A camper I admire

 Thinking about camping and campers, I thought of Roy Bedichek.

For years, he guided the University Scholastic League, an organization that encourages competitions for high-school students in Texas. Today, the league is known for trying to govern high school football. But it also encourages students to develop skills in music, drama and debate.

Bedichek had to travel the state, getting the competitions organized and resolving disputes. He camped on his travels, shunning hotels.

Rodney J. Kidd, Bedichek’s associate at the University Interscholastic League, traveled with him and left a lovely account. Bedichek had camping spots all over the state. The backseat of his car would come out and in would go camping gear: two small mattresses, a 5-gallon can of water, cooking gear and a nature library.

People do many things when they camp. I think Bedichek was after three things:

• He wanted to be close to nature. He wanted to wake up at 4 a.m. and look for the morning star, rather than for the light switch in a hotel room.

• He wanted to tend to his own needs. He liked to cook over an open fire.

• He liked the solitude — the quiet that a person needs to think and read. 

• Source: Rodney J. Kidd’s essay “Out-of-Doors Hotel” is in Three Men in Texas, edited by Ronnie Duggar; The University of Texas Press, 1967. His description of Bedichek’s camping techniques begins on p. 27.

Camping

 As the Wise Woman and I were leaving Cloudland Canyon, a fellow camper asked me about our rig. I confessed that I was only a pretender. We had rented a camper. We have been trying different kinds of vehicles because we don’t know what might suit us.

The fellow who asked had an enormous coach that reminded me of a touring bus. He was towing an enormous cargo trailer to carry all the stuff that wouldn’t fit into the enormous coach.

It made me wonder about what we’re doing when we go camping. I wondered about the point of getting away from it all while trying to drag it all with us.

“Camping” is a strange idea. Before I met the Wise Woman, I used to hike alone in the wildernesses of East Texas. I usually didn’t carry a tent. I traveled with a tarp that could be rigged as a shelter if it rained.

I was interested in seeing the country. Sleeping under the stars and cooking over fires made me feel closer to the place in a way that I didn’t understand — and still don’t. I went to the woods time and again. I guess you’d call that camping, although what I was up to had little to do with the wondrous technology available through the gazillion-dollar camping industry.

I wanted to see the places I loved, but I was also after something else. While a tent seemed an unnecessary burden, I always packed a book and a notebook. I seemed to need to hike and camp most when I had questions I wanted to think about.

On this recent trip I carried a copy of Gandhi’s The Way to God, a collection of his newspaper writings about his spiritual or interior life — or maybe the writings are about his own psychology. Gandhi’s ideas seemed vital to me as a younger man, and I wanted to see if that were still true.

We were expecting rain on our recent trip. I wanted to read and think while it rained. I once did that under a tarp, and now I’ve done it in a recreational vehicle.

The way I camp has changed and will continue to change as the Wise Woman and I get older. But I still camp. And if I had to account for my rig, I’d start with a book and a notebook. I would start with a state of mind.

Cloudland Canyon

 The Wise Woman and I spent three days at Cloudland Canyon, on the west side of Lookout Mountain in northwest Georgia. We camped on the West Rim and hiked down to Daniel Creek.

The canyon is 1,000 feet deep in places and was turned into a state park by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. It was once owned by the Sitton family and was called Sitton Gulch. But the clouds that hug the mountains routinely drop into the canyon. We saw the fog and can see why people call the place “Cloudland.”

The place was once the floor of an ancient sea. It got its shape 200 million years ago when old continents collided and pulled apart, creating the Cumberlands and Appalachians.

The rim, once the ocean’s floor, is a hard sandstone. Beneath it are layers of softer shale. The layers can be seen clearly as you hike down the canyon. Water that seeps into the ground erodes the softer rock, creating caves and sending boulders sliding toward the creek.

It’s wild, rugged, beautiful country. The older I get, the more I seem to need to see places like this.

Maybe it's a librito

 I have been thinking about novellas, probably because I have written a draft of something that might pass for one.

There are many ways to learn. One, not highly recommended, is by ignoring sound advice and just doing it. You write something that is like something you admire and try to figure it out as you go. When you finish the draft, you try to figure out what you’ve done.

I don’t like the word novella. The -ella ending, like the -ito in Texan, is a diminutive. I think — thinking in Texan — that it should be librito or bookito, not novelito. The specimens I like are little books, but I don’t think they are derived from the novel. (It seems equally plausible that they might be derived from a short story, but I don’t find that helpful either.)

To me, the craft in this project is like that of a photo essay. In the early days of photography, the artist simply framed a photo. Photographers who were trying to make documentary records — archeologists and sociologists, for example — took a lot of photos. You’d find as many photos in their archive as scenes in a novel.

By contrast, a photo essay might cover two facing pages in a newspaper. By moving in and out of the event or place, the photographer shows overall views of the subject and highly tightly cropped images. This form provides context and a sample of telling details.

One craftsman is trying to provide a complete picture, while the other is trying to be suggestive. They are after different goods.

I can spend an evening looking at a photo essay. I wouldn’t really want to spend an academic term on it.

I’m no scholar, so apply the appropriate warning label to this note. But having gotten some ink on my hands, I’m dubious that the novella is derived from the novel. That notion doesn’t help.

Eyes on the ground

 Walking through the woods after a storm, I was checking the ground.

Earlier in the spring, you would see lovely tulip-tree blossoms, which are apple green, yellow and orange. They’re mostly gone.

You always see pine straw. “Evergreen” is a bit misleading. Pines shed year-round. Falling needles get stuck in the canopy and then come down in bales during a storm.

I walked through dozens of downed limbs off boxelders. By contrast, it’s shocking to see a broken limb off a magnolia. It made me wonder if the boxelder, a member of the maple family, is the most brittle tree in the forest.

Foresters say the general rule is that the faster a tree grows the weaker it is. Acer negundo is fast growing, so the wood is light and weak. You can get a rough idea of the strength of a tree by looking at a forester’s chart showing the weight of a cubic foot of a log.

Boxelder isn’t really a forester’s idea of a tree, so it wasn’t on the chart. But maples were generally around 45 pounds per cubic foot. By comparison:

• Red spruce, 34.

• White pine, 36.

• Magnolia, 59.

• Live oak, 76.

My hypothesis that boxelders are the most brittle is not looking good. The possibilities for observer error are myriad.

A shelf of old journals

 My father read a quarterly journal called ETC: A Review of General Semantics. I remember, as a teenager, finally noticing dozens of them in his office and asking about his interest.

He’d read Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity. Korzybski suggests that the conceptual framework we create with language is a map of reality, not reality. My father, who was drafted off a Tennessee farm and fought through the Battle of the Bulge, was interested in the mass movements of the 1930s. His unit liberated a concentration camp late in the war. He had a sense of how lives could be touched, changed and destroyed by propaganda — by bad conceptual maps.

My father was convinced that we have an obligation to look at the words and phrases we use to see where they come from. We should see if the language we use gives us a map that reflects the world we experience — or whether it reflects someone else’s prejudices, fears and grievances.

That inquiry is not etymology exactly, but something similar. It’s not like determining the provenance of a work of art exactly, but similar.

I wish we had a review of popular semantics.

Those who rule the symbols

 The council in Cork, Ireland, is considering building a statue honoring the mosquito that allegedly infected Oliver Cromwell with a fatal dose of malaria.

I know this because I read Julian Girdham’s wonderful newsletter The Fortnightly. Girdham cites the story as an example of how people can have a toxic legacy that endures for centuries.

I read the story is an example of how we use symbols to make sense of our experiences, especially the toxic ones. I thought of this line, which my father used to quote:

 

Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols. For this reason, we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.

 

Since I live in a part of the world that is still debating Confederate monuments, I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if we took the statues off their bases and replaced them with figures that were, say, 5 mm high.

• Sources: Julian Girdham’s site is here:

https://www.juliangirdham.com/the-fortnightly

Liz Dunphy, “World’s Smallest public statue’ proposed for Cork mosquito linked to death of Oliver Cromwell”; Irish Examiner, May 14, 2025. It’s here:

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/munster/arid-41844780.html

Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelean Systems and General Semantics; Lancaster, Pa.: International Non-Aristotelean Library Publishing Co., 1933, p. 76.