over for a beer-and-signmaking night. Then hide the signs until race day, when you can stage them along the route. Your partner will get a boost of encouragement from supporters they might not have expected, and you’ll be building your own network of people you can call if you start freaking out over, say, split times. “Bre’s dad found a website where we could see in real time where the ship was, how many miles out of port, the sea conditions, all of that,” Dan says. “That was definitely a way to feel connected to her trip, and it kept me connected to her family, too.”

The connections that form through a big endeavor can be surprising. After one of my first successful dogsled races, I got a note from a legend in the sport, Lloyd Gilbertson, who said he’d noticed my win and that I’d done a great job. I was flying high. I drove out to meet him, and we’ve since become close friends. It took me a few years to realize what should have been obvious: there was nothing exemplary about my race in particular; that wasn’t why he reached out. He simply had a practice of noting up-and-comers and being generous with encouragement and praise. Lloyd is a dogsledding mentor to me now, but more than that, he’s a mentor in building and holding community—two things that are vital when it comes to big adventures, whether it’s you or a loved one doing the adventuring. And being the person at home often means you have more time and space for communication, not less. Try to follow along with other athletes or adventurers doing the same thing as your partner, and don’t be afraid to reach out unsolicited to let them know that you care. Good energy comes around, and putting goodness into their community is a way of looking out for your partner, too.

And what if you get that restless feeling that you wish you were out there yourself? Try to distinguish between jealousy and envy: jealousy means wanting something just for yourself, while envy means that you see what someone else has, and you want it, too. It’s non-possessive, and luckily, there’s no scarcity of adventure in the world. Do you feel that your partner supports you, too, when it’s your turn to do something big? If not, �ٳ󲹳�’s a bigger conversation—but if so, now’s the time to breathe deep, refocus, and work on your patience. There are journeys enough for all of us, and yours will come, too.

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In college, I brought guys into the forest at night because it was a place where I was less scared than they were. As a woman, dating—or even just being alone with a man—felt vulnerable. I wanted to flip the script.

I remember the second time in particular, with a man I really liked. We were a mile deep in the campus arboretum, following a trail through faint moonshadows and then, as the trees grew thicker, into a tunnel of black. My flashlight was dim. He held my arm as I led the way.

Something rustled in the dark to our right.

The man jumped a little, chuckled once, and grabbed my arm with his other hand. He squeezed.

“You nervous,” I said.

I sensed, rather than saw, his nod.

“What are you scared of?”

“What was that?” he said. He meant the rustle. Probably a mouse, I thought, but I didn’t answer. I imagined what he’d do if I said the flashlight had burned out. He wouldn’t panic, at least not outwardly, but his breath would quicken. He’d stay close; he’d squeeze my arm tighter. He’d trust me to lead the way out.

Still in blackness, I stepped back so we weren’t touching. He didn’t move. I thought about reaching back toward him, but instead I waited. Counted. One breath. Five, ten. When he still hadn’t moved or spoken, I stepped back toward him. Took one of his hands, then the other, and rose to my toes for a kiss.

“That would never have occurred to me,” he said later, back inside. “Going into the woods at night. I just never think of it as an option. I don’t know how you weren’t nervous.”

The secret was that I’d been nervous, too. But unlike him, I was used to it.

As a kid, I dreaded getting home at night because I hated walking in darkness from the car to the front door. I’d run past the roses and thuja trees by the driveway—fearing that at any moment, hands would reach from the thickets and grab me tight—and I didn’t calm down until I’d reached the bright artificial light of the entry. In the daytime, I loved being outside; I made passageways in the bushes, and tossed seeds to lure squirrels close. But at night, the yard turned into something different. It became a place I didn’t understand.

By my late teens, I spent most of my free time outside, bushwhacking through mountainsides and forests with a backpack and a map. I felt that my fear of the woods at night—though common, normal—was one of the last barriers between myself and the wild life I wanted. But the dark wasn’t dangerous, I told myself. It was just scary. And fear, I hoped, could be fixed. It was with that intention that I tried solo backpacking at 18, laying my sleeping bag on the moss at the edge of a mountain lake called Sick Water, where I planned to spend two days. But I panicked the first night–lying frozen, eyes open in blackness, barely able to breathe–and then hiked five miles home at three in the morning. I climbed into my own bed as the sun was rising, weak with relief.

Later that year, I tried again. It was winter. I skied uphill to the same lake, which was smooth and white, and found an open creek at the edge, barely a foot across and bounded with deep banks. I drank the water by cupping it in my bare hands, though the cold hurt my skin, and then I built a fire for warmth. I’d brought a book of poems—Prufrock, I think—to read for distraction, but I never opened the book at all. I didn’t need it. For some reason, that time I wasn’t afraid.

In retrospect, I think the cold helped my nerves. Winter’s always been my comfort. The world quiets; animals sleep. And the snow doesn’t lie. At times, lying in the darkness, I imagined creatures creeping toward me. But when the sun rose again, I saw from the untouched snow that they had not.

By the way, there was nothing sick about Sick Water. I don’t know how the lake got its name. It was good fishing, so maybe �ٳ󲹳�’s why. Some fisherman tried to scare folks away and claim the whole lake for his own.

My husband and I live deep in the Wisconsin woods; we take all our city friends outdoors. It’s a running joke that we can teach them dogsledding, kayaking, fishing, skiing—and when we bring them back to the cabin late, by headlamp, and they’ll say, “I didn’t know I could do that.”

And we say, “Dogsledding?”

And they say, “No, being in the forest at night.”

Why is this fear so universal? I looked up science, studies. I wanted to tell you facts about what we’re afraid might happen, and how to push through. But I found almost no research at all. Only stories. Fairy tales, myths, legends, warnings. Don’t go in the woods at night, characters tell each other, or else. Or else what? In the forest, power shifts. We’re not in charge anymore. We have to face the fact that we never were.

Stories don’t create our fears; they reflect them back to us, shimmering with layers of unease. One reason humans are scared of the dark woods, wrote scholar Dr. Elizabeth Parker, who studies ecogothic literature, is because we fear nature’s appetite, even when it pales before our own. In the forest, “we fear being eaten: be it by literal predators such as wolves and bears, or by the many monsters that we imagine within it.”

In the dark, in the trees, anything can creep toward you.

You won’t see it coming.

It will open wide its mouth.

It might consume you, or might just stand there watching.

We’re scared of the dark woods, Dr. Parker writes, because they hold a secret we’re not sure we want to know.

Over the years, I have, in fact, been approached by animals at night. One time, alone in a lean-to of sticks in Florida, something huge blackened the night nearby. I imagined it might attack me. I saw from its tracks in the morning that it had been a cow.

In South Africa, I was surrounded by a pack of hyenas for several nights in a row. They circled, barking and grunting, for hours on end. I had no weapons, but I built my fire high. They didn’t dare enter the light.

Hyenas eat people. Big cats do, too. Some bears. Sharks, I guess, with all those teeth. But the fear of being consumed isn’t just a fear of dying. It’s a fear of recalling that you’re an animal, too, with warm soft flesh like the rest of them. We’re not afraid of the woods at night because we don’t belong there. We’re afraid of them because we do.

It takes practice, time, to accept that. After my stay at Sick Water, I didn’t spend a night alone outside for several years; I’d just needed to know that I could. But when I finally did venture out again, it was for weeks straight. I was visiting a Norwegian village, and needed somewhere to stay, so I set up camp in a grove of sparse birch, a few minutes’ walk from the nearest road. Each night I lay on my back in my sleeping bag, watching heart-shaped leaves flicker against the sky. That was the Arctic, in summer, so the sun never set. Darkness only came when I closed my eyes.

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In February, I joined four strangers on an overnight dogsled expedition for beginners. They ranged in age from their twenties to sixties, and sat long hours around the campfire—laughing, roasting marshmallows for each other, and petting a yellow dog who squeezed along the snowbanks behind them, nosing for snacks. Each attendee had signed up for the trip alone; they’d never met each other before. But the mood—and the conversation—couldn’t have been better. If you’d told me right then, sitting around the fire, that we’d be extending the expedition for a month, I would have looked at my companions’ eyes sparkling in the firelight and thought: Yes. Bring it on.

Recently The Atlantic published a , which is caused—in part—by what we might call an epidemic of individualism: our own ongoing choices to stay siloed in tiny worlds. We work from home; we eat at home; we stream instead of going to the movies—and the problem, as diagnosed in The Atlantic, isn’t so much that we’re lonely as that we’re not. We’re alone by choice, and we’re OK with it, in part because of the ways that technology intrudes on what used to be solo time. Let’s say you choose to take a quiet evening to recharge. But your phone’s lighting up constantly, and you owe so-and-so a text and so-and-so an email, and you should probably check socials just to see what disasters are happening in the news… and by the end of the night, you haven’t spent quality time with other people or yourself. So you’re hungry for quiet, and stay home the next night and do the same, with the same result. As author Annie Dillard says, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives—and a life of neither solitude nor companionship can leave us feeling consistently wrong.

The article strikes me partially as hand-wringing (I’m rarely compelled by arguments that other people are choosing to live their personal lives wrong) and partially as terrifying (it’s easier to hate people for their differences if you rarely encounter them). But I also wrote an outdoors advice column for almost a decade, long enough to notice deep grooves of recurring themes in the questions that readers sent in. Many readers’ problems were steeped, above all, not in solitude but in true loneliness; the theme came up so often that it was sometimes difficult to find questions to answer that weren’t about being alone. People struggled to make friends as adults, or after a move to a new location; they mourned when relationships drifted apart, and weren’t sure how to fill the gap. And yes, when you’re a hammer—or an outdoors columnist—everything looks like a nail, but it’s hard to ignore the degree to which time outdoors can heal these ills, at least when it comes to the particular forms they take in modern life.

When we go outside with someone, whether that means joining a meetup or organizing a trip with friends, we’re committing to spending time together in bulk: a two-night camping trip with a buddy means logging as many waking hours together as two years’ worth of monthly coffee dates. Researchers have found that the closeness of a friendship can, : that it takes roughly 50 hours to build a casual friendship, versus 200 to be in someone’s inner circle, and  that involved locking male strangers in a room together for ten days resulted in the men becoming, well, basically besties. If you’ve spent any amount of time traveling or hiking with strangers—or even sitting around a campfire—and experienced the intense bond that results, then this degree of rapid closeness may not surprise you at all.

I spoke to Jenny Baker, the founder of Sheventures, an outdoors camp for women in Tennessee, about how her campers make friends. She tries to make sure that 35 percent of the slots at each camp are saved for people who don’t know anyone else, so that they can meet and connect with one another. The strategy is so effective that now, nine years on, it can be hard for her to find enough solo travelers: previous years’ campers are now friends with each other, and choose to return together as a group.

“If we want to combat loneliness,” Jenny told me, “we can’t just find the places where people are connecting. We have to build those places intentionally. How do we ease the hurdles that people encounter when they’re making new outdoor friends? How do we make space for deep connection?”

Jenny’s found that not all outdoor activities are created equal when it comes to making friends. Paddleboarding and mountain biking require too much solitary focus, even when a group does them together. “Hiking is great for introverts,” she told me, “because you don’t have to make eye contact while you’re talking.” But the best activity she’s seen for building friendships, by far, is rock climbing. “You’d think it’s a solo sport, but it’s not. At camp, we might have three women on the wall and 20 women on the ground cheering for them. A climber might be scared. Maybe she’s tried for the next hold a few times, and keeps missing it. As women, we try not to take up space, so she’ll say she’s done and someone else should go. But the women on the ground will literally not let her off the wall. They’re calling out, helping her. They’re completely invested. And when she succeeds, the cheering that erupts in the woods is incredible. It’s like everyone succeeded together.”

But what about after camp? How can people keep those intense bonds from drifting apart?

It turns out that the science of friendship can guide us here, too. For one thing, it’s OK for friendships to drift apart; we benefit from companionship at any level, and just because a friendship is short-lived doesn’t mean that it’s not important, or that it won’t be rekindled later. But if you find yourself making an outdoor friend that you really want to hold onto, just remember to do the opposite of what every true crime podcast tells you and go to a second location. Going from the trail to the pub, or making plans to meet up after camp, helps you to see each other in a different light, and also lets your new pal know that you care about them beyond convenience. And that choice–that intention–can make all the difference between an outdoor friend and a friend for good.

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Last fall, at a dryland dogsled race in Pearson,Wisconsin, one canine athlete stood out from the rest. While her competition—mostly pointers and Alaskan huskies—ran one- to three-mile sprints, then rested, she entered multiple divisions in such quick succession that she once hurried straight from the finish line to the starting line without slowing down. Her gaze is stoic. Her fur is orange. Her legs are four inches long.

Musher Betsy Heidt of Wausau, Wisconsin, didn’t plan for her 18-pound dachshund mix, Muppy, to become one of the most recognizable sled dogs in the Midwest. As it turns out, that was all Muppy’s idea.

“I could never get Muppy to walk on a leash,” Betsy told me over the phone. (I’m a dogsledder myself, and cheer for Muppy at races, but I don’t know Betsy well; I reached out to learn the full story.) “Someone commented that I should walk faster, so I walked faster, and then Muppy started running, so I started running, and then she started running faster. I don’t have the cardio for that, so I hooked her up to a bike and off she went. I was like, oh, I guess this is a thing.”

Betsy grew up on a dairy farm in the southern part of the state. As a kid, she sometimes hooked up the farm collies to a plastic sled with bailer twine, then threw snowballs for them to chase so they’d pull her. But those experiments, plus the movie Snow Dogs, were the only context she had for sled dog sports. So she turned to YouTube for urban mushing tutorials, which explained the basics of , , and : dogs pulling bikes, scooters, and human runners, respectively. The videos were helpful, but geared toward folks with huskies and other big dogs. They didn’t address many of the problems she encountered, like that Muppy was so short that she had to swim through puddles. Plus, where do you find a good harness that size?

But Muppy loved pulling so much that Betsy was determined to figure it out. She contacted a harness company called , ordering their smallest adjustable size, and got some goggles so that Muppy’s eyes were protected from sticks and burdock. They trained on deer trails in the woods by their house. Muppy was ecstatic to pull, and her never-ending energy felt like magic—even when she turned to chase critters, and Betsy went flying. “I got really good at reading her body language,” she told me. “I can tell by the way she holds her tail if she’s locked into something ahead of us, whether it’s a person in the distance or an unsuspecting rabbit.” Betsy learned to brace herself, and Muppy learned not to swerve: “She throws into the harness even more to get out that frustration.”

When Muppy was four, in 2021, Betsy posted a picture on Facebook, and a page called Twin Cities Dog-Powered Sports liked her post. “I sent some messages to their page, asking them 900 different questions, and they were super helpful.” When she saw that they were hosting a first-time race in Minnesota, she signed up for the 1.3 mile bikejoring event. She was terrified.

For one thing, Betsy didn’t know if other mushers would accept her. “But my biggest fear,” she said, “was that someone would pass us.” That summer, Muppy had been attacked by three golden retrievers at a park, and she’d been sketchy around strange dogs ever since. How would she react to a team coming up behind them? Betsy made a plan: if another team approached, she would veer off-trail and sit on the ground, holding Muppy, until they were gone. As it turned out, she and Muppy both had so much adrenaline—“We were pedal to the metal!”—that no other teams came close. They finished the course in just five and a half minutes, averaging over 14 miles per hour. The duo didn’t make the podium, but they weren’t on the bottom, either.

After that, they were hooked.

When most people picture sled dogs, they imagine huskies racing 1,000 miles through snowy wilderness. But in dryland racing, an ever-growing corner of the sport, teams consisting of one to six dogs compete in parks, cities, and small towns worldwide. Mushers gather at trailheads and parking lots for long weekends of racing, with world-champion sprinters (often huge, muscular pointers with legs a mile long) competing alongside teams of purebred Siberians and assorted mutts. When Betsy and Muppy first started showing up at races, people assumed that Muppy belonged to a spectator, or that she was a pet accompanying another team. But it wasn’t long before they took her seriously, as both a friend and competition.

Muppy’s not the fastest dog on the race circuit, but she’s among the most recognizeable, and crowds will sometimes gather to chant her name. The affection is mutual: there’s a bar on the country road that leads to one of the race sites, and whenever Betsy makes the turn in her car, Muppy starts screeching with excitement. In the starting chute, while the judge counts down, she wails, eyes glued to the trail ahead—and the moment Betsy releases the brake, they take off at top speed. She’s become a pro at some of the more technical aspects of racing, like getting passed—or, just as often, passing. “The dog parts of the other team, sometimes they just stare as they’re running, trying to decide if she’s food or friend,” Betsy recalled, laughing. “And their mushers will say, ‘Come on, Snowball! You’re getting passed by a wiener dog!”

For the past four years, during dryland season, Muppy races frequently, and trains by pulling Betsy or her husband two to three miles up to four times a week. Betsy works at a composting facility, and even brings Muppy to work sometimes, so she can practice running up and down the compost rows—which smell enticing, making them perfect practice for resisting distraction. Until this year, winter’s been Muppy’s off-season; she spends the snowy months digging and shredding sticks. But Betsy recently bought a fatbike, and the duo have been training for fatbikejoring races on snow.

Last May, Betsy and her husband adopted a second dog, Journey, who’s a terrier-shepherd mix. Journey’s bigger than Muppy, and not that into pulling, but she does love running, so sometimes they enter two-dog races together. Muppy pulls, and Journey simply runs alongside her. Betsy doesn’t mind. The point of dog-powered sports, as she sees it, is to make dogs’ lives richer, and that means embracing each dog’s skills and interests—so as long as Journey’s happy, she’s happy too.

As for Muppy, she’s fully embraced her role as an icon; she prances when fans call her name. Betsy’s thrilled to be her ambassador. “If someone has a pet with boundless energy, a sport like this is a great opportunity for them,” she told me. “Even for a dog who doesn’t pull a lot, like Journey, being out in front and making decisions seems to tucker her out more than games of fetch ever did.”

But Betsy’s favorite thing has been seeing how much joy and inspiration Muppy’s athleticism brings to people. “I want to show that little dogs can do things,” she said proudly, “and help more dogs live enriching lives!”

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Leslie Gaynor, 68, loves survival shows. After she finishes her day’s work as a therapist, she makes herself some tea and puts on an episode of Naked and Afraid. By the time the show’s over, it’s dark out. Her dog has to pee, but she doesn’t like to go outside at night. What if there are wild animals in the yard? One time last year, her dog ran out and saw a possum, and the possum flopped over dead, and when she went out a few minutes later it was gone. So it wasn’t really dead, but the whole thing was traumatic anyway. Not for the possum. But for her.

Leslie’s my aunt, and my husband and I were both on Naked and Afraid; we’re outdoor folk by trade, and when we were invited to apply for the show, we couldn’t resist the opportunity to step into a ready-made adventure. That’s not why my aunt watches it, though. She was a fan first. “I can’t really explain it,” she told me after we watched a scene together of a proud, hungry woman plucking a grouse for stew. “I just think it’s relaxing!”

Leslie’s not the only one who finds survival shows addictive. Ever since Survivor premiered in 2000, and promptly became one of the highest-rated shows on network television, survival-themed reality shows and their spinoffs have reproduced like rabbits. In addition to Naked and Afraid, there’s Alone, Survivor, Dual Survival, Survivorman, Ultimate Survival, Man vs. Wild,, Race to Survive, Outlast, and Celebrity Bear Hunt, not to mention numerous spinoffs and international versions. (My personal favorite title? Naked and Afraid’s Shark Week special, Naked and Afraid of Sharks.) Sure, some of their viewers are outdoorsy, but the shows aren’t just made for survivalists any more than shows about serial killers are made for, well, other serial killers. No: what makes survival shows so popular is that, while they depict extreme situations, the feelings they tap into are damn near universal.

“There aren’t many shows that are really truly unscripted, and where you can see real emotions, like craving for fish, or craving to be with a loved one.”

There’s pleasure in seeing someone succeed despite hardship—and there’s also pleasure (maybe more) in watching someone fail spectacularly, particularly if they went in cocky. Whenever a survivalist’s intro includes them sayingany version of the phrase “making nature my bitch,” you know they’re gonna get their ass handed to them. It’s just a matter of when and how.

“Some guy’s hungry, or cut himself with his knife, and it’s time to tap,” says my husband, Quince Mountain, who survived 21 days—mostly alone—in the Honduran jungle. (We were on the show at the same time, but were sent to different locations.) “He’s crying because he misses his wife and kids too much, but he says it like, ‘It’s really unfair to them, me being out here…’ Is that his epiphany about how his wife does massive amounts of invisible labor to keep his life comfortable, and now he’s going home a changed man, a grateful, devoted, humble partner—or is it his excuse because he’s hungry and lonely and doesn’t know how to take care of himself? You decide!”

In one of the most popular survival shows, Alone, participants film themselves in complete isolation without knowing how many of the other contestants are still out there. The show premiered in 2015, but viewership soared in 2020 when select seasons became available on Netflix and Hulu. “With COVID, there was a lot of interest because of the isolation aspect,” recalls Juan Pablo Quiñonez, author of the survival book , who won Alone’s season 9 after surviving 78 days in Labrador with a strategy of fasting, drinking unboiled water, and hunkering down to rest. “There aren’t many shows that are really truly unscripted, and where you can see real emotions, like craving for fish, or craving to be with a loved one. How often do we get to see someone catch a fish after five days without food? These moments are super powerful.”

He believes that we’re all hunter-gatherers at heart, and that survival shows—and wilderness survival in general—connect us to an ancestral legacy that feels both vital and familiar. “There might be strong feelings on The Bachelor, but it’s definitely not as real.”

As much as skeptics in online forums might debate the authenticity of their favorite shows (a common theory centers around the idea that when people are getting too weak, production will leave a dead animal in one of their traps), it’s hard for viewers to dismiss the fact that at least something real is happening onscreen. People don’t lose 20 pounds in three weeks without going awfully hungry, and a lot of the effects of survival—sunburn, frostbite, open wounds—are physically undeniable. There are even ways that being on a show can be harder than plain old survival. Camera crews inadvertantly scare away game, and interrupt survivors for interviews, even when they’re beyond exhausted. Plus, the survivors are usually limited by geographic barriers that have little to do with what’s actually practical or effective. You’re ravenous, searching for any darn calories, and finally spot some berries in a clearing �ٳ󲹳�’s off-limits? Too bad, so sad. This isn’t just survival, it’s a show, and you gotta perform for both.

It’s about watching our everyday adversity reflected back to us, but distilled into a pure form.

Another factor in their proliferation is that survival shows—and reality shows in general—are economical to produce. “The reason that unscripted TV came out of the gate so strongly is that it’s cheaper,” says Rachel Maguire, who’s been an international showrunner and executive producer for Naked and Afraid and Dual Survival. “You don’t have high-paid actors. There are no writers. The cast is generally not union.” Although, she adds upon reflection, Naked and Afraid does have awfully pricey accidental death and dismemberment insurance.

Her theory as to why the genre’s so popular? People are increasingly aware of instability in the world—including a steep increase in natural disasters due to climate change—and watching survival shows helps them feel prepared.

I agree with Quiñonez and Maguire, but I also think there’s another instinctive appeal. We worry about extraordinary disasters, but we worry about problems in our lives just as much, and usually more. Survival shows are addictive because much of our daily life is also about struggling to meet our basic needs, and we feel that stress even when we can’t name it. Negotiating jobs, health insurance, child and elder care, housing? That’s all survival, viscerally so. And so watching people get shelter by building it from scratch, and food by catching it in a handmade trap, isn’t about watching them go through challenges that are completely disconnected from our own. It’s about watching our everyday adversity reflected back to us, but distilled into a pure form. We empathize when TV survivalists want to tap out; we cheer when they succeed. It’s relatable. It’s therapeutic. We know—deep down—that we’re all just trying to survive.

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My favorite Tough Love question from the last eight years, the one I (somewhat inexplicably) recall most fondly, was from a woman whose boyfriend was grossed out that she used a pee rag—a.k.a. reusable toilet paper—while camping. We got a lot of impassioned reader feedback about that one: Pee is sanitary! Pee is gross! Bodies are normal! Women’s bodies in particular are gross! (OK, dude.) And though I’d phrase my answer differently now, I stand by the gist of it: If you don’t want your boyfriend weighing in on your wiping habits, don’t tell him about them. Wherever that couple is now, together or apart, I hope they’ve figured out how to pee in peace.

The secret about an outdoors advice column, of course, is that it’s basically a regular advice column with the words “while camping” tacked to the end of each question. Consider:

Should I break up with my boyfriend? He’s ignoring my boundaries while camping.

How do I stop hating my body while camping?

I’m desperately lonely. While camping, I mean. Obviously. Right?

“While camping” is �����ԹϺ��� magazine’s “asking for a friend”: a framing that distances us just enough from our problems that we might gather the courage to speak them aloud. The questions that readers sent to Tough Love were almost never uniquely outdoors-specific. Rather, the outdoors served as both backdrop and shared language between asker and reader. A number of thru-hikers, climbers, kayakers, skiers, and runners wrote to me over the years, but their problems weren’t about, say, the best way to dry long johns over a campfire. They were about grief, illness, heartbreak, anxiety, and love. �����ԹϺ���’s community, more than anyone, should know that wherever we go, our shadows follow. And it’s often in the most spectacular places—a mountaintop at sunrise, a bonfire with friends—that our worries are cast in the greatest relief.

At the core, advice columns are gossip.

And yet there is something unique about an outdoors advice column, less in the specifics of individual problems than in the way those problems reveal the contours of bigger, communal ones. By far the most common questions I received, again and again, were variations on two issues. First: I am a man, and I’m struggling to find and date women who are outdoorsy. Second: I am an outdoorsy woman, and men won’t date me because I’m better/stronger/faster than they are. It would be too simple to suggest that the writers of these letters meet, date each other, and thus solve all their problems, because it’s precisely the contrast between these two categories that reveals the root of the issue. What is it? Misogyny (or to phrase it as generously as possible for individual men: the sexist pressure on them to be more accomplished than their girlfriends or wives). Men, if you want to date outdoorsy women, there are plenty available—but you might need to work on your insecurities first. As for women who date men? At least some of us are outta luck.

At the core, advice columns are gossip. It’s a myth—an excuse we tell ourselves, as part of the writer-columnist-reader triad—that their purpose is to deliver wisdom to the letter-writer. Instead, the whole dynamic is a collaboration, an exchange. Readers rubberneck, reassuring themselves that although they make plenty of mistakes, they would never make that one. Alternately, they take comfort in the fact they’re not alone. And the letter-writer shares something vulnerable, under cover of anonymity, in exchange for being seen.

I never shared letter-writers’ identities, even with my editors. A few questions were written by celebrities. Some were sent by my friends. Some people were so cautious that they wrote in under fake names, from fake email addresses. And at least one question was my own. (A great exercise, in a tricky situation, is to imagine that you’re an advice columnist and someone sent in a letter about your exact situation. How would you reassure them? What would you recommend they do? And if you happened to write an actual advice column, wouldn’t you be tempted to publish the exchange?) There were questions, too, that I never had a chance to answer, either because they were too similar to ones we’d already published, or because they lacked context. “What do I do next?” someone once wrote, as the entirety of their email. I just wanted to give them a hug.

I suspect my primary strength as an advice columnist is that I don’t think I have the answers.

Sometimes readers sent in advice for other letter-writers, pouring their hearts out over shared experiences, and I passed the messages along. Other times, folks corrected my takes, explaining details I’d missed or ways my response was short-sighted. Regarding a woman with asthma whose boyfriend accused her of abandoning him when she had to leave a campground due to wildfire smoke, I received, to Tough Love’s email address, this phenomenal piece of reader feedback: “The fact that your advice to this poor woman was decent enough does not justify your presuming, as a dogsledder, to answer her deeply concerning plea.”

I texted my friend a screenshot, delighted by the implication that dogsledders are uniquely bad at giving advice. “Does she think that advice columnists go to… advice column school?” she texted back.

In fact, at the time I started writing Tough Love, I was just out of grad school, living on $18,000 a year and supporting a fledgling sled dog team. I’d written an essay—a love letter, really—that went viral, and got passed around �����ԹϺ���’s editors. When they approached me about writing an outdoors relationship advice column, I felt like I’d won the lottery, and in a way I had: a steady freelance gig is practically as rare. I was on a road trip when I got the email. To give me practice, my now-husband read letters from Cosmo magazine aloud, tweaking details to make them outdoors-specfic. I still remember: “What do you do if you get cum in your eye,” he asked me, “in the woods?”

I had no idea. Stick your face in a river? I googled it. Then I regretted googling it. I probably wouldn’t get that question, I reassured myself. On the other hand, what if I did? I didn’t want to guide people wrong. Or make their eyes hurt. I felt then about the column, and always have, an intense pressure to do no harm.

Problems are inherently vulnerable; they invite vulnerability in return.

I suspect my primary strength as an advice columnist is that I don’t think I have all the answers. For some questions, I dug deeply into my own experience.Those columns are still raw and near to my heart, whether they’re about grief, being a woman alone in the wilderness, writing a memoir, or the fear of losing a dog. But more often, I used the questions as springboards to approach and interview people—family members, friends, even strangers I admired—whose wisdom I wanted to both learn from and pass on. With particularly puzzling situations, I even brought up the questions at dinner parties, asking folks around the table to weigh in. It was in response to these strangers’ questions that people close to me shared some of their most tender truths. For that, I’ll always be grateful.

At the close of the column, I think its greatest lesson, at least for me, is this: we should ask each other for advice more. The questions don’t even have to be our own. Share situations you’ve read about, or heard about, or even seen on TV, and ask your loved ones what they’d recommend. Problems are inherently vulnerable; they invite vulnerability in return. You’ll be surprised by how often people will take the invitation to say what they’ve needed to say.

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