The first year we went to the Berkshires. Labor Day weekend, 1999. The world was a little more innocent then.

Bacon, whose marriage was on the rocks, drove up from DC. Lane and Adriana drove up from New York with Karen and her son Ian, who was what, seven or eight? They came in Karen’s then-still-fabulous silver Jaguar — the interior lining on the roof hadn’t started to cave in yet. When they arrived, Lane got out of the driver’s seat, slammed the door, and said, “That’s what I call an automobile.”

If I’m not mixing up years or camping trips, Stephanie and our daughters drove out with Mark and Pandora and their boys. (But how could they all have fit in the Brewers’ Explorer?) Bacon and I followed later that day in our battered blue Accord hatchback. I’m pretty sure I remember trucking west on Route 2 with Bacon riding shotgun. The car stereo was blown, or maybe it had been stolen, and so we had a cheapass boombox on the floor. We listened to mixtapes from friends who weren’t there.

We had only started calling ourselves the Northeast Corridor Social Club earlier that summer, when a bunch of us got together in midtown Manhattan, where Stephanie had a hotel room for a work trip. I had been in the city for a month or so doing dissertation research, and our kids were in Washington with their grandparents. Bacon trekked up for the weekend, which consisted of several all-nighters of intense conversation, barhopping until we wound up dancing in a bad 80s bar, 4 a.m. fries in the meatpacking district, art outings (including a trip out to PS 1, where Lane was involved in some family fun day or another), and lots of pizza and beer.

Before we split up — Stephanie on her way to LaGuardia and back to Boston, Bacon on a train to DC, me on a train to Princeton, where I’d finish out my summer research — we’d settled on the plan to go camping over Labor Day.

Stephanie and I were campers. We’d both grown up with it, and when we lived in Cambridge we used it as a chance to get away from the stress of grad school, jobs, and the sheer poverty brought on by full-time childcare for two kids, a necessity for me to finish my dissertation. For daytrips, we’d drive the kids out to Walden Pond, to the North Shore beaches in the summer, but a couple times a year we liked to get even farther away, spend nights in a tent, cook on a campfire, look at the hills while the leaves just threatened to turn.

Some of our friends were not so sure. They agreed to the plan only if we found a campsite with warm showers and shopping nearby. Karen called around and made some reservations at a place that even had a road house. I wish I could remember the name, or even the closest town, but details like that are too far gone.

Here’s what I loved the most about camping with friends:

• Getting away from TV, computers, and phones, especially for the kids. (We had no wi-fi or cellphones back then.)
• The challenge of campfire cooking with friends who were all foodies and competitive in the kitchen — a deliberate decision to reduce the number of ingredients and methods at your disposal and still produce above average meals. (My mouth still waters at the mere thought of Mark Brewer’s slow-roasted eggplant steaks.)
• Sitting around a campfire drinking Stepharitas (my wife’s signature poor man’s drink: sort of like a margarita, but with Fresca) and really just starting to get to know each other.
• Retaining proximity to some culture. (We always made outings to MASS MoCA or just to shop in North Adams.)
• Gaining exposure to what the rest of America was like outside our liberal urban utopian centers — enough to make us feel self-satisfied about our politics and taste.
• Having space to enjoy one another’s company without being held prisoner in the same house — that and the fact that no one had to take responsibility to host.
• And, of course, precocious kids who’d cover your back in an argument:

The first year was downright pleasant. Our incidents were few, but they made for great anecdotes:

Early on the campsite manager pulled up in his golf cart, slid out of the seat, and limped over to tell us he’d received some complaints about a silver Jaguar exceeding the 5mph speed limit in the campground.

A more serious brush with the locals came at the road house. A group of us went over one night for drinks and dancing to the live band they brought in. Most of the crowd consisted of bikers, a few hippies. The band wore beards, braids, shades. Big-bellied, they cut away their sleeves at the shoulders and sported assorted tattoos. They played classic rock with a hint of honky tonk. We settled in to dance the night away.

At some point, though, Stephanie got a hankering for something by Neil Young and went to see what the band could do. The players consulted with one another, then launched into a total downer: “Ohio,” CSNY’s memorial anthem for the kids killed at Kent State. Within seconds the crowd had abandoned the floor, leaving us out there all alone, feeling obligated to dance, since we’d requested Neil Young, but guilty for dancing to a song about dead anti-war protesters. Bikers glared, shook their heads at our nerve, and when the song ended the lead singer let out a little cough into the mic and then sold us up the river. “Ahem,” he said. “Well. That was by request, but you bet we won’t be playing that one again.” We gathered our coats and slipped out the back door.

The trip must have done something for us, because we planned another the following year, this time on the beach in Rhode Island. Our crew expanded this time by a few — Karen’s friend Fabulous Brian came along with one of his roommates; Bacon had a new girlfriend — and the intervening year had brought the group together several more times, including Karen’s inaugural Thanskgiving event in Tribeca, where almost three dozen people crowded around a 9-foot square table. We all knew each other better — for better and worse. 

In Rhode Island our circumstances were a little less ideal than they had been the previous year: In the midst of a West Nile scare, we battled an endless army of mosquitoes. The neighbors seemed a little more gothic than our friends in western Massachusetts had been, including a neglected toddler in bloated brown pampers, his body covered with swollen insect bites, who constantly pestered us for food until his parents screamed at him to return to their trailer. (They seemed to be permanent residents.) Someone stole a set of camping knives Stephanie’s grandfather had given us for our wedding. And then there was the rain — at least one whole day’s worth of a downpour. Lane and I tried to string a tarp between the tents so we could at least get out and converse as a group, but the tarp filled with rain until it ran off in small waterfalls. On the beatup boombox, Paul McCartney reassured us that with a little luck, we could make this whole damn thing work out. We hoped it was true — and it turned out to be so. When the rain cleared we had at least one nice afternoon on the beach; just as the sun started to set someone found a fish and chips shack nearby. We wolfed down our food while the salt caked on our sunburned bodies.

Camping with the NECSC was only partly, if ever, about nature. Sure, Berkshires and beaches provided gorgeous settings for our holiday weekends. We found the vistas we were supposed to find, took our requisite number of photos. Hell, I even forced people to listen to Melville’s semi-satirical rhapsodies to the “most excellent purple majesty,” Mount Greylock.

I’d say camping’s draw — for me, at least — was more about primal drives than about an aesthetic or aestheticizing encounter with our surroundings, spiritual, replenishing, or otherwise. Earth, wind, fire, shelter, food (glorious food!). These were essentials, served up with style. More than any other of these elements, though, I’d call fire the key primal draw. Sitting around a campfire exchanging stories, sideways glances, and an occasional song — what could be more fundamentally human?

Our camping trips consolidated our friendships — in part by calling our various strengths and weaknesses into the open, by laying our quirks bare. I learned that more than one husband-wife relationship among us depended on carefully orchestrated coffee and breakfast rituals, without which some of my friends were unable to enter society. (A communal pan full of scrambled eggs was out of the question: things had to be just so.) I learned that Karen had a natural knack for entertaining kids with large group pageants and art projects. I learned that Lane was happy to get up earlier than everyone else to get a fire started. I learned that some among us were natural workers, others natural socializers who had to be whipped into shape.

One night in Rhode Island, Adriana worked like mad against the setting sun to get ingredients prepared for make-your-own gourmet hobo dinners. She chopped fennel and crumbled fresh herbs, prepared one little stack of diced goods after another, while everyone else stood around the fire stipping their Stepharitas and laughing, free and easy. The sun continued to set. After a while, the folks around the campfire, not so quietly tight, had all but forgotten about dinner, until Adriana’s voice emerged from the dark edges of camp, shaking the trees: “FUCK!” she shouted, sending campers scrambling, finally, to do their parts.

By the end of year two, some of the romance had worn away, and in 2001 we scrapped the Labor Day ritual, though several of us — this time including Farrell and Cedric and Dave — went camping that summer on the edge of a gorge outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, where we awoke in the morning to the hiss of hot air balloons filling and releasing, riding the line of the canyon. Some of the boys that summer took another camping trip to some hot springs farther south, though we somehow forgot to take anything to cook our food in. We wrapped whole onions in aluminum foil and ate them like the freshly butchered heart of a wild animal once they’d cooked all the way through. When we ran out of kindling, Lane insisted we burn his copy of Air Guitar.

After Stephanie and I relocated to New York that fall, the large group camping trips gave way to more civilized reunions — in Bacon’s backyard, at Karen’s country house, at our place in the city — until a new crop of kids put an end even to those. The majority must have felt the labor wasn’t worth it, though we plan to take at least one camping trip this fall — maybe with a different group of friends, maybe just on our own.

On 4 September 2000 I wrote this in my diary:

It’s been quite a weekend — the friends’ camping trip to Rhode Island. Lane & Adriana, Mark & P and the boys, Karen, Ian, and her friend ‘Fabulous Brian’ (&, for one night, his roommate Kristi), and [Bacon], coupled with E__ A__. A mix like that & there are certainly stories to tell. Not sure how much detail I’ll get into. Certainly not tonight: it’s almost 11 and tomorrow is 1st day of school for the kids. Need to be up early to make sure they’re ready. We got home tonight tired, smelly, dirty, & mosquito-bitten, which is unsettling given the Rhode Island epicenter for West Nile Virus. While we were there, so the news reports, a horse was taken sick w/ it.

The next entry is dated two months later. I never filled in the details, told the stories there were to tell. Who knows what they all may have been? I do remember, though, an interesting verbal formula Lane offered one afternoon while we drove under a canopy of sunflecked New England trees, winding through country roads to some daytrip destination. A Joni Mitchell album I’d never heard was on the stereo. Or maybe it was Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, which we seemed to listen to a lot back then: “Don’t You Worry Bout a Thing,” in particular. The car was traveling a little too fast. I can’t even remember who was driving or whose car it was, but we had too many people in the back seat, and each bump sent us airborne, our heads smacking the top of the car.

“What a great memory this is,” Lane said, as if the experience itself moved faster than we possibly could.