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  To Julianna and Amy for making this book possible, and to my dear father, Victor White (1926–2016), who died just before the publication of this book. He was my first camping hero and a major influence on my creative life. May his memory be a blessing to everyone who knew him and loved him.

  What though? May there not come one glorious day in the weary year when we may cast aside every grief and every separate care and invite the soul to a day of rest? And in the future, when the days of trouble come, as they will come, I shall remember that grand day of rest, and the abundance of trout and bass wherewith I was comforted.

  —George Washington Sears, aka “Nessmuk,” 1883

  I heard two noises coming from two separate areas of space over there. One of them could have been an owl, but the other one sounded like a cackling.

  —Joshua Leonard, The Blair Witch Project, 1999

  prologue

  Under the Stars

  I go to the wilderness to kick the man-world out of me.

  —Colin Fletcher

  I love camping. I hate camping. I can’t seem to stop. In case you haven’t noticed, campouts hardly ever go the way you want them to go. It doesn’t matter if you’re glamping or backpacking, on a guided exploration or alone. Chaos finds a way. In the course of writing this book, a hike through the history of American camping from the nineteenth century onward, I have been treated for chilblains, stung by evil wasps, set upon by marmots, chomped on by a large and stupid bird, and knocked unconscious by a wooden plank. That hasn’t stopped me from returning to the woods for more doses of enchantment and abuse. It’s the fissure, the derailment, the surprise that gives each campout its flavor and character. I like to think that Leonard Cohen was talking about camping when he said that everything is cracked but that’s how the light gets in.

  If we want stability and uneventfulness on our vacations, Microtel awaits us. But when was the last time you struck up a meaningful conversation at the Hampton Inn? I’ve had only one memorable interaction with strangers in a hotel, and it was disturbing. I was in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, at the Days Inn, with my wife, Amy. We had just checked in. When I put the key card in the door, I was preoccupied, and so was my room. When I walked inside, a big-boned couple was making love in the queen bed I’d paid for. The man got up, put on a towel, smiled, escorted me from the room, and kicked the door in my face. Aside from that, I cannot recall any of the people I’ve met in low-priced lodging chains, but I can remember a thousand faces and stories from my campouts over the years.

  I have camped six hundred days and nights so far. I’ve passed a pleasant evening in a friend’s backyard in Santa Cruz and watched a baby skunk climb a woven wire fence protecting a tomato plant. I’ve slept on the oxbows of wild rivers in the Sierra Nevada and on a tree-lined traffic divider near Skykomish, Washington, during my backpacking journey on the Pacific Crest Trail. I’ve watched the sun set on the North Cascades, set up a tent on a mushy lawn behind an Iowa truck stop, and passed the night on a coastal bluff in Point Reyes, where I threw pebbles and sand at ungovernable raccoons. I’ve felt everything when I camped: terror, safety, contentment, danger, lust, derangement, discomfort, gratitude, ingratitude, cowardice, heroism, hedonism, boredom, frustration, gluttony, wisdom, self-pity, and extreme stupidity, sometimes all in the same trip. For better and worse, camping shows you who you are. With camping you cannot hide. William James Stillman, who camped in the Adirondacks in 1858 as part of an illustrious group that included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louis Agassiz, wrote about his campmates dropping their “disguises” in their isolated conclave out on Follensby Pond. “Conventions faded out, masks became transparent, and for good or for ill the man stood naked before the questioning eye,—pure personality … I gathered more insight into the character of my companions in our greener Arden, in the two or three weeks’ meetings of the club, than all our lives in the city could have given me.”

  This book is about a Victorian passion that got out of hand. Like croquet, polka dancing, and scrapbooking, recreational camping was a nineteenth-century fad that refused to die. Optional or pleasure camping is a recent and quirky takeoff on the mandatory camping that human beings have been doing ever since they’ve lived on earth. The first Americans fashioned comfortable foursquare dwellings from wood, bark, leaves, grass, reeds, earth, snow, stone, skin, and bones. I have to be careful not to compare their way of life to “camping” as we know it now. For one, they did not have large, sulfurous, malarial cities to drive them ever deeper into the forest. They saw no separation between their daily lives and the outside. Even wilderness as we know it now, the notion that you have to head way out there to some remote land to encounter the real nature, would have made little sense to them.

  The Euro-Caucasians who started building settlements in North America in the early seventeenth century would have had a hard time recognizing the camping we do today. So would the gold rushers and the pioneers. As Cindy Aron wrote in her book Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States, “The earliest American ‘campers’ were not on vacation … The wilderness, for most such people, held little charm. It represented hardship, strenuous labor, and danger—a place to be traversed, subdued, and settled.” Granted, some forms of camping are closer to the original spirit of survival camping than others, but if we’re choosing whether to camp, it still falls into the realm of lifestyle or recreational camping. Just like “pick your own strawberries,” pleasure camping is a playful and indulgent twist on something that was not meant to be fun in its original incarnation.

  Recreational camping is not an invention like the dynamo or the incandescent lightbulb. It’s a product of gradual refinement and much reconsideration, not just of camping practices but also of the animating philosophies behind them. Today’s camping is the end result of changing attitudes toward wilderness as a place of mischief, devilry, and derangement in colonial times to a place of release, relaxation, or even worship. An estimated fifty million people camp every year in the United States. When contemplating such gigantic numbers, I had to wonder about the roots of this pastime, about the people who first experimented with voluntary camping, when it became popular, and how it changed or did not change with time. In the course of this journey, I began to notice that campers, including me, tended to dip their buckets into the same reservoir of tropes and traditions, unconsciously acting out the history of camping. A few brilliant, charismatic, and troubled young men with bold ideas and extravagant facial hair, and a few brave women who ventured into the forests and mountains in spite of restrictive clothing, double standards, and widespread prejudices, influenced the camping we practice today.

  If you’ve camped because you wanted a more strenuous life to build up your character and prove something about yourself; or slept in a three-sided “lean-to” facing a cook fire; or spent thousands of dollars to stay in a luxury tent with a parquet floor, kitchen, and bathroom along with an optional “ten
t butler” who roasted your s’mores for you; or if you’ve had ecstatic visions in forests, or gone on “value added” camping trips involving yoga, lectures, site restorations, and trash pickups, you owe something to the people who launched recreational camping nearly two centuries ago.

  To pay tribute to those men and women, I wanted, as much as possible, to see what they saw and do as they did. My general rule is that I could not write about any period of camping history without living through it as much as possible. In my tribute to a survivalist who camped without any gear or clothing a century ago, I went to a forest and camped with nothing, or as close to nothing as I could manage. To understand the once-standard practice of hiring a backwoods guide to accompany nineteenth-century campers into the Adirondacks of upstate New York, I went out there and hired a backwoods helper myself. As part of my exploration of Leave No Trace camping, I set out to clean up one of America’s most popular mountains, using a biohazardous waste receptacle called the Immaculator. I camped in the croc-and-gator-infested Everglades with one of the least-represented groups of people in American campgrounds to explore the thorniest question in outdoor recreation today: What can be done about the blinding whiteness of camping and the diversity gap in the woods?

  When safety and logistics permitted, I made sure to bring my wife and, in particular, my young daughter on these campouts, because my parents transmitted their love of the wilderness to me when I was a young child. I wanted to preserve and sustain this value for Julianna so she wouldn’t grow up to be a twenty-first-century neurasthenic glued to whichever digital gewgaw will become “a thing” by the time she reaches adolescence. So I hope you’ve cinched up your Gore-Tex boots, slathered yourself with SPF 100 sunscreen, and updated your life insurance policy. Throw your things in the backseat. It’s time to go camping.

  1

  Help Me, Henry

  How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book?

  —Henry David Thoreau, Walden

  Everyone has an overwhelming influence at a tender age. One person or entity rules over them. For some unfortunates, it’s Ayn Rand. For others, it’s Paulo Coelho, Viktor Frankl, Judas Priest, or Neil Peart, the drummer and lyricist from the rock band Rush. Henry David Thoreau is an influence that must overcome you when you’re young or not at all. Otherwise he cannot infect you. You’ll develop immunity. If you pick it up when you’re too old, his most famous book, Walden, tastes funny: a treacle pie with too much vinegar. The odd flavor makes sense, considering Thoreau was young, heartbroken, drifty, and confused when he set out to have the experiences that informed the book. That is one reason Walden remains a classic for literary-minded campers, with special appeal to youthful wilderness explorers and aspirants to the simple life. Thoreau speaks to people like my younger self: lumpy, shiftless, bumbling, insecure, unsettled, unfulfilled, and out of step with the times. In proclaiming the woods a refuge, Thoreau, in an offbeat and prickly way, helped generations of nervous Americans fall in love with camping.

  In his combative and seductive writings, Thoreau gave Americans their first coherent and persuasive conservation philosophy. But it took a while for the book and its notions to take hold. Walden, published in 1854, sold briskly during its first month, but interest soon fell off. For the next fifteen years, it sold an average of three hundred copies annually. Then it got into the hands of long-haired wilderness prophet John Muir, who used it as a template for his rhapsodic and angry writings about woodlands, meadows, and mountains and the need to preserve them from lumber interests and livestock. Robert Frost, another great champion of the book, observed in 1915 that Walden “must have a good deal to do with the making of me.” The book began its upward tilt in the early twentieth century, when its ecological message caught on. Much has changed since the days when Thoreau looked out from his cabin at a nation that measured woods “in terms of board feet, not in terms of watershed protection, birds and music,” Justice William O. Douglas of the U.S. Supreme Court once remarked. Walden, with its warnings, tart observations, and detailed instructions for renewal in the wilderness, helped bring about the change.

  The book was radical in its time. Even now it is divisive. It was meant to be. Thoreau sometimes acted like a Puritan, a judgmental prig, and a scold—no booze, no fornication—with annoying temperance rants and occasional salvos at his readers. “It is very evident what mean and skulking lives many of you live,” he wrote in Walden. Yet he ridiculed Puritan ideas about everything, from the importance of daily toil for its own sake to the wickedness of the woods. I see him as a turncoat, old before his time but rebelling against old ways. An agitator and mischief maker, Thoreau had no use for the busybody neighbors who considered him a gadfly and a lazybones. If he acted like a geriatric sourpuss from time to time, we can give him a bit of license, because Thoreau was the nineteenth-century equivalent of the Raging Grannies.

  When Thoreau was a young man, taking his first camping and boating trips, his countrymen were still breaking away from the influence of America’s Calvinist founders. In 1662 the Puritan poet Michael Wigglesworth wrote that forests were places of “fiends, and brutish men / That devils worshipped.” In Puritan speeches and poems, the woods were always “howling,” “whooping,” “roaring,” “screaming,” “singing,” “ranting,” and “insulting.” In a cheeky riposte, Thoreau remarked in 1857 that “generally speaking a howling wilderness does not howl; it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.” By making natural areas seem like places of renewal instead of madness and demons, Thoreau brought America just a little bit closer to today’s world of dome tents, grill racks, and self-inflating sleeping pads.

  He was a fine backwoodsman and camper, although he did some silly things in the outdoors from time to time. In one campout, he and his brother, perhaps because of bad planning, were forced to eat cocoa and bread for supper after a long day’s rowing. In a journey to Maine, he and his campmates set up their tent so close to the fire that it burned to a crisp, forcing them to shelter from the rain beneath their upturned bateau. But Thoreau’s appreciative readers value him not so much for his backcountry prowess as for his powers of observation and description. His writing is ecstatic and specific, larded with insight and biting humor, grounded in details about the natural world and his interior landscape. His antimaterialistic and antimodernist passages and promises of moral perfection in the wilderness challenge his readers to disrupt their lives by taking a journey into the trees. Venturing alone in the wild, a wanderer might discover in the first rays of the “morning star” that he or she has the same nobility as pilgrims from the heroic ages.

  There lies the promise and the inherent danger of Thoreau’s writing. Deep in the forest, we might “settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion and prejudice and tradition and delusion … till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we call reality.” Thoreau tells us that a retreat to the wilderness is no retreat at all; nor is it an interruption. No, it is the life outside the woods, the toil and the compromise that intrude. Days and nights among the trees is not time off the books. It is not a subtraction from the days of life but an addition to them. Such advice intoxicates us, but Thoreau’s words can be fatal if we take them too far without sufficient preparation; he tells us to go out and do it for ourselves, but sometimes nature does not abide. Nature is freedom and sunshine. Nature is also bears, yellow jackets, rockfall, and vertical exposure. Nature wins. In promising freedom and deliverance in wild places, Thoreau sent more than a few copycats to their doom, and has put many more in perilous situations. You can do it too, Thoreau seems to tell us, but sometimes the answer is No, I can’t. Here I speak from grim experience. On more than one occasion, Walden, that beloved, accursed book, nearly cost me my life.

  My Walden-provoked near-death incidents in the woods are legion—near drownings, tumblings, dehydration, you name it—but the most recent and frightening example took place in one of the
worst areas for a man to get lost in the United States: the jungles of eastern Kentucky. I headed out there for the same reason I ever go to the wilderness: because Henry told me that “village life” would make me “stagnate” unless I enjoyed the “tonic” and “compensation” of mists and marshes, pinewoods, high grass, toads, and hickories, the “living and decaying trees, the thunder cloud and the rain” as often as possible.

  Before this camping trip took a turn toward the nightmarish, the journey was lovely and elemental.

  I was camped alone on the first night with my battered copy of Walden beneath some old-growth hemlocks and white oaks in southeastern Kentucky. I was settling into my sleeping spot, nipping from an eighth of frontier whiskey, listening to the night birds of the western Appalachians, close-reading passages at random, and eating cold pumpkin curry straight from the foil pouch. What more could a man ask of his life? My finger settled on a sentence I hoped would inspire me, but it turned out to be a ridiculous tirade about liquor. “I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man. Wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea!” “Oh, shut up, Henry! Why don’t you lighten up?”

  Platforms of wrinkled limestone rose above the trees. The nightjars asked the same question all night long: “Whip or wheel? Whip or wheel?” I was having a fine time out there, and my ego was getting the better of me because I was doing a freelance travel writing assignment, involving a hike and overnight campout along a new forty-two-mile section of the Pine Mountain State Scenic Trail. When it’s finished, the PMT will be part of a sixteen-hundred-mile-long pathway called the Great Eastern Trail, connecting Alabama with New York. I could hardly believe that someone was paying me to go camping. The thought of this made me more self-confident than I had any reason to be. Somehow I’d disregarded the ominous nickname of the Kentucky backwoods: the Dark and Bloody Ground.