Chapter Twenty
Camping is Dead
Let’s All Mourn the Loss of Camping: Before camping died, it looked like this: A family drives a station wagon into a campground, picks out a nice site, and sets up a modest tent. The kids run off to catch bullfrogs, swim in the pond with the other kids, and engage in other Norman Rockwell type activities. After dinner, they sit around a small fire, talk quietly, listen to the crickets and the wind in the trees, and gaze at the stars. That sounds nice, doesn’t it?
But that type of camping is dead because now, it's party time with as many of your toys as you can cram into your huge pickup truck and trailer, plus all the drinking buddies you can assemble! A typical campsite might have an RV, several canopy structures, two huge tents, six coolers, several gas grills, and 12 folding chairs.
A quick observation about those humongous, complicated three-or-more-room tents that are popular today: I've observed that tent setting up time is not happy family time.
The three tent stakes driven through the heart of camping are noise, light, and overcrowding.
Stake number one is noise. Sounds then: Wind in the trees, birds, crickets, happy kids. Sounds now: Car alarms, generators, boom boxes, cell phone rings, cell phone conversations, Playstation tunes, and loud drunken laughing over party music.
Before the death of camping, you might spend the afternoon in the shade of a tree with your summer reading. But now, even if the temperature is a pleasant 75 degrees, your neighbor’s huge RV will be heating up like a meth lab in Bakersfield. So he or she will turn on the air conditioning, which means running the generator. All day. Instead of listening to the breeze in the trees, you’re now essentially sitting next to an idling cement truck.
Worse, generators are no longer limited to RV's. Now even tent campers bring portable generators so that they can watch their favorite reality show on TV.
The constant generator hum is punctuated with car alarms. Every campground is treated to at least one car alarm per night. And since many cars and trucks have remote locks that briefly honk the horn and flash the lights when locked, your sleep is interrupted each time one of these campers visits his or her vehicle.
Stake number two is light pollution. When campers turn on their maxi-light camping lanterns each night (I’m not making this up: some even come with remote controls), the stars fade out until the sky resembles that of Times Square. It's worse, actually, because in the city, people have their lights on inside their houses, but at the campground, the lights are outside.
This doesn’t bother many of the “campers,” since the sunset finds them inside their RV, watching Duck Dynasty. For anyone who’s experienced true wilderness, however, the great outdoors now feels like a fully lit Dodger Stadium.
The final stake in camping’s heart is overcrowding. Your camping experience may actually begin at 12:00 AM on January 1, when you attempt to reserve a site at one of the more favored destinations. Some campgrounds in California are fully booked for popular summer dates by 4 AM. As population increases, we can keep building new Home Depots and strip malls, but the campgrounds are limited.
A large national reservation company may have handled your reservation. The largest booked over 4 million reservations in 2006. Instead of driving through the campground and choosing a site that is a bit away from other sites, a computer server in downtown Chicago assigns you a specific campsite.
If you camp in Yosemite Valley, you’ll find that the individual sites have been squeezed together like mini tectonic plates until every square foot of space is used up. And urban sprawl is bringing new freeways right up against camping areas that were formerly in the wilderness.
I've been talking about car camping here, of course. So you might be thinking that if you want to recreate the real camping experience, all you have to do is go backpacking.
Yes, that's true in many cases, however some backpacking destinations experience so many backpackers that they now prohibit firewood collection. No cozy campfire for you. At Mount Rainier National Park, there are so many hikers, that backpackers are required to put all of their waste, and I'm not talking just about coffee grounds here, into bags and pack it out with them. You thought it was gross to pick up after your dog. Be sure you don't open the wrong stuff sack when looking for the trail mix!
Can camping be revived? I used to think that perhaps some segregated areas of campgrounds could be set up to prohibit all music, generators, and bright lanterns. But that would require a level of organization and enforcement that isn’t justified by the apparently small number of campers looking for a simpler, more natural experience.
Instead, I’ve just come to accept that most people’s idea of “roughing it” consists of television without cable. If you’re looking for the pre-camping-death experience, you’ll just have to camp off-season at a campground far from the major population centers, take your eye-shades, and load your music player with a recording of nature sounds.