Campers’ Group

I was back in New York City, working at a trade magazine and combing the classified for singles listings that wouldn’t feel like a meat market. “Campers’ Group” caught my eye. I hadn’t been camping since before my divorce and a big city group with camping as an agenda seemed unusual, just absurd enough to want to know more.

What a great find. Not just nature and fun but a social club where I could meet people, make friends, maybe even find dates.

We’d get the calendars in the mail typed in the whimsical Comic Sans font. So unfussy, everything so plain and simple. In fact it was a joke around that time when generic foods were first hitting supermarket shelves that we were a group with a generic name, like a can of “Beans.” Campers’ Group.

Singles, yes, but couples were a part of it as well. No limits, no exclusions. A fair amount of ethnic diversity, although overwhelmingly NYC Jewish singles. I had Jewish friends from kindergarten all through college. My Queens neighborhood was a blend of baby boomers with Irish, Italian and Jewish families and the occasional Wasp along for the ride. In Campers Group, ages ranged from where I was, in my 30s, up through 50s and a few older—but not many.

It was car-camping, sites you could drive right up to, unload, set up tents. I’ll never forget the sound of aluminum tent poles clunking on the ground. Later we’d push picnic tables together, rig a tarp over it and set out an assortment of kitchen gear to each cook our favorites, then build a campfire, making s’mores and talking and laughing until time to crawl into our tents and sleeping bags.

My equipment evolved from a barely two-person pup tent that blew over in a thunderstorm to more elaborate rigs: four-person dome tents, six-person domes you could stand full up in. air mattresses, or a cot, propane lanterns and a Coleman stove. The variety of recipes and gourmet delights for dinner on each outing had us thinking we should publish a cookbook “Wokking in the Woods.”

At least once per long holiday weekend we’d leave the campground and find a nearby pub or diner or hometown restaurant and eat out. We were New York natives, after all and reservations were what we usually made for dinner.

During the days we’d usually hike as a group or do our own thing staying close to the campsite. I was an urban explorer and loved visiting new towns, small towns with new-age boutiques or local craft stores. High tea in Jim Thorpe, PA on the porch of a mansion owned by a railroad magnate as part of our group went whitewater rafting—I could always persuade another urban-dweller to forego at least a portion of nature in favor of more refined town delights.

It would be ice cream sodas in old-fashioned creameries or ice cream parlors or the local Tasty Freeze. Maybe lunch at a coffee shop or inexpensive restaurant where you could use a real bathroom before returning to rough it in the woods.

State parks in New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey were inexpensive and ranged from elaborate, with full group bathrooms and showers, electricity, hot and cold running water and places to plug in the hairdryer and also mirrors for make-up, to no bathrooms and only rustic pit toilets. Occasionally we’d splurge and go to a private campground where we felt especially luxurious. But most of us were watching pennies because city living was expensive.

The state park campgrounds were old pines and woods with areas cleared to create single and group sites. We opted for the latter when available, so we could all be together. Some of the privately-owned campgrounds had swimming pools, camp stores and firewood for sale. I devised a rule for maximum comfort in these private locales: camp near the trees where you could keep cool in partial shade; avoid open meadows where the sun would beat down relentlessly all day.

At that time, you could get great camping gear at one of the many Modell’s—a New York sports/fitness/ outdoors emporium with bargain-basement prices. Small propane tanks, the kind you hooked up to your Coleman stove or lantern, cost less than two bucks.

The camping year for the Campers Group began with Memorial Day weekend, when it was still fairly frigid in the hills, to mid-October, although a few hardy souls sometimes extended it to late fall. We were mostly creatures of comfort. In winter months, missing the group experience, we’d meet for dim sum in Chinatown or a museum or gallery adventure or one of the city’s other delights on a Sunday afternoon.

One chilly Sunday afternoon we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge together and ate in Chinatown. Another time I led a group walk through Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens, across a pedestrian bridge to Roosevelt Island, and, after looping the island, back to Astoria to dine at one of the many Greek restaurants. One summer solstice day we donned sea-themed costumes and joined the Mermaid Parade at Coney Island.

One Halloween we made different costumes and walked in the Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village. That summer the big Vincent Van Gogh exhibit had been the news at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The fellow camper I was dating had red hair and a beard and he put on an artist’s smock, carried a palette full of paints and bandaged his ear, placing a plastic fake ear with smears of red on the paint palette. The crowd laughed and cheered him on. “Wrong ear!” someone yelled. He’d forgotten he was looking in a mirror when he dressed.

The structure of Campers’ Group was simple. We’d schedule a camping trip pretty much every weekend and someone from the group would volunteer to reserve the campsites and take the reservations from whoever called during the week. On-site, that person was the point-person who would try to make it all go smoothly. It was so uncomplicated it pretty much ran itself. A good percentage of our group car-pooled and chipped in for gas. Getting passengers to the site was a good way to make friends.

We remained a loosely structured group. There were spring planning meetings, and a “president” who was computer savvy at a time before most of us were who sent out the newsletters: David Levner, who lived on the lower east side in a tall apartment building. I don’t recall if at one point we switched from postal-mailed to email calendars. Probably we did.

Some of us were more determined to explore the singles aspect and dated other members. Some were just friends. Romantic attachments formed and flourished or petered out and reformed. Through it all, the camping remained the constant.

I moved to Washington, DC and then back to the Big Apple and reconnected with the group for a while. Then went back upstate and lost touch again. For many seasons, I got busy being a workaholic and work-related travel had me sleeping in hotel beds and ordering room service instead of cooking over a campfire.

I didn’t go camping, or even want to, until the fifth month of the pandemic lockdown. Now camping is all I can think about. Maybe it’s the idea of finding kindred souls and laughing together in nature. Maybe it’s knowing that you can do something fun with people and eventually even become their friend.

A while back I Googled Campers Group, NYC, just to see if they were still around. The group, my group, came up and looked the same as I remembered, only bigger and better-organized. Photos of some recent trips showed some faces I recognized. Older, now, as I am older. But it gave me a jolt of much-needed joy to see the group still exists.

They’re still scheduling events, now with necessary COVID-19 requirements and precautions. Their meetup page says there are over 2300 members. I’m not camping quite yet, but it’s definitely a part of my future. Maybe one spring day I’ll check out one of their trips.