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 we might recognize today, was formally initiated during these fin-de-siècle years, it was not a particularly radical 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