BONUS: Justification Enough: Ableism and Backpacking

Em’s Bonus Blog Post, B8

This is the companion post to Bonus Episode 8 of the podcast, Shelley Redux. If you haven't listened yet, head there first — then come back here for everything I was still thinking about after we stopped recording and in my listen back.

Nikki and I spent a good chunk of the Bonus Episode circling one question: was Shelly an asshole or wasn't she? I stand by asking it–it's a fair question. But I want to sit here, separately, with something else. That question is giving me an out. If I can sort Shelly into a category of 'good person' or 'bad person,' well-meaning or unkind, then I get to know how I feel about what happened. A verdict resolves things. Ableism doesn't usually hand you a verdict, it hands you a gray area and asks you to live in it. Sometimes this looks like weighing out intention versus impact.

What actually happened at that breakfast, stripped of whether Shelly meant well: I was told that the things I needed were optional, and the things she needed were fine. Not because she checked, because she didn't have to. That's the part that doesn't depend on her being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at all. Regardless of what category Shelly is ultimately sorted into, the pillow was still framed as excess and the deodorant was still framed as sensible, and I was the one who had to do the math on which my own needs were allowed to count. And that's labor, my friends.

Zooming out, I don't think most ableism I run into wears a bad-actor face. I think it mostly looks like someone who has never had to ask permission to bring what their body requires, calmly explaining to someone who does that that they're overthinking or ‘too much.’ It doesn't require malice. It just requires one person's normal to be treated as the baseline for everyone, and the other person's normal to be treated as preferences. Shelly didn't invent this dynamic. She just used it.

That baseline gets built into the sport itself. Backpacking culture runs on numbers: base weight, mileage, elevation gain. And somewhere those numbers stopped being logistics and started being a scorecard. The lighter your pack, the more it's supposed to say about you and your dedication. Disability advocates in the outdoors have pointed out the same pattern for years: accessible trails get treated as the controversial addition, while a trail existing at all, unpaved and unramped, gets treated as neutral. The "hard way" is legitimate. The accommodated way has to explain itself. That's not a Shelly problem. That's the whole culture that gets mirrored in how backpackers treat each other.

Even the ultralight gatekeepers will tell you, if you push them, that there's no real defined spot behind where the line sits between "light" and "not light enough”. Why? Because it's invented, it's status, it's gatekeeping wearing a scale. Which means the deodorant-in-a-Ziploc-bag standard I was being held to at that breakfast was never actually about ounces. It was about who gets to decide what counts as necessary, and it is almost never the person who has to live inside the need.

What gets me now, nine-years later, isn't the 'things' of it (e.g., the pillow). It's that I didn't have the word "accommodation" yet, so I didn't have a category or a justification to put my own needs in; in 2017, it was just a failure to pack "right." I didn't need Shelly to be kind, I needed a framework I didn't have yet. And that points not to a Shelly-problem but a systemic one that I'm still learning how to operate in. That I can name what I carry as accommodation instead of an apology.

Maybe I don't need to know if Shelly was an asshole. I think what I want is to stop needing the answer to feel okay about what happened in Mammoth. The harm doesn't wait on her verdict.