We are in a store, my brother and me. Two kids cut loose, roving with the snaking line of metal carts. Listening to the registers, the PA system, the beeps when a cashier scans an item at checkout. All sounds of us entering another realm. A world full of choice and color, brighter and bigger than any place we have seen before.
When we are in Walmart, we are in paradise.
Every barcode an organism, each shelf its own ecosystem.
Wheat fields that unfold into boxes of cereal. Icelandic glaciers preserved in plastic; frozen giants carved into the rim of a yogurt container. Water from FIJI. Water from the French Alps. Water from Deer Park and Poland Spring, and Mountain Spring, and an untouched natural Spring in Norway. Most natural springs are untouched by man, at least the version of these springs as rendered in this aisle.
There are the cherry blossom body lotions and botanical shampoos in bloom year-round. Pictures of plants I can walk by without sneezing or erupting in a skin rash.
A garden that isn’t a garden but is an image of a garden with flat, glossy florets of green and yellow and red that if we look long enough evoke something from deep inside of us.
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One of my favorite past times growing up was scouring the pages of what we called the nature magazines. Outside. Discover. National Geographic for kids. Coffee-table worthy journals with slick photographs I’d hock from the library, or more often, thumb through at Walmart.
The first time I saw sand dunes was in the newsstand section while my mom shopped for groceries. Seated on the tile beneath the fluorescent lights, I remember looking at a spread that showed these dazzling white mounds in New Mexico, their ridges partially covered in a shadow that moved when I tilted the page. It felt so alive.
Beyond the walls of the air-conditioned store were flatlands. These landscapes—the grim shades of sky, dusty roads, decaying houses—are what many consider classic symbols that characterize the American Heartland. Cliched images that portrayed our region as bleak and gothic. Luckily, I had my magazines.
Walmart didn’t have the best reputation back then either, but it was what we had, so that’s where we went and often.
Where we processed film, replaced small pets like hamsters and fish, selected deer rifles, purchased our toys, clothes, food, power tools.
Where the public restrooms were spacious and clean, and I would know, because I was a kid with a bad stomach.
Where my brother and I would roam on the weekends like older kids who hung out at the mall.
We raced carts, hid in the clothing racks, fought over the one pair of headphones available at a music listening kiosk, sampling every album available. We stared at magic eye posters until our eyes blurred, and the 3D graphic of a shark magically popped out.
That’s what we were after when we were young, just me and my big brother, wandering through a big store trying to see all that we could, knowing that around every corner was the possibility of discovering something new.
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Indoor kid. That was me.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be outdoors but my desire to be outside was met with obstacles. I was allergic to most things past our front door.
Anytime I stepped into our yard I’d return with a runny nose or worse. Red legs, swollen arms, a fever.
From what exactly? Breathing too close to the wrong plant? The sun? It was a mystery that always ended the same. Me at the doctor. Me on a steroid. Me stuck inside watching my brother and his friends from a window, struggling to hold still as my mom pats me with a cotton ball of pink calamine lotion. Me hollering out their names through the screen hoping someone will look up and come to my rescue. Wishing that my mom would give in to my cries and let me run into the wide open air.
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There is a fetish that lives in many of us, an infatuation with big wilderness. Expansive countryside. Panoramic views. A desire for all nature to be not only beautiful but big too. An American impulse to always have our gaze fixed ahead on the next frontier, opting to ignore our history of violence in favor of more romantic portrayals of journeying beyond borders.
In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, eco-critic William Cronon satirically writes, “…if it doesn’t give us God’s eye views or grand vistas, if it doesn’t permit us the illusion that we are alone on the planet, then it really isn’t natural.”
It’s no wonder sites like the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Mount Rainier were the first to be named national parks. Or that many of the most notable nonfiction books featured in The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2025 are titles that center on our desire for adventure and great big bodies of water—“Is a River Alive?” (Robert Macfarlane), “A Marriage at Sea” (Sophie Elmhirst), “The Place of Tides” (James Rebanks), “In Praise of Floods” (James C. Scott). Each narrative resides at an intersection of landscape, history, and humanity, the self as told by virtue of one large geographic footprint.
The greater the landscape, the more treacherous the expedition for the writer, the more aspirational the story, and, higher the title seems to climb on the bestseller lists.
Because what’s more enticing than a writer promising to offer us a glimpse of untouched wilderness?
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My parents didn’t travel or own passports; my mom worked at a food processing plant that produced salad dressing with pictures of hidden valleys of ranch, and my dad took inventory of those same bottles at the supercenter up north.
Each morning, before the store opened, he and the other associates had a ritual. It was called The Cheer, which, as the name suggests, functioned as a pep rally with music, dancing, and inspirational speeches to get the teams psyched for the workday. It ended with the crowd of workers in blue vests chanting “We-are-Walmart!”
They clapped with a familiar cadence and tone of “U-S-A.”
As a kid, it all sounded fun to me, but my dad wasn’t the cheerleading type.
He wasn’t the uniform-wearing type either. In previous jobs he decided what he wore to work. Long sleeves, basic tees, jeans, any shoe with a steel-toe—clothing designed so he could work safely and freely while washing dishes or building decks or laminating notebook covers at the paper factory.
At Walmart, he was on the floor with customers. People with questions, looking for an associate who had all the answers.
To avoid being mistaken for a company spokesperson, my dad ditched the true blue employee signature smock and all its big yellow spark logos.
He clipped his name tag to the front pocket of a grey short sleeve shirt. Walked the aisles, concentrated, counting, with one goal: blend in.
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At 19-years-old, I met someone who liked to stand out. He was older, as they always are, taller too, and often bragged that he was not from a Walmart household, but a country-club going family.
He was nothing like my high school boyfriend who worked as a cashier at my dad’s store.
Against my better judgement, this older man and I started dating. We spent our time together outside. In fact, it was his unbridled enthusiasm for the natural world that initially drew me into him.
Our first date was not over a candlelight dinner. Instead, we took a sweaty hike along the banks of the muddy, rushing river not far from where we both grew up. His idea. He was someone who ran ultra marathons and who had summited Mount Rainier. An endurance athlete. Toned and confident. A slender Paul Bunyan, with the beard and wardrobe of lumberjack reds, plaids, and raw denim. A real American folk hero.
When he suggested an afternoon walk on the water, I was surprised. Once we were on a local path—a trail we both frequented separately as kids—I was curious to learn more about this person who had suddenly taken an interest in me.
There we were. At the water’s edge, shoe prints disappearing into silken topsoil. Nothing to say to one another. No gossip or small talk about the heat.
After an hour under the Missouri sun, we paused to watch the rapids. We swatted at mosquitos against our bare legs. Kicked at loose chunks of gravel. He picked up a pebble and threw it sideways, and we both watched as it skipped three beats west toward Kansas. He had an arm like a major league ballplayer. It was impressive. Again and again, he’d whip his arm forward, the small white pebble would bounce effortlessly off the surface. He was so good at skipping rocks, I soon stopped releasing my sinkers to collect, for him, all the flat pebbles in the area.
Amidst the rocks, we stood for a while. Studied the wind. Asked get-to-know-you questions—at what age did you start coming around here, have you always wanted to work in an office—it could have been a job interview rather than a date. He continued to talk about work, which turned to travel. As if reading through a shopping list, he rattled off places he’d been: London, Paris, Tokyo. In undergrad, he lived in Niigata, Japan.
I nodded and pulled my hair up off my neck. As someone who could count on one hand how many times I’d been on an airplane, there wasn’t much I could contribute to the conversation with an experienced traveler who had nearly a decade of adventures to his name. So, it was all “wow” and “what was that like” from my end.
The more he spoke, the further my eyebrows raised.
I flicked a rock, putting extra zip on it with my wrist.
Twice the rock bounced, which earned me a wink and a “nice one.”
Our eyes met and his, suddenly, were bright and blue. Mine were big as saucers.
It wouldn’t be long after that day on the river before I locked into a new need, this yearning to explore, see the world, experience him, which meant to experience the outdoors.
Over wine and a comically large atlas unfolded across his kitchen table, he made more lists that included both of our names at the top. Kyoto. Stockholm. Bend, Oregon.
Like skipping stones, our hearts drunkenly skipped across state lines and terrains as we mapped our future together.
Our bodies were open. Ensconced in endless dusk. Diving into one another. Nose to nose, to forehead, to cheek. We existed, and for a while, that was enough.
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We married and moved away from my parents, into the mountains.
My world expanded, overwhelmingly so, but not in the direction I hoped.
He traveled less, worked more. Wanted to start a family soon.
Meanwhile, all I wanted was a job. Except no one would hire me. I applied to ad agencies and newsrooms, positions at Target, Walmart and any of the other supermarts in the area. Most days I filled out applications and drove around to pass the time.
In the mornings, I dropped him at the corner of Pearl Street and 14th, then sped off with a set of good, productive intentions for the day. More applications. Perhaps a hike.
But instead of pulling into one of the trail heads along the Flatirons, I found myself driving away from the foothills toward the suburbs. Stopping at a supercenter in Lafayette. Sometimes one in Bloomfield. Sometimes I would go in and smell all of the shampoos. Or bounce one of the large inflatable balls around the home and garden department. Pause and admire the gallery of picture frames and their various sizes of black and white pastoral stock images. Bucolic portraits that to anyone else may have seemed generic, but to me felt like little dreamscapes that transported me to somewhere familiar.
Normally, I didn’t buy anything but enjoyed pushing the cart around the store. There was something about the sound of the metal carts when you’d pull one from the bunch at the corral, the noise of the wheels on the asphalt, and the satisfaction of pushing them all back together. It was enough to almost make me forget about being homesick.
Soon I began dealing with another type of ‘sick.’ The kind that makes going outside and trudging up mountains tough, and having babies nearly impossible. Holidays, anniversaries, and birthdays interspersed with a series of tests all blurred together, like one big magic eye poster, its meaning still obscured to the untrained eye.
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It has always been there, a backdrop in the photograph of my life.
Beneath the surface growing where they shouldn’t be. Traversing beyond the borders of my uterus in search of a new frontier.
Under a laparoscopy lens, its cells are fire red, or black like sesame seeds. Some have no pigment at all.
Mine are white as salt. Microscopic pebbles that have washed up on every surface within their path. The stomach, bowel, bladder, ovaries.
Over time, these endometrium-like pebbles bury in the tissue, creating their own little landscapes in the process.
I bleed for weeks. My lower half swells until it feels my skin may burst. I am told this is all natural. To “let nature take its course.” To keep my sights on the bigger picture, but it was difficult to see past the loss.
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Our eyes are constantly looking for the big picture. Scanning for faces, patterns, colors, movement, a clue that tells us where to focus our attention first.
We see the world through high resolution filters. Brands become our chaperones to exotic landscapes. Never mind the break in aesthetic—the golden arches pop-up along the interstate while driving through Death Valley like the sudden appearance of a roadside oasis. One glimpse of a familiar logo sets our ambling hearts at ease.
There is an argument for omitting these aspects of modern life from literature, one that dates back to the origins of American nature writing. Early pioneers of the genre—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Annie Dillard—believed that technology and consumerism had no place in understanding the environment and all its physical existence.
Few adults can truly see nature, according to Emerson.
How can we see nature more clearly? If Emerson were asked this question, he would suggest we distance ourselves from society and fully immerse into the natural world.
Thoreau quit his day job at the pencil factory and retreated to the shores of Walden Pond, where he lived for twenty-six months, penning his ode to simple living.
Dillard escaped into the Blue Ridge Mountains to write her Pulitzer-prize winning debut, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.”
In neither of these canonical texts do we the reader see the contemporary conveniences supporting both writers behind the scenes. Thoreau’s mom who helped with his laundry, or Dillard’s husband and university-affiliated residence she returned to after a long day of fieldwork.
We see the loon bathe in Walden’s waters.
We watch a giant water bug suck a frog out of its skin on the banks of the Roanoke River.
We linger on each gruesome detail like a voice over of a nature documentary as the camera inches in closer to predator and prey, captivated by what we are witnessing and also in knowing that no one is coming to intervene in the natural order of the world, no matter how violent its events.
In this style of nature writing, skylines are formed around trees and mountain tops, landscapes are rendered as nearly void of other humans.
An illusion is upheld: wilderness untouched.
Today there is a CVS within a five-minutes from Thoreau’s cabin. A Whole Foods within 15 minutes, and three Walmart Supercenters each within a twenty-minute drive.
If part of a writer’s job is to help us better see nature, then, as the landscape continues to radically change, how does one responsibly write about nature in the current moment?
How does one render a modern world that is both truthful and beautiful? Is it possible to maintain a naturalist framework while writing the current American landscape? In creative nonfiction, one can argue this is no more than a challenge of craft: rewrite reality in the image you wish to see. An act that requires one to buy into a flattened reality, to write without looking above the horizon.
I don’t want to write about Walmart, but I also can’t remove it from the backdrop of this essay, of my autobiographical archive, of the culture, of this country, of this moment in time when Walmart is the landscape for so many people.
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My mom flew out for my first surgery. She said she was coming to help around our apartment. But I think it was so I didn’t do anything stupid like try to get on a plane. Which was what my husband was planning. He was antsy to get us back in the air and on track. He had visions of us flying somewhere romantic and warm. The bags were packed, and we weren’t even out of the hospital.
When I was finally able, my mom and I took a walk.
She picked a destination nearby: a Target. Not the same, but close enough.
My stomach was bandaged and protruding over my sweatpants.
I held it with two hands, widened my stance, and slowly stepped in a side-to-side motion so I didn’t bump anything and nothing bumped me.
Checkout was crowded. Chaotic. People standing, sighing loudly, looking around for our cashier, someone, anyone in a red shirt to run interference.
The store was understaffed.
Enough time had passed, the judgment of a man immediately in front of us, for him to act. He began to make movements that signaled to us, the rest of the cue, that his patience was up. He paced in place. Then, called out. “Hello?” he shouted.
“There’s a pregnant lady over here for Christ’s sake,” he waved one hand above his head.
There is? I scanned the row until I realized he was pointing at me.
“Should I correct him?” my mom whispered.
It was warmer than usual. I wasn’t looking so hot either. Like I might faint.
As everyone around us expressed their discomfort, I was oddly calm. Sweating, but calm. Maybe it was the heavy pain meds, but it felt nice to have her in my corner.
My mom kept looking at me then back at the guy, our unofficial spokesperson. She was ready for us to leave.
If it wasn’t too much to ask, I told my mom, let’s stay.
I haven’t lived in that mountain town or with that older man in almost a decade. People have told me he’s remarried and has a family. Travels overseas and posts their trips online. I haven’t seen the pictures but if they ever come across my screen, I’d like them. For now, I’m scheduled to have another procedure. Am focused on what’s immediately ahead. The smaller landscapes.
