I have a friend who worked as a musician this past summer at Bohemian Grove, the place out in CA where *all* the big enchiladas go and get loose. It sounds like that would represent one end of the "camping" spectrum. Not exactly roughing it. But I used to hear all kinds of stories about Bohemia Grove, relating to the relative anatomies of Henry Kissinger and William Buckley. Oh never mind. But there are all these adirondack "camps" built for the east coast rich. They brought all of their servants, and had all the amenities of home, but were built in a rustic style, and were intended to allow the families to get close to nature. These really are evocative, in the sense that this was around the time of the beginning of the conservation movement, and the creation of the national park system, and the whole Roosevelt, Rockefeller, Perkins, Harriman involvement in creating state and national parks. Obviously this represents a sea change in the upper crust's perception of nature. While these folks were busily mining and carving railroads out of the countryside in places far away from home, they were preaching the virtues of untrammeled wilderness closer to home, as a way to nativise the immigrant population, introducing them to the glories of the wilderness. Lot's of interesting threads to pull together, in what Salvador Dali called the "paranoid critical" mode of inquiry. A useful phrase, that. Eric Siegel [log in to unmask]