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Mon, 30 Oct 1995 11:20:56 EST |
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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]
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