Ah, Wilderness?

(See Cover) I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived ... 7 wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

That is how Henry David Thoreau felt in July 1845 as he went into the woods at Walden Pond. He built himself a little cabin, largely out of secondhand materials, the cost of which he recorded in precise Yankee style: $28.12 1/2, including a 10-c- latch and a penny piece of chalk. Thus he began his celebrated two-year sojourn in happy isolation. Last week. 116 years later, Thoreau would have been able to find his clump of woods easily enough, but not necessarily the solitude to permit him to drive life into a corner. The snort and belch of automobiles punctuate the old serenity of Walden. and the yelps of children, followed by the cries of their parents, have all but enveloped the summer-soft days. Across the whole expanse of the U.S., the wildernesses where once only the hardiest of outdoorsmen trod now shuddered under the invasion of hundreds of thousands of families hungering for a summertime skirmish with nature. Smitten by the call of the not-so-wild, these families were happily engaged in a great and grow-inp national pastime--camping.

Moonscapes & Rapture. Despite civilization's inroads, the U.S. still offers some of the world's great spectacles of nature, and campers know it. They fished last week in the Cascades of the Pacific Northwest, threaded among the prehistoric ruins at Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park, trailed the animals in the Adirondacks, bathed in the cold streams of South Willow Crater in Utah. On the moonscapes of Arizona, in the thick forests of Upper Michigan--wherever the land had managed to preserve its ancient dignity--both tenderfoot and oldtimer paid his respects to grandeur. In return, they absorbed something as ineradicable as it is elusive: the rapture of the spirit in the presence of creation.

In Maine, campers poured into Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island and swept over 31,000 acres of mountain, fresh-water pond, deep woods and seashore. At Rangeley Lake in the same state, the campers took nature walks between classes at the camping school, where they learned how to keep a campfire from turning into a disaster (dig a hole for the fire, line the rim with rocks; before leaving it, douse it with water and sand and stir thoroughly until it is cool enough to be sifted by hand). In Georgia's Chattahoochee National Forest, the streams rippled with trout (provided by the wildlife commissions), and the campsites, many with their own blacktop driveways, rippled with people. The rhododendron overhung the creeks in Minnesota's Lake Itasca State Park, and little boys overhung the rhododendron, while some of their fathers were just hung over, gazing blankly at the huge oaks, hickories. spruces and poplars. At Kennedy Meadow, just north of Yosemite Park in the California Sierra, campers hiked along a winding stream through pine and fir forests and sandy flats, fished for brownies and slept under the stars. At Minnesota's Lake Carlos State Park, the overflow of campers slept under picnic tables.

The figures that ooze from reports on the camping economy are wild enough to make a forest ranger reach for a cigarette: P: This year 16.500,000 people are headed for campgrounds--about 2,000,000 more than last year.

P: In the eleven Southern states, the craze, in the words of park officials, is "blowing sky high." In Georgia alone, the "camper days" (number of campers multiplied by number of days camped) are expected to jump 15% over last year's 1,362,000. P:In the Rocky Mountain national forests of Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska, 2,000,000 appeared last year; in 1961, 100,000 more are expected. P:In the camp-crazy hot spots of New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, where visitors logged 2,000,000 camper days last year, the 1961 projection indicates another 200,000. The number of campsites has leaped from 3,000 in 1950 to a record 5,900, including facilities provided by 29 national parks and 152 national forests. P:Sears, Roebuck's camping equipment sales are up 40% since 1956; its sales of rubberized mattresses alone have risen 700% in a single year. The Coleman Co. of Wichita. Kans., one of the biggest suppliers in the country, has already registered its highest sales in company history for the first four months of 1961 -- and this after a 400% climb in ten years. P:The U.S. Forest Service, which in 1957 launched "Operation Outdoors" in an effort to keep up with ever-blossoming outdoorsmen by pouring $122 million into new facilities, plans to kick the budget up to $285 million by 1970.

Promissory Notes. Why this mass movement into the world of mosquitoes, snakes and burrs? For many, the motive is simply that they are tired of expensive hotels and motels; camping provides an inexpensive vacation. A family of four can go into a national park for $1 (or in some cases, nothing) and an outlay of as little as $200 for equipment that will last for years. For a great number of other people, the urge goes deeper than economics: in a sense they still seek what Thoreau looked for at Walden.

The industrialization, urbanization and suburbanization of modern life have sharpened the need for many to rediscover the essential facts of existence. More than ever, Americans now have the means -- prosperity, new leisure hours -- to make that rediscovery.

But as their industries, their urbs, suburbs and highways encroach upon the wilderness, that wilderness becomes particularly precious. Where it remains, its symbol has become a disturbingly anthropomorphic grizzly named Smokey the Bear, who wears pants and a hat and speaks. With perhaps too much urgency, a physician's wife, drawing water from a campground faucet in the Rockies last week, explained: "We have to get away from the daily routine once in a while, and we want our children to see something of an America that may not be here much longer."

Those who yearn for the primeval places in the mountains and canyons are apt to be highly vocal. Lester Buck, a reporter on the Wichita Eagle and a veteran camper, puts the case for that group as passionately as anyone who ever hiked a trail: "The city man has come to realize that the paper he pushes on his desk is without structure, that it is merely a promissory note guaranteeing that life and death do exist in counterpoint; that somewhere water is truly wet, the sun hot and the sand granular beyond human belief. He goes camping not to get away from it all but to get back to it all. His customary world is flattened by his own excesses, sealed by its brick, insulated by its pavements. He does not see his apartment building or his office building as 10 or 20 or 30 stories reaching into the sky and seeming to move as the clouds swing by; he hasn't looked up. Outdoors, he knows intimately only two vistas: the entrance to his office building, the entrance to his home; there is no reality in between. Nor does he go camping to relax, to simply fall apart, for that is what urban man has learned to do so well at home for the sake of his sanity: to relax, to stop reacting, to dull the colors, muffle the sounds, dilute the smells."

The Revolt. But the man who wants to get back to it all had better know his way around, for progress has caught up with camping in an alarming fashion and has altered it drastically. Once the last refuge of the male--the one leisure activity in which he could be stubble-bearded and dirty--camping has been taken over by the women.

Actually, most women couldn't care less for the mess and comparative hardship of camping; as far as they are concerned, the whole thing is strictly for the magpies. But like golf widows and fishing widows, they know they are licked unless they join the menfolk, so they have revolted, picked up their sunglasses and mosquito spray, and marched off together. They will concede that camping, after all, is good for the children, and besides, it is something that the whole family can do together. Thus established on the threshold of the wilderness, the women have demanded--and are getting at a dizzying rate--all the comforts of home.

At Colter Bay, in the Grand Tetons of Wyoming, a luxurious campground financed by the Rockefellers has segregated areas for cabin campers, trailer campers, campers, or just plain tenters. A tenderfoot can turn up there with the clothes on his back and rent anything he needs, from a cabin ($5 a couple per night) to sleeping bags (50-c-) to icebox coolers (50-c-) to bath towels and soap (15-c-). At Eastport, on Maine's Cobscook Bay, the campsite opened this year with a woodsy band concert and a Down East fish chowder. At night, the campgrounds were thoughtfully floodlit so that everybody would not be lonesome. At "The Gatherings," in Surry, Me., campers danced to the music of a jukebox and joined in the bridge tournaments and bingo game.

In most of the national parks, campers can find hot and cold water, city-style plumbing, cocktail lounges, automatic laundries, hairdressers, TV, and enough electric power to light the city of Boise.

Michigan authorities have already approved installation of additional electrical facilities to handle the increased load of electric frying pans and blankets, but Wisconsin has called a halt. Says Forest and Parks Superintendent Roman Koenings: "We have had requests to provide sewer hookup facilities for some campers, but we are not going to comply. We've gone as far as we're going."

Compulsion & Culture. In cases where campers cannot plug their heaters and stoves and coolers and hair dryers and shavers into handy outlets, they can always hike over to the rest rooms to plug in there and cook their dinner (a practice on which the authorities frown). There are times, too, that some campers feel compelled to take other drastic measures. Yellowstone Park rangers still chuckle when they tell about the two old ladies who camped together for weeks at a time. They lived in a tent, cooked their meals, embroidered and sewed, read a little. Each afternoon, they got into their car and drove off for an hour, then returned to their quiet routine. At length, a polite but curious ranger asked the women where they disappeared to every day. The shy reply: they had a room in a luxury hotel some distance away, where each afternoon they took a soaking bath.

Another unmistakable sign of the female revolution in camping is culture. Instead of allowing unlimited time for silent meditation or even family conversation, camp officials all over the country feel that they must fill the campers' minds with formal programs and entertainments. There are illustrated lectures on flowers, wildlife, geology, ancient cultures and the mating habits of garter snakes. Family campers can now attend a scientific lecture about a geyser while watching it spout its stuff, or take in a good talk on wildlife and then drive out to the edge of a marsh and see that the wild moose standing out in the water actually has a bell-like tassel hanging from his neck, just as the ranger said.

The Compromisers. Most modern campers avoid solitude. Like skiers and bowlers, they are a gregarious bunch. They love nothing better than to camp alongside one another in long, soldierlike rows of tent cities, William Roeder of Aurora, Ill., who, with his family, set up a big (gft. by 24-ft.) wall tent with picture windows and zippered flaps at Devils Lake State Park, Wis., last week sported a portable toilet, aluminum chaises and gas lanterns. Explained he: "We happened to talk about camping with other people at a cocktail party, and after getting a bit high, we got the urge." The Roeders were enjoying themselves and the vast company, too. So was Warren Fowler, a regional director for the National Campers and Hikers Association. "The thing we like about camping," said he, "is that we meet the nicest, friendliest people.

Everybody talks to everybody else at these campsites. And it's easy on my wife. It's easier for her to keep the tent clean than it is to clean the house."

Campers like the Roeders and the Fowlers never regret a moment of their experiences, but like so many people, they find it hard to give up their comforts merely because they are on a vacation. This attitude toward the wilderness, write University of Minnesota Sociologists Gordon Bultena and Marvin Taves in a study of campers, "presumes the existence of picnic tables, wells, toilets, washrooms, and the like. These individuals simply do not adopt the more traditional definition of wilderness, substituting instead an 'urban frame of reference.' They are 'wilderness compromisers.' "*

Boots & Bags. Happily, there are plenty of campers who are willing to meet the wilderness on closer terms. There are ascetic backpackers who spend the winter months building lighter-than-air pack frames, breaking in mountain boots, testing clothing, inventing new weight-saving ideas--such as replacing pot handles with wire, stripping grommets from tarpaulins, mixing salt and pepper to save carrying one container, cutting the handles from toothbrushes. But for the average, wilderness-compromising family bent on giving it a try, there is no need to be so Thoreau about it. The novice can begin merely by leafing through camp registries and equipment catalogues and deciding right off whether he wants to invest a few hundred or several thousand dollars.

Minimum gear for the family that will hike the trails requires careful choosing. Tents nowadays are made with durable, lightweight fabrics. For about $95 there are 9ft. by 11-ft. nylon-walled tents with sewn-in flooring, full zippered flaps, and front and back screen windows; they have telescopic aluminum corner poles and roof-bracing metal stakes and no center pole, can sleep four people comfortably, and can be put up (with a little practice) in 20 minutes by one man. Sleeping bags are a lot handier than cots and blankets. The best and warmest, made with down, cost at least $50, though there are less expensive kinds; some are designed to permit zippering two together, forming a sort of double bed.

Light clothing for day wear is essential. Lightweight, waterproof, ankle-height boots are necessary for climbing and long walks, and convenient even for sloshing around the camp in the rain; and a warm jacket will come in handy at night. Many campers pick up inexpensive Army knapsacks at surplus stores, generally a good source of equipment.

Once these major items are secured, the camper must stock up on food (Armour & Co. now markets a variety of lightweight, dehydrated foods that require no refrigeration) and cooking utensils. A nested set of aluminum skillets, bowls, cups, etc., sells for about $8, and a knife-fork-spoon combination that clips together costs 70-c-. A length of nylon line is handy for lashing bedrolls and tents. Flashlights and spare batteries should be packed, as well as a small kerosene lamp, books, matches in a waterproof case, first-aid kit, candle, knife, hatchet, bucket, small trench shovel, mosquito repellent, aluminum foil, toilet paper, foul-weather clothing, cameras, binoculars, a good topographical map (available at park and forest headquarters), handy nature guides and a Thermos jug.

To the Showers. If packing, is no problem, or if the family requires more comfort while in the throes of facing the wilderness, get a portable gas stove, grub box, cots, air mattresses, an air pump for the mattresses (one model gets its puffs from the automobile exhaust pipe), charcoal grill, folding toilet ($11.95) and canvas bathtub ($17.50). If the car battery is in good shape, the camper can also load up a small refrigerator, tent heater, fluorescent lamp, electric smoker for chicken, and coffee maker--all of which can be wired like an umbilical cord into the dashboard cigar lighter, a versatile instrument that can do almost anything but whistle Tenting Tonight.

If he has more money to spend, the camper can look over the variety of mobile campsites in the showrooms. Volkswagen's Camper comes fitted with bunks and a sophisticated assortment of kitchen equipment, sells for $2,973 (plus taxes and shipping); Chevrolet has a similar model, and both Land-Rovers and Ford station wagons are promoted with special camping equipment. There are small house trailers mounted on pickup trucks, also called "campers" (some are available on a you-rent-it basis), which feature refrigerators, butane or propane stoves, utensils, even hot and cold running water, showers, toilets and air conditioners (about $2,100). Farther down on the scale are specially designed tents that fit over the tail gates of station wagons, lean-to canvas that turns a car into a bedroom, tepees (the rangers' favorite), and pup tents for storage.

Loading Up. If he is wise, the camper with a new tent will set it up first in his own backyard, cook a little something on his stove, light his lantern and pump up his air mattress. "Everyone should do his staff work before he starts out," says Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Lemuel Garrison. "Too many people think they have inherited Daniel Boone's knowledge as well as his spirit. They haven't."

Similarly, packing the station wagon requires some forethought. The gear that is needed last will go in first, with the tent and bedrolls on top. When everything is loaded, there is always the wife who remembers the two cartons of groceries, some odds and ends from the kitchen cabinets, and a couple of handbags containing toiletries. Invariably, something is missing, and the load all has to come out so that the baby can be extricated. Then there is the necessity of supplying the children with toys and books (many somehow prefer to look at a picture of a cow than at a whole herd grazing off the highway). Sometimes, though, the kids overdo the toy business. Recalls one Denverite: "I am a pliable sort of human being and a well-trained husband and father, but I damned near threw a tantrum when I started on our last camping trip. The kids had ready to go a toy sword, 24 plastic models of prehistoric saurians, a cannon, two dolls, a toy kitchen cabinet, one dump truck and a doll buggy."

At last, after the logistical errors are rectified, the children mollified and the milkman notified, the camper sets his H-hour for some occult reason at 6 o'clock the next morning. The departure time, however, is always 8:05.

The Choppers. Chances are that once the family arrives at a campsite, something will go wrong. Somebody will complain about the fellow whose children brought along a pet squirrel or a white rat. At least one man somewhere will drive an ax into his foot, and many others, after a frustrated search for firewood, will get caught chopping up a public rest room or a picnic table. Hundreds of campers will be washed out in the first rainstorm because they neglected to dig a run-off trench around the tent.

At St. Mary Lake in Montana last year, one fellow tried to pound his metal tent stakes into gravel, and after destroying every last one of them along with his temper, hauled his family off to a motel. In Wisconsin a while back, ten-year-old David Pierson, son of a Missouri salesman, dropped his flashlight into a lake and fell in after it. Scrambling out, he squished back to the family fireside and took off his clothes. His mother hung them on a chair near the fire to dry, and in a few minutes both chair and clothing went up in smoke.

And despite all the warnings, there are still a few hundred unfortunate run-ins each year with the bears that roam the parks. Animal lovers simply do not believe that it is dangerous to feed the bears, often forget that leaving food or candy in a tent is an outright invitation to any beast within sniffing distance. Trouble is, they look so cute, and they seem to be smiling a happy welcome to visitors--but too few campers realize that a bear hardly ever smiles: he just looks that way all the time, even when he is rummaging through a garbage can or swatting somebody in the head. Like TV's cartoon Yogi Bear, the beasts at Yellowstone are "smarter than the average bear": they can open automobile doors, and some have been known to slip a paw through a small ventilator window of a car and open the door from the inside. At Yellowstone recently, a good-sized black bear ambled up to a picnic table where two couples were dining. Three of the people quickly withdrew, but the hostess stayed put. "I cooked this breakfast," cried she angrily, "and no damned bear is going to eat it!" With that, she whacked the animal over the head a few times with her skillet, and the bear slunk off.

Husk & Ash. With all the trials that camping brings--even with all its absurd concessions to civilized living--the one overwhelming fact about it is that the great mountains and forests of the U.S. are such indestructible marvels, and so mysteriously instructive to man's nature, that even the most unabashed dude and his togetherness-mad neighbor in the sprawl of Tent City return from a camping trip stronger for their experience.

Recently, New York Toy Designer Don Traub and a friend drove into Wyoming's Grand Tetons in Jackson Hole, parked where the road ended, swung their heavy rucksacks and sleeping bags on their backs, and hiked north along a woodland trail to Leigh Lake. From there, they rowed better than two miles to the foot of a snow-splotched mountain on the western shore, hacked out the underbrush, laid down a floor of pine boughs, and put up their tent. By nightfall they had a campfire blazing (disdaining such backyard aids as starter fuel), and ate corn roasted in the husk, ash-baked potatoes, hamburgers, cold beer (iced in the lake) and hot coffee.

Next morning, after dressing in the chilling air, they had their breakfast and, carrying light packs, traversed upward through thickets of aspen and pine and cedar and wild flowers. Now and then they recrossed the stream and stopped to drink, and after an hour, high in the mountain, they found the waterfall that fed the stream below. Clambering across a rockslide, they tucked some beer into the water, built a fire and cooked their lunch. When they returned to their camp, they stripped and plunged with agonized cries into a lake cold enough to recall Joyce's scrotum-tightening sea.

By the time they broke camp at dawn next day and headed for the city, they knew why a man returns again and again to the wilderness: to become aware once more, to regain his natural animal tension; to see the cardinal slash through a sea of green leaves like a streak of new blood; to know again that water has taste as well as temperature, to drink sloppily and desperately because his mouth is dry and his tongue too big for his mouth; to eat the fat trout quickly cooked after the catching; to backpack his gear through glades and trails and to know the relief of rest; to climb high along the creature trails, grabbing suddenly for a fall-saving hold on a limb.

Ravens & Wild Roses. Not quite so uncompromising in their attitude were two New Mexico physicians and their families who camped last week at Vallecito, in Colorado's San Juan National Forest. Hemotologist Samuel Painter, who had camped in the rough before, this time had a rented trailer for his wife and four children because he wanted to save his pregnant wife the heavy work of tent camping. Cardiologist James Conrad and his wife and two children were using a station wagon and a tent. Neither family fished, but they sailed and hiked. Bird Lover Painter delighted in helping the children discover some wonderful birds--a hoarse raven that flapped over the yellow pines, a broad-tailed hummingbird, a pine siskin, a violet green swallow, bluebirds and chickadees, orioles and woodpeckers.

Late in the afternoons, Painter made the martinis (while Conrad "held the vermouth a bit downwind"). With Painter playing the harmonica and Conrad the guitar, the children sang till suppertime and then climbed into their sleeping bags. On other days, the Painters and Conrads walked among the ponderosa pine and the aspen trees, past berries and pink dianthus and lupine and wild roses, yarrow and wild strawberry and kitten ears and vetch. Though most campers swear that the forest is a world of green-muffled silence, it is actually full of noise: the constant cry of gulls and other water birds, the chit-chatter of squirrels and chipmunks and the hum of honey bees in the warm sun, the distant buzz of a motorboat, and the whine of a power saw biting into the big trees; the drone of an airplane far overhead, the growl of a lumber truck on a steep grade, the small talk of tiny birds in the bushes, and the murmuring of a mountain stream. And at night: the goose-pimpling patter of rain on the canvas that wakes a child, the stark clarity of detail in the tent when lightning flashes, and the crack of thunder and its rolling echo around the lake shore.

Living Monuments. Far off, while the Painters and the Conrads and thousands like them slept, trailers and turtle-backed Volkswagens and humpbacked sedans piled high with tents and bedrolls, were sweeping along the roads into the Sierra, the highways circling the Smokies, and the byways of Wisconsin and New Hampshire. Through valleys where Mariposa grow, and lilies and larkspur, beyond the cities and into the living monuments of hills and forest and rivers, the camping families were finding their way.

Too many of them, perhaps, wanted their nature well done rather than raw. But even for those who chose the new-style, cocktail-slinging mass encampments that will surely spread from park to park in the years ahead--even for those, there was at least some of the flavor of living as the pioneers had lived. With father bull-horning instructions like a circus hand, the tent would go up, and the kids would find their boxes and their toys and their fishing rods, and mother would get the stove going. They might even sleep off the ground and eat over the picnic table instead of a campfire, and launder their clothes in a machine, and rejoice in the modern plumbing, the community sing and the backyard tongue-flapping with the neighbors. They might bumble into a beehive, or topple into the lake, or get stuck in the tent Zipper.

But there would come the moment when, following the nature lecture, one of them would belly down to cool his mouth at a rushing spring, or spot a hoof-mark of a deer in the dust, or turn abruptly to see a red-winged blackbird dancing on a reed. To these campers, as to the backpacker in his solitude, would come the experience (in Thoreau's words) of something sublime, and the need to give a true account of what they had discovered.

*Even in Europe, traditional home of the intrepid camper, authorities have had to create new sites and new luxuries for additional, more trepid folk. In Italy campers rent tents with clean linen and floor mats, are served their meals by waiters in canvas-covered dining halls. In France, where le camping is drawing more and more enthusiasts, food comes first, even out-of-doors: the campers will sacrifice air mattresses and luxury tents and the like for refrigerator bags and cooking equipment.

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