The Art of Camping: The History and Practice of Sleeping Under the Stars is out now in Penguin paperback.
http://www.facebook.com/artofcamping
Reviews
Does for camping what Roger Deakin did for wild swimming. (Independent )
A delightful combination of history and memoir with a generous dollop of guidance thrown on top . . . read this gem of a book. (Economist )
An elegant ode to the joys of camping. All sorts of tips on campsite etiquette, lore, equipment, and best practice, and his advice is convincing and honest. He is a lovely writer and his history is enlivened with tremendous flashes of wit. (Daily Telegraph)Teaming witty anecdotes with a potted history of what sleeping under the stars means sociologically, De Abaitua makes learning how to create a tented home away from home fun. (Elle)De Abaitua will soon have you believing in this consistently engaging and enjoyable book. It’s a fine writer indeed who can seem authoritative, approachable and just great fun. (Metro)
“The Art of Camping is the perfect chiarascuro of personal observation, wit and insight, with a detailed – but never over-egged – history of a stream athwart the main current of urbanised life. The entire hidden under-the-groundsheet history of camping provides such a fascinating perspective from which to look back on the follies of the permanently settled, while, in and of itself, it turned out to be a vital strand in the liberation movements of the 20th century.” Will Self.
Could there be another way of life? Can I survive with less stuff? Should I run for the hills?
These are all good questions that people have asked before, throughout history, and which have inspired people to set up camp. But now camping is part of the drive for self-sufficiency, a reaction against mass tourism, a chance to connect with the land, to experience a community, to leave no trace . . .
From packing to pitching, with hikes into the deep history of the subject and encounters with the great campers and camping movements of the past, the Art of Camping is a witty and philosophical blend of ‘how to’, history and personal anecdotes – a must for every camper.
Readers who are interested in discovering more about the history of camping should like our Art of Camping Facebook group. Photographs of the eccentric camping movements covered in the book will appear here and it will be place for new material on camping history as we discover it.
http://www.facebook.com/artofcamping
Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, John Burroughs and Harvey Firestone
The most famous autocamper was Henry Ford. Every summer Ford undertook a camping tour with his friend Harvey Firestone, of Firestone tyres, and his mentor, Thomas Edison, the bringer of electric light. The fourth member of the party was the antithesis of the modern industrialist, the ageing writer John Burroughs, disciple of Walt Whitman and friend of Theodore Roosevelt.
Burroughs was a critic of the era of mass production, of which Ford’s cars and Edison’s light bulbs were potent symbols, but he had been courted by Ford, and his presence on the trips was a symbol of two American centuries meeting around the campfire.
Henry Ford was a farm boy who couldn’t read a blueprint. He was nervous and energetic, emotionally immature, and puritan in matters of intoxication. A genius with his hands rather than his head, he did not read many books, but he did read the works of John Burroughs, due to his interest in birdspotting. In December 1912, Ford wrote to Burroughs telling him that few persons in the world had given him as much pleasure as he had. In return, he wanted to do something for Burroughs. He wanted to give him a car. He assured Burroughs that it was not a publicity stunt, and the car could be there by January.
Burroughs had misgivings. He was seventy-five years old, an advanced aged for a learner driver. Friends persuaded him to accept the gift and the old man spent the winter attempting to master it, with comically haphazard results. Behind the wheel, he was easily distracted by rare birds or plants, and would take his eyes off the road to follow its flight, his white bushy head rattling as the car bumped over the farm track. Driving scared him. He was not the master of the car. This technology was an unbroken horse with a will of its own.
The gift achieved Ford’s intended aim, which was to meet his hero. In June, Burroughs travelled to Detroit to visit Henry Ford. The two men got on. After a tour of the Ford factory, Burroughs described the manufacturing process with the eyes of a nature writer; it was a “wilderness of men and machinery covering over forty acres. The Ford cars grow before your eyes, and every day a thousand of them issue from the rear.” After returning home to Roxbury, Burroughs went to park his car in the barn but “it run wild”, bursting through the side of the building and rattling on to a drop of fifteen feet. The forward axle went out over the edge but the wheels caught enough purchase to prevent the car landing at the foot of the steep hill. He regarded the accident with shame. The old fool should not have dabbled with technology. Four vagabonds on a water wheel: Harvey Firestone Henry Ford John Burroughs and Thomas Edison
Ford’s courting of Burroughs continued. In September, Henry Ford undertook a pilgrimage in Burroughs’ company to Concord to visit Thoreau’s pond at Walden and the house of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the central figure of The Philosophers’ Camp of 1850. The camping trips that Ford, Burroughs, Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone undertook echoed the transcendentalist gathering in their assertion that camp is a fitting place to thrash out solutions to the issues of the day. Only at camp, removed from the demands and pressures of daily life, could great men discern the greater good.
Ford and Burroughs’ visited Thomas Edison’s home in Fort Meyer in Florida. Edison was a decade younger than Burroughs, and sixteen years older than Ford, or as Burroughs put it, “Mr Edison and Mr Ford are as young as I am, but no younger.” The public images of all three men relied upon their physical vigour. Burroughs was uncommonly fit for a man in his seventies. When dallying at a cliff edge, it was suggested to him that he show caution and step back. In defiance, the old man sprang onto this hands, his feet in the air, to prove there was no danger. In his early fifties, Henry Ford could run like a deer, and prided himself upon his high kicks and leaps. Edison had many famous pronouncements concerning diet and sleep, claiming that he subsisted on four or five hours rest a night and ate a sparing diet of toast and hot milk. Their camping trips saw the suspension of Edison’s frugal regime; as Burroughs’ diary of his first visit to Florida relates, “We begin the day so late here… Edison sleeps ten to twelve hours in the twenty-four; says he can store up enough sleep to last him two years.”
Edison suggested that the men and their wives should take a break from Fort Meyer and go down to the Everglades and revert back to nature. “We will get away from fictitious civilisation,” said Edison to a reporter, “and we expect to be happy and learn much.” In early March, the party slipped away for two days camping, with two guides and a cook. The trip was a success. More ambitious camping trips were to follow, billed by The Washington Times as “Edison and Ford to go back to nature”.
Taken from The Art of Camping: The History and Practice of Sleeping Under the Stars by Matthew De Abaitua and published by Penguin
I was lying in my tent in the middle of a cold night when I received an urgent call from nature. I often camp in remote spots, seeking a connection with the land and respite from creditors. The call was urgent, and so I clambered over my sleeping wife, out of the inner tent and into the cold chamber under the flysheet.
I was wearing a thermal vest, long johns and thick hiking socks. To go outside, I would need footwear. In the corner of the tent, my boots – which require some lacing – and next to them, a pair of sandals. I gazed down at my stockinged feet, back at the sandals, and then at my sleeping wife:
Could I do it? Could I wear sandals and socks?
Edward Carpenter modelling his sandals with socks
Sandals and socks are reviled because they are a philosophical cop-out. The sock we associate with the shoe, with keeping one foot in the compromises and confinements of city life. The sandal yearns for the simple life, the toes wriggling free and tickled by spears of dewy meadow grass. To put a sock between the foot and the sandal is an ugly compromise.
Although Edward Carpenter could cast off the repressive expectations of Victorian society, he could never quite take off his socks
The shoe is a “leather prison” for the toes. So declared Edward Carpenter, a free-thinking socialist of the late Victorian period who was responsible for introducing the sandal into bohemian culture. A friend sent Carpenter two pairs of Kashmiri sandals from India, and he set about copying the design and distributing them to contemporary free-thinkers, in partnership with George Adams who he set up as sandal maker-in-chief.
Carpenter was gay, overtly so. His discretely circulated pamphlets did much to prepare the ground for what a same sex comradeship might be in the modern world. Born in Hove and educated at Cambridge, he set up home in Millthorpe in the countryside beyond industrial Sheffield, attracted both by the radical potential of the labour movement and by the sexual potential of the labourers. He met one such labourer, George Merrill, on a train. The two men enjoyed an open relationship, and Millthorpe became a site of pilgrimage for seekers of the simple life.
How would the spectacle of me in socks and sandals affect my wife? The marriage would survive, but it is likely that her libido would not
Although Edward Carpenter could cast off the repressive expectations of Victorian society, he could never quite take off his socks. Photographs of the lean bearded “Saint in Sandals” show him wearing them with socks pulled up to the knee. Freedom was more important that the restrictions of style: he dispensed with waistcoats, underlinen and ties and wore instead a minimal outfit of woolly shirt, coat and pants. His sandals cost 10s 6d, less for children, and were a symbol of belonging to the progressive cause.
All these thoughts assailed me on that cold night in my tent. How would the spectacle of me in socks and sandals affect my wife? I wasn’t worried about the damage that it might do to our marriage. Our marriage has solid economic underpinnings, and there are children involved. The marriage would survive, but it is likely that her libido would not. I checked that she was soundly asleep, and then carefully slipped on the sandal.
Archeological analysis of fibres found on Roman sandals suggest that when the soldiers were in colder climes, such as Britain, the sandal was worn with socks
The sensation was obscene. The thickness of the sock caused the strap of the sandal to tighten indecently around the foot. The sandal was a Birkenstock, a German family company who made contoured shoes contemporaneous with Edward Carpenter’s sandal business. The German people are associated with the sandal and the sock combination, a Teutonic assertion of pragmatism over aesthetics. One wonders if they even remove their white ankle socks during intercourse.Birkenstocks did not get into sandals until 1965 during the American revival of the simple life or hippy movement.
The sandal was mankind’s first article of footwear. In the age of Homer, both sexes wore a wooden sole fastened to the foot by thongs. The Mogollon Indian in Southwest America plaited their sandals from the leaves of the Yucca tree. In Roman times, the sandalium worn by women was a sole with a piece of leather covering the toes and was worn mainly indoors. The soldiers of the Emperor wore the caliga, a heavy and high-laced boot that was open at the toe. Archeological analysis of fibres found on Roman sandals suggest that when the soldiers were in colder climes, such as Britain, the sandal was worn with socks.
Today the British army issue sandals that are man-made with velcro fastenings. Far more appealing than these are the Northwest Frontier Chaplis worn by the Indian army during campaigns in the 1930s; with two thick leather straps crossing a tongue, only the merest peep of the toes is visible, thereby sparing passersby the sight of your ten blind blunt-headed worms.
In my sandals and socks, I went out into the night to heed the call of nature. It was the moment before the moment before dawn, and the land seethed with anticipation. Carpenter and his sandals stand for the lost mystical socialism of Albion; a place where the working man and the high-minded type could join together to exceed the bounds of the acceptable and push away the deadening influence of mindless consumerism. This mystical socialism did not survive the Second World War. Sandal-wearing cranks were seen as an impediment to the credibility of socialism. George Orwell famously railed against “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac… in England.”
In his essay On Sandals and Simplicity, GK Chesterton also took the sandal-wearers to task. He complained that advocates of the simple life would make us simple in the things that do not matter – diet, costume, etiquette – and complex in the things that do – philosophy and spirituality. The mystical socialist believed in plain living and high thinking. Chesterton, the scruffiest man in England, corpulent and windblown, sought the opposite: high living and plain thinking.
In my socks and sandals, I walked across the meadow to the witchy silhouettes of the copse, where I satisfied the masculine urge to urinate against the vertical. The black tops of the trees thrashed around in a bohemian dance. Grainy bands of indigo lay over the land. I felt the spirit of vitality move within me, the urge to cast off all clothing and to run amok as a natural animal. The wind goaded the tree tops into complete self abandonment. Would I join them?
No. Donning the sock and sandal was a transgression that threatened my very being! What next: speedos in the office? Trainers? The age of mysticism is past. I tromped back across the meadow, removed my sandals and cast them into the undergrowth. Never again would I be tempted by the comfortable compromise of the sock and sandal. From that night onward, my toes would serve out a life sentence in brogue and Brasher boot.
There was a fascinating review of my book published in The Independent and written by Ken Wolpole. I like the sound of the Flysheet movement he mentions and will investigate further.
“The author does for camping what the late Roger Deakin did for wild swimming, infecting the reader with his enthusiasm, while chastening us with stories of the darker aspects of the back-to-nature movement. The lightweight tent can be the naturalist’s best friend, but it has also provided a refuge for the survivalist with the Book of Revelations and an automatic gun. De Abaitua is not afraid to discuss the concentration camp and the labour camp alongside the holiday camp – and sometimes worry about connections between them all. His enthusiastic tone is enlivened by a self-deprecating wit: there is no better account of the rain-soaked family camping holiday than here.”
The Telegraph also published another review, this time written by Toby Clements.
“De Abaitua goes on to give all sorts of tips on campsite etiquette, lore, equipment and best practice, and his advice is convincing and honest. He is a lovely writer and his history is enlivened with tremendous flashes of wit. What is lovely, too, is his ambiguity about his passion. He doesn’t want to persuade anyone to take up camping, and with good pitches so few and far between, hurrah for that.”
To launch my camping book The Art of Camping: The History and Practice of Sleeping Under the Stars, I will be performing at various festivals throughout the summer.
The talk will range from obscure camping cults to the best way to make pancakes over a campfire. There will be diversions on camping etiquette and the role of camping in alternative culture. We will address what to do in case of rain, sex, or loss of faith.
Illustration by Paul Blow
I will be compering and reading at The Free University of Glastonbury in The Park area of the festival, and extolling why we must camp at Port Eliot and Camp Bestival. In August, I am doing a joint event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival with Tom Hodgkinson (How To Be Idle and the forthcoming Brave Old World: A Practical Guide to Husbandry, or the Fine Art of Looking After Yourself). I will add events as and when they are confirmed to the feed below. And if any festival organisers or literary campsite owners want to bring my rolling camping talk to their event or site, you can contact me via the comments section of any post, the About page at the bottom of this page or twitter on @MDeAbaitua.
“The Art of Camping captures the reader with a thoroughly researched, detailed and fascinating account of the origins of camping and its development as a recreational pastime. Interspersed with the author’s anecdotes of his formative years as a camper, The Art of Camping evokes the spirit of the campfire and then douses the flames in the reality of modern day life.” Read more
I missed this review by Tom Fort because I was in Glastonbury. Also, the Telegraph’s Anne Cuthbertson writes about camping with children with a brief but welcome reference to the Art of Camping.
The fruit of two years’ research and a lifetime of camping, The Art of Camping book takes a left-hand trail through the history of sleeping outdoors; the book recreates the camping trips of radical youth movements of the 1920s such as the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift and Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, at a time when it seemed like society was teetering on the edge of collapse and camping was the key to a new way of life.
It follows the first camps of Thomas Hiram Holding, the grandfather of camping, and it sits around the campfire with the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Theodore Roosevelt – great American mavericks for whom camping was to key to their self-mythology. These vignettes from history are interspersed with contemporary questions about why we camp and what it means.
The Bookseller recommended this camping book as their One To Watch in July. It includes marvellous illustrations by Paul Blow.
You can pre-order The Art of Camping now from Amazon. Pre-ordering means you get the book as soon as it becomes available, and it makes the author feel happier as their Amazon rank improves as the publication date approaches and makes it more likely that other people will become aware of the book.
