“Go outside and get some fresh air!”
Teenagers hear that all. The. Time.
“Stop watching TV! Go spend some time outdoors!”
Have you ever read a teen novel about going outdoors? Either you get killed by wild dogs (Island of the Blue Dolphins), almost starve to death (Julie of the Wolves), or go blind (The Cay). But sometimes you also have beautiful epiphanies and become self-sufficient and learn to appreciate the beauty of nature (My Side of the Mountain).
Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of going outside!
PRO - You Don't Have to Listen to Your Stupid Family Anymore - As New Yorker Gail says in Signpost to Terror (1967) when her family goes on vacation in the Adirondacks, “Only silence seemed of any use in dealing with her family.” And you can understand why. Her little sister, Karen, “screeches and yammers” and her mom and dad nickname them “Ka” and “Gay” which is essentially child abuse in most states. As for Lisa Gallagher in Walking Out (1979) her mom's a jerk and her divorced dad lives in Alaska and “not much seemed to be going well for him.” Well, for starters, he’s living in Alaska. Then the plane she's taking to see him for a pity vacation catches on fire and she has to parachute out and survive on her own in the wilderness for 25 days, so who's doing well now, Lisa?
CON - Bank Robbers - For Lisa, it's “Redbeard” a creepy ginger she stumbles across while he's murdering his partner in crime. He tries to murder her her, then chases her around in his canoe for a while, but she eludes his canoe pursuit by running into the woods. Pro Tip: canoes can't chase people on dry land. Gail runs into a gang of adult criminals who've just knocked over a small town bank and drugged and abducted a child hostage to get away. The gang's criminal mastermind is 18 year old Lew who convinces Gail that he's the hostage (boys are confusing), then he pushes her off a cliff and she almost dies (super confusing!). That's okay, though, because later she pushes him off a fire tower and he definitely does die. The saga of Redbeard, on the other hand, ends far less dramatically when Lisa is found by park rangers who later arrest Redbeard offscreen. But that's okay, because Lisa has experienced a Big Change, which brings us to...
PRO - Getting Epiphanies - the best thing about going outside is that you realize how tiny you are compared to the endless Alaskan wilderness that you're currently starving to death in and how fragile human life really is because all you have to do is knee some gaslighting teen creep in the nuts and push him off a fire tower, and hear his back shatter on a boulder to really understand that we're all just passing through this life on a journey so we should take the time to really be there for one another. As Gail spoons Lew on the boulder that shattered his spine as he takes literally forever to die, she tells an imaginary rescuer, “If you're human, you feel responsible. Even if someone lies to you...Human; not animal. It means you care. You don't leave someone dying in the cold — even if first you were so scared you pushed him off.” See, Lew? Life is a wonderful voyage of miracles if you’re not a creep who’s paying for his sins by bleeding out on a rock while a teenaged girl whispers platitudes in your ear.
Of course, sometimes this particular Pro turns into a Con, like when Gail first hears about the bank robbers while hiking with Lew before she discovers his true colors and she starts babbling about how she can't understand why people would kill over something as insignificant as money when…why…there are mountains and the majesty of nature all around us. The problem with reading books about teenagers is that often you want to strangle them. Fortunately, Lew's there to give it a try.
CON - Nature is gross - to get away from Lew, Gail rubs mud all over herself. Later she'll be forced to break into a hunter's cabin, which hasn't been cleaned in ages and is disgusting, and then she has to murder Lew and it's totally gross. Lisa does better, insisting on doing her make-up every day and washing her hair every other day while hiking out of the Alaskan wilderness, but eventually disgusting nature gets the upper hand, as it always does, and soon she's grubbing around in the mud and throwing away her high heels and shampoo, and from there it's only a short step to rummaging around in squirrel guts:
“The first cut through the fur was the hardest. The skin, held only by a thin membrane, peeled easily away from the flesh. It was like taking off a glove. I cut off the paws and the head — not easy. Then I slit the squirrel up the belly to the insides...I reached inside the squirrel to see how to pull the insides out. At first they resisted — a slurking sound. Then they fell out on the pine needles: the intestines, wound so neatly; the lungs; the dark red liver and heart.”
Lisa is basically a serial killer as she eats her way through 100 miles of Alaska wilderness, naming her favorite squirrels “Besty” before trapping and eating them, sucking down fish, spearing birds (she was high school javelin champion in track & field), and murdering everything she can fit in her mouth. Which brings us to the biggest advantage of going outside...
PRO - Weight Loss - At the beginning of Walking Out Lisa complains:
“My thighs in the new Calvin Klein jeans were fat — definitely fat!
“‘You thighs are not fat,’ my mother had said when I complained about them. ‘Just chunky. You have a chunky build like me’.”
Her friend B.J. tries to smooth things over by complimenting Lisa on her clear complexion, prompting mom to double down:
“If Lisa keeps eating junk foods, she’ll be able to join the Zit Gang, too, and make herself even chunkier in the process.”
Lisa's mom should thank her lucky stars she's not a squirrel. After all this negging, no wonder Lisa spends most of her flight agonizing over whether she should eat the brownie from her in-flight meal. But soon the plane's on fire and the pilot's shoving her out the door with a parachute strapped to her back, shouting “Good luck, Lisa!” Even as she guts squirrels, Lisa vows, “I’ve got to come out of this thinner,” then she neatens her camp in case rescuers come. She doesn't want them to think she's a slob! Which means she probably read Signpost to Terror where “sloppy” is just about the worst thing you can be. In that book, Karen, Gail's little sister, is all “gross sloppiness” and a “messy barrel” while Martin, the little boy the bank robbers take hostage is “sloppy and soft.”
Fortunately, when Martin makes it back to civilization he begins to eat apples as an afterschool snack instead of cookies. His suffocating mother always pushed cookies on him, and his bullying father always told him to go outdoors and run that fat off, but Martin learns that he has to be kidnapped at gunpoint and drugged and then watch a man die before he's ready to lose weight on his own.
And no matter how many forest epiphanies Lisa has, the second she makes it back to civilization she cheers, “I got thin. Without trying.” Prompting her sad dad to say, “You look great.” But this time, she eats the brownie on her in-flight meal tray, so I guess that's kind of a victory?
CONS - Boys - before she crashed in the Alaskan wilderness and murdered and ate everything in the forest, Lisa was torn between her boyfriend, Kyle, and the nerdy guy at school who really listened to her, Dave. As she hikes through the wilderness she imagines Kyle selling his car to buy a ticket to Alaska and rescue her. She imagines making out with him all over the woods. But Dave...Dave gave her the field guide to Alaskan edible plants that saves her life. And he told her how to find dry firewood when it's raining. “It was beginning to dawn on me how much information Dave had given me about the woods in the couple of weeks before I left,” she marvels. Lisa learns that boys are always happy to share their great information, like what podcasts you should be listening to, or what bands you should like, or how to build a fire in the wilderness. Gail, on the other hand, learns that the world is full of boys like Lew who will taunt you when you say you want to be a vegetarian, make fun of you for not having read Thoreau, and then try to push you off a mountain. It's better to just murder then into submission, and then cuddle them while the life drains out of their bodies.
[NOTE: at the end of Walking Out Lisa chooses Dave because when she gets back to civilization Kyle dares to speak to the press on her behalf, whereas Dave asks her questions about how she's really feeling.]
IN CONCLUSION - If you're thinking of going outside and you need to lose weight, or have an epiphany, or you want to get away from your annoying family, go for it! But if you don't want to run into bank robbers, or touch squirrel guts, or lose all your illusions about boys, then AVOID THE OUTDOORS AT ALL COSTS.