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 8×10 tarp ($11.37) and four tent stakes ($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 hammock from Walmart for $44.95. 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.
