There are two kinds of vacations I take: the relaxing ones where you visit a new city, stay in a hotel, and explore a new part of the world. Then there are the dirtbag vacations, where I’m sleeping in a tent, hiking and camping somewhere, and come back a bit stronger and wild.
This isn’t a new thing.
Back in the mid-1800’s, two of the more influential writers that kicked off the American Renaissance were Ralph Waldo Emerson, the spiritual figurehead of the Transcendentalist movement, and his student/protege/apprentice Henry David Thoreau.
In his book “The Emerson Circle,” Bruce Nichols writes that:
“When Emerson traveled, it was to give lectures or visit Europe’s leading intellectuals. When Thoreau traveled, it was to live roughly, in the deep woods of Maine or the wilds of Cape Cod or to hike many miles to climb a mountain.”
Where Emerson was more the type to travel and meet with other public intellectuals and use his public speaking circuit to write essays and columns, Thoreau was more keen to avoid people and take what we’d today call Type 2 fun, where you’re not having a ton of fun in the moment but afterwards say to yourself, “Man, that was fun!”
I’ve stayed in some bougie hotels with ski-in/ski-out access on vacation; places with outdoor hot tubs and saunas, indoor spas with steam rooms and massages, where a cocktail costs as much as a meal. I loved it!
But equally memorable trips are when I portaged a canoe through mosquito-ridden trails in the BWCA, or paddled through sloughs and streams by the Minnesota River in the humid summer, or spent weekends walking up mountain streams outside Crested Butte with a pack of warm peanut-butter-and-ham sandwiches, Fritos, and a few guides to local wildflowers.
Hiking and camping were kind of a new recreation in Thoreau’s time. Emerson mostly wanted to sit in his study or walk in the woods to contemplate universal truths. Thoreau was weird, taking nighttime paddles on the river and play music on his flute. He was more about observing nature and writing about its secrets, more focused on experience than abstract morality.
This was also the golden age of travel writing, and Thoreau fit right in: his first book was “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” about he and his brother’s boating and hiking trip, which not only detailed his trip but weaved in digressions on Homer, history, poems, Hindu Scripture, and ancient writers.
Thoreau would bushwack up mountains like Mount Katahdin, which had no trails. They’d sleep on the ground, pick raspberries for food, and drin, out of streams. On one trip, he slept on the summit of Mount Monadnock, which had a disintegrating observation tower. He got cold in the middle of the night, so made a fire for warmth and “put a board on top of me, with a large stone on it, to keep it down, and so slept comfortably.” Using a rotting piece of wood for a sleeping bag is Type 2 fun if I’ve ever heard of it.