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 when we “camp,” particularly in the highly organized sites described above, replete with water, showers, electricity, toilets, and check-ins with map distribution? Are we telling our children that this is nature? The only real difference between that type of camping and staying at home is a worse sleep and no cable TV. It might just be better to watch the Nature Channel on TV with the kids and a bowl of popcorn.
I jest. But only partly, because we do continue to cherish and demand our conveniences and gadgets, and this is, obviously and disturbingly, more the case with today’s children than with previous generations (not that they are to blame since it’s us, their parents, who are their prime facilitators in this regard). Still, the trend towards convenience in camping was established long before the Internet, long before the cellphone, before television even (for many of my younger readers, this period—Before Television—is what your teachers mean when they talk about “pre-history”). In the 1920s, Denver’s Overland Park was among the first campgrounds in the US to focus on a range of civilizing services; the Overland became the model for the KOA, which, to anyone who camped in the seventies, was as pervasive as tight jeans and bad haircuts. KOA was the Starbucks of campgrounds. This was part of its appeal to parents, my own included, who had enough to worry about without fretting over the unknown campgrounds they were taking themselves, and us, into. This would explain, I suppose, why we drove four thousand kilometres—one way—to stay in a KOA campground in Mexico City. KOA ruled the campground world at the time; it started with but a single campground in 1961 and by 1979 it had 829 campgrounds across North America. KOA had individual owner/operators, supposedly to put a personal touch on the service, though in our case, in Mexico City, it led to “personal touches” we could have done without.
The oil crisis may have been ongoing at the time, but I can safely say that none of us children were aware of it. It’s possible my parents took note of these world events, and it’s also possible they relayed them, but for that to have made an impact on us would have meant listening to them. Certainly I do not recall ever being unable to gas up during any of our stops, and once we hit Mexico City just before Christmas, you’d have been hard pressed to say the oil crisis was putting the squeeze on vehicle usage. Quite the opposite. We’d never seen traffic like it. Driving from the middle of Mexico City, from Chapultepec Park, say, to our KOA campground fifteen miles outside the city centre, seemed to take almost as long as it had to drive from Calgary to Mexico City. The snaking endless line of cars, six lanes regularly converging into three, the choking pollution caught in Mexico City’s unlucky inversion basin, the sheer number of people—we’d never seen anything on this scale. We’d also never camped outside a city of twelve million people. At times the KOA felt as crowded as walking through the city itself. Row after row of tents. It was a tented village, though this was hardly a negative thing. Some of the memories of playing in that campground are stronger than the time we actually spent in Mexico City.
That KOA campground no longer exists, or at least it’s no longer in the hands of the KOA. Whoever owns it now has, I’m sure, or I hope, relaxed the draconian laws of the place. They shut down things early. They closed bathrooms at ten o’clock at night. They shut off the water taps at 10:05. They turned off the electricity at 10:10. They closed the office and went home at 10:15. They locked the gate so no one could break in . . . but no one could get out, either. Basically, it was a jail without the humane conditions. Not that we especially noticed at first, as long as you weren’t thirsty or had to go to the bathroom late at night. They said it was a safety issue, which was fair enough, given that we were in a huge city in a third-world country and had gringo written all over our pasty faces. Only as our time there progressed did it start to feel oppressive. Still, we reasoned, we were nearly through with Mexico City, and from there it was off to the coast, to Acapulco, to see the cliff divers. Us boys were beside ourselves with excitement.