Instagram is a Rural Cancer
Moving from town to country is a bigger change than anyone can explain ex ante, but the difference between being someone who spent evenings and weekends away, to becoming an actual resident, is that your initiation into the fold begins when you speak to your neighbours and an inevitable question is delicately raised, “So, how are you handling the…crowds?”
Last year I moved to an area outside of Toronto called Caledon, where the equivalent near New York would be Westchester, Surrey to London, Wellington to Miami, and while there is no greater or more insufferable snobbery than that of arrivistes like me trying to fit in by kicking down at people I only recently resembled, covid lockdowns unleashed an invasion of shell shocked suburbanites into the surrounding countryside, completely unburdened by rural norms around privacy, property, livestock, safety, and who have made themselves a now-constant nuissance and a danger to themselves and others.
Most weekends I have to drive out to the edge of my field to introduce myself to the carload (or few) of tourists parked along the concession of unpaved sideroad I am the sole inhabitant of, and who climb over the deer fencing to take photos in my field. Usually, I say, “Hello, I’m James, I live here. There is a beautiful park just five minutes north with parking and trails and incredible views, it’s much safer and people are much more welcome there. I will have to ask you to stay on the road as having people on the property is a safety and insurance risk for me.”
“We’re just taking pictures.” they say, as though carrying a camera makes them welcome, or entitles them to documentary access to my field.
“Of course!” I say. “It really is beautiful out here, and I hope you get a chance to enjoy it. However I am sure you can appreciate that having people parked in front of your house with cameras, coming up the driveway, sitting on fences, leaving litter, is really quite weird. I really do not want to be that guy, but there are lots of hiking trails and parks around and it’s much safer for everyone if you use them instead of my house.”
“We’re just taking pictures, you know, Instagram.”
Yes, Instagram. That website someone invented as a vibrator for narcissistic supply. It created a massive generational vacuum of need for attention that is turning anything resembling God’s own creation into a soft porn set.
I’ve taken to saying, “Hi there, I know you’re just taking pictures, but could you please be sure to strip off the GPS coordinates from your photos before you put them online? It’s causing people to immitate you and not everyone who comes out here as a result is as polite as you are.”
In the city, people don’t talk to each other, so someone rolling up and talking to them must seem very aggressive. “We are just taking pictures, 20 minutes,” they say, a bit miffed that someone would interfere with their right to take pictures of their butts without regard for property laws or privacy.
There is a marked difference between people who are are there to appreciate nature, and those who use it as a platform for something else. The Bruce Trail is a 900km national treasure that runs through the area, and though it too is not without its controversies, even the dubiously licenced fly fishermen who have some basic competence and engagement with the river treat the environment as though they were its stewards. Hikers are almost universally welcome because they pass through without leaving much of a trace, they don’t hang around or come back at night, they are friendly to the locals, and they make a point of shopping locally in support of the businesses in towns.
Around the corner on what was a beautiful road favoured by motorcyclists (who locals previously complained about speeding, the tension here is never ending) there are now almost more “no parking,” “private property,” “Maximum 30 km/h”, “local traffic only,” signs than visible trees. The irony is that by discouraging the motorcyclists with heavy police enforcement and farcically retarding speed limits, they have made the road safe for these new and much larger caravans of loitering selfie takers who make the roads impassable.
There’s also an emerging class of matronly safetycrats who are rapidly filling local councils whose town websites seem so concerned about not offending anyone that they didn’t stop to think who they were making these places safer for. It’s certainly not the people who live there, and it’s not the people who appreciate it. I think the township has even stopped removing grafitti because they think it’s hip and edgy, like one of those terrible haircuts.
Together it’s exacerbating tensions between locals and tourists to where they’re up and leaving to find more isolated areas further afield, as normal boundaries regarding privacy and personal property don’t seem to register with either the tourists or the administrators responsible for maintaining the environment. .
One afternoon over at the barn I ride at, a black Corvette with tintend windows comes down the driveway, just fast enough to give away that the driver hasn’t been around farms or horses before. It stops in the middle of the parking area without using a spot and out hops a small woman with some physical indicators of dwarfism, wearing those red-soled high heels and a strappy cocktail dress, middle of the day, looking like she’d been going since the night before . She doesn’t even look around or acknowledge anyone, just does this tippy-toe run thing in the heels in the dirt and heads straight for the fence line where one of the stallions was standing at the gate. Then the driver gets out, gaunt and lanky criminal type, wearing something like what someone who has never worn a suit before wears to a court appearance, and he’s carrying a camera. Again, doesn’t acknowledge anyone. I’m standing there with the barn staff asking, “Hi! How may we help you?” But they ignore us. The woman in the cocktail dress squats down in front of the gate in front of the stallion (who was sporting a good half metre erection, as stallions tend to) and poses with it making suggestive faces at the horses member while the driver camera guy is popping off shots like it’s a fashion shoot. We’re calling out that it’s not safe to be that close and she was lucky the horse didn’t strike out at her head. Whole episode takes about three really awkward minutes, they both get back in the car and leave, not like they were fleeing, but like this was normal. It’s like some people see farms and think they are parks or public places. We’re polite people and so the idea of yelling at someone and menacing them to leave seems absurd when you never thought you would have to do it. When you’re having a normal day at the barn and a sexified dwarf in a hooker outfit appears out of nowhere to forcibly take suggestive photos with your horse’s erection, you just kind of go with it, because you really can’t know what someone like that is capable of.
Even though I bear them no malice, I do wish they would go where they were welcome. You don’t get angry about the incursion until later, because in the moment you’re just confused because you’ve never met anyone that dumb before.
Nighttime, however, is a different situation altogether.
It’s a small mountainside here, almost a valley, so there are no lights except the stars and the moon. The city to the far south forms a dim halo of light pollution that reflects off the clouds over the horizon, but otherwise it is a rare absence of illumination. The kind of place you can still see stars. I’m often out in the middle of the field at night on a stool I bring out with me, just watching the sky, and you can hear packs of coywolves yipping and howling so close that sometimes even I actually get up and go back inside.
The nearest police station or hospital is about a thirty minute drive, and the house of my nearest visible neighbour is a 10 minute walk. It’s a risk I take because I am able bodied and have no fear of the dark, and being at peace in nature itself is worth everything that goes on. In the winter, I keep the lights off and let my eyes adjust to the moonlight on the snow and then go walking in the woods in the dark.
About once a week around ten or eleven at night, the high beams come. I can see them a mile off and I ignore them like normal traffic, but eventually, one of them slows down. The beams from the road shine through the livingroom window, and you can see them slowing down, looking for something in a place where there is nothing around. The cars slow to a crawl and stop. There’s nothing else to see outside now, because the beams make anything in front of them blind, and there they sit. Sometimes, the dull, omnidirectional thud of a subwoofer penetrates the walls of my room, and sometimes they just sit there with their engine running and their high beams on. Others put on their emergency flashers as if to bargain with some abstract sense of propriety. It’s about 50 yards from my door to the road, and if something were to escalate, law abiding people don’t really use guns in Canada so it’s uncertain how it would go. I would be surprised if people lurked in front of other peoples homes at night in Florida or Texas though.
If you live in the middle of nowhere where nobody else has any reason to be and someone pulls up and parks their car in front of your house at night, even as a reasonable person, what kind of odds are you calculating?
I have a high beam flashlight with a long distance lens that I use to shine on the parked cars to make them aware that they are not alone or invisible. It has a flashing setting that makes it pretty unambiguous that someone is out here in the dark and doesn’t find them welcome. I assume it’s lovers lane stuff, which is a polite euphemism for rutting in public, but the light is is enough attention to get their attention and get them to find somewhere more private. A few concessions over, you have to watch for groups of young men darting out of the bushes into the road at night, as it seems to have become a gay cruising area for Indian men from the suburbs as well. If something runs into the road at night in late August, it’s more likely to be a man than a deer, so you have to be extra careful. It’s the same kinds of cars, tinted windows, aftermarket rims, street racing team insignia and decals both day and night too. The grafitti on nearby rail bridges suggests gang activity but nobody takes them seriously because really, if you have to write the word “gang,” in your tag it’s probably not a thing. It’s just kids imitating. Though perhaps until it isn’t.
When the torch beam doesn’t move the car along, I get in my truck and drive out with my high beams on and sit behind them until they get unnerved and move. If you had people sitting in front of your house at night, the only thing to do is discourage them every time or you’re just going to get more, and the larger the sample, the greater the likelihood that one is a real problem. What you reward, you only get more of, and every car that lurks outside my house at night without acknowledgment is one that will come back. I live here, so making the point that this is someone’s home is a responsibility.
Driving out here to just “take pictures” during the day is a big part of why they are now here at night. A couple of times, I’ve sat in my truck with my lights on them and they just took it as a challenge and sat there. Instead of escalating and knocking on the window of a car in the middle of nowhere at night, I call the non-emergency number for the police and say there’s a suspicious car camped in front of my house that I need to treat as a risk, and would they send someone down the road when they free up. It takes police about forty minutes to an hour to respond, but both times the cars were still sitting there when the cruiser arrived. I never bothered to find out who they were. We can talk all day about the dangers of police encounters, but when you have someone who is ignoring cues to leave in the middle of the night, out in on a country back road with nobody there to witness or intervene, righteousness like that is hard to see as anything other than aggression and a source of danger. I’m all for the freedom to be anywhere you can make yourself welcome, but I don’t know that there’s a commensurate right to drive half an hour into the countryside to make yourself a private nuissance.
When they put it on the ‘gram, it just attracts imitators, and imitators of people doing nothing but imitating people taking pictures. There is no real experience or memory behind any of it, and most of what they “take” when they take pictures is the goodwill, privacy, and tolerance of the people who live out here. You can’t tell people these days that what makes nature beautiful is their absence.
The neighbour across the road has what you would describe as a large country estate, which happens to border the road I live on. It belongs to the children of a billionaire family who seem to be able to afford everything in the world, except fences that would keep tourists with jeeps and those leased rovers from driving off the road, up the bottom hill on their property, and holding tailgate parties. It’s so far from the main house they can’t see it, and those of us in the few cottage size places out here have to deal with the sort of people their failure to keep boundaries attracts.
I’m all for bush parties and I think they are a rite of passage for kids, and I’m from the generation of early ravers, where as kids we would get on strange school busses at two in the morning that would take us to secret locations, always somewhere we literally had no idea where we were going, and we would dance in front of subwoofers until the sun came up. What we didn’t do was have subwoofers in our cars where we decided what was missing from appreciating a bucolic, pastoral arcadia was 120-decibels of bhangra while squatting on some strangers lawn.
I think if there were a message to send, it’s that nature isn’t a platform. People who live out here worked their entire lives to be able to afford the peace it brings, and anyone can be welcome anywhere if only they actually respect and appreciate it. If you want to see nature, get some hiking boots and walk in it. Parking by the side of the road and taking pictures nobody cares about, putting your childrens’ hands near strange animals mouths, having tailgates and picnics on peoples lawns, creeping on peoples houses, pretending you are in Fast and Furious or a music video, tagging rocks and cliff faces with krylon, and going where you aren’t welcome is not only spiritually fugitive, it’s beneath your basic human dignity. So put the phone down, turn off your headlights, get out of your cars. If you are appreciative of your surroundings you will become welcome wherever you go.