I saw a couple of ghosts at the bottom of the mountain recently. I was finishing a trail run, and they were dressed in dirty gray coats, hovering near a small fire in a large, grassy field at the edge of the forest. Okay, they weren’t ghosts. They were Civil War reenactors. But if you had never seen a Civil War reenactment before, and were a little loopy from the heat, you might think you’d stumbled upon a couple of apparitions.
I was running up and down Kennesaw Mountain, which is home to an amazing trail system today, but back in June of 1864, it was the site of a battle that marked the turning point in the Civil War. Today, there are cannons scattered throughout the 2,965-acre park, and you can still see the deep ditches that the soldiers dug for the battle. I grew up near the park and remember finding bullets in my backyard when digging holes for my own pretend wars.
This is all part of the charm of growing up in the South; you live with this history, including the occasional situation when a grown man pretends he’s a soldier from the 1800s. I grew up watching hundreds of men recreate the battle of Kennesaw every summer when I was a kid. My family would stand on the edge of the field and watch the soldiers march toward each other, firing muskets and pretending to die. Then we’d go get an old-timey family photo taken where we dressed like farmers.
Weird? Maybe. I never gave it a second thought when I was younger, but seeing these two men now, dressed like apparitions from 150 years ago, I’m intrigued. These dudes aren’t pretending to be at war, they’re camping. They had pitched a couple of simple A-frame tents and had their bed rolls out. I assume they slept in the field last night and are just getting their day going with coffee and eggs over the fire.
They have an impressive attention to detail. Their boots look to be 150 years old. The mugs they’re using, the kettle over the fire, and the cast iron pan sitting on a rock…it’s all straight out of a history book. From my experience, most of these reenactors are historians, or at the very least, history buffs, and being “period appropriate” is a big deal. My high school history teacher was a reenactor, and he was a stickler for details, down to the laces in his boots.
Not much has changed with camping gear in 150 years. I mean, a lot has changed. The materials are different, our tents are lighter, and our clothes are more comfortable, but the basics are the same. I look at these two guys hanging out by a fire and I know instantly that they’re camping because the scene doesn’t look much different than what you’d find on a typical weekend in Pisgah National Forest today. I’ve never felt much connection to the past—I’m not a history buff and I don’t know much about my own family’s history—but watching these men camp, doing the exact same things I do when I camp, gives me a sense of kinship I’ve never experienced before. It also makes me wonder about the future.
What will camping gear look like in 150 years? Will people even camp in 150 years? Or will the notion of sleeping outside under a thin piece of fabric be completely foreign to them, like when I watch a historical movie and see people fetching water from a stream to cook or bathe and I’m like, “Fuck that.”
Camping is hard, and we seem to be moving away from hard things at an increasing rate with each generation. Maybe the only people that will camp in the future are historians, reenacting the practice for curious onlookers at public parks. The Future Historical Camping Society. They’ll show up with their vintage backpacks and Patagonia fleece and pitch MSR Hubba Hubba tents that have been lovingly restored and sit around eating freeze dried meals from water boiled on JetBoils. And kids will ask about the stoves and be amazed that campers had to wait 90 seconds for boiling water!
“Ninety seconds! Can you believe it?”
The historians will pull replica cans of beer out of Yeti coolers and guys will marvel at how the ice melts after 24 hours. I bet the concept of keeping beer and food on ice that melts in just a few hours will seem pretty ridiculous to them because of their futuristic cooling technologies that use hydrogen or something.
“And then what? They had to replace the ice? Fascinating!”
Will historians also bring mountain bikes to reenactments? I imagine that by 2125 we’ll be using hoverboards for fun so mountain bikes will look ridiculous. I wonder how these historians will explain the sport to the people gathered at the reenactment.
“Actually, mountain bikers liked riding up hills and they preferred trails with rocks and logs in the way.”
Will they put on slackline demonstrations and let kids take turns pretending to walk across the rope just like campers did in 2025?
“They walked across ropes for fun?” Kids will say and then laugh before tapping back into the feed.
What will these future historians think of Teva’s? Or trekking poles? What will happen if one guy shows up to the 2025 reenactment with an external frame backpack–something that’s old, but not period appropriate? Will the other history buffs give him a hard time for bringing gear from a different century?
Or maybe there won’t be a Future Historical Camping Society. Maybe we’ll all still be camping in 100 years because camping is awesome. I’m even willing to bet that camping will look the same in the future, just like it looks the same in the past. Sure, our tents will pitch themselves, and hopefully by then sleeping pads won’t deflate in the middle of the night no matter how much money you spend on them, but dudes will still hover around a fire in the morning and cook eggs and drink coffee and talk about how they wish they had time to camp more often.
Maybe camping will be one of the consistent through-lines of history, instantly recognizable no matter what the rest of the world looks like.
