But then, the DOW and NASDAQ took a beating this past week, on some shaky retail, housing, and employment numbers. And then, GM joined Chrysler in announcing the closing of vast swaths of automotive dealerships, not a good sign for an industry that constitutes about 4% of the total US GDP. The real estate bubble and mortgage crisis continue to proceed at breathtaking pace, with one in 159 housing units in he US receiving a foreclosure notice in the first three months of 2009. Obama's $75 billion homeowner rescue program is making some headway, but at best, it is a stopgap measure designed to stem the bleeding from a serious wound to the culture of the American Dream. And meanwhile, the current administration still has to wade through the kudzu-like muck that Bush and company left strewn across the geopolitical landscape, from torture to terror to never-ending conflict in the shifting sands of Mesopotamia. Oh yeah, and we're going to be treated to the ideological spectacle of a Supreme Court Justice appointment, with all of the accompanying grandstanding, fetus-saving, and sodomy-bashing. That should be fun.

It is in this maelstrom of economic and cultural meltdown that we find ourselves, and it is no wonder that you can see the strained, sicky-sweet look on faces everywhere, as we mentally yearn ahead for picnics, school vacations, baseball games on the radio, and the simple pleasures of throwaway paperback novels. Maybe, just maybe, the summer holds something as positive for our national outlook as it does for the individual psyche. This may not be a big deal in warmer climes, but it is certainly the zeitgeist here in New England.

I don't know what the summer holds on the economic front, but there just might be something in this glorious season that can serve as a guide for life on the downslope of Peak Oil: summer camp. I never went to summer camp myself when I was a kid, but during my college years, I was a counselor at a residential camp on the shores of a beautiful Finger Lake in Western New York. This was a camp run by the Catholic Church, but it was not a "religious" camp, per se. We did have regular mass services (once a week, I believe), and there was a time each day devoted to a spiritual subject. But the whole vibe in that area was open, inclusive, and kind of hip. The religious aspect was downplayed. In general, this was just a regular summer camp, with swimming, sailing, capture the flag, campfires, and S'mores.

I consider my time at this summer camp to be one of the peak experiences of my life. I was a counselor for a few summers, and I also worked one off-year in the maintenance department for the camp, preparing and cleaning up after off-season groups, and fixing up cabins for the following summer. The most noticeable aspect of the camp experience was the sheer intensity of collective living. Camp is a truly tribal setting, with a couple hundred kids and adults living in tight quarters. We ate, slept, played, worshiped, and worked together. I know that summer camp doesn't really seem like "work," but it most definitely is, in the purest sense of the word, as exhausted campers and counselors through the years can attest. 

I remember we had a saying back then, that the rest of the year only exists to link the summers together. And that is truly how it seemed. Each weekend, when most of the staff vacated the camp for a quick overnight getaway at their homes or co-couselors' homes, the difference between the "outside" world and camp life was stark. The intensity level of the regular world seemed much too low, and we counselors tended to just stick together for that off-night. Once you had immersed yourself in the collective life of the camp, you just didn't want to be with anyone else. The end of the summer was really a dark time, as the magnificent closeness of camp faded away, and the dull thudding of the workaday world pounded its way back into the psyche. We counselors desperately tried to maintain the beauty of our experience throughout the year, by staying in close touch with each other for as long as possible. But eventually, simple separation did its inevitable work, and the collective magic was gone until the following summer.

It's been a long time since I last set foot on a summer camp, probably 15 years or so. But I still remember it like it was yesterday. The physical layout of the camp is embedded in my mind as a kind of spatial template, and my dreams still sometimes play out on that landscape by the lake. Recently, thanks to the magic of Facebook, I have reconnected with some of my old camp friends, and the tribal, group identity is still there, a connection forged out of sleeping on crummy metal bunks, eating scads of mediocre food, and performing ridiculous skits in front of the campfire. It takes just a well-placed phrase or two to bring wonderful memories flooding back, and the melancholy of nostalgia that comes with them.

I remember telling some of my fellow counselors, back in the day, that regular life needed to be more like camp. People obviously thrived on the close-knit living arrangements, so why shouldn't we live that way all the time? There is a kind of alchemy in collective living, a force melding work and play that has no equivalent in the current social form of One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling. What makes this such an interesting model for the Post-Peak Oil landscape is the low consumption nature of camp culture. We lived a completely fulfilling, satisfying life, with very limited material throughput. We did not watch a lot of TV. We did not go to the mall. We did not engage in relentless comparisons of each others' loot. We didn't even have any real personal space in which to gain complete privacy. We survived mostly by working with and enjoying each other. We played games, told stories, taught each other skills, and generally spent a lot of time just goofing around. In that respect, camp life was very similar to the tribal situation of hunter gatherers.

Anthropologists have consistently found, despite the myth of the desperate and starving savage, that tribal societies spend a large majority of their time just lounging around and shooting the shit. Food gathering and hunting proper only requires a few hours out of the week. The rest of the time, "work" is seamlessly woven into a leisurely pace of story-telling, teaching, joking, and basic lazing about. And of course, tribal societies are generally bereft of material possessions, as they are a hindrance to physical mobility. And yet these cultures are, as camp culture was for me, profoundly satisfying. The intensity and gratification that come from close-knit community is in our genes, and is indeed our appropriate social setting.

Compare this camp and tribal style to the characteristics of our current consumptive setup. Much of the economic activity of the last 40 years has been geared towards creating a living arrangement (suburbia) that isolates us from our fellow human beings. Then, to make up for that deficit, for that community-shaped vacuum, we purchase prodigious amounts of crap, which quickly loses its luster. We binge on food to the point of pandemic obesity. We watch endless hours of canned entertainment, much of which is simply a pale, sit-com reflection of our disappeared community settings. Then, because none of this is quite satisfying, we dip ourselves into vats of stimulants, narcotics, depressants, anti-depressants, and boner-pills. We fill our restless, distracted kids with all manner of drug to keep them sedate, behaved, and "normal." The resulting American populace is thus anxious, angry, depressed, and rootless, susceptible to all manner of distraction, ingnorance, bigotry, and political manipulation.

In short, I would describe the larger portion of our schlock-ridden culture as a kind of macro-prosthesis for lost collectivity. We are trying to consume our way out of a communal and natural deficit (see this post for more on our isolation from the natural world). We have split our work lives from our dwelling places. We have separated our children's life-spaces (schools) from the adult world. We have shattered the ability to weave together work, play, learning, and teaching in the same physical place. We are thus left with an overly expensive, extremely inefficient, ecologically destructive, and hyper-consumptive pseudo-substitute for what we should have: a vibrant, close-knit social form, high on interpersonal activity and low on conspicuous consumption. The result of our current arrangements is, of course, what I have described earlier as Concentric Circles of Collapse. The only solution to our ills, and the only way to attack all of our problems at the same time, is a culture that much more closely reflects the values and lifeways of Summer Camp. We need real, solid, permanent community, the whole year round.