I love camping, but the more I learn and think about it in its modern day form, the more perplexing and perverse I find it. Much of my perplexity centers around camping food, although camping shelters also come into play. Camping is often espoused as a way to get ‘back to nature’, and in some ways has implicit in its image the idea of returning to the wild and living more naturally. At the same time, as far as I can tell, there is very little that is traditional about camping.
Consider first two groups that camping might be related to- nomadic lifestyles and voyageur or woodsman lifestyles. In the first case, that of nomadic cultures, people did (and still do) live in more temporary structures. However, people remain in one place, in these more temporary structures, for fairly extended periods of time, living off of food available in the environment (e.g. their own herds of animals, or local plants and wild game). People like voyageursbehaved a bit more like modern day campers, especially with respect to carrying foodbut I’m not sure that the voyageur experience is really what most modern day campers are looking for. As well, voyageurs would at the very least not have carried their own fuel, or worried too much about providing their own sources of warmth, since they would have had cooking and camp fires.
According to wikipedia recreational camping didn’t appear until the beginning of the 1900’s, with backpacking also appearing as a popular activity at this time. As camping and backpacking became more and more popular, however, environmentalists became more and more concerned, and eventually a bunch of the them came up with the whole “Leave No Trace” idea.
Now, in principle I agree with this idea, but I think it has resulted in camping being far from either a back to nature experience or an experience at all similar to that of nomadic people or woodsmen. Modern campers must carry all of their food, all of their shelter, all of their cooking fuel and all of their ‘other items to keep warm and dry and happy’ on their backs. Under the leave no trace principle, none of their needs, except, perhaps, drinking water, may be met by nature at any time or under any circumstance. Indeed, the camper must remain as disconnected from nature as possible, while still technically being ‘immersed in nature’.
Feasibility aside, I think this has some implications regarding the
practicality of camping in the modern day and age.
posted at 00:40 on Wed, 12 Apr, 2006 |
path: /living
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