Heading Out: A History of American Camping by Terence Young (review)

At this moment, thousands of men, women, and children are camping throughout the United States. Whether they arrived at their night's destination on their own two feet, by boat, on horseback, or in the climate-controlled comfort of a car or RV, they are engaging with America's long history of sleeping under the stars. Terence Young's Heading Out: A History of American Camping explores this pastime from the evolution of gear to the cultural and political meanings of sleeping outside. Along the way, the reader encounters questions of gender, race, authenticity, and identity that campers from the 1870s to the present day have sought to answer by loading up a backpack or a car and heading out.

Young argues that "while camping has been an antimodern reaction to a modernizing world, it has also been subject to modernization itself" (2). He explores this through three trends that shaped the American camping experience. First, modernization—the increasing industrialization and urbanization of the United States—drove people to seek out time in the natural world. Second, in so doing, Americans who camped engaged in a pilgrimage to seek spiritual renewal in a natural landscape that seemed the inverse of the grimy, polluted, and busy cities in which they lived. Third, technological change shaped the gear campers used, making the experience smoother and more comfortable even as campers sought to leave behind the comforts of everyday life. These trends guide the book as it traces how campers employ the natural world as a place both for social and cultural escape and experimentation and to debate what it means to be both an authentic camper and an authentic American.

Chapter 1 focuses on William H. H. Murray, a pastor whose 1869 book Adventures in the Wilderness started the camping "rush" in the decade following the Civil War. Although the American public had been primed to understand the natural world as "sacred" and rapidly industrializing cities as "profane" by the Romantic movement, Young shows that Murray argued for the restorative powers of nature and that his book marked a turning point because it gave would-be campers a howto guide for where to travel, what to bring, and how to enjoy themselves once they had escaped the city. Chapter 2 follows the consequences of the "Murray Rush" (49) as camping grew in popularity in the decades before the automobile became an accessible and affordable way to reach the rural and remote areas where the increasing number of guidebook authors suggested Americans escape cities to camp. Chapter 3 explores how the proliferation of the car enticed Americans, such as Mary Crehore Bedell who embarked with her husband on a nine-month auto-camping trip across the country, to take to the open road in 1922. Autocampers like the Bedells participated in "a pilgrimage to the wild" (99). While forging "a connection to American history and identity" (103) as they camped in places deemed significant for their sublime scenery and their contribution to the creation of America.

Chapters 4 and 5 investigate the social, cultural, and political response to the increased use of America's campgrounds. While E. P. Meinecke sought to adapt the physical design of campgrounds to accommodate autocampers and the damaging environmental impact they generated, William Trent Jr., a member of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's "Black Cabinet," fought segregation in national parks as an increasingly diverse constituency demanded access to the out-of-doors. Chapter 6 explores the rise of trailer camping in the postwar period through the development of the now-iconic Airstream trailer. These trailers not only allowed Americans to camp in greater comfort, but also provided "a more authentic and vital experience of America" (209) than one could find in the nation's cities—a view adopted by the State Department in a partnership with Airstream to show both American and foreign officials "authentic" America by sponsoring trailer-camping trips across the country. Chapter 7 delves...