There was no newsletter from me last week, because it was half-term, and I took my daughters camping in the Peak District. I don’t know the Peak District at all well – I’d spent a weekend in Edale in the past, and have run the Edale Skyline route, but that’s about it. This time we were in the “white peak” area, in the Manifold Valley, and it was stunning. We’ll definitely go back.
I’m a relatively new convert to camping. I didn’t camp at all during my childhood, although it was something I dreamt about a lot. The idea of being cocooned in a tent represented a fantasy of safety, I think; an alternative to a home that often felt unsafe and bewildering. And when I started camping as an adult, it was again part of a search for safety. It was during the first 6 months of the pandemic, when the concept of being indoors with strangers was suddenly full of danger. I spent the spring and summer of 2020 greedy for time spent outdoors, always worried that our freedom to run and walk and roam around the countryside might be dramatically curtailed, or even completely revoked. So my decision to try camping was part of that desperation to cram in as much time outdoors as possible; as well as being a search for safety, at a time when danger seemed embodied in other people.
When I was researching In Her Nature, I was struck by how many women in the early days of outdoor leisure were also in pursuit of a greater degree of safety, a flight from a social world that posed dangers to women. In the 1810s and 1820s, Ellen ‘Nelly’ Weeton rambled long distances in the Lake District to escape domestic hellscapes characterised by extreme male violence, from an employer and later from her husband. At home, she was ‘in extreme want’, with ‘imprisonments and bruises…my life daily in danger’. But in the great outdoors, she found physical ease, autonomy, and, yes, safety: she ‘would ramble the country over; would traverse the vales, glide over the surface of the lakes, and run up the hills like a mountain sheep – here, I could live a life of seclusion, and scarce heave a sigh for society.’ Florence Dixie (who corrected Darwin’s work on Patagonia, based on her travels there; wrote on women’s rights, predicting a female PM by 1999; was a Boer War correspondent; president of British Ladies’ Football Club; & who loved blood sports - before becoming Vice President of the London Vegetarian Association) specifically chose to go camping in Patagonia because ‘I wanted to escape somewhere, where I might be as far removed from [other people] as possible’. Relatable!
Mountaineering is frequently written about (often by men) in terms of the risks and dangers it poses. But many women, from the nineteenth century and today, speak of how the great outdoors feels far safer than the populated world. On city streets and in the home, women face far more significant and less manageable risks stemming from male violence; whereas in the mountains, women perhaps have a greater degree of control over their own vulnerability. On p. 281 of In Her Nature, I quote my friend Maria, who puts this brilliantly:
I think it’s important to note, though, that the association of camping with safety for women applies more to camping-for-leisure, than camping-for-necessity. Women and girls in refugee camps are at high risk of being subjected to rape and assault. Homeless women are similarly vulnerable. Men in camps - such as early settler camps - represented the spectre of violence and rape for indigenous women. Men in military camps continue to pose the threat of wartime sexual violence. Even in leisure campsites, and while wild camping in national parks, women are not as safe and free as we deserve: in 2021, a woman testified to a Scottish court about how she was raped by a teacher while on a school camping trip, and a number of women have been murdered while camping on the Appalachian Trail. Many women turn to camping because of its potential to offer greater safety and freedom than their day-to-day lives, but nowhere is immune to gendered inequalities and male violence.
There’s something else I’ve noticed more recently about the meanings of camping. Because a tent is a home in microcosm, camping offers the opportunity to recraft one’s domestic environment. The Australian historian Bill Garner has written a fantastically interesting (and beautifully illustrated) history of camping, called Born in a Tent. He writes, perceptively, about how camping offers the ‘possibility that things may be done otherwise’; that tent life and the openness of the campground has the capacity to alter the character of ‘relations with neighbours and social behaviour in general’ (p. 53). In Why Not Socialism?, G.A. Cohen uses camping – and the fantasy of an equal division of labour among campers – as a vision of society made anew in a socialist model. Truthfully, I’m a bit sceptical about this; and about whether the reality of camping lives up to its egalitarian promise, especially in terms of the gendered division of labour. When I looked around our campsite last week, it was hardly a feminist utopia. I didn’t see men equally pitching into stereotypically ‘feminine’ domestic roles. Women certainly were getting involved with the hard labour of camping – pitching tents; emptying toilet waste from campervans – but they were also doing the lion’s share of cooking; cleaning young children; and putting them to bed - while the men sat around campfires drinking beer, or went down to the river to fish, or played rough-and-tumble games with the kids. The campsite was a place where the unequal gendered division of labour in the home seemed to be replicated, not remedied.
(This image is a sketch by Eugenia Elizabeth Hawker (née Inglis Jones, 1834-1901), who crossed the Tschingel glacier with her husband in the 1860s. She sketched their camping pitch, and the division of labour around the tent.)
Nevertheless, I’ve found a great deal of benefit in the potential of camping for forging a new home in microcosm. I’ve suffered a number of bereavements in the last 4 years, and after each one, I’ve found myself turning to home-making (for want of a better word) as a source of comfort. After my step-father died, I incessantly watched interior design programmes and made plans for dramatically reshaping my study, our bedroom, our living room. After my husband died, I didn’t have the energy to embark on any big home renovation projects – but I could conceive of a much smaller project: turning my car (a Citroen Berlingo) into a micro-campervan. This is an ongoing project, and I can get very boring about it, but I love the satisfaction of identifying nooks that can be used for storage, and finding boxes that exactly fit; or of devising small ways to make the process of folding down seats and converting them into beds more streamlined. I love my house, but it often feels overwhelmingly big and empty and lonely without my husband’s presence. But my tiny van is just the right size for me – and, with various tent extensions, for my daughters too – and, in it, I find that the loneliness doesn’t have quite the same magnitude.
And, in the wake of Pete’s death, I’ve found that camping is, once again, meaningful to me because it connotes safety. Being bereaved in such a sudden, traumatic way has made the world feel unreal and dangerous; in every event, I see the possibility for things to go fatally awry, and I’m acutely conscious of how little control I possess. But, in contrast, camping feels simple and manageable. The days are governed by a series of sequential steps (shower, wash up, make packed lunches, hike, lie in the hammock and read, cook dinner, sleep), and there is little contact with the human world. Small tweaks I make to our camping set-up can have big effects on our comfort, and a fantasy of being in control, and safe, is restored.
(my much-loved Berlingo)
I missed this when it came out - what a great description of the comforts of camping: yes, that really articulates something I have felt without being able to pin it down. Beautifully written as always, too.