this is CAMP

YMCA’s Camp Whittle is situated in in the San Bernardino mountains, over 7000 feet in altitude, near Big Bear Lake. The area is densely populated by pine and fir trees, lanky conifers that stand like prehistoric totems, perfumey needles and peeling bark falling like dandruff onto the dusty campgrounds.

If I were nine years old, I would have arrived at Camp Whittle in a big yellow school bus, with a sweat-soaked t-shirt that I would have had to peel off the dark green vinyl seats. I would have carried a bedazzled Lisa Frank pillow and a bright turquoise sleeping bag, and I would have been nervous about which bunk would be left and which truth or dare would be thrust upon me. Afternoons would have been spent making chevron-patterned friendship bracelets and bubblegum-colored lanyards. I would have subsisted on fudgesicles, orange creamsicles, and otter pops, and I would have plugged my ears at the campfire as people were telling horrible ghost stories. I would have gotten ash-colored boogers, post-campfire. I definitely would have delighted in setting marshmallows on fire. Still do.

These activities, of course, are iconic in American camp heritage, but perhaps camp promises not only the individual activities (which can replicated anywhere, in a garage, in your office, in your house), but also the particular arrangement of activity, circumstance, and feeling that conjures a very specific spirit, which is pure and free and reckless and sometimes fraught with the tingling of pre-adolescent anxiety and desire. After all, camp (which is the generic cover-all term for the summer camp in the woods attended by kids and pre-teens) is about the un-sanctioned activities as much as it is about the sanctioned; it is about the latent, unrequited, and unfulfilled desires as much as it is about realized dreams and passions. It is the embarrassment and the joy, the awkwardness and the boldness, the boredom and the excitement.

As such, any re-creation of the ultimate camp experience demands nostalgia as its essential ingredient. Camp is a feeling, and not merely an activity.

Unique CAMP is a camp for adults, the brainchild of the quintessential entrepreneur-creative-type Sonja Rasula. Sonja is thirty-something, which thick, blunt-cut bangs that skim the tops of her eyebrows. Her eye makeup is as black as her hair, and her outfits are well-curated, always in step with a design or fashion trend, done well of course (the wilderness hat, the olive green anorak, the Mexican flower-embroidered baby-doll dress). When she speaks to a crowd, her language is casual, as if she were in conversation with all two hundred of us, and she cusses at such frequent intervals that her word bombs serve to emphasize, accentuate, and enhance, rather than to damn. Think #GIRLBOSS more than #leanin.

We leave from the Unique Space headquarters in downtown LA, a co-working space that also serves as a social and creative hub, and seasonally, as a physical marketplace for artisans and makers (the marketplace is called Unique LA—Sonja helms the entire Unique brand). We are given matching camouflage backpacks in a burnt orange that reminds me of the Grand Canyon. The backpacks are branded with leather CAMP insignia and are filled with deluxe camp items, an upgrade from the kiddy fare: Luna bars, water in a carton, plant-flavored toiletries, Word notebooks. All the swag is provided by participating sponsors and emblazoned with CAMP insignia.

On the bus I sit next to a porcelain-skinned girl with auburn hair, delicate features, and a perfect gap-toothed smile. Her full name, given to her by her mother, is India Summer Love. She is attending CAMP with Handsome Coffee Roasters, a specialty coffee roaster in downtown LA that, I find out, has just been bought by Blue Bottle Coffee. She tells me that she and two other baristas will be serving Blue Bottle Coffee every morning, a bourgeois perk that delights and amuses me. At CAMP, when the line for artisanal coffee is too long, I drink the machine coffee happily, thinking to myself that it isn’t bad at all.



When we arrive at the campsite after a dizzying two hours through mountains, the first thing we do is hand over our cell phones to our “counselors,” who are a bunch of ultra-energetic adults in white tees and red bandanas. Their job is to corral us, which turns out to be more difficult than corralling baby goats, and to instigate CAMP spirit. We are told to take one last selfie before turning off our phones, a last remnant of our digital selves before we castrate our technological lives for the next few days.

Not having a cell phone for four days isn’t exactly a challenge for luddites, but there are no luddites in this group: we are technologically savvy, digitally connected, social media mavens (I can’t put myself in the maven or savvy category, but many CAMP attendees are). I can confidently say that 85% of the people here use at least four social networks per day, if not more (think: Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, etc). Just as organized camping in the United States emerged as a response to increasing urbanization, a conference like this, a camp for adults, is in part a response to our technologically tethered selves. One morning, a girl in my cabin wakes up and tells us that she misses her cellphone; her morning routine involves checking #frenchbulldog hashtags on Instagram.

At CAMP, I immediately get the sense that people know of each other, even if they do not yet know each other, the way we know President Obama or Taylor Swift, whose lives we are involved in tangentially, their personas an assemblage of facts and social media profiles and photos and videos. I arrive at CAMP anxious because I neither know anyone nor know OF anyone. I do not live in Los Angeles, which means I’ve never heard of most of these people, and I do not even know the insta-celebs, the people with hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers. There is a kind of social media street cred given to those with high follower numbers, and during the course of CAMP, it becomes clear that there are a lot of high-rolling social media gangsters here: people whose lives you’re familiar with at a surface level at least, you know what they like to eat or where they like to shop, you know the furniture styles they prefer and their idea of aesthetic perfection (punchy colors, white walls, clean lines, bold geometry, water colors, typography, Native American accoutrements, cortados, avocados).

I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing here at CAMP. “Connect. Unplug. Play. Learn.” is the tagline, and without phones to occupy ourselves, meeting people face-to-face is an integral part of the experience. The introductions are inevitably tied to professions and locales, and with every iteration, my own introduction increases in its self-assurance. “I’m a writer and a photographer,” I say, “but by day I’m the creative content manager at a tech company.” I think about which I should say first—the thing I do that pays, or the thing I do and love to do that I hope will one day feed me. Do I identify myself with a spirit of aspiration or resignation? With idealism or realism? After all, what I say I am—to a stranger at least—is probably what I believe I am.

This isn’t uncommon at CAMP, this struggle to verbalize one’s professional identity, which is often torn between the purely creative and the purely professional, a dichotomy that has been created because the former does not put food on the table and the latter can sometimes grind one’s soul into dusty smithereens. A large percentage of people here are “in transition,” people who have arrived needing, more than any workshop or advice, merely the courage to leave what they’re currently doing and “follow their dreams.” The CAMP theme is, unsurprisingly, “DREAM BIG.” Many people have multiple occupations, “slash careers,” they’re called by Marci Alboher, the author of the book One Person/Multiple Careers. Writer/photographer, actress/designer, entrepreneur/hiker—self-definition is limiting and complicated.

Each day begins with optional activities: a polar plunge in the camp swimming pool, yoga on a turf lawn, a nature hike. Then we all have breakfast, go to two workshops, have lunch, go to another workshop, and do more campy activities: there’s archery, horse-back riding, and crafts provided by Martha Stewart (making necklaces with dyed wooden beads, stamping leather badges, stenciling American-manufactured t-shirts).

The workshops are a mix of inspirational talks, entrepreneurial stories, how-to’s, and crafts. By the end of the first day of workshops, I’ve come to terms with the fact that no one is going to give me the answers to my existential questions, or tell me what decisions to make. Everyone has such a different story and path; if anything, the camaraderie exposes that all of crises—which we think are highly specialized and specific to ourselves—are in fact common, if not ordinary. That we share these crises creates a well of empathy for each other, which is comforting and validating. Anyone who has ever struggled creatively knows isolation and loneliness; is used to people discounting her laments as “bitching and moaning;” has been critized for professional schizophrenia; has been told to “be grateful for what you have,” “stop being so romantic;” “just quit your job already!”

The question, "What should you do with your life?" is a fundamental question, not merely a professional question but a deeply spiritual and philosophical matter. Whenever I ask myself that question, I return to what Annie Dillard wrote in The Writing Life, that "how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing." She says that there is no shortage of good days, but that good lives are hard to come by. Good days add up to a life of sensation, a life of greed that requires more and more, but "the life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet."

The ordinary choices that we make are often the tuning forks for the tone of our lives; one half-step down and your chord is now minor; two half-steps and you're falling into diminished. I try to remember the half-steps when I'm faced with a dramatic, philosophical question that threatens to paralyze me. I think about the next ten minutes, rather than the next twenty years. 

There's a poem by Gary Snyder that goes:

Clouds sink down the hills

Coffee is hot again. The dog 

Turns and turns about, stops and sleeps.

Just as the clouds sink down the hills over and over again, and the dog turns and turns again, I am going to ask myself, so many times in this lifetime, what I am supposed to be doing and why I am doing it--this consciousness is essential to our existence, the voice of reason, the spirit of faith, the belief in hope. I will never stop asking myself these difficult questions. 

On the night before the last day of camp, we are led into a clearing in the forest, where a triangular formation of tables has been set. We sit down for a silent dinner, all two hundred of us. People are visibly uncomfortable, uneasy. We are not used to the silence, the absence of noise. We begin passing bowls of cold vegetables around, and we clink our plastic cups for a silent cheers. We begin to eat. Then someone begins to laugh, and then another person laughs, and then an entire section of a table is laughing and cannot contain themselves. The silence of course, is supposed to be reflective, meditative, and respectful, but the laughter that emerges, defying the silence, is a kind of resilience that is familiar to me, and I am comforted by it, this ordinary rebellion of the spirit, free to disperse its atoms into the wilderness. 

*All photos courtesy of Unique Camp. See more photos here. 

this is hogon living

*In the morning the light was unbearably bright, more golden and harsh than would be expected on a February day. The first light of day makes everyone look angelic; even the shadows that crease into crevices of skin herald the morning light. By dusk, light is soft and glowy, tired from its daylong shining, but the arc of the sun between dawn and high noon is a blazing trail, a space for strength and glory.



*Jasper knocked on the door to say that coffee was ready and offered to bring it to the room. Coffee sounded tempting, but the first moments upon waking, when waking is of your own accord and not out of obligation, are some of the most precious and calm. So we stayed for awhile, basking in that perfect subtle heat. 

*Later we went outside on the deck and had coffee with Jasper. He was wearing a long furry scarlet robe, with a NY Times crossword mug in one hand, a cigarette in another. He sat on the railing overlooking the panorama of trees and ocean and clouds below, his long legs resting in delicate parallel balance on the wooden railing. 

*We sat and talked for awhile, and then Jasper and I took a walk through backyard, which is probably the biggest and best backyard I’ve seen. We walked barefoot on a semblance of a trail, which was rocky and covered in brush and pines. We dodged trees and branches, first passing by an outhouse and compost area, and then finally arriving at Jasper’s humble abode, the Hogon.

 

*The Hogon is a one-room wooden conic shelter built by Jasper and his father. Its roof looks like a hat worn by rice paddy farmers. The base is lined with concrete, and plexiglass windows held together by a wooden skeleton fill in most of the sides, enhanced by bright tie-dye curtains and stained glass, Jasper’s handiwork. A four-minute walk from the main house, the hogon is where Jasper reads and sleeps. The glass door opens to a writing table filled with objects from another time and place–objects that seem anachronistic not because of their existence but because of the effort taken to procure them. Typewriters and oil lamps seem silly and romantic now–a luddite’s proclamation or a self-conscious aesthetic statement. But Jasper pointed out that the lack of electricity in the hogon made these objects practical, and I never doubt his earnestness, which I have known to be true since I first met him, backpacking through the Carter Mountains on the Appalachian Trail. 

 

*It’s easy to paint Jasper as a caricature, what with the cigarettes and the robe and the ornate details of his hermit existence, all of which could easily be perceived as the overwrought arrangements of a crafted, romantic life. But after knowing Jasper*** for more than four years, even the most absurd affectations that seem to play into a particular trope, are natural for him. 

*Nevertheless, I’m still puzzled and intrigued by Jasper’s effort to simplify his life so selectively. Despite the missing electricity, the limited space, and the communion with nature, the stacks of books (John Updike, poems by Louise Gluck and Emily Dickinson, The Brothers Karamazov, foreign language dictionaries, Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen), the silver goblets, and the piles of clothes on the bed betray the minimalism that this kind of lifestyle could initially suggest. In an age where we’re tethered to technology and the absence of electricity is unfathomable, the act of simplification can sometimes stem from an elaborate, self-decorative impulse. Ridding oneself of modern accoutrements often seems more difficult than just living within it all, strangely enough. Do we seek out vintage objects because of aesthetic fondness for a misplaced nostalgia? Do we abscond into the woods because it’s a romantic distraction? Are we obsessed with living out ideal lifestyles instead of figuring how to live? The former is easy and trivial, and I am certainly guilty of doing so. It’s easy to confuse minimalism with luddite living, and simplicity with certain aesthetic choices. Clearing out the noise has never felt so effortful or complicated.

***Jasper was also the subject one of my very first photo assignments in college, back in 2008. During the shoot, he smoked an entire cigar until his face turned blue.

More pictures after the jump...

this is la buissonniere

*Overlooking Lake Leman, on windy road in the hills of Evian, France, there is a little estate called La Buissonniere.

*It is lived in occasionally -- a refuge for sojourners and travelers. A place of respite, it has taken on the motley characteristics of everyone who has ever passed through.



*It is imprinted but still untamed and wild. It is kept and unkept.



*A simple structure of unpolished wood leaves little to be desired. The place is strange and unimaginable because of all the incongruous things it contains, the things left behind by each of its inhabitants -- half-drunken bottles of wine, dusty porcelain dolls, cross-stitched pillows with outdated aphorisms. Surrounded by forests, sandwiched between a sky and lake of blue, La Buissonniere is plain and unaffected -- purposefully, it seems, so that the wild beauty on all sides is an overwhelming embrace.

*It is easy to just sit and look here. It is easier to be still, to be okay with this one present moment.





*Someday I'll return.

  

this is from the archives: middlesex fells

 

*Date: October 22, 2011

*Location: Middlesex Fells, MA

*I finally understand why poets write about leaves and seasons.

this is fresh water

This is Part I of my trip to Walden Pond.

This is what Thoreau had to say about Walden Pond:
"The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much concern one who has not long frequented it or lived by its shore; yet this pond is so remarkable for its depth and purity as to merit a particular description. It is a clear and deep green well, half a mile long and a mile and three quarters in circumference, and contains about sixty-one and a half acres; a perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak woods, without any visible inlet or outlet except by the clouds and evaporation. The surrounding hills rise abruptly from the water to the height of forty to eighty feet, though on the southeast and east they attain to about one hundred and one hundred and fifty feet respectively, within a quarter and a third of a mile. They are exclusively woodland."



Imagine my surprise when we arrived at Walden Pond and found this: what looked like a theatrical beach scene out of the 1920s. Loud and colorful and plasticine, the colors of the visitors so disarmingly jarring against the grain of the sands and the green of the woods.





Luckily, that was only the entrance, and as we made our way around the pond, on the dusty trail in the woods, we found more solitude and more nature. There were little pockets of people here and there who had found small openings to jump into the water. It makes sense to walk until you've found a comfortable distance from the main shore, until you've found a space of privacy for a placid dip or swim. Then you can claim Walden Pond for your own. There in your own little swimming hole you can be in nature without reservations and without any disturbances.

And it feels more like the Walden Pond that you imagined. The Walden Pond that Thoreau described.




Having grown up in California, I'm so used to swimming in salt water. Our sandy shores were always on the coast, always at a beach. The ocean always greeted you loudly, with waves crashing onto the sand and white foam spreading onto your feet and then running away as quickly as it came. Even if you weren't in the water swallowed up by the cold, rough waters, you were at the mercies of the salty breeze, which enveloped you and left its residue in your hair, so even when you left, you always brought a little bit of the beach back with you: the sand nestled into your scalp and the salt that crusted the hairs on your arm.

After tiptoeing down rocks and inching into the water, after dunking my head and coming back up for air, I was surprised. Not by the temperature of the water but by the lack of salt. The purity and freshness of water was at once unfamiliar and thrilling. The water was so still and I could see through it, not like the ocean that is dark and white and so powerful it could sweep you away. This was a different kind of power: the quiet resonance of stillness. I felt like I could float on the pond forever, like in a dream, and I felt like the world had stopped and that in the water, everything was timeless. Because I think in some sense, these bodies of water are timeless and the way they make us feel is timeless too.




"Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to rise and fall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they now wear, and obtained a patent of Heaven to be the only Walden Pond in the world and distiller of celestial dews. Who knows in how many unremembered nations' literatures this has been the Castalian Fountain? or what nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age? It is a gem of the first water which Concord wears in her coronet."
-Henry Thoreau, "The Ponds"