Camping with cats, I’ve decided, is an act of personal defiance, a disruption to the single-cat-lady stereotype—the one where you’re tragically sad, tucked away with your cats listening to soundtracks of endless misery. But we’re not home today, and our only soundtrack is the open road.
Pope Francis argued a life with pets instead of children is meaningless, and JD Vance tried to shame childless cat ladies, even as studies report that solo women are the happiest demographic. I used to tell my students that, even if they want to settle down in their hometown, go somewhere else for a few years and make the active choice to return. Make the choice, whatever it is. Don’t let your life happen by default.
Nothing about camping with cats is default.
I started camping with cats because Galway was scared of everything, and Maeve was 12 pounds of blue-eyed Siamese evil. Neither could be left behind, and we figured out how to manage Galway’s fragile mental health and make sure Maeve couldn’t enact world domination from the front window.
Twelve years later, in 2021, with both original cats gone to the great campground in the sky, I parked my Scamp in my dad’s driveway for my long summer visit. No sooner had I reattached the newly repaired Scamp screen door than four very tiny paws poked new holes in the screen as he perfected his Sir Edmund Hillary impression.
Dublin! We just replaced that!
He looked me dead in the eye and meowed the mrow of a very tiny kitten arguing he is indeed an apex predator.
Dude, just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
He gave me one last snarky mrow, then gave me his back.
I hadn’t expected to get a new cat so soon after Galway died suddenly from a stroke two weeks before, but my sister’s boss’ sister-in-law was trying to find homes for kittens, and I brought home a tiny silver tabby with purple peets (paws) and an ocelot belly who didn’t weigh more than 2 pounds. When we arrived home to Chattanooga, Dara, a golden-eyed brown tabby kitten, staked out her space in the Scamp.
Camping with cats is not just about defying the stereotypes of society’s idea about what a proper female solo camper looks like. It’s a delicate art of adaptation, understanding that your travel companions have boundaries just like you do, and their version of the outdoors is a little different from yours, but everybody appreciates being curled up on the bed as a storm rages and nobody has to go outside for any reason.
People might eventually understand what compels me to travel, but they’ll never understand why I travel alone with my cats. In the end, camping is about finding comfort in a world that tells you how you should live. It’s a gentle rebellion, a declaration that your version of adventure is valid, no matter who’s doing the backseat driving.
Karen Babine is the two-time Minnesota book award-winning author of Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of Northern Life; All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer; and The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo. She is a UC Foundation associate professor of English at UT Chattanooga.