Ogged [Umm, actually, it was Bob. –ed.] went camping in Colorado and was struck by an eerie realization: He was the only non-white person out there.
I know Denver’s somewhat diverse, but Colorado in general isn’t. I flew back from Denver via Atlanta, and my layover felt almost exactly like my layover at Heathrow when I flew back to the States from Copenhagen (also my layover in Paris when I flew back from Vienna): the sudden visual rush of skin colors, accents, and clothing styles brought home how powerful a force the air-travel industry is in mixing worlds together into new worlds. (For the opposite effect, fly from San Francisco through Salt Lake to Chicago.)
My question: why are camping and hiking such white-person activities? At visitor centers and short, paved trails, I saw many people of color. Not so on the longer or rougher trails. And I’d bet money I was the only nonwhite person in our large campground.
For years, there has been a running joke among many African American comics that you only see white people in horror movies because, well, black people would simply move at the first sign of a homicidal ghost. Maybe it just doesn’t occur to black people who have worked hard to afford a home and a car that, “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun to trek out to the boonies and walk a long way and then sleep out in the rain among the snakes and bugs!”
