o you want to go to Banff with me on Labour Day weekend?”
It’s early August and my friend Mirusha and I are sitting in front of a waterfall a few hours outside of Toronto. The water is colder than we had thought it would be, but we’re making the most of it.
I had Facetimed her a couple days earlier to ask if she wanted to rent a car with me and plan a day trip for the two of us to go hiking, do shrooms, and drive around rural Ontario blaring Megan Thee Stallion. As we drive around I’m constantly pointing out how beautiful the province is—evergreen trees, windmills, the acres of farmland. I scream every time I see a cow. Mirusha tells me to pay attention to the road.
Like most of our friends, we’ve had to make a shift to hanging out almost exclusively in the outdoors in the midst of a pandemic. Our time spent together ranges from short park hangs, days spent with Neptune—Mirusha’s rescue bull terrier—on the Toronto Island, shrooming in High Park, ending our nights sitting in parking lots talking about our parents. We love our Toronto summers, but as the months go by we find ourselves craving new experiences that take us further and further from the city. Maybe we’re just bored.
So I tell her we should go to Banff. That I so badly want to see mountains. That I’m obsessed with the idea of the two of us—two absolutely annoying brown kids from the city with no hiking experience or gear—climbing a mountain as we close one of our most memorable summers spent together.
Mirusha laughs. We’re surrounded by young white families at the spot we’re at, and there’s a couple nearby taking Instagram shots of themselves while being pummelled underneath the waterfall. Romantic af.
She says she’ll have to check with her work. Over the next few weeks, I slowly convinced her over a few more Facetime sessions. After a few weeks of meticulous planning (I get off on building itineraries), we hop on a plane to Calgary. 

s my melatonin starts to kick in on the plane, I think about how before this summer, neither of us—like most brown kids—would have called ourselves “outdoors-y.” Brown kids do not spend time in the outdoors growing up, at least in Toronto. Being “outdoors” for recreation was not a part of our cultural curriculum. My childhood was not spent going for hikes on the weekend with my family or learning how to ski. It was spent accompanying my dad to the West-Indian grocery store down the street, going to Albion Mall to watch Hindi films on the big screen, and walking with my siblings to spend time at our grandmother’s apartment during our summer vacations.
I wonder why this is, and how I’ve been conditioned to have a strained connection to the outdoors. I know from this summer that spending time outdoors costs $$$ and time—both of which my parents did not have in excess. I know that brown people rarely see themselves in outdoor recreation catalogues. I think back to the first time I walked into a Mountain Equipment Co-op in downtown Toronto when I was 21, hunting for the perfect Nalgene water bottle, and was instead blinded by posters of white women cyclists. I remember grabbing a few CLIF bars and promptly hauling my ass out of that store as soon as I could.
In a city that loves to boast about its wooded ravines as a point of civic pride, and easily accessible by transit, I think about how Toronto’s outdoor spaces always seem to be populated by white folk. Even with the off chance that we can, brown people just aren’t going outside. I wonder if others also have felt like they don’t belong in the outdoors. Do they see the outdoors as a white space? What are the consequences of that feeling? What are brown kids missing out on?
Mirusha and I arrive in Calgary, meet up with our shrooms dealer at a parking lot outside a Cabela’s near the Calgary Airport (he hops in the car and we are slightly uncomfortable) before driving to Banff. Mirusha comments that she thinks he’s hot and I say “Ew, absolutely not.” We practice radical honesty together.
A couple hours into our drive, mountains appear in the distance. We take a second to turn down the volume on our music. Mountains. We smile and cry and scream. SZA’s “20 Something” plays quietly in the background. We talk and laugh about how jealous we are that kids growing up on the West Coast have mountains in their backyards, while Ontario kids have Niagara Falls, which is inarguably, much less exciting. We feel scammed.
Over the next few days, we take our time getting ready before heading out on our planned day-long hikes. I meditate and get our sandwiches for the day ready while Mirusha writes in her journal. Our mornings are slow and quiet. We try our best to divide up the shrooms equally so that we can share in the same heightened experience as we set out on our hikes. Who needs a scale?

lberta is different from home. As we begin our climbs, we see cute brown families who are here for the long weekend, their hikes usually ending at the first rest stop on the trail. On one morning, before we hop into our car, we see a small Tamil family staying at the same hotel with us, playing with their two young children. Mirusha asks me if it’d be bothersome to ask if they’d like a photograph. I say no, and we share twenty special minutes with the family, taking photos of their kids and getting their emails so that we can send them over once we get back home. We share a small moment with them, and I wonder if they’re as happy to connect with other brown people in this space as much as we are.
Over the next few days, Mirusha and I climb mountains. We tell ourselves that we feel powerful, and that we can do anything. We stop every five minutes to take in the sights, and I keep falling in love. I say sorry out loud as I collect some flowers to frame them when I return home, we share an AirPod each as we listen to the Little Women soundtrack together and pretend we’re in our own movie as we peak and debate whether or not Timothee Chalamet is good in bed (we think he is, but only when he wants to be). Mirusha says that hats are like a hug for your head. I talk about how I feel like this is the closest thing to falling in love. We say we want to move to the West Coast to be closer to nature, perhaps to make up for the time we’ve lost so far.
We cannot stop laughing together as we climb, sharing little moments of joy. I’m so aware that I’m living in a memory. We belong here too.
As we go deeper into our trails, the brown faces become fewer and fewer, and our company in the outdoors quickly becomes exclusively white. At a rest stop, one girl tells us that she can see Mirusha’s orange toque in the background of all of her photos, and that she loves our bright colour palettes - purples, blues, oranges. I notice that most of the white folk we’ve seen on the trail wear more natural hues like black and browns. We later talk about making an outdoors clothing line exclusively for POC, with clothes that are exceptionally bright and vibrant, that announce our arrival and claim our space without having to say much.
“Is anyone else even seeing this!!!!???” I yell when we stop at Mirror Lake.
I make mental notes on the hikers that pass us by, observing that they’re not engaging with their surroundings in the same way that we are. They walk, they stop, and then they continue without missing a beat. We hear them say things like, “the view is *so* much better around the corner,” and I wonder why they can’t appreciate what’s right in front of them. I joke that that’s a symptom of capitalism, of never feeling satisfied with what you’re given, and of aiming to extract more than you need from one experience. I still think some of this is true.
I meditate on my relationship to the land at one point when I can feel myself peaking. I think about what my Indian ancestors felt when they were brought to Guyana on boats to cultivate, to tend, and to care for the lush, gorgeous, tropical lands that in turn sustained them. I had been looking at this entire summer as a new discovery of my love for nature, but what if my entire experience had actually been more of a rediscovery of that love and care for the land that my ancestors felt, and had passed down. I wonder what a white person feels connected to when they see what I’m seeing.
Mirusha and I leave Banff feeling whole, and happy. 

few months later, while cleaning out my parents’ garage, I come across a few photos of my siblings and I—we’re all outside in a forest, neatly sitting across a log in a line. My two brothers are waving at my dad (the photographer) and my sister and I are looking pensively at the camera. I take a seat to look at it more clearly—four brown kids who look happy to spend some time frolicking with their Dad outside on a Saturday, soaking up some sun and fresh air. I want this for brown kids everywhere.