There's a hundred illegal erections in the hills behind my parents' house

If you're a native English speaker, you know what "tramp" means. If you're not, you can read the wikipedia article, but also look up "tramp stamp" to get a different, more contemporary meaning. Neither is particularly helpful here though.

If you're in Czechia or Slovakia, it means something else altogether. "Tramping" describes a hobby and an identity that strongly relates to woodcraft, Scouting and perhaps a romanticized version of the old-school hobo life. Basically tramps are a loose community of people who like to walk through the forests, sleep outside, sing songs around the fire, usually drink, all the while respecting the nature and each other.

The part that I want to write about, though, is more interesting: their camps. Semi- or entirely illegal hidden spots in the forest, built and maintained by volunteers and free for use by anybody who finds them and behaves.

The community has existed for over 100 years and what helped it quite bit were oppressive regimes - first Nazis and then especially communists. People liked to escape the everyday atmosphere of oppression in the towns and disconnect from it in the countryside, where they could feel truly free for a couple of days.

When you want to sleep in the forest, you can of course just use a tarp and a sleeping bag anywhere, but there's a much more comfortable way: tramp camps. Some are legalized, with private ownership, and these days often contain your standard countryside cottages. But the majority is not. Popular tramping areas are full of spots that range from just a campfire with a couple of logs to sit on, through many places that contain comfortable benches and a wooden sleeping platform with a tarp-covered roof, to full-on small log cabins.

Some of these, mostly the bare campfire spots, are easy to find and near main trails. Others, especially the log cabins, tend to be hidden. There are no public maps. The more hidden they are, the more helpful stuff they tend to contain: a saw for making firewood, various pots for cooking and also for carrying water to douse the fire, a fire grate, sometimes even shelf-stable condiments, books, more comfortable sleeping arrangements... And most have a visitor's logbook too.

The beauty here is that all of those are free to use for anyone who finds them, and many of them are also completely illegal. I'm not sure what the rules are specifically in standard forests (though as far as I know making a fire is illegal even in those), but many tramp camps are in protected forests as well. This may sound bad, and sometimes it is. But many of the camps existed for decades before the environmental protection was established, and the people using them tend to not cause issues, so they're usually tolerated.

A large group of people of all ages that isn't organized in any way and merely like doing what they do has spent countless hours working to build and maintain these spots - just to bring joy not only to themselves and their friends, but also to other people they've never met.

It all relies on two things. First, the locations of these spots will only be shared privately or found by people who care and make the minimal effort to find them, and therefore are unlikely to abuse them. Second, the authorities know this too and therefore have no reason to interfere even where law says they should.

I love these instances of systems that work entirely without the involvement of any official structures, based on trust among completely unknown people, only protected by minimal gatekeeping. What they're doing could be harmful to the environment if they were selfish or irresponsible, but they're neither, so it has worked for a century.

Their image has some specifics

Oh, and there's one more thing that may seem cute to people from north America. Tramp culture used to almost idolize some small parts of US and to a smaller degree Canadian history and culture. This was understandable - the freedom of living in the wilderness of old-timey North America or in the wild west as known from literature and Western films felt like the complete antithesis to living under the oppression of soviet-style communism. But it often brought things that in retrospect may seem cute, a bit silly or even wrong.

For example every legalized and permanent tramp village had a leader who would settle disputes etc., called a sheriff. Unfortunately, those people were often targets of the communist secret police, trying to break them to snitch on their friends. Many camps have vaguely foreign names, or names inspired by real places in the US or Canada. I remember a camp called "Ontarko", a diminutive of Ontario.

But aside from western symbols like clothes, cow skulls etc., sometimes some Native American imagery or military references (tramps to this day like older versions of US Army backpacks) you would also often see Confederate flags.

These days they're almost gone, but you may still encounter them among old tramps. In the pre-internet era, with heavily censored information coming from the west, they were often seen simply as a symbol of rebellion, freedom and independence. American Civil War was barely understood here, and almost nobody saw the negative connotations that many people in the West immediately perceive today.

Why am I writing this now?

One of the prime tramping locations is around the area where my parents live, and every time I visit I take a bike to ride into the hills and then walk around interesting potential spots - near streams and springs, on steep hill sides farther away from paths, behind unusually dense patches of forest etc. So far I have found around 7 of them nearby (and probably 10 others elsewhere). It's like a game of geocaching that, instead of just giving you a virtual point, grants you a new place you can grill sausages and then sleep in, often times quite beautiful too.

Unfortunately, the fact that many of the spots are on protected land and therefore illegal has one obvious downside: it would just take one person with a lot of time and energy to start pressuring the authorities to remove them, even if they don't want to.

Quite honestly, some of the camps are a bit much. Log cabins partially covered in creosote (preserves wood but is quite far from eco friendly), with store-bought doors, on protected land... Yeah. I can see why somebody would have a problem with that. This is a small minority though.

As often happens, the one person unfortunately eventually appeared and started pushing for the removal of all of those camps. He's a journalist known mainly for being contrarian and combative. There are some minor aspects of tramping that are clearly too much as mentioned above, and others that are clearly up for discussion, but this is not his approach: his work feels truly personal, fueled by hostility towards the whole subculture, ego, and an unwillingness to understand why these places matter to people.

His communication is spiteful, full of juvenile snark, including things like mockingly misspelling tramp slang. He (or possibly some accomplice) also uses dirty tactics like mapping the camps and then anonymously publishing the maps online and in smartphone apps, where the pretense is "democratizing access to the camps", but the real intent is to remove the gatekeeping so that people who do not care about nature start using the camps, leaving a mess and causing issues, which forces authorities to act.

Unfortunately it works. In the most popular protected area many of the camps have been removed, others are scheduled for removal. Just a few camps are planned to be legalized with some conditions, despite his demands, at least.

So far this only concerns the protected areas, the hills behind my parents' house should be safe for now. Most of the forests around there are privately owned, which may or may not help when he tries to target them in the future. I hope it does. The mapping of the area is already slowly starting though.

I'm giving you some crude phone photos of the camps I or other people have found. I really want you to imagine the feeling of walking around the beautiful temperate forests of central Europe and knowing that these places are probably somewhere around you and they are free for you to use and enjoy, if you just find them and leave them in the same state after using them. They're not alpine cabins intended for survival, they are purely for enjoyment with your friends, family or alone.

A couple examples

I wish I could share more, but I only started taking photos of them relatively recently, and there are a couple that I'm not comfortable sharing even anonymously here.

Here's a tiny gallery

And here's a video of my band playing a very old tramp song from 1939 (yeah, I know what I say below) in another one - a big campfire with a half-circle of benches around it, likely established by a local scout troop.

I am not a member of the subculture, I am not a tramp. I hate the music they traditionally play, I don't like cheap rum and I don't have that much in common with many of them. But I have a lot of respect for their traditions and the beauty of the whole concept is that I can experience some of it on my own terms.

I can only hope that in the future, when the one majorly disliked person pushing for their removal no longer has the strength to do what he does, the camps will gradually get rebuilt and the tradition will recover in some way.

(no, I will not address the clickbait elephant in the title)