"Camping out" is becoming merely a name for moving out of one's
permanent habitation and dwelling for a few weeks in a well-built lodge,
smaller than one's home, but as comfortable and almost as convenient;
with tables, chairs and crockery, carpets and curtains, beds with sheets
and blankets on real bedsteads, a stove and its full outfit of cooking
utensils, wherefrom meals are served in the regular ways of
civilization. Living in nearly the same fashion of his ordinary life,
except that he wears a flannel shirt and a slouch hat, and fishes a
little and loafs more than is his ordinary custom, our "camper" imagines
that he is getting quite close to the primitive ways of hunters and
trappers; that he is living their life with nothing lacking but the
rough edges, which he has ingeniously smoothed away. He is mistaken. In
ridding himself of some of its discomforts, he has lost a great deal of
the best of real camp life; the spice of small adventure, and the woodsy
flavor that its half-hardships and makeshift appliances give it. If one
sleeps a little cold under his one blanket on his bed of evergreen
twigs, though he does not take cold, he realizes in some degree the
discomfort of Boone's bivouac when he cuddled beside his hounds to keep
from freezing--and feels slightly heroic. His slumbers are seasoned with
dreams of the wild woods, as the balsamic perfume of his couch steals
into his nostrils; his companions' snores invade his drowsy senses as
the growl of bears, and the thunderous whir of grouse bursting out of
untrodden thickets. When he awakes in the gray of early morning he finds
that the few hours of sleep have wrought a miracle of rest, and he feels
himself nearer to nature when he washes his face in the brook, than when
he rinses off his sleepiness in bowl or basin. The water of the spring
is colder and has a finer flavor when he drinks it from a birch bark
cup of his own making. Tea made in a frying-pan has an aroma never known
to such poor mortals as brew their tea in a teapot, and no mill ever
ground such coffee as that which is tied up in a rag and pounded with a
stone or hatchet-head. A sharpened stick for a fork gives a zest to the
bit of pork "frizzled" on as rude a spit and plattered on a clean chip
or a sheet of bark, and no fish was ever more toothsome than when
broiled on a gridiron improvised of green wands or roasted Indian
fashion in a cleft stick.
What can make amends for the loss of the camp-fire, with innumerable
pictures glowing and shifting in its heart, and conjuring strange shapes
out of the surrounding gloom, and suggesting unseen mysteries that the
circle of darkness holds behind its rim? How are the wells of
conversation to be thawed out by a black stove, so that tales of
hunters' and fishers' craft and adventure shall flow till the measure of
man's belief is overrun? How is the congenial spark of true
companionship to be kindled when people brood around a stove and light
their pipes with matches, and not with coals snatched out of the
camp-fire's edge, or with twigs that burn briefly with baffling flame?
But it will not be long before it will be impossible to get a taste of
real camping without taking long and expensive journeys, for every
available rod of lake shore and river bank is being taken up and made
populous with so-called camps, and the comfortable freedom and seclusion
of a real camp are made impossible there. One desiring that might better
pitch his tent in the back woodlot of a farm than in any such popular
resort. This misnamed camping out has become a fashion which seems
likely to last till the shores are as thronged as the towns, and the
woods are spoiled for the real campers, whom it is possible to imagine
seeking in the summers of the future a seclusion in the cities that the
forests and streams no longer can give them.
Yet, let it be understood that make-believe camping is better than no
camping. It cannot but bring people into more intimate relations with
nature than they would be if they stayed at home, and so to better
acquaintance with our common mother, who deals so impartially with all
her children.