with nature at that level never appealed to her much, and frankly it didn’t much to me, either. Whenever we hit a campground that had running water and indoor plumbing, she always seemed to cheer up and view camping as not so bad, really. I’ve since done my share of long hikes and roughing it in the bush, but I would still pick a decently equipped campground over the backwoods experience any day. I don’t know what that makes me, but what it does not make me is an outdoorsman.
We never journeyed too far away on our short camping trips around Alberta. We camped at Elbow Falls, just outside Calgary, or at Gull Lake, north of Red Deer. These were short trips, but in my memory they were some distance from home, journeys we had to plan for, pack up for, bring the tent, and generally just be organized about (to the degree that we were ever organized). I don’t think we camped much at these spots after I was about ten or twelve years old, but our early trips remain evocative for me, a true removal from home and our life there. Part of it was that we called it “a vacation,” which instantly gave it a meaning it wouldn’t have otherwise had. We had so little money when I was in elementary school that I’m sure my parents called camping at Gull Lake a “vacation” so that we could at least tell our friends we’d done something over the summer break.
But looking back, it seems clear to me now that what made our early camping trips worth remembering was the tent, the same one we would eventually take to Mexico; it may have been a beast, but it was a magical beast. The thing was gigantic and like no other tent I’d seen before or since. There were different rooms, caverns, corners, places to hide, folds from which to leap out and frighten a sibling, a hundred different smells, a separate room for the kids, a “living room,” our parents’ room, a front awning that always acted as a kind of water basin when it rained. It was both a curse and a temple, the kind of tent that for some reason my imagination wants to give a trapdoor leading to the underworld. A lack of plumbing may have prevented us from camping more, but the primary reason had to be the tent. Yes, it may have been a child’s portal, but it was also so daunting a proposition to set it up that I think my dad had to gird himself for days and weeks beforehand just to get in the proper mindset. It was so monstrously heavy and bulky and finicky that it made any trip—one night or ten—something that required full emotional commitment, not to mention a few days of Marine Corps physical preparation. Remember, we’re talking 1970 here. This was not a tent made of the lightweight waterproof fabrics of today, with their hollow, high-strength aluminum poles. Putting up one of today’s tents is a breezy five-minute stroll compared to the full-pack, army-boot, abusive-drill-sergeant swampy day-hike that was the erecting of that tent. It was not just a nightmare to put up, but I’m sure once it was up my father never slept, consumed as he must have been by nightmares of having to take it down. There were hundreds of poles of differing lengths, none of them attached by the interior elastic of today’s tents. They were heavy suckers, too, capable of braining you if one dropped on your head during decamping. Thick skin-shredding twine, attached to the four corners of the eternally useless rain guard, had to be regularly uncoiled and recoiled from many metres away. The tent itself was made of oiled canvas that through years of wear and tear had lost most of its ability to repel water but none of its ability to stain your clothes, leave streaks on your skin, integrate and return odour, and resist folding. It was a solid material, probably an eighth of an inch thick, and was so stiff that folding it, and keeping it folded, was like trying to fold thick rubber; you could do it, but unless you literally stood on it until the moment it was roped, it would spring back into some new, shapeless and utterly demoralizing version of itself. It was a kind of freestyle fabric origami, though by the time we’d been at it for an hour or so, it veered closer to Noh drama, a silent, haunting tale of frustration (and repression, surely, given my father couldn’t swear nearly to the degree I’m sure he wanted to, with six impressionable children looking to him as a role model).
Yes, our tent was a portal to a different experience, a family experience, but putting that beast up and deconstructing it afterwards was always a kind of test, a passage of a different sort, one in which our patience, and particularly my father’s, was taken to the limits of human endurance. You might think I’m joking, but I’m not. Compressed into its so-called “packed” state, it would have easily crushed a small dog or disabled a young child had it toppled from the roof of the station wagon.
Our camping trips today, with our two girls, are a mixture of the farce of yesteryear and the discomfort of an aging body lying on a rocky surface with crawling ants. We do insist on camping occasionally, and it often turns out to be fun, but as often as not, it’s more of an exercise in “teaching our children” something outdoorsy (what that is, precisely, I’m not sure). This was compounded in recent years by tossing a deaf dog with bladder problems into the mix, and into the tent—a small and light tent, I should add. Who says we can’t learn from the past?
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Given that camping has long been, and still is, a vacation choice for so many families, it’s somewhat surprising that the formal history of camping is not that long. You’d think that camping out would have been something started pretty much the minute we dragged our knuckles off the ground and learned to walk upright. I suppose the difference is that when you didn’t really have any other options but to live outdoors you couldn’t really call it camping. Neanderthal man did not come home from a hard week of hunting and gathering to suggest to his wife and the little Neanderthals that they should get out of that smelly, dank cave and trek a few miles across the Serengeti (which you may be surprised to learn was not then known as the Serengeti) so as to pitch a mastodon-hide tent and roast meat over an open fire for a few days. That wasn’t a holiday, that was daily living. I can hear it now: “Dad, you said we were going to do something fun. That’s not fun. We might as well just stay home. That sucks.” At which point the Neanderthal dad, in time-honoured tradition, would have responded that that was just as fine with him and he’d be perfectly happy to stay home and get some work done on the cave painting, only to witness the intervention of the mother, urging family unity, reiterating that the family that vacations together evolves together. (It occurs to me as I write this that it’s entirely possible our original family tent was, in fact, not canvas but a mastodon hide, passed down from generation to generation, and evolutionary adaptation to evolutionary adaptation, absorbing every smell across the millennia, until it finally arrived at a garage sale where my father immediately recognized it as the only campsite dwelling fit for his children.)
Camping as we know it today only became a leisure pursuit once people had leisure to use, so perhaps it’s no surprise then that camping did not come into being as a pursuit until the decade or so prior to the First World War. The founder of so-called recreational camping—as opposed to the Cro-Magnon or Civil War survival variety—is generally acknowledged to be Thomas Hiram Holding. He wrote the original Campers Handbook in 1908, and many have written about how his understanding of how to live in the outdoors came from having crossed the plains of the United States with his parents in 1853. He was also a dedicated bicyclist and often rode and camped around the UK, and in fact wrote a book entitled Cycle and Camp in Connemara. Historians have said that it was this very trip that led Holding to create the Association of Cycle Campers in 1901, which had thirteen original members. It was the inaugural meeting of that association that led to the founding of what is today called the Camping and Caravanning Club.
Holding had hit upon something. Just five years later his organization had over five hundred members and modern camping was effectively born. Camping clubs sprang up all over the UK, and there was soon a breakaway club, led by Holding, that ditched cycling and devoted itself strictly to camping, though they did rejoin a few years later, only to then join with another group in 1910, all of which was then singly known as the National Camping Club. That membership was listed at 820 campers in its initial year.
Real world events soon intervened, of course, but after the First World War, camping picked up again as a leisure pursuit. It’s worth remembering that camping at that time was essentially a novelty pursuit of the wealthy; the lower and middle classes still did not possess organized or formalized workers’ power or rights, and such things as paid days off were still to come. So although camping, as the leisure pursuit
