The Allure Of Campers & Camping - A Slightly Philosophical Thread

[Luna Bliss]

What is the love of campers and camping we see springing forth now upon this world?  I was starting to get new ideas, from those who have a different experience in Canada regarding the westward expansion and the romance of it all for those in the U.S.  (on another thread, that disappeared, due to negativity & derails).

I think for me, it's the love of nature that camping always brings, as well as more of a disconnection from civilization -- we may have become too civilized for our own good - so civilized that we lost touch with the essence brought forth in camping....

Edited September 19, 2019 by Luna Bliss

[Alyona Su]

21 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

I think for me, it's the love of nature that camping always brings, as well as more of a disconnection from civilization -- we may have become too civilized for our own good - so civilized that we lost touch with the essence brought forth in camping....

I know it's a whole new thread and threads are for ongoing discussion of things, but I think you've pretty much nailed it right here. It's about slowing down and enjoying the natural creation of Providence, 'Mother Nature" to some. Peaceful, relaxing, bewildering, healthy clean air and water. It's the bare-bones essence of the human condition: nature itself.

And Patch and Moles have done an amazing job at emulating that in a virtual world. Seriously - the House and Houseboats are fun, but the Bellisseria Campsite is stunning to me.

Edited September 19, 2019 by Alyona Su

[Luna Bliss]

2 minutes ago, Alyona Su said:

I know it's a whole new thread and threads are for ongoing discussion of things, but I think you've pretty much nailed it right here.

Well, at this point I'm wondering how the Canadian experience was different historically -- the desire to head west (or north), as I was exploring this via a link someone posted when the thread poofed!  I'll nudge the Canadian when I see them back online.

[Alyona Su]

1 minute ago, Luna Bliss said:

Well, at this point I'm wondering how the Canadian experience was different historically -- the desire to head west (or north), as I was exploring this via a link someone posted when the thread poofed!  I'll nudge the Canadian when I see them back online.

Please do! I love Cananadadians! (My affectionate word for them, I go "up there" often (I'm in Seattle area)

[Luna Bliss]

Just now, Alyona Su said:

Please do! I love Cananadadians! (My affectionate word for them, I go "up there" often (I'm in Seattle area)

Oh?  I love that area...have relatives there and remember a summer spent with them in childhood.

[Madelaine McMasters]

23 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

I think for me, it's the love of nature that camping always brings, as well as more of a disconnection from civilization -- we may have become too civilized for our own good - so civilized that we lost touch with the essence brought forth in camping....

Though more than half the world's population now lives in cites, the vast majority of human evolution occurred elsewhere. There's plenty of evidence that getting back to that "elsewhere" is good for us. I've been doing it since childhood, laying out in fields, looking up at the sky... and listening.

Last week, I heard of recent research showing that squirrels listen to bird chatter for advance warning of predators in the vicinity. I was somewhat surprised to hear that, not because I didn't know squirrels did it, but because I thought researchers should have known that they did.

Next year I intend to start road-tripping again. I haven't done so in 30 years and I miss feeling the awe of expanses. I too think you've nailed it.

[Luna Bliss]

3 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Next year I intend to start road-tripping again. I haven't done so in 30 years and I miss feeling the awe of expanses.

I haven't road-tripped for sooo long myself. For awhile I planned to sell my house & live in an RV, but that proved too difficult. I think though, it might just be possible to keep a home base and make shorter trips, getting some of what I want.....those awesome expanses out west (if it isn't all burned up by the time I get there).

[Luna Bliss]

36 minutes ago, Alyona Su said:

It's the bare-bones essence of the human condition: nature itself.

And Patch and Moles have done an amazing job at emulating that in a virtual world. Seriously - the House and Houseboats are fun, but the Bellisseria Campsite is stunning to me.

Indeed, but the problem is that these regions are getting so beautiful, with these new waterfalls especially, that now I want to house-hop again...    

[Madelaine McMasters]

36 minutes ago, Alyona Su said:

Please do! I love Cananadadians! (My affectionate word for them, I go "up there" often (I'm in Seattle area)

I call 'em Can-ada-mins.

How can you not love the society that created this...

...and yes, even Scylla.

[Alyona Su]

13 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

How can you not love the society that created this...

That is hilarious! Though I cringed and frowned at the same time at the "This is a man's car" part. Not because of what he said, but rather... LOL

Edited September 19, 2019 by Alyona Su

[karynmaria]

When I think of camping it brings back memories of my childhood.  We use to go camping a lot and also did the cabin thing and all of us kids just loved it.  Weekends at the lake lots of swimming, tree climbing, bike riding, candied cigarettes so we could pretend to be adults, and lots of our imagination being used to come up with games and things to do.   Of course we had outhouses and no electronics back then  (I am 54).

However, if I was to go camping now there is no way I would go unless I was in an RV 😂.

[Madelaine McMasters]

8 minutes ago, karynmaria said:

we had outhouses and no electronics back then  (I am 54).

I still have an outhouse...

(I am 49).

[LittleMe Jewell]

3 hours ago, karynmaria said:

When I think of camping it brings back memories of my childhood.

Ditto, which is part of why I hate camping now.  Most of the time when we camped, it was in tents & sleeping bags.  When I was older, we camped a few times in a popup camper, and I hated that just as much.  I even tried the popup camper thing again with my own husband & children, but found that I still hated it just as much. I could possibly handle a fully decked out RV, but otherwise, I want a hotel.

 

3 hours ago, karynmaria said:

Of course we had outhouses and no electronics back then  (I am 54).

Every summer we would spend a few weeks at my grandparent's lake cabin.  Ugh, I still remember that outhouse - definitely not something I wish to ever endure again. I was truly ecstatic when we finally got an indoor bathroom.  

 

I don't need to camp to "get back to nature".  I can drive for a couple of hours one direction and sprawl on the ground up at the continental divide.  Drive a few hours another direction and the elk walk up and down the main street of town, sometime wandering right into the stores.  Just walking from the car to the condo I'll hear plenty of nature sounds all around.  

While I truly detest camping in RL, I do find these SL campers & trailers quite cute.  I may still opt to try to get one, just because they are so darn cute -- and it is not real camping.

[Zoya McDonnagh]

All of the beauty...

 

 

...none of the bugs!

[Madelaine McMasters]

Just now, Zoya McDonnagh said:

All of the beauty...

...none of the bugs!

Pfft, bugs are beautiful...

[Ivanova Shostakovich]

   I've always liked being in the woods. When I was little, my family went camping a few times every summer. We didn't need reservations. We didn't need to check with anyone. We just packed the Blazer with everything we needed, and drove into the mountains. When we found a spot we liked, usually near a river or stream, we set up and stayed there the whole weekend.

   These days I still like camping, either using tents or our vanagon. We go way more often to coastal locations than anywhere else. I like camp cooking and evening camp fires. But I also like having access to real bathrooms and showers.

[Zoya McDonnagh]

1 hour ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Pfft, bugs are beautiful...

Ok as I sit here on my deck listening to country night sounds, let me amend that...

 

All of the beauty...

 

 

...none of the: mosquitoes, flies, wasps, centipedes, and tent worms.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

20 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

I think for me, it's the love of nature that camping always brings, as well as more of a disconnection from civilization -- we may have become too civilized for our own good - so civilized that we lost touch with the essence brought forth in camping....

Well, I spent a bit of time last night sneaking through people's backyards in the new(ish) trailer parks . . .

They are unquestionably beautifully done . . . and the landscaping is lovely. Lots of bushes to hide behind.

I'm going to admit, however, that I don't quite "get it" myself. That's ok, of course: I don't need to "get it." I think I can understand the appeal of an RV that you can actually move from place to place: it would have the sort of appeal that building a blanket house in my living room as a child used to, or a snow fort in the backyard. AND I can understand the appeal of a beautiful old farmhouse in the country . . . but, as nice as these trailers are, they still look, and of course are supposed to look, like modern prefabs. Aesthetically, the landscape appeals, but the abodes don't.

I never stayed in, and indeed don't know that I've ever even visited, a trailer park like this, but the equivalent, I think, in the part of Canada where I grew up and live is the "summer cottage." In my part of the world, those are usually in Muskoka, to the north east of Toronto, or around the shores of Georgian Bay. Having (or renting) a summer cottage is, or was, a standard part of a family summer in Ontario: you'd toss the kids and the pets and boxes full of "supplies" into the back of a car, and drive three or four hours away to a smallish and generally rather primitive bungalow (four or five rooms, although I've seen some that are HUGE) that had usually been built on a back road off the main highway, through a heavily wooded area. The back road usually has a few dozen cottages on it, sometimes within sight of each other, and sometimes not. Lake frontage of some sort was a must: fortunately, Muskoka is thick with small lakes. My parents owned a cottage until I was about 14 or so, I guess: we'd go up, usually two or three times a summer, for a week or two at a time. In the winter, my father would have to go up at least once, too, to shovel the snow off the roof so that it didn't collapse from the weight of it. On a couple of occasions, I went with him. The back road to the cottage wasn't plowed, so we'd have to haul everything (food, water, clothing) from the main highway through waist-high snow (well, it was waist-high for me) for a few kilometers. The best thing about that was jumping off the roof into snow banks. I'd generally hate being dragged off to the cottage, away from my friends. Then I'd get there, and I'd enjoy it for a couple of days . . . and then get bored out of my gourd.

I don't know that I feel the need, usually, to "get back to nature"? I do like nature, but Toronto has lots of parks, some of which are very large and include wetlands and densely wooded areas you can easily get lost in, and forget that you're in the middle of a city of two and a half million people. I love walks through wooded parkland . . . but I like to be able to emerge from it after a few hours, to the luxury of well-appointed public washrooms and nice restaurants.

But Canadians have historically identified themselves as "hewers of wood and drawers of water," and a lot of us clearly have that stamped in our DNA.

Not so much me, though.

[Madelaine McMasters]

4 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

it would have the sort of appeal that building a blanket house in my living room as a child used to, or a snow fort in the backyard.

I still do both of those things.

7 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Then I'd get there, and I'd enjoy it for a couple of days . . . and then get bored out of my gourd.

I can understand wanting to be somewhere else but, unable to make that happen, I'd find something to occupy myself where I was. Stranded at a snowy cabin (and if the snow was suitable for it), I'd probably surround myself with endless Calvin-and-Hobbes snowmen, all doing my evil bidding. Or I'd walk out on the lake at night and watch all the warmly glowing windows along the shore, smug in the knowledge they didn't know I was out here being smug.

8 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I don't know that I feel the need, usually, to "get back to nature"? I do like nature, but Toronto has lots of parks, some of which are very large and include wetlands and densely wooded areas you can easily get lost in, and forget that you're in the middle of a city of two and a half million people. I love walks through wooded parkland . . . but I like to be able to emerge from it after a few hours, to the luxury of well-appointed public washrooms and nice restaurants.

I loved my two years living in downtown Milwaukee. The energy of that place was palpable and infectious. I could walk along the lakefront and get as much nature as I needed, then return to a noisy pizzeria for a late-night dinner. I still, at times, miss that. And that's why I contemplate a semi nomadic retirement in which I move not from place-to-place so much as from lifestyle-to-lifestyle.

My home base of Port Washington is often too familiar to me. I can walk into the hardware store and hear "Hi Maddy, what did you break now?" That's lovely, but breaks through the looking glass.

I like anonymity and distance.

Vast expanses give me that.

So do large crowds.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

19 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

...and yes, even Scylla.

The Red Green Show is hilarious. But it's also kind of odd, in some ways, because it's really an affectionate parody, written by and for urban folk like myself, of life in small town Ontario. It's full of funned-up cliches about "being Canadian," but, again, in the context of a particular cultural milieu. In one way, it's a prime example of the Canadian talent for making gentle fun of ourselves (cf. Bob and Doug Mackenzie), but it's also, at least maybe, a sort of condescending portrait of non-urban Canadians, as viewed from the perspective of the so-called "urban elites" (who are the main demographic, I suspect, of the CBC).

BUT . . . as I say, it is affectionate. I don't know how those who live in the small towns of Ontario that it is sort of ridiculing feel about it, but mostly we (Canadians) are pretty slow to take offense. I suspect that they find it funny too, even as they recognize themselves in it?

I do remember, btw, The Red Fisher Show, which is one of the things that Red Green is parodying. It was hilariously awful. If you like Red Green, it's probably worth dragging up an episode Red Fisher: it's unintentional self-parody!

[Scylla Rhiadra]

4 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

I still do both of those things.

Of course you do. Except, now, they are all of them miniature marvels of modern engineering.

4 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

I can understand wanting to be somewhere else but, unable to make that happen, I'd find something to occupy myself where I was. Stranded at a snowy cabin (and if the snow was suitable for it), I'd probably surround myself with endless Calvin-and-Hobbes snowmen, all doing my evil bidding. Or I'd walk out on the lake at night and watch all the warmly glowing windows along the shore, smug in the knowledge they didn't know I was out here being smug.

Oh, sure. I'd always find things to do! There was a huge sandlot (a giant pile of sand for laying on the "beach" front of the cottage) that was amazing for making sand forts and such. And there was a closet full of games, most of them cheap and kind of stupid, but still fun. And cards. And every once in a while, I'd get (literally) lost in the woods, forcing my parents to have second thoughts about the wisdom of owning a cottage . . .

Actually, that's I guess one of the differences between the Ontario "cottage," and these sorts of trailer parks. Cottages usually have a reasonably substantial acreage of woodland attached to them. I don't know how large the woodland plot that was part of my parent's cottage was, but it was, as I say, big enough for me to get lost in it.

Getting lost in the woods (and worrying about bears, of course) was/is another Canadian rite of passage?

11 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

I loved my two years living in downtown Milwaukee. The energy of that place was palpable and infectious. I could walk along the lakefront and get as much nature as I needed, then return to a noisy pizzeria for a late-night dinner. I still, at times, miss that. And that's why I contemplate a semi nomadic retirement in which I move not from place-to-place so much as from lifestyle-to-lifestyle.

Yes. This. That's ideal.

[Luna Bliss]

40 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I'm going to admit, however, that I don't quite "get it" myself. That's ok, of course: I don't need to "get it."

Scylla I see you as a traveler to wild places of the mind...
Perhaps there are many paths to the wilderness.

When leaving comfort and safety (in the mind or the physical world), a larger and more-encompassing reality can emerge.
Of course, this is not really happening in my little camper in Bellisseria -- here I sit in my comfy chair playing around a bit and having fun. But it reminds me, the camper nestled in the wilderness reminds me, of leaving some of the comfort and safety behind, and the beauty that might emerge when I let go of some safety, or some patterned ways of viewing the world, and choose to experience a reality beyond my usual consciousness. 

[Luna Bliss]

18 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

My home base of Port Washington

Oh, I see where you are. I lived for a time on the Michigan border, and one of my fondest memories is traveling all around the border of Michigan, observing the lighthouses and lakes, picking up rocks.  It's a whole different culture in that area, from where I live now. I call it 'lake culture'....I remember being amazed at just how large ships are. I mean, I saw them in movies of course, but there's nothing like the experience of standing right against one to get a sense of how immense ships are.

[Luna Bliss]

40 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

I like anonymity and distance.

Vast expanses give me that.

So do large crowds.

Interesting what the vast expanses do for you.  For me, vast expanses give  a sense of how small I am in the scheme of things, and  I feel more distant from the way I was conceiving myself, and closer to nature than I usually feel (when standing at the edge of, for example, the Grand Canyon).

* I feel this way in the wheat fields too.

I went on a road trip with a woman who had never been to the mountains and valleys of the West, and she was absolutely terrified of these vast views!  For me, there is some fear, but along with it a sense of exhilaration and beauty.

*...remembering a trip to Colorado and my brother's girlfriend who was terrified of the mountains. She had always lived in the wide open spaces and felt the mountains were "closing in on her".  I almost thought we'd need to take her to an emergency center due to the extreme anxiety.   Very interesting what nature can do to people..

Edited September 20, 2019 by Luna Bliss

[Scylla Rhiadra]

21 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

Well, at this point I'm wondering how the Canadian experience was different historically -- the desire to head west (or north), as I was exploring this via a link someone posted when the thread poofed!  I'll nudge the Canadian when I see them back online.

Well, Canada, like the States, has a really pretty diverse range of geographically-determined cultures, and I speak from the perspective of only one -- albeit, a very influential one.

Canada's attitude to the history of our expansion westward has changed, and continues to change really quite radically, as our relationship to, and understanding of, indigenous cultures and first nations evolves. But the older "official narrative" (i.e., the one that appeared in textbooks, and on CBC) of the west was that it was essentially empty space that was gradually populated by tiny clusters of European settlers, mostly, after about 1890, immigrants from Eastern Europe. The building of the intercontinental railroad tied these tiny rural communities to the larger urban centres: it was literally a precondition for Confederation in 1867, as the building of the CP line to the west coast was an actual precondition of the western provinces and territories signing on to the new nation. The hammering of the "last spike" of the intercontinental in 1885 is an iconic moment (and photograph) in Canadian history.

We used to like to pretend that our relationship with western First Nations was peaceful and well-ordered: the Mounties, in their early incarnation as the Northwest Mounted Police, supposedly used reason and diplomacy rather than guns to keep the peace. A famous story is of the arrival of Sitting Bull and the Sioux as refugees from the States after the Battle of the Little Big Horn: this "fearsome band of warriors" was "subdued," we used to be told, by a single Mountie who greeted and welcomed them to Canada, firmly insisting that this was not the USA, and that no violence would be tolerated.

Of course, the truth is a bit different. The Sioux were "settled" peaceably, but no provision was made to feed them, as they were not native to Canada. They eventually began starving to death, and most drifted south again, back to the USA. And we had two rebellions by First Nations peoples in the West, the Metis, led by Louis Riel. Both were crushed by military force, and Riel was eventually tried and hanged. He is now regarded as something of a Canadian hero, actually, which shows how things are changing (although he's always been revered in French Canada, because the Metis spoke French, and were the descendants of intermarriage between early French trappers and the local indigenous populations).

It's an evolving story, as I said, but it is different from the US one. In fact, many of the stories about violence and conflict in the Canadian West (and especially in the Yukon, which is a whole other story) traditionally centre around gun-toting, whiskey-smuggling Americans.

What is true, I think, is that our "myths" don't focus upon movement, or "expansion" as such. They are instead mostly (whether accurately or not) about stability, community, and that most Canadian of concepts, "good government."