movement. The lower and middle classes didn’t own cars or land on which to camp. North American camping at this time was almost certainly of the pioneering or homesteading variety, borne of necessity rather than leisure or desire to get back to the land.
In the years between the wars, camping continued to grow in popularity. One of the principal camping clubs of the UK at the time, the Camping Club of Great Britain and Ireland, had Sir Robert Baden-Powell—the man who started the Boy Scouts—as its president. The Second World War interrupted the growth of camping, although in Britain many sought to escape German bombing by going to the countryside; fascinatingly, this very well may have been one of the progenitors of camping as a family pursuit (although most fathers were off at war). Mothers and their children, wanting to escape the horror and danger, fled to the countryside; many of them had to camp because they were not wealthy enough to own second homes.
In the years following the Second World War, camping truly began to grow, particularly as a family pursuit. By this time, workers’ rights were becoming more entrenched and, helped by the rise of the automobile, the good highway system, and many thousands of new campsites in the national parks, camping exploded as a cheap and accessible family pursuit. By the 1960s, it would be no exaggeration to say that the family camping trip—piling into the car, tent on the roof, hitting the open highway, finding a national park, setting up camp, and hanging out for a week—became the norm for the lower-and middle-class family vacation. (Caravans and trailers experienced rapid gains in popularity during this time, as well, but I’ll discuss those further on.)
That was then, but what of now? Martin Hogue, writing for the Design Observer in 2009, noted that the Kampgrounds of America—the KOA to most of us—had five million visitors at its sites across North America, and that there were 113,000 federally managed campsites in the United States and 166,000 campsites in various state parks, as well as a virtually uncountable number in private facilities. But, writes Hogue, modern camping displays a strange contradiction, in that it is “defined and serviced by an increasingly sophisticated range of utilities and conveniences, and yet marketed to perpetuate the cherished American ideal of the backwoods camp.” In other words, we like to think we’re roughing it, but, really, we’re not. There was certainly no sophistication to our camping in the mastodon-hide tent, however; it was anarchy, pretty much like every day at home—a scramble for cereal at the picnic table, a frenzied rush to get a wiener on a stick for dinner. And there’s no sophistication in our camping today with Jess and Grace; there’s a primitive cast to our dinners, eased only by the presence of a slosh of wine in a cheap plastic cup.
But what Hogue is talking about is part of the larger narrative of today’s vacations, including family vacations, a phenomenon that I think is increasingly peculiar to our era and to relatively rich and cocooned westernized populations. We want authenticity, but we also desire comfort and security, which, again, reflects the matrix of safety versus experience. Camping sits at the intersection of the competing desires for safety and experience; it offers a gateway to the natural world, to a simpler existence, to a better understanding of and sympathy towards the planet and our fellow creatures—all fine and desirable things—yet so many of us want all this but with good plumbing and WiFi. Most of us, myself included, have become, in some way or another, acolytes worshipping at the altar of Gear. We want great gear, high-end gear, the best gear. Waterproofed, Velcroed, leathered, Gore-Texed, and micro-layered to within an inch of our lives, we set off into the wilderness in our SUVs and ATVs for an authentic back-to-nature experience . . . and if something bad happens, well, hopefully we’ll still be within cell range. If not, the GPS locator will help the rescuers to find us. We remain shocked when, every year, someone dies after getting lost in the backwoods or attacked by a cougar or skiing on an out-of-bounds slope. Well, that’s what’s supposed to happen in nature. Life in the natural world is nasty, brutish, and short, and the surprise is that it doesn’t happen more often.
But it doesn’t happen more often because we’ve tamed it to our will for the most part. Which is why camping, particularly as a family exercise, can be fun and inexpensive—the reasons for its popularity with families—but which most of the time cannot really be classed as an authentic journey into the natural world. At least not the way we camp; I think my daughter Jessica would revolt if she had to spend more than a day away from her hair straightener. Hogue notes ironically that a “campsite” in any major park today ain’t what it used to be. “Each ‘lone’ campsite,” he writes, “functions as a stage upon which cultural fantasies can be performed in full view of an audience of fellow campers interested in much the same ‘wilderness’ experience. Who in the camping community has not experienced a degree of gear envy at the sight, on a neighbouring camp, of a brand new Primus Gravity II EasyFuel stove (with piezo ignition), a Sierra Designs tent, or a Marmot sleeping bag?” KOA rents out permanently parked Airstream trailers, which means “campers” don’t even have to bring any equipment.
Little wonder then that the things we used to have to do just to stay alive when camping—find wood, chop it, draw water, clear a site, hunt for food—are now, says Hogue, nothing but a series of “almost spiritual rituals intended to reconnect the camper with what has been largely lost.” Now, instead of clearing a site, chopping wood, and finding water, we show up at a campsite, park the car, pitch lightweight tents, grab some food at the camp store, hook up our electricity, light up the propane stove, and set up our patio chairs.
In other words, we’re just playing at it.
Not that there’s anything inherently wrong or immoral about that, though it’s interesting to remember that campgrounds were originally created to protect nature from campers as much as campers from nature. It’s ironic that so many of these sites we consider “outdoorsy” actually serve to separate us from nature. Many of today’s larger campsites have conveniences such as water taps, electrical outlets, toilets and showers, all of which make “nature” something of an abstraction. We’re separated from a visceral sense of its power and mystery. Hogue relates a sad incident, reported in the wider media, that occurred in June 2010, in Arkansas, where a flash flood at a large campground led to numerous deaths, including six children under the age of seven, all of which underscored “crucial historical shifts within the culture of camping itself: an increasing lack of awareness of potential danger, and an implicit trust in the protective confines of . . . the campsite and the resources at hand.”
So what’s a family to do? Take the children on a safe back-to-nature holiday, where there is no or minimal risk (though, as the Arkansas disaster illustrates, there is still some risk), or do we seek out something as close to nature as possible, a worthwhile goal in a digital age that increasingly distances children from the natural world they might not even know they occupy. It’s no accident that a considerable amount of advertising in today’s media universe trumpets the desire to get back to nature or participate in the natural world. Vehicle advertising and naming, for example: Tahoe. Outback. Ram. Mustang. Sierra. Highlander. Tacoma. Yukon. Outlander. Cougar. Bighorn. Lynx. Sequoia. Tracker. Trail Blazer. Most of these gas guzzlers are as close to being celebrations of the natural world as Three Mile Island. The inherent contradiction and complexity of camping and the family vacation is that it’s getting harder and harder to actually get back to nature these days, which means it’s becoming harder to locate an authentic natural experience for our children, all while recognizing the additional contradiction that the only path most of us can use to seek out such an experience is to pile the family into an SUV or a van and drive in our environmentally unsound vehicles to find a place where the environment has largely been tamed for our consumption. An additional layer of irony lies in the fact that when we camped back then (as well as when we camp today), we as often as not used the car itself as part of our camping equipment, tying ropes to it for the tent and/or an awning, dropping the back gate on the station wagon as an extra table, opening the door and playing the radio for entertainment. When our family camped at Gull Lake, the station wagon was almost as much a part of our camping experience as the beast tent.
It all raises the question, in retrospect as much as in the present, of what precisely it is we’re achieving
