Who are the real campers? Through-hiking backpackers traversing the Appalachian Trail? The family in an SUV making a tour of national parks and sleeping in tents at campgrounds? People committed to the RV lifestyle who move their homes from state to state as season and whim dictate? Terence Young would say: all of the above. Camping is one of the country's most popular pastimes—tens of millions of Americans go camping every year. Whether on foot, on horseback, or in RVs, campers have been enjoying themselves for well more than a century, during which time camping’s appeal has shifted and evolved. In Heading Out, Young takes readers into nature and explores with them the history of camping in the United States.Young shows how camping progressed from an impulse among city-dwellers to seek temporary retreat from their exhausting everyday surroundings to a form of recreation so popular that an industry grew up around it to provide an endless supply of ever-lighter and more convenient gear. Young humanizes camping’s history by spotlighting key figures in its development and a sampling of the campers and the variety of their excursions. Readers will meet William H. H. Murray, who launched a craze for camping in 1869; Mary Bedell, who car camped around America for 12,000 miles in 1922; William Trent Jr., who struggled to end racial segregation in national park campgrounds before World War II; and Carolyn Patterson, who worked with the U.S. Department of State in the 1960s and 1970s to introduce foreign service personnel to the "real" America through trailer camping. These and many additional characters give readers a reason to don a headlamp, pull up a chair beside the campfire, and discover the invigorating and refreshing history of sleeping under the stars.

テレンス・ヤングが描く本書は、単なる趣味の変遷史ではなく、都市の喧騒に疲弊した人々が野生を通して魂を再定義しようとした壮大な精神の漂流記です。便利なギアの進化のみならず、人種隔離との闘いや未知への渇望といった濃密なドラマを織り交ぜ、キャンプという行為に潜む自由への意志を鮮やかに炙り出しています。 歴史を彩る先駆者たちの情熱的な足跡を辿ることで、読者は星空の下に眠る哲学的意義を追体験します。自然の中で真の自己を回復しようとする切実な祈りが叙事詩のように綴られており、ページをめくるたび、あなたの心にも温かな焚き火が灯るはずです。