This newsletter is coming two days later than usual—apologies! After a reporting trip to the Everglades and an expedition to Mississippi’s barrier islands, I’ve been away from my laptop, with good and bad consequences. Now that I’m back in the office, I’ve jotted some meandering reflections on recent camping trips in Mississippi. First, though, some book updates:
Signed copies
A few people have asked how to acquire signed copies of The Great River. One good approach is to show up at one of the events I have scheduled in June and early July. (They’ll be held along the Lower Mississippi, as well as in Hartford and St. Louis. And there will be more events to come in July and August!)
If an in-person signing isn’t possible, you can pre-order through Octavia Books in New Orleans. In the “Order comments,” note that you want a signed copy. (If you’d like the book inscribed, include the name or any other instructions!)
A spring full of river books
The Great River is not this season’s sole Mississippi River book. Trapper Haskin’s paddling memoir Crooked Old River just dropped. So did Ned Randolph’s heady and philosophical Muddy Thinking in the Mississippi River Delta. Dean Klinkenberg’s guide to the Wild Mississippi and Virginia Hanusik’s lovely photobook are coming soon. Heck, the biggest literary sensation of 2024 seems to be Percival Everett’s masterful retelling of the Huck Finn story from Jim’s point of view.
To celebrate all this, I wanted to create an incentive to buy not just my book, but others, too. So if you send me receipts showing proof of preorder of The Great River plus purchase or preorder of another new Mississippi River book, I’ll enter you in a raffle to win the supplies to throw a little Mississippi River party.
Audiobooks
There is an audiobook in production, but don’t preorder the “Audio CD” option that’s noted on Amazon. (I have no idea what that is.) Like the hardcover, the audiobook will be released on June 11, but the preorders won’t go live until mid-May. Watch the newsletter for a link.
The strange act of camping in Mississippi
In the typical telling, the practice of camping (for fun) began in the Adirondacks, in the 1860s, when a Connecticut preacher began to spend vacations tramping in the mountains—simple adventures he later described in a best-selling book. Then came the first national parks, which were situated amid the dramatic topography of the American West. If you wanted to see Yellowstone (b. 1872) or Yosemite (b. 1890) you had to crash somewhere. The rise of cars were a boost: Between 1910 and 1930, annual park visitation jumped from a few hundred thousand to five million. States launched parks, too. And many of the visitors camped out—cementing an all-American tradition.
The South doesn’t play much of a role int that store. At the first national conference focused on state parks, in 1926, an official report called the Southeast the “coming field” for the trend. That was a nice way of saying the region was behind the times. In 1930, Southern states contained just one percent of the country’s total expanse of state and national parks.
In much of the South, the field never came: today, only 0.1% of the state of Mississippi is parkland. The only state with a lower percentage is Kansas. When I first moved to Mississippi in 2009, I was struck by this lack. How was I supposed to get outside?
Eventually, I became an expert Southern camper. I lived out of a tent for six weeks, after all, when I canoed half the Mississippi in 2017. My drybag was an ideal of order. And the trip was a reminder that there are beautiful places, tucked away where you least expect them—including behind the levees that hold back the nation’s big river.
But in the years since that trip, I’ve grown old and overworked and lazy. I’ve hardly camped at all. My gear is scattered across three different closets. So when I decided in March that I needed a few nights away to think about the future, I was lured by the prospect of some plug-and-play camping—glamping, really—a few hours north of New Orleans.
Per the official company history, Getaway was born out of burnout. Founder Jon Staff quit his job at a startup so he could tour the country in an Airstream trailer, then decided that he wanted to help others enjoy nature, too. So he launched a chain of “Outposts”—sites outside of major cities where the uninitiated can ease into the outdoor lifestyle. No need for a tent: The outposts are collections of small trailers, each featuring sufficient amenities—showers and flush toilets and electricity and climate control—to keep even the squeamish comfortable. The first outpost was built outside of Boston in 2015. It seems fitting that the company did not reach the Southeast until 2020, with a location outside of Atlanta. The Mississippi outpost, which is surrounded by the Homochitto National Forest, opened in late 2022.
The cabins feature a familiar look—sleek, vaguely Scandinavian, with exposed blonde wood and simple angles. Getaway’s branding encourages visitors to abandon their phones—they give guests a “lockbox” in which to stow their smartphones—but, even if you acquiesce, you’ll be left with the uncanny sense that you’ve slipped through a portal, into an Instagram post. The trailers offer the standardized outdoors aesthetic that’s been hammered home through social media.
I contemplated uploading a post myself. But the sprawling bedside window—a signature feature of the Getaway House—my view was of a stubby collection of pine trees. None looked wider than my arm. It wasn’t much to post home about.
The Getaway outpost featured a more subtle design, one that’s hard to capture on Instagram: The little houses were strung along roads, each with their own pull-in parking spot. This design was first honed on public lands, where early campers would drive right through—which is to say right over—the wilderness to find a suitable spot. To spare the vegetation, a U.S. Forest Service plant pathologist developed the idea of looped roads and designated parking.
What is the point of camping? That design was less about immersing visitors in nature than keeping them slightly away. That’s a reminder that camping, as developed in the national parks, was a functional act: the point was getting close to pretty places. This is the trouble I found at my Getaway: by the standard aesthetic metrics by which we measure wilderness, little of Mississippi is a pretty place.
There are other reasons to set up camp: Because you want not to look at nature, but interact with it—hiking or paddling, say, or, big in the South, hunting and fishing. I’ve managed to get out into truer wildernesses lately—including Horn Island, a bit of National Park-approved paradise within the borders of Mississippi—which has reminded me that one pleasure of backcountry camping is building a tidy and temporary home.
The name “Getaway” suggests another reason we go camping. What matters more than getting anywhere specific—getting to some pretty scenery—is simply getting away. This is camping as an antidote: The marketing copy may emphasize being-in-nature, but mostly the experience is about being-not-at-home. The stubby trees are just a side dish. Given how few trees there are for sleeping under in Mississippi, they’re not a bad starting point, really. I think I may get back.