I have a weird relationship with nature. As someone who grew up in the post-modernity United States this should come as no surprise. I’ve always lived in cities. I’ve never gone hunting. I’ve never had to grow my own food. During elementary school I did once try to grow some corn and tomatoes. Unfortunately, some dirty, thieving racoons ate all the tomatoes and all but one of the corn cobs. I believe I cried when I saw the devastation. Since then, I haven’t lived in a space that would even allow me to grow anything. I use nature entirely for recreation. And rarely at that. I live in Chicago, don’t have a car, and get paid grad student wages. A situation uniquely unfit for exploring nature. But I do still have more access to nature than others. My parents live in Montana and I try to see them at least once a year. Hiking trails lie a few minutes’ walk away from their house. Driving a few hours in any direction will get you to any number of outdoor recreation spots. The light pollution in Missoula remains low enough that at night you can sometimes see the Milky Way within city limits. Not everyone has access to places like this however. High costs to entry wall of much of the U.S. from the natural beauty remaining in America. Camping in Glacier National Park, in my mind one of the most beautiful places on Earth, could easily but you back five figures. Not to mention all the time off needed to truly enjoy and experience the park. This of course doesn’t account for the added pressure of not wanting to add to the climate crises by flying or driving such a long distance. Most people will never get to experience the natural beauty of the U.S.
I have camped a fair amount. For the first of my life, family vacations revolved around car camping. We’d rent a site in Maryland, or Maine, or Pennsylvania and camp for about a week. Sometimes a little more or a little less. Usually we’d have to shower in a communal bathhouse that rarely got cleaned and had a lot of bugs in it. We’d probably have to wait in line. Mosquitos enjoyed nothing more than feasting upon your flesh. Sometimes it’d rain three out of the four days. Sometimes it’d be hotter than all hell. Sometimes your dad drags you up what he swears is a trail to the top of a mountain but is actually a dead-end path into a scree, and you have to be a very brave 11-year-old on the way down. But if the dad in the Calvin & Hobbes cartoons got anything right it’s that camping actually rules. This sort of camping sometimes gets frowned upon by people who do backpacking trips. Backpackers, think REI fanatics, can look down on it as easy or boring camping. They shouldn’t.
In the last couple of years I’ve gone on two different kinds of camping trips. In 2017 I went backpacking for the first time. In March of that year I took at trip down to Utah. We planned on backpacking in the Dark Canyon wilderness area of the Bears Ears National Monument. Barack Obama had recently declared it a National Monument in one of his last acts of office. I had gone camping in Utah with these folks in Utah before, but never backpacking. I had to borrow everything but boots, pants, and a water bottle. I flew down from Chicago to Salt Lake City to meet my fellow backpackers, which included my parents and four other friends. I got into the airport around seven in the morning. I then promptly got airport mimosas with my friend Beth while we waited for the rest of the crew to arrive. When everyone arrived, we got supplies, ate some wonderful pupusas in Salt Lake City, and drove the five hours to the trailhead. The next night we hiked into to our base camp for the backpacking trip. To get there we had to hike a few miles in and then down into the dark canyon. We camped for two days by a river. We saw a few other people but not that many. We left a day early so as not to get caught in an oncoming rainstorm. We hiked out the same way we hiked in. The hike down and out measures about the size of the Empire State Building in elevation over a very short amount of distance. A grueling trek to say the least. When we made it back to Salt Lake City we took showers for the first time in four days, ordered about two hundred dollars of Chinese food, watched Ocean’s Twelve and passed out by nine-thirty. A wonderful trip.
More recently I convinced three of my friends to go camping. The final week of June 2019, Mark, Jon, Josh and I borrowed a four-person tent from Mark’s parents, loaded up Josh’s cooler with burgers, beers, and Cheeze-Its and drove Jon’s car up to Wisconsin. We stayed at one of the campgrounds in the Kettle Moraine complex. We drove into our camp site, set up the tent, made some burgers, and drank some beers. The next day we did about a two-mile hike with almost no elevation gain, went back to the camping site, and swam for a bit. Then we ate more burgers, more hot dogs, drank some more beers. We added a few Trulys into the rotation for hydration as well. Most of the afternoon’s conversation revolved around what bands we would invite to our perfect music fest. On Sunday we drove out of the campground, went to a “Supper Club” for an all you can eat brunch and went back to Chicago. An excellent camping trip.
So why mention those two camping trips? On the surface they seem wildly different. In Utah we hiked and camped in the backcountry, highly inaccessible land. We had to dig holes to go to the bathroom. We had no food that we didn’t carry in ourselves. In Wisconsin we drove into our camping spot, went to Costco and Wal-Mart for supplies and used a bathroom with running water. But underneath the surface lies far more similarities than differences. On both trips I talked with people that I love. We told jokes about animal scat. We talked about philosophy. We looked at the stars. We sweated. We slept in tents and tried to ignore everyone else’s snoring. We felt uncomfortable at times. Backpacking may seem like the more “legit’ or “real” way to camp, but that’s just branding. Driving a car into a small patch of grass with a wooden picnic table and a fire pit with a metal ring around is a way of interacting with nature no less mediated by modernity than backpacking. Backpackers use all sorts of specialty gadgets and lightweight water wicking fabrics to facilitate their interactions with nature, much the same as car campers. To put it somewhat scatalogically, the freeze-dried biscuits and gravy I ate while on that Utah trip clogged me up just as much as the two days of Costco burgers did on my Wisconsin trip
No one has the perfect way to interact with nature. That guy on Youtube who goes into the woods and builds a whole house with no tools but his hands is just as legit as the people who car camp with two hundred other groups in Kettle Moraine, Wisconsin. They both rule. Just as long as your camping trip doesn’t involve participating in strip mining, massive deforestation efforts, or resource intensive “glamping.”