While it has always been amusing to poke fun at the modern love-camping crowd, lately I’ve encountered several critical slams of “camping with the family,” and they indeed have been hilarious! Friends love Lena Dunham’s TV series Camping, which began in October, and how it lampoons many tropes about car camping American style.
We see this borne out in the titles of some of the first eight episodes: “Up All Night,” “Fishing Trip” and “Just Plain Mad.”
With her funny satire “Camping Sucks,” local columnist Starshine Roshell joined the hate-camping tribe that reinforces the meme. It turns out that we all have friends who also tried family camping (once) — usually car camping — and like Roshell are openly “Done Apologizing for Detesting the Great Outdoors” (her subtitle).
There also is P. J. Petersen’s old favorite, I Hate Camping, and spinoffs. (See 4.1.1. for books referenced.) We also can read Tony Earley’s short story “Backpack” in the Nov. 5 New Yorker. Notice that the main character in the story purchases “the backpack” at REI, like many of us have.
The futurists who long with techno-optimism for the coming singularity, when supposedly all of our human troubles dissipate and we’ll endure no discomforts, usually hate camping. The idea to willfully choose overnight car camping out at nearby Upper Oso Campground in a tent, for example, seems bizarre, or at the least kind of stupid.
So I agree with fellow Noozhawk columnist Capt. David Bacon about the joys and allure of raw nature. He recently wrote that rather than go to museums as a child and visit ancient ruins:
What I did is get out of town, go into the hills, hike to a secluded off-trail
spot to sit and experience nature — the local flora and fauna. I like to think
about what the land was like for eons before people came and put our
marks on the land.
I’m an outdoor columnist, and I do car camp frequently. In a tent near the car, with an ice chest on a sturdy table, a fire pit and hopefully some running fresh water in the area, Upper Oso Campground is a nearby haven.
Growing up in suburban Los Angeles, my four sisters and I never went family car camping, with one exception.
Giving in to the much-ridiculed “need to get the kids out camping,” my mother and father drove us all to Sequoia for four days. While I sort of liked it as a 12-year-old, the experience was basically hellish for all concerned.
My wonderful parents had no clue what to bring or where to hike, the food was awful, the bathrooms stunk and, thus, I can truly chortle with every one of Dunham’s riffs on “camping” or Roshell’s lethal jabs.
The gibes about bugs and never catching any darned fish and freezing at night can be hilarious, and slapstick falling-down descriptions make us laugh aloud. These nature slams amuse, and most laughers are well-intentioned parents who couldn’t figure out how to camp comfortably and safely, with some enjoyable adventures available.
Delving deeper, I believe that most of this healthy laughter at “camping” actually reflects some embarrassed chagrin that folks have carefully repressed. Most mentally healthy human adults intuitively know that time spent in nature is crucial for the species.
Even outdoor-haters acknowledge that children need their blue sky time, their essential “vitamin N(ature)” and some chances to savor our fecund planet. Most parents are equally aware that children today spend increasing percentages of their daily time indoors, under a roof, behind glass, in a thermostatically-conditioned walled space.
We are quite rapidly becoming an indoor species, rather like many of the other social (insect) species such as ants and bees. Starry-eyed prophets of the singularity, such as top Google engineer Ray Kurzweil, view such a subterranean retreat and AI takeover with equanimity, and even welcome it. Obviously, Capt. Bacon and I recoil from the vision with horror and urge all parents to get their children outside as much as possible.
Shared guilt at our allowing this expanding chasm to separate us from nature is behind much of the mirth invoked by this postmodern meme. As Richard Dawkins defined it in 1976, a “meme” is part of a culture (or system of behavior) that may be passed from one person to another by nongenetic means, e.g. through imitation (The Selfish Gene).
This meme is now so “current” that it’s almost a stereotype: Make fun of awkward “camping.” And basically, camping is a dying art in our Anthropocene world, and easily screwed up by half-hearted indoor lovers.
Jokes and jocular insults flower easily against the car camping world: problems putting up the tent, biting flies or inconvenient rain during the night, a snake in camp, burning oneself while camp cooking, eating wretched camp food, lack of hot water — the list of witty tropes is very long.
The backpacking type of camping garners even more aggressive lampoons and funny misrepresentations, but real backpacking is so difficult that not many tackle the activity effectively. You simply have to accept the discomforts in order to have any pleasure on a true backpacking trek.
The common slam is, only masochistic screwed-up older men get into it, and they only want solitude and serenity (or to get drunk and piss in camp).
What Roshell and other camping amateurs need to realize is that car camping itself rather “sucks” — as she indelicately puts it.
Today, the prices are way up — $30 a night at Fremont Campground near Red Rock — and the amenities are down. There are too many RVs and small RVs running their loud generators until 10 p.m., domestic disputes, dogs running loose, and the camp hosts often fear to stop wild parties and mini-raves inside these car campgrounds.
Check out Refugio State Beach if you want to see deterioration from what was once a very beautiful car camping site.
Small group car camping at more remote locations (try Carrizzo Plain, Selby Campground) or, even better, short but intense backpacking outings right into the San Rafael Wilderness work much better with children than the mish-mash at too many car camping locations.
Capt. Bacon gets it as the quote above shows, and lucky Santa Barbarans can drive a half-hour or less and usually get in some significant day-hiking in wilder nature without any car camping.
At the same time, some highly cultured packers might bring with them a slender volume of favorite poems (e.g., William Stafford) or a half-liter of Fred Brander’s Sauvignon blanc; another hiker might carry in her three-pound trail guitar and sing out beside the babbling brook. Others might sketch natural wonders, or begin listing avian species, or scribble detailed geology notes.
Certain cultural practices enhance the quality of the backcountry experience, although truly there’s nothing more moving that just being there, serene and quiet, getting a pause from the frantic becoming world of Santa Barbara, the Internet and vagaries of complex relationships.
So, dear readers, enjoy the meme we share for chuckling at satiric takedowns of American “camping.” We do feel a need to go out there into nature, at least for the kids’ sakes.
We’re generally underprepared and hence underwhelmed by the novel experience in the field. A few quality preparations (food and so on) would enhance the experience exponentially; with a good introduction, a few short readings (or poems), art activities in the field, camp-craft techniques, the time spent outside could be exhilarating and instructive.
We have to accept that homo sapiens had to evolve through wild nature (wildeor) in order to become what we are today in the early Anthropocene. Even given a generous time-scale, say 12,000 years, we anatomically modern humans have existed as “civilization” less than 2 percent of our species time, so “camping” is actually our default living practice.
True camping may be what our local homeless people have to practice. At least Roshell and others freely choose to “camp” and thus can follow the meme and enjoy making fun of it.
In October, when some homeless people chose to live some weeks beneath the Stanwood Bridge at the mouth of Rattlesnake Canyon, they kept it clean, had bedstands and seemed to avoid any (illegal) fires. I wouldn’t make fun of these young men, and they were living hard in the canyon. This was real camping.
4-1-1
» Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (2005) and more books by him.
» Dan McCaslin, “Looking Back at the History of Hiking in America”
— Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity, and has written extensively about the local backcountry. He serves as an archaeological site steward for the U.S. Forest Service in the Los Padres National Forest. He welcomes reader ideas for future Noozhawk columns, and can be reached at cazmania3@gmail.com. Click here to read additional columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
