Butters - Glamping with MaryJane: glamour + camping

Text and photographs copyright 2012 MaryJane Butters except where noted.

First Edition

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ISBN: 978-1-4236-3081-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012937603

Art Direction by MaryJane Butters

Design by Alicia Baker and Carol Hill

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MaryJanes personal blog can be found at www.raisingjane.org.

Dedicated to you,

and you and you and you

who

get it.

Were thousands strong and growing!

You know the scene. The happy 60s family pulls into a campsite. Father backs the trailer into position and unhitches it (or sets up a tent), hunts for firewood, starts a fire. Then, he finds a good spot for the family potty. His work done, he leaves to go fishing.

Mother entertains the children, fusses over the food, and gets the campsite ready. What she does next are the origins of the modern-day glamper. She drapes the table in an ironed tablecloth and proceeds to decorate it with a bouquet of just-picked wildflowers. Then she ties a pretty hankie on a lower tree branch by the potty, telling the kids to tie it high when theyre behind the treehankie high, squatters rights; hankie low, good-to-go.

Flash ahead 50 years to the next generation of campers, where the missus owns the trailer, backs it into position, unhitches it herself, and then goes fishing, but only after shes arranged all her special dcor effects just so: a doily here, an ironing-board table there, a toity tent, and a pink barbeque grill ready for her catch of the day. Frilly this, and frilly that. Its a grown-up girls version of playhouse. Pretend. Escape. Dcor and more.

Between then and now, whats changed? Girl campers have ditched the notion that camping equipment is the domain of men (were buying trailers as fast as we can find them); weve jettisoned the notion that going camping means you have to give up creature comforts like a billowy-soft bed, stamped linens, and bubble baths; we decorate our gypsy world (trailers and tents) in our favorite happy colors; we decal them (previously allowed only on home refrigerators); we hang our prom dresses right next to our lanterns; and we eat chocolate with abandon

trading in harsh and
roughing it for comfort, play,
and style

The women who settled the West employed unadorned grit

(Im talking the six-shooter variety), plenty of cast iron (packing on pounds back then meant hauling around your load of pots and pans), and canvas enough to push back the sky

all of it ADORNED, of course, with a bit of glam

a piece of torn white fabric worn as a neck or hair bow, a hollowed-out log made into a flower planter, a crocheted pull cord on a canvas tent flap, a tatted stampede hat string, a plain white flour sack turned into lace after 300 hours of punching needle holes at nighton the heels of punching calves all day.

For this
(former wilderness ranger turned organic farmer/author),

it was a bit of fun to have my unusual Idaho canvas wall-tent Bed & Breakfast featured in National Geographic Traveler, Sunset, The New York Times Magazine and Travel & Leisure (even on the Today Show) as the place to be. The New Yorker magazine went so far as to write my lifes story. In its predictable take on Westerners, the writer pointed out my tendency to drop Gs. More than happy to take their version of notoriety and run with it, Im all about the three Gs that really matter:

grit, grace, and glam.

I lived year-round in a wall tent in the Idaho outback in the 70s while working for the Forest Service and have five wall tents presently set up at my farm outside Moscow, Idaho, for the purpose of offering an organic safari of sorts to those who want a chance to unplug and experience my version of camping,
or glamping, as I call it (one of those lost Gs replacing the C in camping).

My guests bathe and eat outdoors, sleep in tents that are gussied up with antique iron beds, billowy down comforters, frilly linens, and woodstoves.

When I was working on my first book in 2004, my New York City editors, in an unsuccessful effort to wall me in, insisted an Idaho wall tent, as weve always called them, needed to be a walled tent in print. My reply?

No maam, this is a wall tent; no pretenses out here, if you please, except for that pearl necklace strung around my lantern.