Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space

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The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

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8>L@;KDFÉ . Camp Campaign eschews conventional political action that targets a specific predetermined end. The link between camp and campaign instead serves as a provocation to generate questions and thus returns campaigning to process and to its roots in the open country of the campagne— its military connotations remaining only in a resolve for autonomy, not in a pursuit of control. Motivated by Giorgio Agamben’s work, Camp Campaign formulates questions that do not seek to infer camp’s definition through historical events but instead ask more directly “What is a camp?” and “How could such events have taken place there?”2 For the group, GTMO serves as a “critical site for developing a discussion with a public about various timely themes in politics today.” The openness espoused by the “campaign” as format and forum also accommodates a duality: camp as object of protest and camping as artistic practice and field research. As an operative form of protest, particularly conducive to asking questions, camping becomes an autonomous act to interrogate sites and contest normative formulations of camp space. Artists Rene Gabri and Ayreen Anastas of Camp Campaign used a van as a camping vehicle and as a “mobile studio/ billboard/ library” for traveling, conducting interviews, and investigating diverse sites ranging from detention camps to summer camps.3 The camps served as efficacious sites for generating additional questions about the politics of twenty-first-century spaces. Protest camps make room for autonomously generated responses and give concrete form to the auxiliary denotative use of camp to describe the commonly held ideas of a group. The protest camp thus counters the political camp. Motivations for protest also connect back to necessity—a perceived need

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for actions that do not come, for policy revisions believed beneficial to others, and for recognition of alternative viewpoints. The urgency of many protest camps underscores this necessity. Strategic sites in the built environment—the Zócalo, Crawford’s Prairie Chapel Road, or the Washington Mall—gain symbolic and physical presence in the spatialization of one side of an argument, leaving the opposing group to defend its “camp” of ideas, to restate its position, to meet with the protesters, or to build a camp.

Counterhegemonic Spaces

The MigMap project combines the art of map making with the flexible, virtual terrain of the Internet to interrogate European migration policy. Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, the MigMap series includes four main maps: Actors, Europeanization, Places and Practices, and Discourses. The latter map zones three sets of primary discourses—illegal migration, asylum, and trafficking—as a background to visualize confluences of geographic borders, campaigns, terminology, and political positions. Zones of interdiscourse— what MigMap’s authors have called “counterhegemonic” spaces—populate the discursive field, which is itself a virtual campground. Begun in 2004, the MigMap series has paralleled the increased number and organization of protest camps along Europe’s internal and external borders. Having been made room for through the actions of both protesters and migrants, these mapped spaces have been carved out of the matrix of multilayered discourses in highly figured white zones. Some of the spaces identify specific activist campaigns

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and others circumscribe the “autonomy of migration.” The MigMap artists have argued that migrant tactics circumvent European Union (EU) policies based on knowledge transfer, experience, and collective actions. The autonomy of the refugee, in a world without borders, is both premise and objective for European activists who protest within the “counterhegemonic” campaign spaces shared by migrant and activist.4

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the camp’s distance from the static permanence and official status of organizations, such campaigns also follow an enduring tradition of “direct action” protest, memorialized in the designation of the Women’s Camp at Greenham Common as a historic landmark. The centrality of the campfire in the proposed site design tempers the monumentalization of the campaign, linking the universality of elements and the lithic stability with the fire’s fleeting space of reverie and action. As a commemorative space, the camp works retrospectively but continues the process of witnessing at the heart of ongoing struggles of peace and protest. The peace camp registers and sometimes facilitates the thoughtful, often painstaking, development of campaign into organization.16 Faslane Peace Camp (FPC) has been continuously occupied since June 12, 1982, when protesters first arrived to dispute England’s testing of the Trident nuclear missile. This site, referred to by its founders as a “permanent peace camp,” continues adjacent to the Faslane Naval Base on the River Clyde northwest of Glasgow, Scotland. On the eastern edge of the A 814 road, the camp is strategically located so that it is visible to traffic coming toward the base from Helensburgh. In its recent forms, FPC has included at least twenty campers, eleven caravans, a bus, a tepee, a bender tent, a tree house, and an array of self-built outbuildings. With respect to the camp’s longevity, its residents received unlikely support from the local government councils until 1997, when the Argyll and Bute Council won its initial case to expel FPC. Council boundaries had changed between 1996 and 1997, making the camp vulnerable to legal action and possible eviction. The protesterresidents “built up physical defences such as tunnels, tree-houses, and walk-ways” and increased their numbers at the camp to resist forced expulsion. The campers ultimately defeated the eviction plans by showing that the process would cost the council £300,000. The duration of this and other peace camps is notable— contradicting more typically fleeting protest camps, which

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react to specific events or must move with geopolitical shifts. The campers had originally planned to occupy the site for two weeks, but, like the Welsh group at Greenham, they soon found that the camp’s location and resources could provide a base for organizing direct action protests of the nuclear program. In spite of the conflicts in the mid-1990s, campers leased the land for a small monthly fee and were given “continuous planning permission from the district council.” The story of the camp’s siting and formation summarizes its context, flexibility, and mission in a “brave new world”: June 12th, 1982 started off grey and miserable but ended up a lovely, warm, happy day. At 9:30am, 14 of us set off in convoy for Faslane Submarine Base. We’d had all kinds of dire warnings from Dumbarton CND that we’d be immediately arrested for sedition so our feelings were a mixture of apprehension and excitement. We arrived at the site we had chosen for the camp and started putting up tents and banners. By midday we had the two tents up and the kettle on when along came our first encounter with the MoD. They informed us that we were on MoD land and would have to move but not to worry because they had found us another site. Down the road about 500 yards was the perfect place. There was a stream behind us and a tunnel which crossed over the busy main road. As well as this, the land belonged to Strathclyde Regional Council which had declared itself a nuclear-free zone. We moved the tents, re-erected the banners, lit a fire and set up camp. With many visitors who had arrived, we sat around the fire singing peace songs and dreaming of a “brave new world” early in the morning, hoping that Faslane Peace Camp could help in any small way to stop the arms race.17 The United Kingdom’s tradition of the “common” and its system of regional councils have proven particularly conducive to peace camps. Nuclear-free zoning and the inveteracy of its

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activists contributed to the historic legacy of Faslane Peace Camp—a heritage reinforced by its colloquial designation as “FPC.” Glasgow’s Museum of Transport installed one of Faslane’s original caravans in its collection, confirming the camp’s presence within Scottish cultural memory.18

SDF Camp

Red tents painted with “SDF” (sans domicile fixe) in white letters lined the Canal Saint-Martin to protest failures of “droit au logement” legislation to provide housing for Paris’ homeless population. The protest became known as Camp les Enfants de Don Quichotte for the advocacy organization led by Augustin and Jean-Baptiste Legrand, who set up the initial array of nearly one hundred tents. The camp served two purposes—to provide a site for Parisian citizens to give up their homes temporarily in solidarity with the homeless and to make available temporary lodging for homeless citizens, while at the same time creating an urban space for dialogue among agencies and those with and without “fixed domiciles.” The protest’s success in appropriating urban space as a zone of provocation makes the SDF more effective as a site of radically autonomous organization than as a resolution of need, for which other camp permutations have proven more efficacious j\\k_\j\Zk`fejk`kc\[È?fd\c\jj:XdgÉXe[ÈM`ccX^\ :feZ\gk:XdgÉ`eZ_Xgk\i* . The visibility of the red tents and their position along the canal resulted in an immediate and readily accessible urban image, symbolic as a space of transition, dialogue, and dispute.

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The site of the SDF camp is strategic not only in its imageability but also in its defensibility. Legrand validated the choice of the canal site as one of the “few places where authorities couldn’t send the police in to break it up without chasing the homeless into the water.” Reversing the barricade strategies of earlier Parisian struggles, this use of indirect force to maintain a position between opposing conditions characterizes the tactical space of the camp, which appropriates existing urban conditions for its efficacy. The SDF camp then follows the philosophy of the larger movement in Paris and France to address homelessness. Since 1990, the mission of the association Droit au Logement (DAL) to affect changes in legislation and policy has included the objective of ensuring that evictions do not occur without rehousing, thus assuming that a lack of rehousing results in marginal, exclusionary, and unacceptable camping or squatting. Like DAL’s earlier homeless camp that lasted for months in Paris’ 20th district, the protest camp calls attention to this transition between no housing and “rehousing.”19 This camp, in its imageability and its linear rationality, reads as a planning mechanism. The camp is infinitely photographable, invoking the aesthetic drama of the city’s perspectival vignettes and picturesque Haussmannian boulevards. Deeper though is the canal’s presence in Paris’ urbanization, its land tenure debates, and revolutions. Overseeing construction of the canal system that included Saint-Martin, Napoléon Bonaparte planned the canals as critical infrastructure for water supply and for economic trade. With a stated intention to make the banks of the canals a public park, the city acquired land for the canal under laws of expropriation and proceeded to allow the construction of commercial buildings.20 During the Revolution of 1830, Canal Saint-Martin’s bridges gave passage to the withdrawal of insurgents from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. And during his urban transformation and recanalization of Paris, Baron

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Haussmann made this canal system secondary and inferior to a modernized “noble” water system fed by springs. The SDF camp is on contested ground, its historically charged strata activated by a new logic of defensible space and rights to housing. The camp returns urban density and mixed-income settlement to the canal’s cleared urban space.

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Mock FEMA Camp

On August 23, 2006, St. Bernard Parish restaurateur Rockey Vaccarella met with George W. Bush in the Oval Office to thank the president for his FEMA trailer and to ask that he not forget about the people of the Gulf Coast. The first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall was approaching, and Vaccarella’s survival story of four hours on top of his roof as floodwaters rose recalled the city’s many displacements and disappointments after the hurricane’s devastation.21 Vaccarella had hoped that the president would accept an invitation to dine in the trailer outside the Capitol, but instead Gulf Coast coordinator Don Powell joined the traveler for a meal of Cajun food. As protest camp and as a trailerite’s singular, independent mobilization on national television, Vaccarella’s trailer came to symbolize FEMA’s embattled postdisaster camps of necessity. But these symbolisms were not without ironic coincidence. The trailer’s signage was patriotic and sympathetic to the president but at the same time was critical of FEMA’s response and administrative lapses, challenged by one of the trailer’s signs— “forgotten on the bayou.” Because it is illegal to tow a FEMA trailer, Vaccarella and his crew pulled a privately owned trailer modeled on the FEMA-issued units. This “mock” FEMA trailer’s atypical mobility drew attention to the paradoxes of

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photograph,” Foo campers answered with their intentions to build a series of HexaYurts, to camouflage the camp as an optical illusion of a mountain or a “huge hole,” and to invent a “whole new art form” with reams of grayscale paper and a “very low res png.”39 The aerial visualization of the camp then becomes a tool to explore dwelling, aesthetic practice, and technological limitations. Evoking but transforming the eclipse camp, in which earthbound scientists view the celestial body, Foo Camp participates in a kind of subject-object reversal and allows technologists temporarily to understand not only how they are making a physical place in the world but also how they might transform its evolving reliance on communication and interconnection. Although the name Foo has at least two other derivations—“Friends of O’Reilly” and colloquial use as a variable in computer science, this process of the camp’s visualization recalls the use of foo to describe the unidentified lights that appeared on radar scans during World War II and were attributed to natural phenomena, alien spacecraft, or enemy weapons. In this etymological conflation, the Foo Camp might be understood as the field that negotiates the technical mysteries of the cybercamp with the earth-bound exigencies of camping.40

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Gaming Camp

In computer games, spawn camping threatens a player’s opponents and at the same time questions the game’s integrity. Spawn camps are strategic sites where gamers wait to ambush other players or linger to accumulate resources and “experience points.” This combination of attack and defense parallels the diverse set of conventional military camps j\\k_\j\Zk`fejfe È:FELJ:XdgÉXe[ÈFm\ij\XjD`c`kXip=XZ`c`kpÉ`eZ_Xgk\i) . Making this connection, gamers employ strategic practices of siting camps on high ground, camouflaging and providing a low profile to the bivouac, or shifting camp to avoid detection.47 To simulate further the sites of warfare, computer games also furnish ready-made, often generically equipped camps like the Allied Camp in Wolfenstein’s Enemy Territory. Camping practice in the virtual world of gaming also challenges the classic precepts of war, like those found in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. In one spawn strategy, gamers “camp out” at respawn locations. To spawn camp at these points of entry for refreshed or new players is to confirm ironically a Sun Tzu axiom: “Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy will be fresh for the fight.” So fresh that programmers and rule makers have scrambled to circumvent these spawn camps, perceived as an unfair advantage in computer gaming. In other camps, gamers find points of limbo, even if seemingly vulnerable in an open field or highly accessible location, where they can increase their “survivability,” a practice that contradicts another art of war: “When in difficult country, do not encamp. In country where high roads intersect, join hands with your allies. Do not linger in dangerously isolated positions. In hemmed-in situations, you must resort to stratagem. In desperate position, you must fight.” In computer gaming and the spaces of its camps, players have found that you do not have to fight to win.

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With spawn camp, lingering is strength and isolation empowers the gamer with the artifice of inactivity and a self-made ethics of noncombat. In Enemy Territory, campers are programmers who use the command “setspawnpt” variable to map their spawn locations. This strategy draws on the latent meaning of spawn—the manipulation of origin and effect. The solitary gamer, as camper, reprogrammer, and avatar-warrior, controls the rules of the game and its outcome, putting the game itself into a kind of limbo. The unwitting player, expecting confrontation and “war,” is haunted by Sun Tzu’s army on the march: “If his place of encampment is easy of access, he is tendering a bait.” Yet, the artifice is not necessarily to engage directly with the enemy, and it is the nonengagement of the camper with other players and the code of conduct, along with the camp’s manipulation of the game’s programming “code,” that make the spawn camp unsocial and by all accounts unfair. Spawn camping exceeds the art of seeing to approach spaces of modern warfare, which are characterized not by vision but in terms of speed—a topological rather than topographical approach.48 Spawn camp, like the related practices of turtling, base camping, wait-screen camping, and refresh camping, plays on the computer gaming construct itself. Waiting at the game’s entry point, spawn campers exploit the threshold between the game’s virtual spaces and its external realities. Gamers also control play through an autonomy afforded by technologies of speed and interconnectivity. Spawn camps function most efficaciously and maliciously in the “public” worlds of online gaming. Here, the virtual gamer survives through the distances of the social network and the hyperproximities of the game’s landscape. Spawn camp affords an absolute position, controlling the game not by strategic action but through immobility—to the extent that popular games like EverQuest have come to be known as EverCamp.

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Hacker Camp

Camps reverse decentralization without sacrificing hacker ethics. At the Chaos Communication Camp (CCC ) in August 2007, more than two thousand hacker-campers found the requisite open space to satisfy one of Steven Levy’s codified rules of hacking—to disperse authority—and at the same time to generate a centralized community physically located at coordinates 52.8317,13.6779. This was an open-air and open-source environment for hackers, not defined by stealth but by technical expertise. Art and beauty on the computer, another of Levy’s codes, manifested in the camp as a bricoleur’s laboratory, where hackers excel at making one thing from something else—the trick, or artifice, of bricole “turning” technology to unintended but significant, and beautiful, use. CCC ’s planners turned the former Soviet–East German airbase near Berlin into a hacking community linked to the Internet through a two-mile cable. And Porta-Johns were deployed in the camp as network hubs, their switches elevated and protected in the ventilated space of the datenklos (“data-loos”), which then became the data-campfire nodes of tent clusters. Camps allow for such nonstandard use of site and facilities. For five days, CCC’s campers resided in thirty autonomously themed villages where informal discussions were encouraged and experiments were carried out j\\ ÈK_\d\:XdgÉ . Although for the most part camper-defined, the camp posted rules prohibiting dogs, regulating the flight of drones, and delineating a “no camera camping” zone. CCC ’s history of camping extends back to 1999 in a Berlin field and builds on previous hacker camps. Although it did not provide open-air camping, the Galactic Hacker Party (GHP), held in 1989 in the converted church of Amsterdam’s Club Paradiso, did help initiate a series of hacker gatherings. Dutch hacker magazine Hack-Tic hosted a follow-up event in

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1993 that was billed as an “in-tents summer congress.” Participants in Hacking at the End of the Universe (HEU) camped thirteen feet below sea level in Holland’s Laserbos campground. HIP (Hacking in Progress), known as “ HIPcamp,” convened two years later at the Kotterbos campground in Almere, The Netherlands. Connections between camping and hacking have also extended to TechTrain sessions described as intensive “hacker camps” for rapidly acquiring expertise in information technology systems, but organized camp planners have seemed to resist the “hacker summer camp” designation because of the term’s potentially negative connotations.49 At Chaos Communication Camp, members of the Hacker Foundation from the United States explored European models for collective meeting spaces. The foundation has developed its Hacker Space Initiative to support the development of infrastructure for research and services. For the group, “hacker space” is the camp space of CCC where the intellectual commons espoused by Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) ideology gains a physical presence. For the Hacker Foundation, the open camp, apart from decentralized isolation, is a potential model for hacker community outreach—charitable work and advocacy. To that end, participants in the CCC event called for a U.S. network of fixed hacker research spaces like Metalab in Vienna and Berlin’s C-Base—legendarily sited on the crash site of a spaceship and a reverse-engineered space station. As a starting point, they proposed a camp—the “Hackers on a Base” camp, also making use of a decommissioned military base j\\k_\j\Zk`feÈ8[Xgk\[:XdgÉ . And so, in the annals of hacker terminology, the phrase “AOS the campfire” denotes the augmentation of “add one and do not skip” (AOS) programming instructions—a cumulative process also found in campfire-building and an increased exchange similarly afforded by the camp’s locative qualities of geography and placefulness.50

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Queue Camp

Sony released its long-awaited Play Station 3 (PS3) to North American consumers on November 17, 2006. In spite of cold weather throughout much of the United States, PS3 camps emerged in the parking lots and along the entry walks of the nation’s electronic department stores. Prospective buyers of the game camped out days before the release date, some auctioning off their positions in line once they realized the value of these campsites.51 On YouTube, the PS3 camp video became a common type of footage, exhibiting hauntingly uniform site conditions, with Best Buy’s rusticated concrete block the standard background to a hodgepodge of lawn chairs, Coleman tents, and bleary-eyed tedium. From Miami to Davenport, Iowa, from Aventura to Germantown, Maryland, storefront walkways became tent-laden campsites. Many Best Buy stores posted their store policy disallowing overnight stays on the site and required customers to remain offsite until the product release date. One printed sign in Burbank, California, read: “Best Buy appreciates your interest and excitement for the upcoming gaming release but we have a general practice that we do not allow lines to form prior to the day before a release. We hope to see you on the release date.” But many managers of Best Buy, Circuit City, Target, and Wal-Mart stores tolerated the anticipation and embraced the publicity, while in all likelihood secretly fretting about the liability. The console launch-day campout continued with Nintendo Wii’s release on November 19, and bloggers compared the phenomenon to its virtual gaming counterpart of spawn camping j\\È>Xd`e^:XdgÉ .52 Not limited to far-flung big-box hardscapes, the queue camp also accommodates tent dwellers seeking to purchase event tickets. Here, spectacle replaces fetishized object as the motivation for suspending daily life to camp out in the

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elements. Camping for seats at sporting events entered the popular imagination with the juxtaposition of tents and collegiate Gothic in the 1980s when Duke University students founded the tent city of Krzyzewskiville, after head basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski. More than a thousand students camp for up to seven weeks to claim free admission to the basketball team’s games at storied Cameron Indoor Stadium. The grounds adjacent to the basketball arena and Card Gymnasium have become a part of the university’s landscape master plan and are typically included as a stop on campus tours. In 1998, students camping in K-Ville participated in an early pilot program to bring wireless computer access to the campus, and camp infrastructure now includes Wi-Fi and Ethernet ports in the light poles. The Duke University Student Government regulates the queue camp in a highly articulated policy that includes the following permutations: preblue tenting (for those who set up camp before the official 8:30 a.m., January 7, start time); blue tenting (sixty registered tents with a maximum of twelve occupants can be pitched at 10 a.m. on January 7); and white tenting (supplanting blue tenting on January 29 in preparation for the basketball game with the University of North Carolina). Line monitors, as rigorous as boot-camp sergeants, administer K-Ville’s policy of tent checks (Duke ID and required tent occupancy), grace periods (for a one-hour daily break and for instances of health and safety problems), personal checks, and tent roster changes. Tent city life culminates with the distribution of wristbands for admission to the game with North Carolina.53 (%), GJ*ZXdgflk`e]ifekf] 9\jk9lpjkfi\`eDflek CXli\c#E%A%#feN\[e\j[Xp# Efm\dY\i(,#)''-%K_\ ZXdg\ijXi\nX`k`e^]fik_\ i\c\Xj\Xk()1'(X%d%=i`[Xp f]JfepËjGcXpJkXk`fe* ^Xd\%8GG_fkf&D\c<mXej

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PS3 campers choose to participate in the commercial hype of the computer gaming industry, and the culture of K-Ville reflects the pleasures of college life; but queue camps, particularly those with a focus on acquisition, also register more complex situations of displacement and consumption. In April 2007, civilians and service families hoping to purchase decommissioned housing units camped on the former British Royal Air Force military base in Coltishall, Norfolk. Development company Annington Homes bought the camp’s 328 houses in 1996 and planned to dispense 48 units that had been leased back to the Ministry of Defense. Under requirements imposed by the developer, service families found themselves camping two hundred yards from the home they were leasing and hoped to buy, with further stipulations that vacating a tent for more than two hours in a given twenty-four hour period would sacrifice the place in the queue. This camp indicated the lack of affordable housing in the region, provoking many service families to camp out for more than three weeks for a chance to buy their leased homes.54 The necessity of dwelling-in-line relates to the queue camp’s corollary—camping while waiting.55 Donna McSherry has developed a website to dispense information about how to camp in airports. The site also serves as a zone of exchange for travelers and includes testimonials and experiences. Postings to the website range from camping experiences behind the airport terminal in Maun, Botswana, to provisional couch campsites in the liminal spaces of London’s Gatwick airport. McSherry’s website takes on the camping principles of adjusting to circumstances. Her recommendations for camping accessories include: $2 inflatable pool rafts, bottled water, snacks, and alarm clock. The popularity of London’s Stansted airport with young travelers in Europe has caused congestion in the prime airport camping locations, which have become so frequented by budget travelers that “you need to arrive by about 11pm at the latest if you want to secure a bank of padded seats to sleep on.”56 Singapore’s Changi Airport is

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famed as a prime destination for travelers with its free “napping lounges”—the Plaza Premium Lounge and the Rainforest Lounge. The latter “campsite,” located in the Transit Area of the Changi Airport, is open twenty-four hours a day and includes areas for napping within its “thematic lifestyle lounge,” a re-created tropical rainforest. The Plaza Premium Lounge includes fee-based napping suites. McSherry summarizes the airport’s amenities: “I am almost inclined to travel to Singapore, just to camp out in the airport.”57

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Tree Camp

Cosimo Rondò camped for most of his life as baron of the trees. Having left his parents’ table on June 15, 1767, the twelve-year-old oversaw central Europe’s green canopy without ever setting foot on earth again. The matrix of leaves and branches and his headstrong autonomy necessitated an impermanence. After he gave up on the construction of a full-blown aerial house, his only shelter was a suspended hammock lined with fur. And his movement from foliaged camp to foliaged camp was at the mercy of natural distribution and later became a function of human intervention after the Napoleonic Wars drastically altered and diminished the arboreal coverage. In spite of this transience, Cosimo, temporarily immobilized by grapeshot in his leg, was able to formulate a counternation called the Republic of Arborea, with its own Constitution of an Ideal State in the Trees. Cosimo Rondò camped on air. Tree camps and the hanging bivouacs of cliff camps approximate this suspended, unfortunately for the most part fictional, existence along a vertical campground described in Italo Calvino’s novel: “From the tree Cosimo looked at the world; everything seen from up there was different, which was fun in itself.”58 This playful change of perspective combines with the challenges of extreme camping. With tree camping, you might feel as if your new ground is the sky, as your bird’s-eye view of the world collapses what is near and far into a near-vertical frame. Having climbed trees recreationally and professionally, Peter Jenkins founded Tree Climbers International in 1983. According to the classification system established by Jenkins, a Class 6 tree with a commitment rating of VI or VII would rival the Baron’s own expedition, if not in duration then in its difficulty, which takes the tree climber as high as 370 feet into remote areas “with several days of tree-top camping.” Derived

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from mountain climbing and arborists’ procedures, technical tree climbing requires helmet, ropes, throw weights, carabiners, and harnessed saddles, within the self-belay system of using two ropes to raise and lower oneself—an autonomous movement that culminates in a night’s sleep in a “tree boat.” Typically carried out in a four-cornered canvas hammock, tree-boating is a form of suspended camping where, according to Jenkins, sleep is enhanced by vivid dreams and a nervous system “in a state of mental readiness.”59 Tree camps are also longer-term, environmentally sensitive sites of protest. Just as Cosimo’s canopied territory diminished, timber harvests have left islands of publicly owned, oldgrowth forests where environmental activists have established village networks in the air. Tree-camping practices to protect these stands are solitary and communal—from Julia Butterfly’s two-year tree-sitting protest to save the thousand-year-old redwood named Luna to the village camp of Fall Creek in the Willamette National Forest. The Fall Creek camp, also called “Red Cloud Thunder,” floated at an elevation of two hundred feet in the forest’s fir and hemlock stands in a six-year ecoprotest campaign from 1998 to 2003. The canopy camps afforded the tactical positioning of direct action along with the seclusion necessary for the protest’s longevity. The tree camp also became an ad hoc field research station, and the tree villagers’ familiarity with the canopy environment unexpectedly added to the protest’s success with the discovery of previously unknown habitats. As amateur zoologists, botanists, and arborists, the tree campers identified nests of the red tree vole, common prey of the Northern Spotted Owl, by law forcing the U.S. Forest Service to reduce the extent of its logging and thus saving more than half of the ninety-four acres slated to be clear-cut. As a site for both the detachment of anarchoprimitivism and direct action’s engagement, the tree village camp becomes not the ideal state of Cosimo Rondò but an aerial scene of pragmatic imagination.60

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Wall Camp

The lightness of camping vertically might certainly induce a unique dream state, but it is the practicality of lightness that characterizes the hanging bivouac of rock climbing, more accurately termed “big wall climbing.” When Warren Harding and his climbing team completed the twelve-day ascent of El Capitan’s northeast face called the “Nose” in November 1957, he had drawn national media attention to the sport for his traffic-jam inducing visibility from Yosemite’s popular Meadow site below. He had also reinvented the “siege tactic” for shuttling provisions between camps during the grueling climb. If the vertical climbing route does not include a ledge for camping, then a prolonged ascent requires climbers to camp suspended with thousands of feet of air between the ground and their prone, hopefully not wakeful, bodies. The visual exposure of Harding’s camp to an enthralled public is also the natural vulnerability of the “bivvy” camp to wind, snowmelt, and temperature extremes. But it is the campfire, disengaged from its earthen conventions and suspended as cookstove, that poses the greatest threat to the wall camper.

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For a week in early summer 1998, a wall camp’s hanging tents—more than a half-mile above the frozen Arctic Ocean— provided respite from the vertiginous context of Baffin Island’s Great Sail Peak. North of the Arctic Circle, climbers had continuous daylight during the ten days to pitch the camp and the seven days to occupy the wall camp, a staging point for reaching the peak’s 5,305-foot summit. Combining hammock and hanging tent, portaledges provided the camp’s three shelters—intricate cocoons of vapor barriers, insulation layers, and carabiner connections, tethered to a “bomber” hold—a tie-down, actually a “tie-up,” in which the experienced climber has the greatest confidence. Here, camping becomes a sleeping and clothing system that must be tailored to exposure, weather, the available “pitches” and holds, and the duration of the climb. Tree camping and cliff camping reorient the grounding of camp’s spaces, to harness, poetically and technically, the tensile nature of tent camping.61

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Philosophers’ Camp

The first installment of Deleuze Camp convened in the late summer of 2007. But it is likely that this collision of terms was latent in our minds for many years previous. When postgraduate students met at Cardiff University’s Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory for “a hectic combination of lectures, seminars, and workshops,” they did not camp outdoors or engage in the rusticism typically associated with the iconic summer camp. But their conference confirms one of many philosophical, and semantic, trajectories that can be traced along its own camping plateau, particularly the events of August 5, 1858. When Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louis Agassiz, James Lowell, and other members of the Saturday Club left on their camping trip with their guide William James Stillman, they departed not only the urban distractions of Boston but also a world still slowed by paper telegraphy. But before hearing the news of successful tests of a transatlantic cable—an irony itself given the presumed inaccessibility of the camp—Emerson would write elegiacally about their experience: “Follansbee’s Pond. It should be called Stillman’s henceforward, from the good camp which this gallant artist has built, and the good party he has led and planted here for the present at the bottom of the little bay which lies near the head of the lake.”62 Urbaniteturned-woodsman Stillman documented the experience at what he named Camp Maple in The Philosophers’ Camp, in which Louis Agassiz can be seen dissecting a trout on a tree stump while James Lowell’s group, with Stillman himself, fires rifles at a target in the valley. In the center of the painting, among the eponymous and highly symbolic maples, the transcendent figure of Emerson anchors both groups and, acting as a transcamp figure, links the two “camps”: science and the arts.63

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Still camping, the group reacted with some degree of agitation at the news of the transatlantic experiment, which though marginally successful revolutionized the speed of communication and telegraphic connectivity. The camp, it seems, was uprooted from this “good camp”—an organic construct, its rhizomatic influences apparent through Emerson’s subsequent poetic essay “The Adirondacs” about the transcendence of the camp and through William James’s radical empiricism that can be said to have paralleled his own camping experiences. James begins his famous essay “What Pragmatism Means” with his return to camp, where he finds his fellow campers in a heated debate about a squirrel and a tree. Reflecting his philosophy of pragmatism and his practice of empirical psychology, James’s resolution of the conflict entirely fits with the camp’s setting, one in which the rationalized methods and rigorous sequence of camping (from siting to breaking camp) are tempered, and at the same time radicalized, by the “real” experiences in nature. Though one of James’s favorite camping destinations, Putnam Camp was not wholly primitive and was in fact semipermanent, with rustic cabins and some amenities. The distance from the city and the connection with the remaining wilderness was such that other campers like Sigmund Freud might chop wood and “rough it” in relative seclusion. First the transcendentalists and then the pragmatists went camping in the rapidly contracting American wilderness. If the camp is a transcendental field, its spaces might be understood through events of a transcendental empiricism. Perhaps this is the “pure immanence” that Freud expressed with his exhilaration from the camping experience: “Of everything I have experienced in America this here is probably the strangest: a camp, you must imagine, in a wilderness in the woods, situated like a mountain meadow. . . . Stones, moss, groups of trees, uneven ground which on three sides merges into densely wooded hills.”64 Or, the camp may simply be a spatial parallel to what Deleuze called the minor American

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literature—marginal sites for experimentation. Today’s philosophers’ camp is virtual, a function of what the August 1858 transatlantic connectivity has brought with it. Camping, we set up home pages, blogs, and wikis—the latter conceived as a campsite from the outset—a place where the nomadic thinker is asked to set up temporary residency, to pitch a tent and to converse across the campfire, now flickering with a refresh rate j\\È9Xi:XdgÉ . These open camps of the Internet are indeed a kind of place-making apparatus, when place is defined as a site (campsite) for debating, telling stories, and asking questions—even if remaining as sites for an idealism or aspirations of utopia j\\È!:XdgÉ .

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Eclipse Camp

In late April 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington, British scientist and adventurer, arrived at the eclipse camp on the Island of Principe. From this camp, Eddington recorded the first measurements of starlight deflection since Albert Einstein’s publication of his general theory of relativity three years earlier. A Quaker and a conscientious objector to the First World War, Eddington was avoiding one camp by traveling to another. In 1917, his pacifist convictions almost led him to North England, where he knew that many of his friends were peeling potatoes in the objector camps. In spite of Eddington’s acceptance of this fate, the Astronomer Royal Sir Frank Dyson nominated Eddington to lead one of the expeditions planned to prove Einstein’s theory in the next two years. The war ended and Eddington went to an eclipse camp to weigh light.65 This intersection of camping and science was not new— the Victorian propensity to traverse its colonial grounds in the name of science and leisure had begun in the previous century.66 However, the idea that attempts would be made to provide experimental proof of Einstein’s theory on a camping trip was profound, if unexpected, and the result of an extraordinary effort. Assistants carried massive equipment over the Atlantic from England to the islands along Africa’s west coast in preparation for the event months in advance. Along with simultaneous observations from another British expedition in Sobral, Brazil, the Principe site was chosen for its clear skies, its accessibility for heavy equipment, the availability of local labor and construction material, and most important, the existence of a source of pure water for photographic work. It was the flexibility of the camp’s location and its precise positioning along the path of totality that rewarded the mobilized scientist Eddington with the practical measurements that had eluded Einstein.

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Although the precision of these measurements has been questioned and Eddington’s camping excursion has since been mythologized, eclipse astronomers have successfully measured the distances between the stars flanking the covered disk of the sun during totality.67 Comparisons made with prior images of the stars’ configuration then show whether the sun’s gravitational forces have resulted in the space-time curvature predicted by Einstein’s theory. The eclipse’s occurrence on May 29, 1919, was especially auspicious and provided the optimal conditions because at that time of year the sun traversed a patch of particularly bright stars, which aided as reference points in the measurement of light’s deflection. Previous researchers had attempted proofs of Einstein’s earlier special theory of relativity in 1912 and 1914, but weather and eventually war intervened. At Principe, a momentary break in the rain and cloudy skies yielded only two photographic plates in the last phases of totality, enough data for Eddington’s island-bound confirmation of Einstein’s theory three days later.68 By November 1919 with the additional measurements from Sobral, British headlines announced both a “revolution in science” and the observance of the first Armistice day. For Eddington, the eclipse camp and its results were significant not only scientifically but also politically—the outcome of a British Quaker astronomer collaborating with a German Jewish scientist, transcending nationalism and nationalistic boundaries through the camp’s far-flung African location. Following Eddington’s work, equally obsessive scientific pursuits have generated an array of research camps that track a geography of discovery. On September 21, 1922, in what has been lauded as the follow-up proof to Eddington’s confirmation, an expedition led by William Wallace Campbell convinced the skeptical Lick Observatory Director of the value of Einstein’s theory at the Wallal eclipse camp in Australia. With the momentum of these previous explorations, the eclipse camp entered into collective memory and social-scientific aspirations. The 1937 joint expedition of the National

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Geographic Society and the U.S. Navy took scientists, naval officers, one painter, a broadcast announcer, and two engineers to Canton Island. A Marine Corps sergeant oversaw the thirteen-member crew’s construction of the camp, which took the form of a prototypical American town and borrowed from New York City’s iconography. National Broadcasting Company (NBC) announcer George Hicks worked from his tent dubbed “Radio City,” a town hall was established, “Fifth Avenue” ran through the residential tents, “Broadway” divided the tents and instruments, and the fourteen-foot telescopic camera was named “Big Bertha” after World War I howitzers. On June 8, with antennas raised by kites, a swimsuit-clad Hicks narrated a fifteen-minute broadcast from this hybridized military, science, media, and artist camp.69 Descriptions of preparations and totality reached NBC studios for rebroadcast and eventually arrived at BBC studios in London. Worldwide broadcasts had not only captured the eclipse’s longest duration since A.D. 699 but had also provided a vision of island camp life in its daily rituals and extraordinary observations. Confirming its temporary permanence, camp was broken and the USS Avocet set sail for Honolulu thirty hours after the last glimpse of totality.70

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Field Camp

Lodged between drift camp and field camp is the mooring station. This lightly tethered, typically five-day camp sets up the mooring’s two forms of measurement—Lagrangian drift and Eulerian fixity—which are emblematic of the research camp’s kinematic nature. These types of measurement have also led to the automation of drifting data buoys and unmanned platforms. These changes highlight the extraordinary nature of manning the drift camps throughout their twentieth-century program, beginning in 1937 when onsite researchers ran crank generators and sent up balloons for climate readings, in spite of the camp’s danger and inaccessibility. By the time of NP-32, tourists accompanied field researchers because of the floating station’s inaccessibility. Such automation has relegated some Arctic researchers to base camps like Camp Borneo, established by the Russian POLUS program and named for its remoteness, now made doubly ironic with research suggesting that the Arctic was once tropical, albeit fifty-five million years ago. After setting up equipment in Borneo, research teams live in the temporary field camps next to the deployment site of the nearly three-mile-long mooring, anchoring its string of equipment to the bottom of the Arctic but stopping fifty meters short of the chaotic ice floes at the surface. Even the field camp’s fixity is susceptible to the Arctic’s seasonal warming, as April 2007 cracks in the ice underlying Borneo unmoored the base camp.81 In Antarctica, field camps have also become drift camps. In 1962, ice holding the ruins of Admiral Richard Byrd’s Little America Camp broke away from the Ross Ice Barrier to become a tabular iceberg in the Bay of Whales. Byrd had made a presentation on May 18, 1938, to the Circumnavigators Club in a room of Manhattan’s

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Hotel Astor designed to simulate his recently established Antarctic camp. Club members dressed in parkas, ice penguins melted, an Eskimo dog accompanied the polar campers, and Byrd noted he was “pretty nearly broke” after his most recent expedition.

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Camp David

Some camps exist in a national consciousness. Formally established in 1942, Camp David has connoted secrecy, negotiation, nostalgia, utopia, and political sentiment. In 1959, Cold War talks between Nikita Khrushchev and President Dwight Eisenhower first transformed this latter attribute into what was called the “spirit of Camp David”— broad phraseology critiqued at the time for its noncommittal intangibility but later invoked for its implied intentionality. The camp form itself parallels this range. As an event, it is an ephemeral experience. At the same time it is a place, a site that can be located. From its beginning, Camp David has served as both retreat space and idea. Camp David’s official designation as “Camp #3, Shangri-La, NAVSUPPFAC, Thurmont, Maryland” catalogs the site’s combination of “spirit” and layered place.90 Camp Hi-Catoctin, as Camp #3, was the third installment of the Catoctin Recreational Demonstration Area (RDA), developed as a part of the Emergency Relief Act of 1935. Along with the earlier two camps and a proposed fourth, Camp #3 satisfied the Works Progress Administration’s objectives to furnish work for area residents, to provide recreational opportunities to city dwellers, and to work with “submarginal farms” and inaccessible forests j\\k_\j\Zk`feÈ::::XdgÉ`eZ_Xgk\i* .91 After its completion in late 1938, Camp #3 hosted Federal Camp Council retreats for government employees and also served as a campsite for Girl and Boy Scouts. With World War II, the RDA became a temporary training camp early in 1941 to respond to the developing European conflict. And Camp #2, known as Greentop, lodged British troops whose ships were in the Baltimore drydock, before it was transformed into Area B, an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) camp.92 It was within this camping matrix that Franklin Delano Roosevelt established

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his Shangri-La, where he could meet with OSS Director William “Wild Bill” Donovan from the adjacent camp, fish with Winston Churchill on Hunting Creek, and play a solitary card game on the hideaway’s screened porch. On April 22, 1942, Roosevelt emerged from his White House confines and boarded a nondescript Secret Service car for the drive north into the Maryland mountains. On his way, he would have passed near his WPA program’s work camps, new military installations (one of which had recently adapted a CCC camp at Round Meadow), the historic sites of Western Maryland Railroad camps, Camp Airy (founded by a Jewish youth organization in 1924 and still operating in 2007), former President Hoover’s preferred fish camp at Richey, and Camp Cozy at the Cozy Inn. On this drive, Roosevelt might have read within the landscape the receding history of the place, replete with the traces of American Indians and early settlers along the Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia. But he probably understood this system of camps in their more recent permutations, as experiments in relief and necessary results of wartime exigencies beginning to transform labor networks into military training sites. The seclusion, a mysterious autonomy, afforded by what would become Camp David, was named the day before Roosevelt’s drive north. In the Oval office on April 21, President Roosevelt answered a reporter’s question about the origin of Doolittle’s planes, which had bombed Tokyo only days earlier, with a similar response he had made to a dinner guest the night before: “Yes, I think the time has come now to tell you. They came from our secret base at Shangri-La.”93 Although Camp #3, at 1,800 feet, did not match the dramatic elevation of the Shangri-La in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, the view of the Monocacy River Valley held Roosevelt and other visitors spellbound. Having named the camp Shangri-La, it was clear that Roosevelt saw the site as remote, secret, and beautiful. It was not until October 14, 1943, that the camp hideaway was involuntarily disclosed to the public. “I don’t know who did

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this. I did not,” and “RDA 501 Catoctin” annotated a presidential copy of the Chicago Daily News clipping that exposed the camp’s existence and propelled it into national consciousness, although its exact location was still undisclosed. The camp has since served as both international event space and presidential retreat to varying degrees with each presidency—a place of as much privacy as is available to a standing president’s public life. Leaving office, Ronald Reagan noted that he would miss Camp David the most. In addition to hosting Churchill and planning the Normandy invasion at the camp, Roosevelt learned of Mussolini’s resignation there on June 25, 1943, and strategized about Guadalcanal there as well. The “spirit” of the camp was echoed in the Camp David Accords of President Jimmy Carter, President Anwar el-Sādāt, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978. And on September 15, 2001, George W. Bush delivered his weekly radio address from Camp David, where he had been meeting with his advisors in the Laurel Cabin to discuss the U.S. response to the attacks of four days earlier.

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Airlock Campout

On April 3, 2006, astronauts climbed into the Quest Joint Airlock of the International Space Station, lowered the chamber’s air pressure to 10.2 pounds per square inch, and began an overnight stay to test spacewalk preparation. NASA had been planning what it called the “airlock campout” since 2001 in order to understand how sleep at particular air pressures might help purge astronauts’ bloodstream of the nitrogen that can cause decompression sickness.94 With its air pressure corresponding to an alpine campsite at ten thousand feet and amidst NASA press releases joking about s’mores, the “campout” has emerged as an important procedure in spaceflights. With the April experiment, astronauts sought to reduce the time spent in the airlock, which affords the critical transition from the International Space Station to spacewalks. The Joint Airlock, launched in 2001, is twenty feet long and thirteen feet in diameter—dimensions making for a yurtlike space for sleep and research. In this airborne camp, the Quest Joint Airlock provides the controlled environment for changing pressure, for carrying out research, and in this case for simulating earthbound camping practices j\\k_\ YffbËj\g`cf^l\#È@e$=c`^_k:XdgÉ . Before sealing the hatch and lowering the pressure in the chamber, the astronauts brought in their sleeping bags and personal items and prepared for an overnight sleep and for the possibility that camps are thresholds to other frontiers of space. (%+/ 8jkifeXlkD`Z_X\cC% >\ie_Xi[k#JKJ$('+ d`jj`fejg\Z`Xc`jk#ÕfXkj `ek_\Hl\jk8`icfZb gi`fikf^\kk`e^jl`k\[ ]fik_\j\Zfe[f]k_i\\

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Theme Camp

Given Burning Man’s focus, the theme camp hints at the roots of recreational camping. Why do we camp? To “find” ourselves. How do we camp? By transforming ourselves. And all of this by temporarily relocating our homesite. With deracination taken care of by the remote and harsh geographies of Black Rock Desert, theme camps provide the framework for a kind of method acting as self-discovery. Thus, the campiness of thematizing the camping experience, as an ironic practice, recalls Susan Sontag’s notations on camp. The festival’s “Theme Camp and Village Resource Guide” does not cite Sontag, but it might begin epigraphically with her warning: “It’s embarrassing to be solemn and treatise-like about camp. One runs the risk of having, oneself, produced a very inferior piece of Camp.”100 Organizers also note that theme camps should be participatory, interactive, and visually stimulating, and that they should “create an ambience” and “in some way provide a communal space or provide activity.” Each year, with responses to the (%,) JkX^\j\k[\j`^e\[Yp :Xk_Xi`eXJZ_fck\e]fik_\ gif[lZk`fef]8ekfe :_\b_fmËj@mXefm#Xkk_\ 8djk\i[Xdj\9fjGXibËj K_\Xk\i?\k#)'',% :flik\jpf]:Xk_Xi`eX JZ_fck\e

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“Placement Questionnaire,” Harley K. DuBois, who is Director of Community Services for BRC, decides where to locate theme camps based on their time of activities, expected noise levels, and degree of age appropriateness for audiences. Theme camp designers must submit a Camp Map with plans of the layout and a Clean Up Plan j\\k_\j\Zk`fek`kc\[ÈCEK:XdgÉ . BRC planners also accept applications for camping villages, cities within the city that typically accommodate at least 150 campers. Themes of these camps range from Camp Blank “about potential and possibility” to Fat Frat Boy Camp, from Camp Katrina j\\ÈD\d\:XdgÉ`eZ_Xgk\i* to 7 Sins Lounge constructed annually since 1997, and from Couch Surfing Camp to Cult of Levitating Plywood Camp. Many of the theme camps illustrate another observation made by Sontag about camp as “the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.”101 Camp as space, method, and idea. So it may be that Lisa Hoffman’s text map of Burning Man ensnares the essence of the festival’s theme camp like Sontag’s own “form of jottings” that, both “tentative and nimble,” capture camp’s “sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful.”102

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At Rainbow Gathering camp, the theme is love, and the purposefulness of the camping experience models itself on an interpretation of the American Indian community, with the resulting tribalism of the Indian camp, as a meditation on the roots of community. At the same time, this theme camp is self-consciously political—a well-planned exercise that invokes the First Amendment to camp constitutionally free and spiritually expressive on public lands. And so each year thousands of the Rainbow Family camp in the national forests, which are understood as “Cathedrals of Nature” and as sites of constitutionally mandated assembly and expression. Camping both in nature and in politically defined public spaces, Rainbow Gatherings began in Colorado in 1972, and the 2006 annual Gathering of Tribes drew an estimated 20,000 participants to its camp at Routt National Forest in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Established to respond to the Forest Service’s concerns about resource degradation and to negotiate each camp without federally required permitting, a well-organized and highly articulated process of scouting precedes the Seed Camp. Local “focalizers” take into account feedback from the virtual tribe to identify potential sites that meet criteria for the gathering—safe drinking water, open meadows, firewood, access roads, and parking. The Seed Camp, made one week before the main gathering, addresses practicalities (systems of water, food, and health, layout of trails, and selection of the Main Circle site) and further negotiates the legal and spatiotemporal implications of the camp. At this point, Rainbow campers notify local forest rangers but typically do not sign permits or agreements with the government. When the main camp finally opens and participants arrive, greeters at the “Welcome Home” tent offer hugs and cups of tea to facilitate each camper’s transition to “Babylon” in the second- and third-growth, but symbolically primordial, forest.

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Within the grounds defined by the Seed Camp, tribes form neighborhoods as smaller camps set up around improvised kitchen areas and “neighborhood fires.” A system of councils or temporary meeting camps administer each gathering’s localized discussions (Main Council) and its negotiation of future sites (Vision Council). An array of other council circles manage each aspect of the Gathering and organize satellite camps such as Bus Village, where those who have arrived in campers, live-in buses, and vans reside. Similar to Burning Man’s theme camp structure, participants in Rainbow Gatherings construct internally focused camps, such as That Camp, Shut Up and Eat It, and Bear Necessities, and neighborhoods like BRC ’s villages accommodate particular groups. Those who plan to drink alcohol at Rainbow Gatherings typically live in A-camp, apart from the Main Council sites and other neighborhoods and theme camps. The blowing of the conch shell signals that a Main Council will convene on the gathering’s Main Meadow. On July 4, participants at the annual national camp known as the Rainbow Gathering of Tribes meditate silently for world peace from daybreak until noon. Other activities include sweat lodges, workshops, and acoustical instrumentation and music. In an ironic collision of camps at a 2004 regional gathering (Region 6 of the festival network), designated hunting camps in the Ocala National Forest served as the “holding camps” that have typically accommodated the early arrivals of the Rainbow Family of Living Light. The end of hunting season had fallen close to the February 6 full moon, the date that participants had considered as the gathering’s opening but instead served as the initiation of the Seed Camp. Annual gatherings at the Ocala site have also registered conflicts between theme camp and government policy. In spite of its general aversion to contractual relations with the government, the Florida Rainbow contingent has applied for and signed permits since February 2002, after a series of court

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cases testing the legality of the group’s nonpermitted camping assemblies in national forests. In a 1998 case at the Ocala Division of the U.S. District Court, plaintiffs from the Rainbow Gathering sought relief from “pro-active” police tactics that, they argued, violated Fourth Amendment protections and prohibited their First Amendment rights.103 Two years later, in June 2000, Pennsylvania’s U.S. District Court charged three members of the Rainbow Family for “use or occupancy of National Forest System lands without authorization” and sentenced them to three months in jail. Selected as representative participants, the “Allegheny Three” had camped with an estimated 20,000 other attendees in the state’s Allegheny National Forest at the Summer 1999 Rainbow Gathering of Tribes. In Florida, as in other regional gatherings, Rainbow planners have identified adjacent campsites outside of the permitted area for those who believe that the permitting procedure compromises the constitutional autonomy of their camps. Previous festival and theme camps have also conflicted with government regulations. In 1985, members of what became known as the “Hippy Convoy,” traditionally camping at Stonehenge from the end of May to the first of July, had tested the legality of camping at Stonehenge after prohibitions by the National Trust and English Heritage that banned midsummer festivals on the ancient site’s grounds. In the “Battle of the Beanfield,” police arrested five hundred festivalgoers in a show of force televised nationally, placing the summer solstice theme camp at the epicenter of national discussions about police tactics and trespass law. The following year, one hundred assembled campers, including those again specified in a court injunction barring them from the monument’s grounds, camped in a meadow at Cooks Cary Farm near Stonehenge. This protest camp once again brought criminal trespass law to national attention, and critics argued that the issues of trespass on private land would

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not have occurred if authorities had provided appropriate campsites, particularly under the Caravan Sites Act of 1968, requiring local governments to provide “adequate accommodation” for gypsies and travelersj\\k_\È>pgjp :XdgÉj\Zk`fe`eZ_Xgk\i* .104 In 2000, the National Trust lifted the ban, but not before a simulated Druidic monument was added in 1990 to the Glastonbury Festival in an attempt to invest the site with mythical meaning and to draw festivalgoers thirty miles westward to the large festival camp’s site j\\k_\È=\jk`mXc:XdgÉj\Zk`fe .

Naturist Camp

Koversada is an open camp. Naked, you might camp among eight thousand others who have also forsaken “textiles” in the campground’s million square meters.105 Touted as the first and largest “commercial” naturist center in Europe, Koversada was established in 1961 on Croatia’s Mediterranean coast, where according to legend Casanova himself was the first naturist-visitor. Koversada’s scale attests to the popularity of naturism in this part of Europe, particularly associated with Croatia’s Mediterranean tourism. The camp’s grounds include varying clothes-free environments, with the degree of nudity increasing with the distance from the entry points, where “textiles” are most accepted. The camp includes a small island, connected to the main area by a bridge, where tent camping is practiced and where most campers are naked. The modern naturist camp combines tenets of “naturism” with the organizational attributes of the nudist club. Like the

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summer camp, the naturist movement began as a reaction to industrialization, and its philosophy of healthful living and self-help reform found parallels in many nineteenth-century discussions. When Henry David Thoreau writes that it is an “interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes,” he echoes the camp-space egalitarianism that would move through turn-ofthe-century social philosophies of nudist colonies and early explorations of nudism in films of the 1930s. Frequently used epigraphically by essayists and promoters of naturism, this excerpt from Walden’s “Economy” outlines the divide between “true utility” and “false skin”—a rift forming one of the basic premises of naturism, but one also pointing toward the complex utopianism of this pursuit and its camping spaces.106 The camp at Koversada reinforces these underlying precepts with its expansive site but also complicates them in its status as a contemporary megapark. It thus accommodates the more closed spaces of the typically privatized nudist club with the more public-recreational zones of naturist pursuits. In contemporary places like Haulover Beach north of Miami, and through more historically charged events like the Free Beach Movement of 1970s California, the spaces of nudity are measured legally. At Haulover, Miami-Dade County laws allow for public nudity along an 800-yard stretch of the county-owned beach’s shoreline. The recreational camp’s spaces lend themselves to practices of naturism, in which the mix of participants differs by degree rather than kind in a milieu that avoids the juxtapositions of the demarcated boundary. What happens where the sign reads “Beyond this point you may encounter nude sunbathers”? At Koversada, the ideals and concomitant moral and legal debates of naturist practices are embedded within the sprawling camp, a context that rivals the accessibility, scale, and commercialization of theme parks. Here, the camp makes room for degrees, types, and durations of naturism. Koversada’s unreserved scale provides for the

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highest degree of naturism, and perhaps the culmination of utopian unrestraint, on the island where campers dwell among the bare necessities of the primitive tent camp. Not clothing-optional but simply-naked.

Reenactment Camp

Some members of the Rainbow Family trace their group’s origins to a set of Native American Indian prophecies that variously foretold of Rainbow Warriors and a Rainbow Tribe, who would emerge as protectors of the environment. The mission, for many at the Rainbow Gathering, is to “make the earth green again.” The gathering then thematizes this objective by modeling the camp on a genericized Indian Council plan and process, drawing from multiple American Indian traditions. In Lakota traditions, the council fire symbolized a family group’s autonomy within the general camp’s assemblage of tepees, particularly in the winter camp circle where each tribe’s nomadic lives came to rest each season.107 The Rainbow Gathering has adapted the council camp’s circular form but has elided its traditionally hierarchical administrative structure in favor of a consensus decision-making approach. Also, at the gatherings, a feather is passed around to designate who is allowed to speak at each council. This themed space parallels the simulated camps of other reenactment festivals. Framed more explicitly as sociohistorical re-creations, the reenactment camps commemorate events that measure the campsite’s duration and its historical dates of occurrence. If the Rainbow Gathering theme camp is

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hyperritualized, then the reenactment camp, whether at Valley Forge or Whittington Castle, emphasizes a vision of historical accuracy and approximates the materials, technology, and characters of the original event. But the reenactment camp that is not considered completely authentic is called a Plastic City. In contrast, Rainbow Gathering camps appropriate the form of American Indian camps but emphasize the often fluidly improvised social interactions that might be elicited— camp as a way of living, rather than a historically accurate, temporary glimpse of a way of life. Summer camps and Scout camps work between these two models, and the raising of the totem at Glastonbury Festival’s “Tipi Field” confirms the camp as a popularized scene for simulated ritual.

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Museum Camp

The museum sleepover has returned to the American Museum of Natural History after a twenty-year dormancy. In April 2007, four hundred campers unfolded their camping cots in Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, the New York museum’s central space tented by its floating blue whale. The camping program’s reintroduction parallels trends that have fused museum and camp with such popularity that museums not offering overnight stays appear to undermine their expected institutional presence.108 Such events support current interests in early educational programs and in safe and climate-controlled venues for children’s play and families’ interaction. The museum camps also satisfy a nostalgic impulse not just toward the AMNH ’s camp program of the 1980s but perhaps a deeper interest in finding home in the quasi-public, institutional spaces “lost” to privatization and disurbanization. Photographs of the AMNH event depict families in cots clustered around the cool flicker of the museum’s Ocean Life exhibits, publicly mediated substitutions for the mythologized television-hearth foci of ordinary domestic life j\\È9XZbpXi[:XdgÉ . From the museum’s perspective, camping reinvents the institution’s spaces to invigorate a young generation of museumgoers— offshoots of the camping program’s resurgence at AMNH sell out in minutes. An eight-year-old remarks that sleeping in the museum is “so weird,” and another young participant revels in the fact that he “hiked all over the museum” with his mother.109

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These camps allow for vicarious experience, either as privileged guests after hours, engaging in typically unauthorized activities (lingering, sleeping, eating, playing), or as adventurers through an environment symbolized by the museum’s didacticism and often simulated by program events such as the Rubin Museum of Art’s climb of Everest from base camps j\\k_\[`jZljj`fe`eÈ9Xj\:XdgÉ . Cynically, we might imagine that the AMNH program’s reinstatement came after the success of the movie Night at the Museum released in December 2006, but the museum had planned to bring back the program well before the Ben Stiller film was produced. To camp in the museum is to traverse prohibited ground and to linger within a suspended time “after hours.” This intercalary and interstitial experience repackages Henri Lefebvre’s festival space, placing the extraordinary urban events inside the institution. In this model, life on the streets remains ordinary, and the extraordinary camps out in the museum j\\ÈJldd\i:XdgÉ .

(%,=FIK?pgjp:XdgÉ . As if to complete this camp-city dialogue, the Cuban artists Los carpinteros mobilized a scaled-down Havana as a city of stretched fabric. In the tradition of John Hejduk’s urban masques, this tent city uprooted the urban monuments to underscore cultural dislocation but also to defamiliarize the political and spatial attributes of a new site. The result was a third city—the urban campsite—or more precisely the decamped and disurbanized city of our daily life, whether conceived in the mobility of the

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commute, the North American proclivity-necessity to relocate, or the rapid global displacements of capital. It is then not surprising when a town is sold on eBay and when one of its longtime residents suggests that it might become a camp: “Schuman says the best plan for Bridgeville is to tear it down, but he concedes it might make a good summer recreation area, perhaps an RV campsite.”145

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Car Camp

The car camp reached its prefabricated zenith in the 1960s and 1970s, with the elongated station wagons offering ample storage for camping equipment and equally suitable room for sleeping. The family wagon doubled as commuting and camping vehicle and has reemerged in the camping possibilities of the roomy interiors of oversized sports utility vehicles. Wholly different from the trailer in scale, self-mobility, and hybrid use, these car camps have followed a historical trajectory that began with self-contained autocampers of the 1920s. The home-modified camping vehicle epitomized the nascent auto culture’s aspirations for mobility and independence. Often mounted on a Model T one-ton truck and, in at least one case, outfitted with a thirty-gallon water tank, veranda, and icebox, these house-cars proved less mobile than expected, and municipalities soon evicted their residents, sending the wagons home and making way for the suburban car camp, with its more privatized spaces and occasional, short-term camping expeditions j\\ÈLiYXe:XdgÉ Xe[ÈJlYliYXe:XdgÉ . The Camper’s Bible would later laud station-wagon campers for their thrift and their “rig’s” maneuverability, and in the spirit of the continued DI Y camping experience, would recommend a homemade corrugated cardboard tray for stowing and sliding out camping gear from the wagon’s rear hatch. The earlier panelized wagons had lingered in an uneasy permanence as homesites in the municipal camps closely linked to the rapidly developing urban centers of the Southern United States. More recent practices of car camping test the limits of this municipal space and its remnants, now relegated to automobile parking spaces. Michael Rakowitz’s P(LOT) proposes the rental of urban parking spaces for onsite living. The project’s tented structures simulate the automobile but

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house domestic practices like reading, getting ready for work, and receiving visitors. Here, the car camp maintains the semblance of vehicle through the car’s form and signage on the fabric—in one case, branded with United Parcel Service symbols. This practice of extended parking reintroduces the more suburbanized practices of camping, in terms of vehicle and nonurban sites, back into the city by appropriating a temporary municipal system—extended parking becomes boondocking j\\ÈGXm\[:XdgÉ .146

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Suburban Camp

In the 1920s and 1930s, cities embraced the municipal camp as an attraction to tourists and as an income generator. But as public perceptions linked the camping tourism to vagabondage and as these camper-denizens strained the municipalities’ resources and extended their stay, confirming the fears of city administrators, urban camps were closed. The automobile, which had ironically concentrated the newly mobilized camping public in urban centers, facilitated the return of the recreational camp to its bucolic, now forcibly exurban, context j\\k_\È:Xi:XdgÉj\Zk`fe . The suburban camp not only followed its site-built counterparts, but the mobile homes and trailers allowed development further afield than the midcentury housing growth did, presaging sprawl and subsequent real estate booms at the millennial threshold. Whether formally planned or incrementally grown, these trailer and mobile home parks have reached a degree of permanency that contradicts the transience associated with such clustering of “mobile homes.” Sprawl has overtaken these immobilized suburban camps, and market forces have destabilized what was once reliably affordable housing. Increased land values and suburban growth patterns have spurred the sale and development of sites such as White Oaks Mobile Home Park in St. Mary’s County, south of Washington, D.C., and Paradise Park in Highlands, New Jersey, across the Raritan Bay from New York City. But it is in Florida, where by some estimates a mobile home park is sold each week, that this increasingly unstable niche in the housing market has been most affected by high-end suburbanization. In St. Petersburg, developers purchased Lake Shore Mobile Home Park’s three and a half acres for $2.5 million—dispersing a community whose

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youngest resident was fifty seven years. In January 2007, the shareholders of Briny Breezes, a mobile home park between Boca Raton and Palm Beach, agreed to sell their 43-acre property to Ocean Land Investments for an estimated $510 million. Mobile home park residents, even if they own the manufactured unit, do not typically own the lot, and as renters they lack the rights that go along with land tenure. In Florida, laws provide detailed but limited assistance for mobile home tenants faced with eviction by developer-landlords. In this transition, developers often purchase the mobile home units for less than $3,000 in a revaluation of the lot (as small as 35’ × 100’) that approaches more than three hundred times the resident’s compensation.147 Although mobile homes and trailer parks are imperfect forms of affordable housing, their niche in the housing market has paralleled suburban growth, in many cases providing denser settlement patterns with a heightened sense of community. Conservation issues have also emerged with urban growth’s absorption of suburban camps. Los Angeles city officials added Monterey Trailer Park to its Historic-Cultural Monument Listing in 2002. Linked to Route 66 and embedded within one of Los Angeles’ first suburbs, the South Pasadena site accommodated migrants and tourists at the urban margins in the 1920s.148 The historic designation seeks to maintain the open site for temporary use. It is then the park’s space and its legacy of mobile housing that are protected, rather than the trailers (however “vintage” they may be). Just as the mobile home lot holds real estate value, conserving pockets of formerly suburban space makes room for sustained public occupation and practices, even if they are now carried out in an urban context. In the summer of 1898, New Yorkers were encouraged to visit a “model suburban camp” in the city’s newly acquired Pelham Bay Park.149 Camps Hobson-hurst and Dewey-dene were vacation camps and included reconfigurations of domestic space, particularly the kitchen, at the urban

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margins. Lodged at the edge of the Bronx’s urban field, the site today remains as the city’s largest park—yielding the possibility that camps, often at the transitional hinge between urban and suburban, witness and, if preserved, record growth patterns.

NASCAR Camp

Race fans can camp for three weeks within the Daytona International Speedway’s 2.5 mile track’s tri-oval loop. At what has been called NASCAR ’s “most RV friendly” event, having won the Good Sam Welcome Mat award five years in a row, the 180-acre infield is a campsite, forming the core of what becomes Florida’s fourth largest city each February. The Speedway markets the campsites as “specialty vehicle packages,” designations that zone the speedway infield by use and value. Visitors can park their cars or pitch tents in the reserved spaces of the orange zone at Turns 3 and 4, while the green zone at Turn 4 offers pull-through motorhome lots. Views of the race and site amenities determine the economic hierarchy of the camping sites, with the waterfront Lake Lloyd Premium lots the most expensive and the West Lot outside Turns 1 and 2 relegated to sites that are “not for viewing.” Added in 2005, Lake Lloyd campsites are standard RV lots measuring 20 by 40 feet, with an additional 20 by 15 foot grass area. The infield camp is also a temporary construction site where RV owners build viewing platforms and scaffolding to watch the race from elevated couches and lounge chairs.

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During the racing season, the infield becomes a dense event space where recreation and sport combine. Though separated by the packaged zoning distinctions, racers and spectators occupy the grounds circumscribed by the track. Drivers live in RVs along with their racing vehicles in the paddock RV park, while spectators pay as much as $1,350 to join them in the infield—encompassing what Daytona Beach’s Land Development Code terms the Major Sports District. Although high priced for the Daytona 500, the infield accommodates thousands of temporary residents in a mode not found at other racing events. Its zoning connotes a populist and at times agrarian field of settlement. While Churchill Downs only provides infield suites at a premium, the racing infield caters, with the exception of high-profile races like the Daytona 500, to a wider socioeconomic group. But the infield space of racing does share an agricultural lineage with the Kentucky Derby and other racing sites. The connection with other sporting infields and racetracks, particularly horse racing, is reinforced by the use of the term paddock to describe the enclosure for cars and drivers to prepare for a race.150 Section 4e of Daytona Beach’s code outlines the requirements for this campsite: The use of trailers, travel trailers, or mobile campers as temporary living quarters shall be permitted on the grounds of a sports stadium or racetrack, or within walking distance of a sports stadium or racetrack on property zoned MS, subject to the following conditions: 1. Sanitary facilities or services shall be available at all times in sufficient capacity to serve the temporary residents. 2. The use shall be limited to temporary periods not in excess of 21 consecutive days. 3. Any new area which was not utilized for temporary living quarters prior to July 3, 2001 shall be additionally subject to the criteria found in article 13, section 3.8 of the Land Development Code.151

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To occupy the typical NASCAR infield is to camp out within the spectacle. Even more centrally located than the action on the racetrack, the campers become a part of the spectacle, or at the very least its background. For Daytona’s 168,000 people in the stands of the world’s largest lighted sports complex, the campground and infield form the visual backdrop to passing cars and the consistent middle ground for the strident sounds of the race cars during each minute’s lap. While many NASCAR tracks offer infield camping, the link between camping and racing also includes the campground sprawl around racetracks such as east Tennessee’s Bristol Motor Speedway, where a patchwork of camps offer lodging for race fans. At Daytona, it is the infield camp’s urban density that makes up the storied landscape of the event, where a hundred square feet of camping ground accommodates each of the estimated 65,000 temporary infield residents. (%.. CXpflkf]ZXdgjXk9i`jkfc DfkfiJg\\[nXp%:flik\jp f];Xm`[Ifn\#9i`jkfc DfkfiJg\\[nXp

RV Camp

If you are forty-nine, married, with a household income of $56,000, you are the typical North American RV owner among eight million RV households. And if you belong to the one million member families of Good Sam and you took the RV club’s 2007 Welcome Mat Survey, then you probably buy gas at Flying J stations, eat Subway sandwiches, shop at WalMart, purchase your craft supplies at Michael’s, and opt for Cracker Barrel as your favorite “sit-down restaurant.” While overnight camping in state and national parks has languished, RV ownership has surged as baby boomers hit the road, and trends show that early-retirement Gen Xers are next.152 If not in the park system, where is everyone camping? As a Good Sam Club member, you might be camping at America’s Best Campground, the five-time Welcome Mat award winner. ABC is not the biggest or the most scenic, but it provides entertainment, which has emerged as a primary purpose of RV travel. “Camping is no longer just an outdoor experience.”153 And the campground celebrates its proximity to Branson, Missouri’s burgeoning entertainment center, easily accessed along the Shepherd of the Hills Expressway in your dinghy vehicle that you probably towed behind your RV. “City close” and “country quiet,” ABC ’s streets index the celebrity theaters you will find in Branson. From the home base in a pull-through lot between Mel Tillis and Mickey Gilley, you can travel less than a mile to catch each performer’s show. The campground is a reception area that maps its guests’ destinations and spatializes the semantic connections of this traveler’s theater. With its own Celebrity Station, ABC supplements this approximated theatrical experience with live entertainment in an environmentally conditioned pavilion. The park’s easily accessible RV wash concludes your departure after breaking camp.

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The recreational vehicle classification system and its hierarchies of the mobilized society can be read in ABC ’s site plan, which is itself a machinic construct indicative of the combined intensive functionalities and recreational excesses of the RV unit. Industry standards of the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association (RVIA) define the RV as a “motorized or towable vehicle that combines transportation and temporary living quarters for travel, recreation, and camping.” The degree that the RV can be “hooked up” then defines site amenities—from none j\\È;ip:XdgÉ to partial (electricity only) to full (water, electricity, and sewer). Ninety percent of ABC ’s sites offer full hook-ups, with the additional, recently added service of Wi-Fi—a twenty-firstcentury virtual “hookup.” Directly associated with amenities is the convenience of parking, the height of which is the pull-through lot. With ABC ’s Lots 1 through 115, campers can pull their RVs through the spaces and do not have to back their thirty- to forty-foot motorhomes into place. Related in part to this dimensional length, the RVIA has identified three classes of motorized recreational vehicles: Type A, “generally roomiest” with “luxurious amenities,” typically sleeping six and costing $400,000 or more j\\È;ip:XdgÉ ; Type B, commonly called “van campers,” comfortably sleeping a family of four; and Type C, with similar amenities as Type A and its identifiable above-cab sleeping space allowing for the accommodation of eight campers. Towable RVs, the minority at ABC , are most likely to be found on peripheral lots 116 through 138—commonly known as “back-in” sites. As if to affirm its “campground” naming convention, ABC includes two tent campsites in the far northeast corner of the grounds.154 Ironically, Branson’s tourism originated with a tent camp. Author and preacher Harrison Bell Wright camped and wrote at “Inspiration Point” for eight summers before publishing The Shepherd of the Hills in 1907. Tuberculosis had forced Wright south from Kansas for the mild climate of the Ozarks. Starting in 1896, his accidental hosts John and Anna Ross, with their

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homestead overlooking the White River Valley, and Wright’s own convalescent platform tent motivated the story that would become one of the bestselling novels in American history and the impetus for the Branson area’s initial tourism of literature. But perhaps you stopped at ABC not for country music or legendary dramatizations but for its convenience, a transit midpoint between cardinal directions and between packaged entertainment and literary folklore. ABC ’s location and the other five thousand campsites around Branson approximate a national crossroads for RV-owning middle America, unsurprisingly located only a hundred miles southwest of the nation’s mean population center.155 The camp’s easy access, less than two miles, from Highway 65 facilitates a connection with the east-west corridor Interstate 44, thirty miles to the north. If you were camping at ABC early in July 2007, you might then have departed for Redmond, Oregon, where Good Sam’s annual gathering, called simply “The Rally,” would host 5,000 RVs and 12,000 RVers in a megacamp with its own diversions—“fabulous live entertainment,” rally dog show, and an attempt to break the World Record for the largest whoopee cushion.156

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RV Club Camp

RV full-timers are homeless. Such was the upshot of the 2000

census, treading the difficult ground of defining residency and residence. The preeminent organization for full-timers is the Escapees RV Club, and many of its members fell through the statistical and categorical gaps of the millennial census. Between census counts and with increasingly urgent and complex self-examination, the U.S. Census Bureau investigates what it terms “residence concepts” to analyze, understand, and address shifts in mobility, ways of dwelling, and residents’ identification with place. In past census reports, officials have attempted to define “group quarters” and to count migrant workers—categories now joined in concept by the RV club and the mobilized group communities that camp in Wal-Mart parking lots j\\ÈGXm\[:XdgÉ or call Slab City their seasonal home j\\È8[Xgk\[:XdgÉ . With the growth of a nonhousehold population, the Census Bureau has narrowed down two options for RVer responses to answer the residency question: Usual Home Elsewhere (UHE) or RV as housing unit (HU ). By default then, the camp at the time of the count is listed as the place of residence. Escapees, who have chosen to use the club’s headquarters as their permanent address to obtain drivers’ licenses and insurance, would answer “Rainbow’s End,” 140 Escapees Drive, Livingston, Texas, 77351, as their UHE. But the approximately 34,000 member families are a fraction of what some surveys estimate to be 1.4 million full-timers on the North American road. As the decennial census report points out, residence rules are in fact meeting real life—a grounding without ground in which the “right place” is a fleeting home place defined more by the RVers’ club affiliations and camping network than an identification with a particular location.157

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These sets of locations, as camps, form a network of dwelling sites for the Escapees constituency that satisfies degrees of longing for home both conceptually, as a recreational community and support net for health and elder care, and locationally, with optional home-base camps. To review the options for the Escapees member is to understand the different needs and spaces of the RV full-timer. “SKP Co-Ops,” with a total of eleven locations in 2007, are independently owned, nonprofit camps set up for club members to use a specified lot until death or until membership is sold back to the Escapees Corporation. This option relates as much to the aspirations of members to establish their own parks as it does to the needs of members to “come home” each day to familiar living quarters—a recurrent home base, though in different locations. The club’s founders, Joe and Kay Peterson, had originally planned for all members to build their own informal, inexpensive parks, which were to be in essence transformations of each member’s home base into a private campground. The second permutation of Escapees camps is the Escapees Rainbow Park (ERP) category, which replicates the archetypal Rainbow Park headquarters and includes the option for lot ownership, constituting a long-term home base with adjacent short-term camping sites to expand further the network of homes away from home. The Escapees Club developed a third type, the ERPU (U for “unlimited”), to resolve the growing problem of lot ownership found with ERP s. Increasing regulation of trailer parks and the time necessary to build campgrounds with deeded lots resulted in a five-year lease plan in this third option, which the club calls a “permanent base.” This evolution from the networked nomadism of the SKP Co-Op to the partial transience of ERPU provides what was determined within the club to be a necessary range of options for living on the road. Ultimately, this set of SKP camps provides a support network in which “SKP” is a phonetic shortening of “escapee” but is also an acronym for Support, Knowledge, and Parking.

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It is this triplicate provision of necessities that allows for the full-timer’s autonomy. “Parked together for mutual support,” the Escapees headquarters in Livingston, Texas, also includes a Continuing Assistance center for members who are “temporarily limited or permanently stopped because of age or disabilities.”158 Organizers promote this lifelong extension of the support network as a way for its members to remain in their RV home in spite of decreased mobility. In these conditions apart from UHE or momentary camp as fleeting place of residence, the Escapees member falls into a third census category—“person is a usual resident of: The camp.”159 Rule 16 for the 2010 Census summarizes one way of defining the full-timers’ residency, within this network of club camping facilities: “On Census Day, person is at a recreational camp (i.e., a commercial or public campground). This rule is targeted to persons known as ‘full-timers’ or ‘good sams’ who live and travel in a recreational vehicle, and the recreational vehicle is their only or usual residence. . . . Count person at: The location where the person spends most of his/her time (UHE allowed).”160 Having “escaped” to a life of camping, the RVer finds statistical solidarity and support for a way of living in a camp that can now be categorically counted—officially verifying the home on the road. A concluding note in the Escapees publication titled “Full-Time RVing: Is It for You?” encourages the prospective RVer and reaffirms the longtime escapee: “You are the ultimate homemaker who carries your home with you. You are not homeless.”161

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Franchise Camp

In April 1962, Dave Drum watched World’s Fair–bound travelers pass his property along Highway 10 in Billings, Montana. Drum’s land, shaded by cottonwoods, sited along the Yellowstone River, and conveniently located next to the highway, became the ideal place to accommodate the travelers moving to and from Seattle for the fair. The Billings site went on to become the first KOA Kampground. With his business partners and his background in real estate development, Drum took what he had learned from those camping on his property and set up a franchise of campgrounds that within ten years had a network of six hundred campgrounds. By 1982, the system had peaked at nine hundred camps in spite of the Arab oil embargo that had generally hurt trailer travel and camping in the mid-1970s. Drum’s camping empire has continued to expand and includes sites in North America and Japan. KOA ’s franchising also extends to its provision of “level RV sites,” trademarked eighteen- by twelve-foot Kamping Kabins, and its development of work camps for retirees who want to work on the road. The Work Kamper program matches the recreational traveler’s transience with the franchise’s need for seasonal employees, and its rewards program ties the Work Kamper to the RV enthusiast, with free camping and other incentives offered to part-time KOA employees (j\\ÈNfib :XdgÉ`eZ_Xgk\i* .162 Another campground franchise, Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Camp Resorts, opened its first campground in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, in 1969. The story of its founding mixes a standardized trope of “humble” beginnings with the business acumen of a successful advertising executive and a fabular legend ready-made from domestic popular culture. On his own trips, Doug Haag vowed to create the “destination campground” after witnessing throngs of vacationing families

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with limited camping options forcing them to park their trailers along highways. English entrepreneur William Butlin had earlier built an empire of holiday camps in England, but Haag envisioned a more narrowly themed fusion of camp and resort, an iconic adaptation of domestic television culture j\\ È?fc`[Xp:XdgÉ . In January 1969, Haag overheard his children’s Saturday morning cartoon: “OK Boo Boo, let’s get our pic-a-nic baskets ready, the campers are coming!” Advertiser Haag had found the theme for his franchised camp in the cartoon construct. Mediating the transition from the public national park (Yellowstone) to privatized resort (Jellystone), the television program provided the content and the branding of more than seventy franchised campgrounds. Flying J gas stations and Camping World stores have also franchised a particular camping experience by allowing boondocking in the stores’ parking lots j\\ÈGXm\[:XdgÉ . Homer Staves, who began his RV camp career with KOA , runs an international consulting firm for the construction of campgrounds. In 1971, he wrote construction codes for RVs and campgrounds, and his fundamental principle is that these two business models should be run by market research, matching the facility with its market clientele. Staves Consulting lists the following steps in designing and building a campground and RV park: (1) comprehensive feasibility study; (2) identification of the specific parcel of land for development (location, location, location); (3) development of specific layout with sites and amenities; (4) zoning and planning department approval followed by final plans drawn up for soliciting bids; and (5) construction and finalizing business and marketing plans.163 This procedure, though not groundbreaking in its individual procedural components, is striking in its approximation of the camping process itself, a sequence that moves from siting to clearing to making to breaking—the latter aligned with the “breaking” into the market upon the franchise camp’s substantial completion.

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(%.0 J`k\gcXe#FË:fee\ccËj Pf^`9\XiËjA\ccpjkfe\GXib :Xdg$I\jfik#8dYfp# @cc`ef`j%PF>@9`icJZflk:XdgÉ . By the 1920s and 1930s, coeducational camps were instituted, affirming the broad, if not institutionally structured, educational offerings of the camp.170 In the intervening years, the day camp has become a popular alternative to summer camps that offer residency. If overnight summer camps serve as the base for tripping and exploring, then the day camp forms a supplemental site to the camper’s permanent home, which becomes a kind of summer “base camp.”171 Summer camp is an extracurricular space for transformative learning—an educational experience lauded over “formal”

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schoolwork by Harvard President Charles Eliot, who saw camp as the U.S. contribution to the world of education. Summer camp’s informal, yet not “unformed,” education has influenced generations of participants but only one Disney CEO. For Michael Eisner, summer camp defined a way of living and, more specifically, a way of working. As a mental and procedural space and the one-word title of his book, “camp” might be said to form Eisner’s ethical matrix. And as a physical construct, camp holds family legacies as well as archetypal childhood memories. Camp Keewaydin is one of the extant turn-of-the-century summer camps, surviving the rise and decline of organized camping. Attending Camp Keewaydin was “the most important formative experience” of Eisner’s life and defined “to a remarkable degree” his “core values.”172 So fundamental is this foundation that Eisner makes the summer camp central to his discussion of the merger between ABC and Disney in his book Work in Progress: “While there were plenty of differences between Disney and ABC , our two companies shared a set of core values that I first learned at Camp Keewaydin: Work hard. Help the other fellow. Tell the truth. When you make a commitment, stand by it. Be tough, but fair.”173 In his follow-up book, more ostensibly about a camp life, Eisner compares corporate work to the camping canoe trip in which teamwork supersedes the individual. Summer camp is Eisner’s business model (he claims to have taken only one course in accounting), but he recognizes its limitations: “The world is not camp—and that’s too bad.”174 Ironically underscoring this camp-CEO relation, summer campers have recently begun arriving by private, sometimes corporate, jet to summer camps.

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Glamp

Accessibility to the urbane camping experience has increased. Retirees drive Class A motorhomes, thirtysomethings pull Airstream’s new BaseCamp trailers, and international ecotravelers sleep in canvas bungalows. Glamour camps and their stylish vehicles are not new, but the frequency and the expansion of their production have altered the way recreational camping is imaged, promoted, and carried out. Greek poet Horace lauded the countryside villa but not without its infusion of the city’s benefits, the maharaja tented in royal hunting camps, and European and American noblesse oblige required summer cottages for status and retreat. After his time at Camp Maple, Emerson wrote: “We flee away from cities, but we bring / The best of cities with us, these learned classifiers, / Men knowing what they seek, armed eyes of experts” j\\k_\j\Zk`feÈG_`cfjfg_\ijË:XdgÉ .175 Unavoidably, there is a camping style. As Emerson later recounts, the sophisticated camper shouts “well done” on hearing a masterful piano rendition of Beethoven from a log cabin in the wilderness. Stylish recreational campers might still listen to classical music in tents, but how we “get away”—apart from social standing but not without dispensable income—and what we take with us have changed. “Go play and take your toys with you” reads the promotional slogan for BaseCamp, a recreational-automotive collaboration between Airstream and Nissan. Less than fifty square feet in area, the aluminum trailer, in the iconic style of Wally Byam’s early 1930s models, is an exercise in spatial efficiency. But this product furnishes an image of technological design for more than $30,000 with optional features. If BaseCamp tracks the recalibration of stylized domestic nomadism, the well-appointed lodging of ecotourism emphasizes, exploits, and commodifies the lightness and noninvasiveness of tent camping. In many

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Winter Camp

Winter camp is a site of rejuvenation, isolation, and entrenchment. In 1846, Brigham Young set up a winter camp north of Omaha, Nebraska—a temporary village for nearly four thousand of his westwardbound followers. Known as Winter Quarters of the Camp of Israel, the layout formed the town of Florence, Nebraska.179 Migrant farmworkers in the 1930s also formed winter camps in Northern California. Antarctic researcher Jean Rivolier documented the “mental syndrome” of loneliness in the winter camp j\\È=`\c[:XdgÉ , and Indian hosts received English colonial ambassadors in white-tented winter camps j\\Èfi_XdËj :XdgD\\k`e^DXelXc#(/,+% 9fjkfe1?%M%;\^\e

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Bible Camp

Bible camps fall under the general aegis of summer camps but deserve special attention because of their sheer number and because of their uniquely drawn methodologies and their popularity. According to surveys conducted by the American Camp Association, religious organizations are second only to agencies for camp sponsorship—meaning that nearly onethird of all summer camps focus on religion. Framed as places apart from secular influence, Bible camps follow in the tradition of camp meetings and spiritualist camps j\\È:Xdg D\\k`e^É . But prayer conferences and youth evangelism camps, as subsets of this type, have for the most part graduated to sophisticated practices of active tutoring rather than a basic confirmation or conversion. Some Bible camps have become training camps.185 Until 2007, the Billy Graham Evangelical Association ran Cove Camp as the summer camp division of its Training Center in Asheville, North Carolina. The “Kids on Fire” program in Mandan, North Dakota, hosted children at a conference center on the shores of Devils Lake. At the camp, Becky Fischer, director of Children of Kids in Ministry International, led children aged six and older in Charismatic and Pentecostal affirmation exercises in prayer and training sessions. As documented in the 2006 film Jesus Camp, the program politicized issues of abortion and religion in schools, transforming the camp into a training ground for religious and government policy reform.186 Paralleling the summer camp as religious training model, Lake Beauty Bible Camp offers a supplemental program called Serf Camp, taking its name from Matthew 20:27–28, interpreted by the Evangelical camp’s leaders as a call for believers to be the “servant of all.” Serf Camp does not focus on the Minnesota lake’s recreational opportunities, but instead seeks to develop leadership potential and to work as a team in the service of others.

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Girl Scout Camp

After having led a Girl Guide troop in Scotland for Robert Baden-Powell’s emergent scouting movement, Juliette Gordon Low returned to Savannah, Georgia, and established the first American troop of Girl Guides on March 12, 1912. Soon afterward, responding to comments from girls in the troop, Low changed the name to Girl Scouts to parallel the naming conventions of the boys’ organization, incorporated two years earlier. To this day, Girl and Boy Scouts share a motto, “Be prepared,” and a slogan, “Do a good turn daily,” but the controversy of calling the girls’ organization “scouts” points toward differences, now subtle, in the groups’ objectives, procedures, and spatial contexts. By definition, guides direct along often previously traversed paths, while scouts lead beyond established knowledge, traversing into new and unexplored territories. Along with Baden-Powell’s assertion that scouting is “men’s domain,” BSA leader James West wanted the Girl Scouts to relinquish the name and to fuse with Camp Fire Girls. A lawsuit alleging patent violations was prepared but never filed. London’s Crystal Palace had been the original scene for this debate when, in 1909 as Baden-Powell transformed the Palace into the inaugural camp of the English scouts rally, a group of girls demanded entry into the proceedings, leading to the formation of Girl Guides the following year. Measuring Low’s resolve to keep the name, Girl Scout camps became sites of “practical feminism,” challenging what was considered suitable for girls through outdoor activities and tests of physical fitness paralleling those of boys’ camps. In early practicalities, the teaching of traditional domestic tasks was transformed into “campcraft” with kitchen “gadgets” fashioned by hand in the camp.187 In 1921, Low founded the still-extant camp in Cloudland, Georgia. At her only personally established camp, Low’s

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objective was to make a place where Girl Scout leaders could be trained and younger girls could experience wilderness camping. Before leading the Girl Guides troop and founding the Girl Scouts, Low had witnessed camping at the nation’s frontier. After Savannah’s surrender to General Sherman, Low lived with family near Fort Winnebago in Chicago, where her grandfather, John H. Kinzie, was an Indian government agent. Low heard stories of Fort Dearborn and saw Indians camping on the grounds of the fort. Her grandmother had frequently camped with her husband’s detachment in the 1820s and 1830s, and Juliette Kinzie’s fascination with the process was not lost on her granddaughter and perhaps anticipated the effect of Low’s Georgia camp on newly arrived girls: “This was my first encampment, and I was quite enchanted with the novelty of everything around me.”188 The Cloudland Girl Scout camp was organized into units with seven 4-person platform tents. Each unit’s staff member lives in a tent at the center of the configuration. In the 1930s, the nonprofit camp became independent from the Girl Scout organization and is currently known as Camp Juliette Low.

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World Camp

When Juliette Low led the American Girl Scouts delegation to Foxlease, England in 1924, she was returning to her origins as camp leader, but she was also following in the internationalization of the organized camp space. In conjunction with a series of international conferences, the World Camps organized by Lord and Lady Baden-Powell framed the establishment of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS) in 1928. By 1931, the global extent of WAGGGS ’s membership exceeded one million girls. Throughout their history, these gatherings have also been referred to as World Conferences, occurring every two or three years.189 In 1926, under Juliette Low’s direction, Camp Edith Macy hosted a meeting of Girl Scout and Girl Guide leaders from thirty-nine nations at the fourth international conference. This camp near Ossining, New York, has since served as a central training camp for Girl Scout leaders. Themed by each site’s cultures, the world camps have become a system of four main international centers—Pax Lodge in London; Our Chalet in Adelboden, Switzerland; Sangam in Pune, India; and Our Cabaña in Cuernavaca, Mexico. These world centers served as refuges during World War II—the Pax Lodge, then known as Our Ark, harbored Guides and Scouts in camp beds throughout London air raids, and Our Chalet sheltered refugees and helped those displaced by the war reunite with their families. Globalized camps now foster the combination of recreation and service that was brought together in the Girl Scout mission. As early as 1919, the Tin Can Tourists of the World, an autocamping club in the United States, speculated on the possibility of camping overseas. It was not until Wally Byam organized his around-the-world caravans that the recreational world camp was realized. Although he regarded his travel as

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nonpolitical, Byam met with world leaders, including Fulgencio Batista of Cuba and Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, and saw his group as ambassadors of peace and an American way of life. Photographs from Airstream Corporation’s archives depict provocative juxtapositions of mobile trailer with permanent monument, suggesting that the world camp consists of “world monuments” as much as fleeting international experiences and temporary campsites. Having carried out caravan tours of Africa “from Capetown to Cairo,” across Europe, and through Central America, Byam planned an unrealized global network of land-yacht harbors to accommodate Airstreamers who were vacationing internationally. Byam’s vision of the world camp does necessitate unique and not inexpensive modes of transportation for water crossings. The floating caravan camp, often tenuous and unwieldy, makes the global tour a particularly complex undertaking charged with overtones of colonialism and militarization j\\k_\YffbËj\g`cf^l\#È@e$ =c`^_k:XdgÉ . World Camp is also the educational outreach program founded by university students in 2000. The nonprofit organization runs programs in Malawi, Honduras, and India to help teach children, with an emphasis on disease prevention in populations particularly vulnerable to HIV/ AIDS. Reminiscent of American Indian Councils and Rainbow Gathering camps, each day at World Camp in Malawi begins with program volunteers forming a circle with local students for songs introduced by the camp’s facilitators who seek to create a “summer camp atmosphere.” The globalization of summer camp as an educational tool has continued to expand with organizations such as World Camp j\\ÈNfib:XdgÉ`e Z_Xgk\i* .

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Boy Scout Camp

The third edition of the Boy Scout Fieldbook begins with an epigraph from Rufus Sage’s 1846 “Rocky Mountain Life.” Sage writes both pragmatically and poetically about the camping experience: “Camp is usually located in some spot sheltered by hills or rocks for the double purpose of securing the full warmth of the sun’s rays, and screening it from the notice of strolling Indians that may happen in the vicinity. Within a convenient proximity to it stands a grove, from which an abundance of dry fuel is procurable when needed, and equally close the ripplings of a water-course salute the ear with their music.”190 In his invitation to the 1937 Boy Scout Jamboree, President

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt will allude to these pioneer camps of Rufus Sage and his fellow Western explorer Warren Angus Ferris as a “way of [American] living,” but in fact the diagrams of Scout camps suggest practical imperatives that are simple yet faintly poetic. Sage’s camp becomes the Scout camp, if not the universal outdoor wilderness camp—its layout measuring the practical consequences of site and phenomena. After quoting Sage and discussing how to choose the camp’s site, ideally near “ripplings” of a stream, the Fieldbook explicates the making of camp Making the Boy Scout camp begins with the kitchen shelter, or dining fly, which serves as the camp’s staging area. Its location sets the configuration of the rest of the camp’s components. The fire pit can then be located slightly upwind, a minimum of ten feet from the kitchen area. Campers locate the tent sites further upwind of the fire site, but with attention to the warmth of the rising sun and scenic vistas that might be viewed from an open tent flap. Firewood storage and bear-bag locations define the other “quadrants” around the fire pit, with the latter holding food storage at least twelve feet above the ground. This diagrammatic camp layout also includes the abstracted components of “tree,” dirt (from fire pit), and a “shady place” to symbolize the emotive aspects of camping in a “grove” and a “sheltered spot.” This campsite then serves as the setting for the Boy Scout activities of camp. “Campcraft” includes hiking, overnighting, canoeing, rowing, sailing, knot tying, and tent making. The latter craft entails the onsite layout of tents and shelters—combining knowledge of geometry with skills of manipulating canvas and wooden frameworks. Like campcraft merit badges, the Boy Scout camp, rarefied though it is as a rationalization of site and ground, remains a nostalgic space lodged deeply within an American imagination that continues to seek a pioneering West in its provisional and recreational camping excursions. The camping diagram, as a way of living that will be called on by President Roosevelt, is “in our very blood.”

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Jamboree Camp

On June 30, 1937, the Boy Scouts of America set up an urban camp among the monuments of Washington, D.C. The Camp Chief’s tent was installed at the foot of the Washington Monument and at the head of the General Headquarters, which occupied the grounds between the monument and the Reflecting Pool. Because of the monument’s slight offset to the east, this location placed James West, native Washingtonian and president of the Boy Scouts, on a north-south axis with the White House. For ten days, this area—along with the Tidal Basin and Potomac shores—became a campground that combined military and recreational activities for the 27,232 Scouts attending this first National Jamboree.

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The camp’s central area certainly transformed the Mall into the standard U.S. Army “Tent Camp,” but this first installation of the Jamboree also positioned the camp itself as a pivotal space for negotiating the Scouting mission of service and ethics and its relation to national identity. The political and social implications of this private institution, an organization that parallels many of the civil body’s objectives and needs, have continued to be fashioned and debated among political leaders, Boy Scout adherents, and the general public. Linked axially, and perhaps axiomatically, to the Camp Chief’s headquarters tent, former Scout President Franklin Roosevelt attended the event, and it is his official invitation to the Jamboree that highlights the significance of camping in general and the event’s Washington location in particular: I am glad that this is going to be an encampment because it is fitting that a movement such as ours should hold its first great national demonstration in the out-of-doors. Yes, we are planning to have a city of tents rise here in the Capital actually within the shadow of the Washington Monument. On a site only a short distance from the room from which I am speaking to you today twenty-five thousand boys will live together under canvas from June thirtieth to July ninth. It stirs my imagination and I am sure that it gives all of you a genuine thrill. Our country was developed by pioneers who camped along the trails which they blazed all the way from the Atlantic Ocean to the slopes of the Pacific. To the American people for generations camping was a way of living—it is in our very blood.191 Roosevelt delivered this address on February 8 to commemorate the founding of the Boy Scouts of America in Washington on that same day in 1910. In subsequent years, the Jamboree camp moved to less urban, and in some ways less visible, sites in state parks such as Moraine State Park in Pennsylvania, as well as to national historic sites like Valley Forge.

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Almost seventy years later, Camp Clark at Fort A.P. Hill hosted 43,000 Boy Scouts at the sixteenth National Jamboree in 2005. On July 31, 2005, President George W. Bush addressed the Scouts at the Jamboree. The U.S. Army base supported twenty subcamps and six action centers, or “skills sites,” including the Army Adventure Area with interactive displays about ordnance, air defense artillery, and other facets of the U.S. Army. In his letter to the soldiers involved in the event, Major General John A. Yingling noted not only that the camp would constitute the seventh largest city in Virginia, but also that it would be the “fastest growing,” with 17,000 tents set up in one day.192 The sprawling compound has hosted the event since 1981, completing the movement away from urban contexts and at the same time concretizing a military connection begun with the Washington, D.C., “tent camp.” What began as an exercise to provide primarily experiences of outdoor camping, albeit with clear military symbolism, has been officially supported by the 1st U.S. Army since 1989, with the Jamboree and the Boy Scouts having received previous support since 1972 through Public Law 92-249.193 U.S. military officials see the large-scale and complex logistics of the camp as a mission-oriented training opportunity—beneficial practice for mobilizing troops and facilities. If the Boy Scout Jamboree is then in part a training camp for soldiers, it is also an immersive experience for the Scouts and an opportunity to gain media exposure for Scouting organizations. Paralleling camping traditions of the carnival, the Merit Badge Midway serves as the focal point of the camp’s public spaces, with demonstration areas and exhibits. The military camp’s Standard Operating Procedures regulate the public experience of the site, and the “Media Ground Rules” outline the media’s participation in the event.194 Each of the twenty subcamps was named for a modern-day American explorer. In addition to such thematic overlays, the Jamboree camp, in its contemporary form, is designated as a “Leave No Trace” camp j\\ÈCEK:XdgÉ , a dry camp, and a wilderness camp—the latter because only one field latrine is in place for the many thousands of participants.

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World Jamboree Camp

“At top speed we drove (on the left-hand side of the road, as they do in England) all the way to the big Jamboree Camp. We had arrived at last!” After more than a weeklong voyage across the Atlantic, the U.S. contingent had reached, breathlessly, Liverpool on the English coast and, with exhilaration, passed to the campsite at Birkenhead on “swift motor buses.”195 An estimated fifty thousand Boy Scouts from more than seventy nations attended this third international gathering, which began on July 31 in Arrowe Park. The anonymous authors of the testimonial published the next year were struck by the many different sizes and colors they witnessed when they arrived at the camp’s highest point, where “thousands of tents looking like small dots spread over a piece of cloth” covered the grassy plains of the park. In this discovery that Scout troops from other countries did not use “our American” tents, they were realizing one of the main objectives of the international Jamboree: to learn more from the differences among other scouting programs and methods. In this spirit of “high idealism,” Sir Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, had first assembled the international scouting community at Olympia, London, in 1920. The use of jamboree to describe the International Rally of Boy Scouts originated with this event, which confirmed the term’s description of strident revelry and an indulgence away from the typical rigors of scouting and daily urban life. The term is often found hyphenated as “jambo-ree” to call out the Swahili phrase for “hello” (jambo). The jamboree camp thus has its early permutations lodged in two vernaculars, one Western in its slang and sometimes militaristic denotations, and the other an indigenous, “primitive” term, suggesting not only world travel but also colonization. And the camp was the experimental ground for this synthesis of imperial

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maintenance and boyhood education. The second installation of the international Scout gathering, held at Wembley, was promoted as the “imperial jamboree.” Laying the semanticcolonial ground for this production, Baden-Powell had previously founded the Scouts with an experimental camp on Brownsea Island in 1907, when he first blew the Zulu war horn he had taken from the tribe’s chief during his trip to South Africa a year earlier. Baden-Powell was applying his experiences from the Boer War as a way of training young men, twentyone at first, for future service. The Brownsea site now hosts a “living museum” camp that combines historic site and reenactment camp. Simply called “Replica Camp,” the site is an event space for Scouts to re-create and participate in the routines of 1907.196

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FOS Camp

To build Camp Bondsteel, the Engineer Regiment moved more than a half-million cubic yards of Kosovo earth, framed a quarter-million 2 × 4 boards, set two hundred tons of nails, and laid one hundred miles of electrical cable. In less than ninety days during the summer of 1999, the Regiment built the equivalent of a 355-house subdivision.36 And, though not uncontentiously embedded within a conflict zone, the camp’s amenities parallel those of suburban life—reflecting the design of U.S. base camps as providing “as high a level of comfort as possible in a temporary camp environment” j\\ ÈJlYliYXe:XdgÉ`eZ_Xgk\i( . Primary accommodations on the thousand-acre site are SEA Huts, and soldiers use Eagle Cash Cards—rather than cash, which is discouraged—to eat at the base’s Burger King, Anthony’s Pizza, or other dining facilities located in the camp’s North and South “towns.” Bondsteel PX, the camp’s post exchange, approximates a bigbox retail store, its prefabricated building housing two stories of the latest merchandise. Its trade area includes the entire Kosovo region, drawing “lots of multinational soldiers from throughout Kosovo.”37 Located near the city of Urosevac, Camp Bondsteel is the main base of the eastern sector of the region’s Multi-National Brigade, known as KFOR. Begun in response to the Kosovo crisis, Bondsteel now serves as a forward operating site (FOS), where NATO and U.S. forces maintain a peacekeeping and strategic presence. The camp also served as a political FOS for U.S. leaders—President Bill Clinton visited for an early Thanksgiving with troops in 1999, and President George W. Bush addressed Bondsteel’s military personnel two years later while Laura Bush dedicated the Camp Bondsteel Education Center, further solidifying the installation’s services and refashioning camp as campus.38 In the camp’s material and

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political construction, tents were rapidly converted to SEA Huts and a temporary presence became semipermanent— resulting in what was considered at the time of its completion to be the largest overseas military base since the Vietnam War. When Colonel Robert L. McClure, the chief engineer of Bondsteel’s construction, referred to the “Bondsteel template,” he made a case for how Camp Bondsteel demonstrates the application of base camp standards and how it can now be understood as an early experiment in strategic transformations of U.S. military operations after the events of September 11, 2001. Retrospectively, the camp forms a critical part of the Base Realignment and Closure policy of 2005, coinciding with EUCOM ’s consideration of Bondsteel as an FOS.39 Reports at the time presented Camp Bondsteel as typifying the new approach . . . while representing a full time U.S. presence, these bases would lack the elaborate infrastructure of the major installations that evolved in western Europe. The buildings consist of Quonset huts or pole buildings, and in some cases are still tent cities. The troops are not accompanied by their families. Overall, the focus of military efforts would shift south and east, closer to current Middle-Eastern hot-spots.40 Rhetoric of the ephemeral collides with the sheer scale and infrastructural extent invested in this approach, making Bondsteel—its name commemorating a war hero but also connoting a firm sitedness—the tentative realization of attempts to resolve elasticity with stability. Suspended between temporary strategy and permanent presence, Camp Bondsteel also exemplifies how planning models and base camp standards are transformed by the particularities of site and mission. Colonel Joseph Schoedel, Engineer Brigade commander for the project, met with “force-protection experts and safety specialists,” while other planners negotiated helicopter flight lines, holding areas

).,

for ammunition, living facilities, and geological conditions. For the latter, military planners used data generated in Vicksburg, Mississippi, at the Waterways Experimental Station to discern underground sources of water from satellite imagery.41 Unexpected site conditions further transformed the camp template. Preliminary excavation unearthed a three-foot diameter natural gas pipeline, resulting in a dynamic asymmetry to the camp’s living areas, visible in the northwest to southeast diagonal green space that runs through the site. This unforeseen easement alludes to the imposition of a military presence on not altogether willing foreign soil. Its location, the timing of its construction, and its continued function have placed Camp Bondsteel at the center of debates—showing how the military camp is often a nexus for moral, political, and strategic concerns. Analysts have suggested that strategic protection and control of the economic interests in the region’s energy resources, particularly the oil supplies from the Caspian Sea, necessitated the Kosovo camp’s location near Corridor VIII of the Pan European Transport system.42 Planning for Bondsteel began before NATO’s first March 1999 airstrikes, opening up the space for debate about intentions behind the camp and for planners to argue for the alacrity of construction, in the process creating an operational, and apocryphal, vocabulary of war: “At the outset, planners . . . convinced decision makers to reach base-camp ‘end state’ as quickly as possible.” Contracts with Brown and Root Services Corporation to support Camp Bondsteel as well as base camps constructed in Iraq have also drawn criticism. And in September 2002, Alvaro Gil-Robles, Council of Europe’s Commissioner of Human Rights, toured the camp and later reported on the detention of fifteen prisoners without judiciary proceedings j\\k_\j\Zk`fefe È>KDFÉ .43

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Demobilization Camp

Camps often occur between worlds, and the demobilization camp moves from militarized to civilian, from a weaponized existence to a life without weapons.44 How the combatant becomes an ex-combatant affects postconflict stability and recovery. In the complex situations of intrastate conflicts and ethnic violence, the demobilization camp replaces the identifiable ceasefire line and clear separation of warring parties—indicating that traditional peacekeeping operations have become multidimensional procedures of disarmament and detraumatization. Demobilization camps are sites of physical and mental processes. The United Nations has sought to formalize this process in the sequence of disarmament, demobilization, reinsertion, and reintegration.45 While arguably necessary for immediate stability and security as well as future recovery and development, this camp is also a site for controlling the collection of arms, the discharge of combatants, and frameworks for longer-term assistance and resettlement. In these camps, weapons become a currency exchanged for benefits and assistance. At the disarmament sites and the demobilization camps, only combatants with weapons or ammunition that meet criteria are eligible for the UN ’s DDR program.46 In the United Nations model, the process of disarmament and demobilization moves through a series of zones for screening, organizing, and dispersing ex-combatants. Initially, combatants arrive at a pickup point (PUP) or a weapons collection point (WCP), from which they typically move to a disarmament site (D1 site) before passing into the demobilization camp (D2). Its location negotiated with a prearranged assembly time, the PUP is often the first meeting point between armed forces and UN groups who seek the minimal surrender of ammunition before combatants move

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to the WCP s. Buffer zones with secure corridors separate sites of conflict and PUP s. Laid out to maximize explosive and weapons safety, WCP sites focus on removing the small arms and light weapons of civilian combatants. The United Nations has recognized this first phase of relinquishing arms as a highly symbolic act, and ceremonies of disarmament sometimes culminate in the open-fire incineration of weapons. Organized around the military observer screening area, the disarmament site is the threshold between PUP and WCP sites and the demobilization camp as well as the juncture of military and humanitarian control. Site-based disarmament is recognized by UN standards as a “fairly coercive approach” because of the often-necessary involvement of leaders of the armed factions before control is passed to the UN ’s DDR program.47 The demobilization camp itself sites the official certification of combatants’ change of status from military involvement to civilian citizenship. On this transition, the UN standards further describe the symbolism of the process: “Individual demobilization mirrors the wider demobilization of a society emerging from conflict, and is an important symbolic phase in the consolidation of peace.”48 To accommodate this emblematic procedure, the standards recommend against the encampment method but, although proposing a paradoxically loaded alternative in the mobile demobilization site, also include practicalities of semipermanent facilities with provisions for residency, from one week to one month. Adapted sites such as disused factories, warehouses, or schools are preferable. If necessary, site-built modular camps for as many as six hundred ex-combatants are securely located within the community of settlement. In demobilization camps, excombatants move from reception to registration areas (screening and documentation), where they are then briefed about the process and in many cases are also counseled and referred to other programs within the DDR process. As a part of this process, a quasi-military sequence of checkpoints and UN stations marshals the ex-combatants through the

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standard 250- by 900-meter site. The camp also includes health screening and sensitization—beginning what UN standards call the social and psychological “rehabilitation” of ex-combatants before their eventual reinsertion and reintegration. UN Peacekeeping Forces along with NGOs dispense transitional assistance packages, also categorized as “transitional safety allowances” comparable to the standard of living of the surrounding population, to ex-combatants during the reinsertion phase and at their discharge from the camp. Entry into demobilization camps is voluntary, but in practice departure from the camp is sometimes contingent on peace negotiations.49 In April 2006, Burundi’s government cabinet decided to open a demobilization camp for members of the country’s last remaining rebel group, known as Forces Nationales de Libération (FNL). Located in the northwestern province of Bubanza and staffed by the Burundi National Defense Force, the camp was seen by government officials as a security measure and as a mechanism for negotiation while the country’s leaders tried to bring peace to the region. Known as Randa “Welcome Center,” the demobilization camp was effectively a detention facility, its residents waiting for a peace agreement.50 In the Democratic Republic of the Congo in December 2002, the Refugees International organization noted that the demobilization camp there had two purposes: to help provide job skills for a productive return to their villages and to teach ex-combatants about what had been going on in Rwanda since they left the country. The information gap in some cases extended for as long as a decade and many had been subjected to propaganda in the DRC ’s war theater.

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GTMO

The naval facility at Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay is the United States’ oldest overseas base. Its official abbreviation GTMO adds to a recently amplified iconic presence that supersedes its historical significance—inventing a new legacy of control as it has cast aside judicial and territorial conventions. Sidestepping classification and international criticism, GTMO camp falls into the broad category of detention camps as it has continued to break paradigms of protocol. In deploying the term enemy combatant, GTMO also invented language to elide traditional categories of detainees—such as dislocated civilians, enemy prisoners of war, and retained persons—and to invoke a war that has not been declared and an adversary who cannot be sited. So pervasive has been the space of GTMO, vaguely imaged but painfully visualized, that high theory and popular culture alike have invoked its exceptional departures from law and humanity. Following Giorgio Agamben’s groundbreaking studies of homo sacer and the states of exception found in new forms of detention, theoreticians and critics have further analyzed the implications of GTMO ’s extraterritoriality and its treatment of the body, through torture but also in the normalized control over the “naked” life of individuals. For Agamben, the detainee, internee, or refugee, as homo sacer, falls at the intersection of sovereign power and political exception in which punishment can occur outside of preestablished juridical (or sacrificial) norms and rules.51 Working between philosophical implication and the grim reality of camp’s spaces, this attention to ethicopolitical struggles has also found a site in the rise of reality television. Reality TV has reconstructed the camps in broadcast rooms to simulate the torture, to attempt to convey the uncontrolled depravity of the now illicit symbolism of GTMO. A simulated camp in an east London warehouse was the site for The Guantánamo Guidebook, a forty-eight-hour

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demonstration of the camp’s conditions and methods with seven volunteers and former Delta Force interrogators.52 Many years earlier, GTMO occupied another televisual space when Bob Hope celebrated Christmas with Jim Nabors and Charley Pride in 1971, following up on ten years of celebrity visits initiated in 1962 with Perry Como and then Ed Sullivan’s own Christmas show.53 Unlike other scenes of detention, GTMO has historically been a nexus not only of public performance but also of colonization, pirating, and military power. Four hundred years after Columbus landed in the Bay on April 30, 1494, after pirates legendarily preyed on Windward Passage ships, and after Spain and Britain battled in the eighteenth century for the puerto grande, U.S. Marines entered the Bay and cut the port’s communication cables linking it to Cap Haitien to the east and Santiago to the west. A critical moment in the SpanishAmerican War, June 7, 1898, might then mark the founding of the island within the island that is the camp at GTMO. Cutting ties was a necessary stratagem to establish the first camp on what would become McCalla Hill, but the action began the camp’s historical disconnect not just from the semiarid, unpopulated landscape, but from its political and legal context as well. Two subsequent cuts would widen the distance of the camp from these contexts. Reinforcing the Platt Amendment, the Permanent Treaty of May 22, 1903, yielded a contested “permanence” that remains in spite of the camp’s characteristic temporality. And on February 6, 1964, Fidel Castro’s government ordered the cutting of the water supply to the base—furthering the camp’s self-containment and a self-sufficiency based on the desalinization of nearly four million gallons of water each day and daily electric power generation of almost one million kilowatt-hours. But it was the U.S. forces who actually made the physical cut in the line to preempt expected rumors that the base was still receiving a supply of water. This gap—measured in inches—would later become an immeasurable geopolitical gulf, cementing the camp as an insular space that defined its own working methods and conditions.54

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Starting in January 2002, detainees were held in eight- by eight-foot cells, while U.S. military personnel guarding the camp lived in Freedom Heights. At the end of April, Camp Delta was built on the site previously used as a Haitian refugee camp and replaced Camp X-Ray.55 The detention camps of Guantánamo Bay form a collisional field of national sovereignty and “imperial ambition” and of judicial law and arguments of extraterritoriality. Between 2002 and 2005, expansion of Camp Delta and GTMO’s facilities created a network of subcamps that form a hierarchical system of control—more complex than the singular camp “GTMO” sometimes presented symbolically in the media. Camp Echo, outside of Camp Delta, is the site for limited access between detainees and their representatives. Detainees wear orange uniforms, recognizable from news reports, in Camp 3, which maintains the highest security level. Camp 2 and Camp 1 are sequentially less restrictive. Sally ports control detainees’ movement within the camp, lights remain on twenty-four hours, and the camps are not air-conditioned. In February 2003, expansion of facilities added Camp 4 as a medium security facility, and Camps 5 and 6 are two-story, maximum security complexes modeled on American Corrections Standards. Camp Iguana houses juvenile detainees between the ages of thirteen and fifteen years. The two phases of Camp America North provide semipermanent housing for troops stationed at GTMO.56 If GTMO as island camp occupies an extraterritorial site many times severed by claims of control at the expense of sovereignty and legality, then GTMO as clustered camp accommodates a landscape littered by expansion and obsolescence, but forming the quintessential camp as space of exception.

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Concentration Camp

The concentration camps of the Holocaust were designed by the Third Reich as temporary installations.57 They have remained, and today the debate about their preservation continues, moving between the significance of the sites’ physical structures and their meaning, and between the sites as witness and as didactic tools for education—all of these questions complicated by the fact that the camps are temporary sites. These camps began with wilde Lager (wild camps) in 1933 as a part of the National Socialist regime’s system of detention centers for political opponents. At the center of Europe’s German occupation, the first camp at Auschwitz was established in 1940, but was expanded to the Birkenau site beginning in 1941. In 1947, Poland officially designated Auschwitz-Birkenau for preservation, and in 1979 the World Heritage Committee added the concentration camps to its list of heritage sites.58 After establishing the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the Polish government installed exhibits in some of the camp blocks and reconstructed selected areas of the Auschwitz site, but left the 430-acre Birkenau camp virtually untouched.59 By the mid-1990s, the remaining Birkenau structures were crumbling, and some of the wooden barracks had been shored up to prevent their collapse. In justifying the nomination, the committee described the universal significance of the site for the purpose of “bear[ing] witness to the conditions within which the Hitlerian genocide took place” and to serve as a “monument to the martyrdom and resistance of millions of men, women, and children”—the “largest cemetery in the world.” In its report, the committee noted its decision to enter the camp as a “unique site and to restrict the inscription of other sites of a similar nature,” and this site remains the only camp of any kind to be included on the list. In 2003, the

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Polish government called attention to the site’s atypical inscription under criterion VI alone, and with no equivalent site on the World Heritage List, the government sought advice from the committee on special approaches to the preservation of the site.60 Indirectly responding to this query in 2006 and recalling the criterion for the site’s inclusion, the World Heritage Committee reinforced the camps’ two-part universal significance—as a depiction of a horrific period in human history and “as a beacon of warning to uphold the human values and ideals that are part of the UNESCO constitution” that emerged from the Second World War in 1945.61 To carry out the latter objective, the report went on to encourage the formation of educational programs and media activities associated with the site.62 Like the unstable ground of the temporary construct, questions of how to carry out this objective remain. We must not only ask what the role of historic preservation is in places that were not built to endure, but we must come to terms with the site’s enduring memory and address whether to memorialize the remnant’s meanings. Complicating these questions is the diversity of the site’s visitors, its tourists, survivors, researchers, and pilgrims. To each group, the site has its own meaning such that the conventional tools of preservation, whether protection, restoration, or reconstruction, have different implications. The reconstruction of Auschwitz’s crematorium becomes the lasting symbol for many visitors completing the site’s tour. And the suppressed histories of the prisoner reception site, which now serves as the visitor center, have implications not just for the tourists’ spatial understanding of the site but also for how those who come to the site bear witness to the intricate transformation from civilian to prisoner occurring at the camps.63 At Birkenau, the scale and decay of the site preclude reconstruction, but preservation of the remaining structures must contend with the expectations of survivors, the possible experiences of other visitors, and claims of entitlement from external sources.

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Camps of need occur neither by choice nor, for the most part, by force. Camps of necessity certainly fall into a gray area between autonomy and control. But defining such camps by what they are not runs the risk of leaving their final definition to external control. At the same time, naming the camp of necessity has implications for its future—how it is named affects how it is funded, protected, and reported, and ultimately how it is lived. Doctors Without Borders has estimated that thirty-three million people have been displaced around the world, with nearly two-thirds of this dislocation occurring within home countries. This chapter explores the transient zones of relief and assistance and tracks the relations of crisis, camp, and need from the urgent worldwide situation of refugee camps to more particular iterations, such as internally displaced person ( IDP), self-settled, and planned camps. Lodged between circumstances of control and autonomy, loss of mobility and suppression of liberties often complicate the objectives of these camps to meet safety and other imperative needs. From disaster responses and states of emergency to protracted conditions of homelessness to historically itinerant populations in conflict with “host” nations, camps reflect

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sites, his “World’s Most Traveled Trailer” upended North America’s midcentury isolation, bringing Jackson Center, Ohio, into contact with Hong Kong, Kiev, and Nairobi. In its idealism, this quest suggested—even if with a hint of land-yacht imperialism—that travel afforded education and a way of living open to other places and cultures. Byam had begun his career in trailer design behind his house in Los Angeles—a backyard camp of particular significance today for a burgeoning DIY community. This work prepared him for his start in the trailer industry as a salesman for William Bowlus, a former U.S. Army Air Service mechanic and RV entrepreneur who had supervised the construction of the Spirit of Saint Louis. Byam acquired Bowlus-Teller in 1936 after the company’s bankruptcy and developed the land yacht that would again be airborne in the C-17’s flying hull. The palletized Airstream/C-17 hybrid has its roots in previous U.S. government adaptations of the company’s trailers. Their streamlined forms symbolizing an efficient relief effort, fifteen trailers served as mobile hospitals for the U.S. Army Medical Corps during the Kennedy administration. And on July 24, 1969, Richard Nixon greeted the crew of Apollo 11 through the sealed rear window of the Airstream, which served for three weeks as a mobile quarantine facility (MQF ) to protect campers on earth from lunar pathogens. With these events, the Airstream provides a seamless transition from the moon to a travel trailer floating on an aircraft carrier to the broader populist ideals of self-containment practiced by full-time trailer enthusiasts in long-term visitors areas. The durability of its monocoque shell and integrated chassis also made it the vehicle for the Civil Defense Test in 1955 in the Nevada desert. Parked in “Doomtown, USA,” the trailer received minor damage from the atomic bomb dropped two miles away. What then does the in-flight installation of the Airstream—heavily laden as it is with industrial efficacy, entrepreneurship, and recreational exploits—mean for the transformation of a machine for living into a machine for diplomacy and a politics of power?

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Byam’s legacy of Airstream caravanning culminated in the Caravan around the World between 1963 and 1964. In a television miniseries, Vincent Price narrated the 34,000mile journey of Byam’s successors—a global tour that began its Asian leg in Tokyo and exited Europe through the port of Lisbon. Like the distinguished visitors (DVs) in the C-17’s “Silver Bullet” forty years later, the Caravan passed through Kabul before camping in the Afghanistan desert where, Price would report, the tourists baked an apple pie in the Airstream stove. On these caravan tours before his death in 1962, Byam the trailer advocate practiced what he called “person to person diplomacy” at the “four corners of the world.” Airstream’s camping aura that followed the recreational diplomat now surrounds the DVs within the protracted military theater at the beginning of the twenty-first century.2 In the early 1990s, U.S. Air Force research laboratories developed two Silver Bullets to accommodate official visits to remote areas of conflict. The modified trailers have been maintained by the 621st Air Mobility Operations Group at McGuire Air Force Base, whose mission includes providing “theater air mobility operations for combatant commanders” and executing the “distinguished visitor airborne communication mission.” Lodged within its C-17 berth, each Silver Bullet has full command and control capabilities, linked to three satellites, secure voice and data transfer, and video teleconferencing. The trailer’s executive and communication suites fall within advanced technology development budgeting, which in 2006 and 2007 included plans for a replacement module called “Steel Eagle.”3 But the Silver Bullet has also been the Silver Palace. The Airstream camp is upscale, symbolic of a class of travelers who before midcentury were differentiated from other recreational itinerants by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who contended that the tourist camp harbored criminals and caused instability in neighboring communities. The Airstream has resisted such aspersions. It is unlikely that U.S. officials would travel in a Winnebago or a Spartan trailer, and the mainstreamed imaging

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of its fashionably polished aluminum skin cloaks seemingly contradictory spaces—now admitting supermodel, world leader, and tourist to a camping procedure that moves between summer camp and clandestine camp. And just as Byam played the adventurer, the capitalist, and the politician, the globalized in-flight camp conflates nostalgia and power, an idealist’s pragmatism, and a treacly imperialism. After the Silver Bullet carrying Dick Cheney arrived at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul in February 2007, journalist Silva interviewed troops at Koele Barracks—one of whom likened the base to summer camp “except you have to stay here for a year.”4 This chronic summer camp does more than problematize our understanding of life on the base; it necessitates a recalibration of how camp’s terminology is used and what it means to camp. The territory that camp traverses is uneven, requiring not just topography but also topology and pointing toward a complex taxonomy. The collision of recreational module with military-political apparatus is not just an uneasy fusion of civilian and military equipment in a camping vehicle with global reach (the C-17 has a range of almost six thousand miles); it is also a collision of autonomy and control—an interaction that can be argued out of necessity. The in-flight camping vehicle offers the amenities of the travel trailer along with its powerful mobility and modularity, here deployed in the “global war on terror.” The privacy afforded by the shell within a shell insulates the leader from traveling cohorts, whether press crew or soldiers, and the double insulation of this multilayered fuselage protects its passengers from the foreignness that Byam sought so intrepidly. The in-flight camp of the Airstream/C-17 hybrid inverts the openness and freedom of the recreational campsite, where the semipublic zone of the campground flows through a trailer’s spaces. Here autonomy serves the interests of national security, and control exists for the double protection of national leaders from domestic inquiry and international dangers. But this space is perhaps made necessary by the lost innocence of Byam’s and our own camping excursions.

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