For two summers, I was on staff at Boy Scout Camp Tula on Lake Greeson in western Arkansas. It was wonderfully rustic. We slept in tents and padded about in our hand-sewn moccasins, up and down the hilly trails on the fragrant pine needles. Dark was really dark, so we could pick out the constellations on most nights. Paw prints were all over the muddy stream banks. We’d stage Indian dances around bonfires and go skinny dipping to wash off the greasepaint after the guests had left.  There was a lot of Hiawatha going on.

But it only worked because we were bolstered by technologies at every hand. The camp jeep brought us canned beans and ground beef wrapped in cellophane. The dining hall stoves and refrigerators were state of the art. The wooden platforms on which our tents sat were made of wood planed in mills. My moccasin parts were stamped out at a tannery, and the box they came in derived from paper mills. The dyes that adorned it came from who knows where and were exactingly applied in four-color presses.

One of my jobs was to take nascent scouts further out in the sticks for an on-the-ground overnighter. We cooked over fires of our own construction, wrapping our culinary concoctions in foil, which had come from bauxite mines employing massive shoveling machines. The ore had been refined in huge electric cookers and spent time as “pigs” waiting for their reduction in rolling mills.

Down at the waterfront, we learned to canoe in aluminum Grumman craft (more bauxite), paddling here and there on a lake formed by Narrows Dam on the Little Missouri River, generating millions of kilowatt hours. Now and then we’d catch a glimpse of some attractive girl skiing by behind an Evinrude motor attached to a fiberglass speedboat, running on fuel drawn from far below ground by roughnecks operating rigs in the wilderness.

And then there were the plastic radios, where we heard the latest Beatle songs, which were somehow brought to us by a chain of electronic magic thousands of miles from England. And if we cut ourselves, we had bottles of hydrogen peroxide and iodine to rescue us from infection, treatments prepared by pharmaceutical labs, which drew on centuries of chemistry.

So yes, “the woods were lovely dark and deep,” but I thank God these Tula woods were nested in a deep technological context.