At the pleasure of nature

If you’ve never gone to a remote place in order to relax, eat, sleep, and do everything else outdoors or in some form of portable shelter, you have no idea how much fun you’re missing. If you have, in fact, tried it and found it disagreeable, there must have been exceptional circumstances that spoiled it, and it would be well worth your time and effort to give camping another try.

So goes the reasoning. People who enjoy a pursuit want to share it with others. Conversely, those who dislike it usually don’t bother trying to persuade anyone to adopt their point of view. Instead, they tell stories about their miserable encounters with nature, which can be more entertaining than the rapturous recollections of happy campers. A common theme running through these stories is discomfort. Here is a short selection of people’s answers to the question ‘Why do you not like camping?’:

• Flies.
• Ticks.
• Mosquitoes. Midges. Chiggers.
• Spiders.
• Filthy toilets. No toilets.
• No showers.
• Animals crashing into or through one’s sleeping quarters in the middle of the night.
• Animals eating noisily in the middle of the night.
• Animals eating or destroying one’s supplies.
• Hard ground. Rocky ground. Sloping ground. Wet ground.
• Dirt or mud in or on one’s tent, clothes, equipment, boots, body.
• Rain. Did I mention mud?
• Hot weather. Cold weather. Wind. Thunderstorms.
• A lot of effort to do simple tasks.

Not all of these torments are present all of the time or at every campsite, but the chances of having to deal with them in a hotel or AirBnB are far less. Camping, unlike hobbies involving a couple of hours from time to time, requires you to commit one or more days and nights to activities that you don’t normally do, or that you normally do indoors with different tools. When you’re camping, you spend more time doing things like cooking a meal, cleaning up afterward, creating heat and light, carrying out personal hygiene, and going to bed. You have to plan ahead so that you’ll have the appropriate equipment and know how to use it. Then you may have to contend with weather that deviates from the forecast, falling trees, bushfires, flooding, unexpected closure of the park or campsite, or large numbers of people with the same plans for the weekend.

The attractions of camping

I go camping with my spouse, usually just the two of us but occasionally with other friends along. Both he and I are suckers for spectacle, wooed by wonder: open vistas uninterrupted; silence except for the sounds of little night creatures through the cloth wall of the tent, the smells of vegetation, earth and fresh, clean air; closer, brighter stars in a vast black sky. He loves camping unequivocally, including the planning, provisioning and packing. 

In contrast, I’m somewhat ambivalent about the camping experience, for two reasons. First, there’s the dirt. I wish I were fond of dirt, or at least indifferent to it. Then there are the bugs. The camping experience would be vastly improved if insects, particularly mosquitoes and biting midges, weren’t so keen on my flesh. But the only way to have a guaranteed bug-free, dirt-free vacation is to do something other than go camping. So I’ll take the bug spray, the anti-itch cream, the hand broom, and the jerry can of water for washing everything, including myself, as a trade-off for slanting light through silver trees, a shape-shifting fire to watch instead of TV, and the low chuckle of kookaburras escalating to a full-throated manic cackle before I’m fully awake in the morning.

Scout camp

My first exposure to camping was as a Girl Scout, starting with day camp for the youngest kids and progressing to one- or two-week-long residence camps. We looked forward to camp every summer, blissfully unaware that as late as the 1970s, girls were getting a pretty tame version. Decades later, I learned from my husband that camping for Boy Scouts involved carrying cast-iron Dutch ovens for miles across challenging terrain and voluntarily undertaking solo ordeals equipped with nothing but a sleeping bag, an egg, a piece of bread and two matches. Meanwhile we girls went on (supervised) hikes, swam (in a clearing in the woods was a conveniently located swimming pool, I kid you not), and rode docile, swaybacked horses, an activity for which, fortunately for us, no complicated knots were necessary. For meals, familiar ingredients were transformed by campfire cooking: dumplings made of canned biscuit dough were wrapped around cubes of Velveeta cheese, bobbing in a kettle filled with many cans of Campbell’s tomato soup.

The Boy Scouts, founded by Robert Baden-Powell in 1908, was the first youth organization in which camping played a major role. Baden-Powell was a Lieutenant-General in the British Army and the training for Scouts drew heavily upon military skills, such as map-reading, tracking, signals, tying many kinds of complicated knots, and the use of equipment such as tents. It was also for boys only, because boys and girls were thought to be different kinds of creatures. Neither public opinion nor Baden-Powell was eager to let girls join the Boy Scouts, but a separate single-sex organization was acceptable to sexist sensibilities and Baden-Powell’s sister, Agnes Smith Baden-Powell, started the Girl Guides the following year.

In 1911 Juliette Gordon Low, a wealthy American, met Robert Baden-Powell at a party during her travels and by the following year had set up two ‘patrols’ of Guides in her hometown of Savannah, Georgia. Low is known as the founder of the Girl Scouts and for her efforts to expand the work of girls’ organizations internationally. The Girl Scouts were involved with civilian war efforts during the First World War: rolling bandages, selling war bonds and planting ‘victory gardens’.

In the early years there was some quibbling over whether the name of the organization should be Girl Guides or Girl Scouts. Today in some countries they’re called Guides, in others Scouts, and there are now
10 million girls in 150 countries who are members. The more significant disagreement has been over whether scouting ought to be sex-segregated, and whether organizations for boys and girls should teach different skills reflective of differences between them, regardless of whether those differences are thought to be inherent or just intransigent. Another organization, the Camp Fire Girls of America, founded in 1910 by Luther and Charlotte Gulick, explicitly encouraged and celebrated gender differences – although the cultivation of skill in cooking and other domestic tasks was combined with horseback riding, canoeing, camping and athletic prowess. Even today, the issue is not neatly resolved by girls being allowed to join boys’ organizations (or vice versa), nor by extending access to transgender youth. When in 2019 the Boy Scouts of America opened its membership to girls, the Girl Scouts of the USA bitterly opposed the move, arguing that girls are better served by single-gender scouting. The interplay between scouting and gender is a topic for another day.

While both the Girl Scout Law and the Boy Scout Law affirm a commitment to respect authority, only the boys’ version contains an obligation to keep oneself clean.¹ In rare circumstances, these commitments could conflict.

A true camping story

At residence camp, our sleeping quarters were platform tents with cots, four girls to a tent. The counselors were all female (it was Girl Scout camp, after all), used pseudonyms instead of their real names and laughed uproariously at each other’s jokes, which we usually didn’t get. Arwen, Galadriel, Bilbo and Frodo were probably college students working at camp for the summer but to a nine-year-old they were adults just like the moms who served as our troop leaders back home. None of us really liked Frodo. She would issue brusque orders and then walk away without looking back, or she’d stare at a kid until the kid ducked her head and scuttled off.

Near the end of the first day of camp, I ventured a question. It was poorly framed. I think it was something like ‘Are we allowed to take showers?’

‘No,’ said Frodo.

She was a stocky, straight-haired girl who wore boxy shorts and glasses with heavy black frames. I timidly requested clarification, but got the same answer: no, you are not allowed to take showers.

I said okay and took my towel and soap back to my tent. The hilarity in the counselors’ tent that night and every night that week would have been priceless.

I had a good time anyway. I was the kind of nauseating kid who accepted authority without a murmur of dissent, and just figured, well, we can’t take showers, but we can still have fun hiking and swimming and whittling sticks. I have no memory of what my tent-mates did in respect of their own cleanliness or what they thought of mine, but we remained friends long after camp was over so it couldn’t have been too bad. My mother’s reaction six days later, however, was one of genuine, epic horror at what must have been a monumental stink (her word). Later, unquestioning obedience to adults gave way to teenage preoccupations and the tyranny of gender, and it’s been a very long time since I’ve willingly spent more than 48 hours without a shower.

Woodcraft, culture and myth

The Scouts and other clubs for youth taught ‘woodcraft’: skills needed for living in woods and wilderness areas. Ernest Thompson Seton’s ‘Woodcraft Way’ was a program for wayward boys, founded on the premise that learning outdoor skills and cooperative problem-solving builds character. He is credited by many, including Robert Baden-Powell, as having had a greater influence on Scouting than Baden-Powell himself.

Seton was born in England to parents who emigrated to Canada when he was six years old. In Manitoba and later Connecticut, USA, he worked as a writer, artist and naturalist. His Woodcraft Indians organization was started as a response to vandalism by local boys, who resented his fences and ‘no hunting’ signs. Instead of seeking punishment, he invited them to camp on his property for a weekend of activities and games not involving hunting. Seton’s talents included campfire theatrics supposedly deriving from Native American culture and ceremony, and he was a charismatic performer. The boys – none of whom was Native American – were enthralled. At the woodcraft camps, starting in 1902, they adopted ‘Indian’ names and participated in singing, dancing and play-acting, complete with bows and arrows and feathered war bonnets. The ceremonies, songs and costumes were a hodgepodge of different tribes’ customs. Seton’s aim was to build community at camp through the power of myth and ritual. If any thought was given to other peoples’ history and cultural traditions, it would have been through the colonial filter.

I was a Girl Scout through about the eighth grade. By that time some of us had also joined 4-H, an American youth club that espouses similar values as the Scouts and that had a significant presence in rural communities. 4-H is part of the Cooperative Extension program, an education effort of state land-grant universities in cooperation with the federal government and state and local governments. It had a particular focus on agricultural projects such as raising livestock, growing vegetables, and making things (sewing, woodworking, building model airplanes, cooking, photography).

Camp was separate from the activities of individual members and their clubs, though. Members of many different clubs went to a camp that served several counties. Activities included swimming and boating (there was a lake, no pool), archery, hiking, nature study and handicrafts, as well as singing and dancing. We slept in cabins rather than tents, with four to six in each cabin including a counselor. Boys’ and girls’ cabins and shower facilities were in different parts of the camp but all activities apart from sleeping were coed. Meals were served in a central lodge and there was a roster for tasks such as setting tables, fetching the food from the kitchen, serving, and cleaning up afterward.

The nightly campfire was a major highlight. Campers were assigned to four ‘tribes’, each of which bore the name of an actual Native American tribe from the region. Prior to camp, the older kids serving as counselors for each tribe met to nominate and elect a ‘Chief’ and a ‘Princess’. In addition to all of the regular responsibilities of counselors, the chiefs and princesses were in charge of organizing and leading their tribe in songs, skits, stunts, and stories, and dressed up for campfire in ‘Indian’ costumes that were either homemade or passed along by a predecessor. There was, of course, competition among the tribes, and along with storytelling and challenges there were cheers and chants.

In the early 2000s, there were complaints to several state governments and to the federal Agriculture Department that Indigenous customs and symbols had been misrepresented and wrongly used at 4-H camps. Internal reviews and the serious prospect of legal action ultimately resulted in 4-H ceasing to use the Native American imagery.  

While some of the terms, customs, clothing and symbols may have been historically correct and culturally specific, much of it was derived from stories and stereotypes cobbled together – just as it was with Seton’s Woodcraft Indians. Whether or not there were any Indigenous persons at 4-H camp and whether they or anyone else would have found the cultural appropriation inappropriate and disrespectful, it was one of the products of a (white) culture that didn’t even recognize that its ability to create a little world purportedly modeled on another was a function of its dominance. I am sure we did take away from camp an appreciation of nature and the importance of conservation, though I’m not so sure that celebrating and role-playing a fictionalized ‘Indian’ culture helped. 

The consolations of camping

Although many people began camping as children and can tell you exactly when their enthusiasm took shape, camping was never just for kids.

In the US, camping as a recreational activity got its start with the publication in 1869 of a guidebook titled Adventures in the Wilderness; or, Camp-Life in the Adirondacks. The author, William Henry Harrison Murray, was a Congregationalist clergyman from Connecticut who enjoyed hiking, canoeing, and other outdoor pursuits in his free time. The book was a collection of narrative vignettes written as an exercise to improve his sermons, and submitted to a publisher upon the encouragement of a friend. Its detailed practical content, along with a prosperous economy, increased leisure time and improved transport to areas that were once wilderness made the book a bestseller and camping a craze.

Camping in the UK took off a bit later. In 1901, Thomas Hiram Holding founded the world’s first club for camping enthusiasts, the Association of Cycle Campers. Holding was born in Great Britain and emigrated to the US with his parents at the age of nine. His book The Camper’s Handbook had a similar effect in Britain to Murray’s in the US. From then onwards, interest in camping in Europe and North America continued to soar.

Murray’s paean to the outdoors offered an antidote to the hectic pace of urban life, the demands of industrialized production and the resulting alienation and discontent. Murray and other writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) and his friend Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), urged the tired and disaffected to seek out wild and unspoiled places for physical and mental well-being. Their younger contemporary, Scottish-born naturalist John Muir (1838–1914), did not simply chronicle and celebrate nature. He actively influenced conservation policy in the US through his articles in popular periodicals, his founding of the Sierra Club and its magazine, and his personal interactions with decision-makers. Muir’s three-night camping trip with President Theodore Roosevelt was instrumental in the establishment of national parks as places protected from commercial exploitation.

A person doesn’t need to go camping to agree that understanding and preserving the planet’s environments is vital to the well-being of our own species. As well as the scientific arguments to this effect, a great deal of passionate feeling has been poured out in essays, stories and poetry, and expressed through the visual arts, music and theatre. But firsthand experience, with or without the reinforcement of science and art, is a powerful motivator. Those who spend time in wild and unspoiled places have a stake in keeping them that way: a personal relationship with nature. At any point on the camping continuum, from survival camping with minimal provisions to luxury holidays, opportunities to observe and reflect on the relationship can be found, or can find you.

I like camping despite all the reasons not to like it, listed earlier. Some of those miseries can be avoided – sometimes – with a bit of research and judicious packing. Camping is not just like any other excursion. You’re entering into an agreement with nature, and you need to understand the terms of the contract – the likely weather, the terrain, what you need to take with you, and so forth. Unlike valid contractual agreements, however, the terms sometimes change without notice.

A friend put it this way:

I like it when my preparations and planning pay off and I have all that I need to eat, sleep and be comfortable. I also like it when nature just messes with me and reminds me that we can’t always plan our way out of every possible scenario. When nature sends high winds or thunderstorms or ravenous wallabies munching outside your tent all night keeping you awake – ‘Bet you didn’t plan on that, hairless primate!’ – camping puts you in your place. You are very conscious that you’re there at the pleasure of nature.

Finding connection

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. ²

Should more people have the experience of camping? Maybe – if we are willing and able, through our state and national governments, to fund the infrastructure needed to handle increased numbers, and to protect the land while keeping it publicly accessible.

On the one hand, I want to encourage people to go camping. All by itself, John Muir’s observation may appear nonsensical or trite; with context, it goes to the heart of our relationship with nature. On the other hand, if the closest to camping you want to get is staying in a hotel without room service (as my friend K. put it), the most eloquent account of spending the night under canvas, waking with the sun and having coffee with kookaburras is unlikely to be persuasive. And that’s fine.

Humans’ relationship with the natural world can be characterized as a constant struggle for dominance, because surviving and thriving appear to require it. Alternatively, it can be thought of as an ongoing effort to understand nature – including our own species – and adapt in order to minimize the costs to us, to other species, and to the planet. I think both of these conceptions contain some truth. But I also think that the second must inform the way in which the first plays out, and that camping can provide a vivid and compelling personal perspective for our complicated connection to (the rest of) the natural world.

References

De Abaitua, Matthew, The Art of Camping: The History and Practice of Sleeping Under the Stars, Penguin Books 2011

Sierra Club, ‘Who was John Muir?’, https://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/about/default.aspx
https://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/favorite_quotations.aspx

Young, Terence, ‘The Minister Who Invented Camping in America’, Smithsonian Magazine, 17 October 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/religious-roots-of-americas-love-for-camping-180965280/

Photo credits

Squamish Valley on the edge of British Columbia by Scott Goodwill on Unsplash

Bicycle camper, Pomerania, Polska by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

Red Jeep with rooftop tent by Dirk Baltzly

Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell, oil on canvas by Hubert von Herkomer, 1903, National Portrait Gallery, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Girl Scout Robertine ‘Robbie’ McClendon (left) of Thomasville, Georgia; Juliette Gordon Low (center); Girl Scout Helen Ross (right) of Macon, Georgia, after Low presented them with the Golden Eaglet, May 1925, Macon, Georgia by unknown photographer, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Ernest Thompson Seton, (1860­–1946), founder of the Woodcraft Indians and pioneer leader of the Boy Scouts of America, Bain News Service, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Campfire by Michael Faes

William Henry Harrison Murray, c. 1875, New York Public Library Image 56083, at William Henry Harrison Murray, LocalWiki Contributors, licensed under CC Attribution 4.0 International

John Muir, Library of Congress, photographer unattributed, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Glamping tent at Spring Bay Mill, Triabunna, Tasmania

Citation

Please cite as: Miller, L. Elaine, ‘At the Pleasure of Nature’, It Could Be Words (blog), 18 February 2021, https://it-could-be-words.com/at-the-pleasure-of-nature

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1. The Girl Scout Law: I will do my best to be honest and fair, friendly and helpful, considerate and caring, courageous and strong, and responsible for what I say and do, and to respect myself and others, respect authority, use resources wisely, make the world a better place, and be a sister to every Girl Scout. – Girl Scouts of the United States of America, https://www.girlscouts.org/en/about-girl-scouts/who-we-are.html

   The Boy Scout Law: A Scout is: trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. – Boy Scouts of America, https://www.scouting.org/about/faq/question10/ [↩]

2. Muir, John, My First Summer in the Sierra, Houghton Mifflin, 1911, p. 110 [↩]