Backpacking with an English Major.

So I had an interesting realization last night (about camping, but I think it is culturally interesting none the less). I don’t know if I had mentioned it to you or not, dear blog, but I have been having a surprisingly difficult time finding places nearby where I can go camping.

Although that’s not entirely true. I shall explain.

See, what I have been looking for – because it is what seems like the most fun – are places in the greater LA area that are relatively nearby where I can go park my car and then hike in for awhile and then pitch a tent to camp overnight and have a nice little camp fire. Sounds like everyone’s classic idea of camping, right?

Now I have read enough of the crazy outdoorsy websites to know that that is actually referred to as “backpacking” and not “camping”. I had originally assumed that the difference was semantic and that they were basically the same thing.

Well it turns out that there is a real difference and I couldn’t figure out why none of those crazy outdoorsy websites told me about it. I couldn’t figure out why there wasn’t a single website that said, “Oh yeah, and B to the W, Southern California is rubbish for backpacking.”

When I first started getting excited about this being-outside thing, I figured that it would be easy to find places to do it because I know that there are national forests and state parks all the hell over the place down here. Well, it turns out that what we seem to have in and around LA are a ton of small nature areas that offer short day hikes without any camping. That’s cool and might be fun, but not really what I am looking for.

And there is a fair amount of “camping” to be had, however almost without exception it is what’s called “car camping” which means that you pull your car up into a flat site and pitch your tent right next to it. In some places you even have to have a freestanding tent because the “campsite” is actually paved, or what I like to call a “parking lot”.

There is some “backpacking” in the Angeles National forest and in Topanga where you can only hike or bike in, but because of the tendency of all of So Cal to catch fire all the damn time, you are not allowed to have a camp fire. I understand that but I’m pretty sure that camping without a campfire is just called “being outside in the dark”.

So I really started to wonder why I was having such a hard time, given that I have been reading a thousand and one websites about EXACTLY what I want to do. So I tapped my head and said, “Think think think” and then I got it!

It’s LA!

LA - more than anyplace else in the world - is a city designed around on for the car. There have always been stories about Standard Oil and Firestone mucking around in city planning in the 1920s & 30s, we know now that those stories are true and that the plan of Los Angeles became a vision of the modern automobile city. So OF COURSE most of the camping would be car camping! Not just from a practical standpoint (as in, people have to drive to these places), but also because that is the culture that we have developed here. If the idea is that you are married and have 2.5 kids and a car designed to move all of you around and that that is a specific sort of lifestyle, then of course when you go out to experience nature, you need some nature that can accommodate your car! Hence, most of LA camping is car camping.

Then there are the day hike places. My sense of these places is that they exist almost as a reaction to the car culture. When I was looking at maps online, it seemed like most of those places are sandwiched in between developed areas. I think that as LA became more and more developed (and bigger – by LA I really mean the whole greater Los Angeles area), there grew this idea that we needed to preserve nature areas and so what you end up with are these places that are big enough to spend a couple of hours in, but not really big enough to accommodate all the things you would need to put in some good car camping. Also, I think that there is something to the idea that we here don’t so much want to go out into nature and experience it, as much as we want to just briefly visit it (the way that you visit your grandmother at the home). I think that also has a lot to do with why there are so many day hikes.

And now back to the websites: how come nobody told me it would be difficult to go “backpacking” in this part of Southern California? Well I tapped my head again, “Think think think.” And then I realized that all the websites that I have been reading are written by people back East or in the Pacific Northwest and that those are places that are culturally very different from LA and that those are the places with the space for “backpacking” and the history and the culture there accommodates it. For instance, everyone has heard of “hiking the Appalachian Trail” (and not just as a euphemism for jetting off to visit your Argentinean mistress), but did you know that the West has an Appalachian Trail of its own? It is called The Pacific Crest and it runs from Mexico into Canada and you can hike all 2,600 miles of it if you so choose, but again, I had never heard of the damn thing. It just doesn’t exist in the American zeitgeist (I NEVER get to use that word anymore!) the way that The Appalachian Trail does. And I think that’s because that sort of participation in the (natural) world just isn’t really part of the culture in southern California the way it is even in Oregon, much less out in the woods of Kentucky or Tennessee.

I’m not making a value judgment, I’m not bitter or angry about it, I’m just kinda proud of myself for figuring it out. And yeah, it seems simple now and so you’re all like, “Well … duh” but that’s because I just explained it to you!

Now, that being said, this car culture does cut both ways. LA is lousy with freeways, which means that I can get out of it going in just about any direction, which then means that places like Joshua Tree and Yosemite and the Sequoias are readily accessible (though not super convenient). But I don’t yet have the skill level to tackle real “backpacking” in those places yet.

Anyway, I just thought that it was interesting the way that the geography and the history and the infrastructure and the culture all kind of came together to generate the world that exists now (and to screw me out of good backpacking). This is the sort of weird, unplanned, seldom-thought-about kind of stuff I love. I am a student of ramifications. It’s like I’m a low-rent Malcolm Gladwell up in here!

Oh! The other reason why – I think – that none of those websites told me any of this; none of the people writing them have English degrees. Not a single backpacking blog I have read has used the work “zeitgeist”. Probably because they aren’t as pretentious as I am. See if I let any of those people share my Grey Poupon on the trail!



P.S. “Backpacking with an English Major” is something Mike the Director thought would make a funny/annoying segment for an outdoor show. Also, he has experienced it firsthand.
Example:

Non-English Major: Which trail do you think we should take? That one goes up and that one goes down.

English Major: I’m not sure. It seems like a Faustian bargain.

Non-English Major: Well I don’t know what that means, but which trail do you want to take?

English Major: You know, Pablo Neruda wrote a really interesting poem about something like this! Most people would go to Robert Frost in a situation like this, but I go Neruda. I’m not big fan of Frost’s.

Non-English Major: Okay, but which trail should we take?

English Major: See, Frost is a little too structural for me. I think that his work borders on gimmickry; the tightness of his poems, that is. I like my white space to have a little ambiguity, you know?

Non-English Major: Sure, whatever. Can I see the map?

English Major: Oh, this? No, no. This isn’t a map, this is a book of essays by David Foster Wallace, you really should read him. You probably haven’t though, have you?

Non-English Major: Where’s the map?!

English Major: Oh, I had to leave it behind; otherwise I wouldn’t have had room for this book of David Foster Wallace essays.

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