There’s a vibe that rolls through Kamp Happiness. Maybe it’s from the musicians playing beneath the pop-up tents, or the friends gathered close. Maybe it’s the crew sitting ‘round the campfire, drinks and guitars in hand.
Or maybe it’s just the welcome calling out from the darkness when we happened upon Kamp Happiness late the first night of Suwannee Roots Revival back in October.
“Come on in,” a woman’s voice beckoned. And on in we came.
We’ve grown accustomed to being welcomed into all sorts of campsites and gatherings. Festival goers are way chill that way. We play host ourselves amid RoadtripMojo’s two trailers – Bertha and Mr. Charlie – surrounded by the dozen or so tapestries that ring our sites. They’re not walls to keep folk out as much as they’re mood setters to encourage curiosity. And we’re quick to make friends along the paths and trails leading to the festival grounds and next set.
But a set up like Kamp Happiness is different, in ways co-founder Katie Walthall never could have envisioned it would become.
It started when Katie, her then-husband, and their best friends – Deadheads Ed Egger and wife, Terry, whom Katie met working at a Cape Canaveral hospital – pitched camp in the woods one weekend and called it Kamp Happiness.
In time, the husband became an ex, and Katie and friends were joined by others – Ed and Moose, Shmitty and Jason Nail among others – keen to hoist the banner. Strangers – musicians, writers, the marketing guy “Royal” who works the Kamp’s social media – have become family.
Some, Katie’s proud to say, have blossomed before her eyes. She’s thinking about Victoria, not quite 21 at the time she walked through the tapestries, who arrived alone at last year’s Springfest at Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park. She poked her head in and meekishly asked, “Can I hang out in here?”
“We said, ‘Of course you can,” Katie recalls.
When Victoria showed up the next and asked permission to come in, Katie’s crew set her straight. “We said, ‘Honey, you’re part of it now.’”
No longer some wallflower, Victoria’s part of a crew that can grow to dozens, depending on the festival.
“We just keep adopting more people,” says Katie, who goes by “Kamp Happiness Co-Founder and Kindness Ambassador.”
“Some of these people have no place to be. They come up beside us and we say, ‘Come on in. Be part of it,” she says. “For me, spreading the love is just as important as the good music.”
It wasn’t always this way. Katie’s stressed-out spirit was calling for a release. After arriving with her S.O. in Cocoa Beach, Florida, in 2001, Katie took a job at the cath lab at a local hospital. That’s where she met Terry, doing “high-stress, life-saving stuff,” she says. “So when you want to decompress, you go into the woods and have campfires.”
Soon, Kamp Happiness emerged, as much a destination as a departure. In time, it grew to have sit-in jam sessions, campfire circles, even a “formal night,” where peeps dressed up like some Goodwill prom, “let loose, and got silly,” Katie says. “Being in a high-stress job, I needed a way to let loose.”
In 2011, the foursome hit what was Katie’s first Wanee Music Festival, or at least her “first ever major festival going as an adult without my folks,” she says. The park, the North Florida wilderness, the music, the people, “We were just blown away immediately.”
“The festival vibe just sucked me in right way,” she recalls. “‘Kamp Happiness’ was always inside me, but I never had a venue or comfortable place where people would cheer you on. Being accepted, hugging and hanging with strangers right and left. Just being able to be yourself. You can just let your freak flag fly.”
Music and camping have always been part of Walthall family life. As kids, Katie recalls tenting on Virginia beaches. Her mom was a blues and bluegrass musician and a fixture at fiddler conventions. The influence rubbed off. Katie’s Pandora teems with bluegrass, Americana, and bands like CSNY, the Grateful Dead, and Simon & Garfunkel.
“My Pandora must think I’m about 70,” jokes Katie, who often plays guitar on the Kamp’s stage or music circle.
About a decade ago, Katie’s little sister got her into backpacking and hiking. Then, last April, Katie quit her job, left her husband, moved back to Roanoke, and its rich live music scene, and set out to explore her own life. She hiked 257 miles of the Appalacian Trail, from the Virginia border back to Roanoke. She took a run up to the Canadian border, and did some hiking, photography, and fly fishing in the Green Mountains of New Hampshire.
For six grand, Katie scored a 2003 Chevy Express 1500 all-wheel-drive van she found on CraigsList in Richmond 130 miles away. She pulled the seats, built a platform she fit with a 50%-off Bed Bath and Beyond memory foam pad mattress topper, and dropped in a footlocker she landed at Goodwill.
She “got all domesticated” and sewed some curtains, and turned “Bertha” into her roadtrippin’ rig.
Next up: Katie’s thinking she’ll take her RN career on the road as a traveling nurse, signing on for 13-week stints wherever the open road – and great festivals, and possible gigs as credentialled media writing about fests for her blog and others – are calling.
Wherever she goes, festivals will be on the agenda. She might head south for the Everglades Roots Festival in Ochopee, Florida, or maybe Suwannee Spring Reunion, or return to RoosterWalk, where last year Kamp Happiness played host to her sister’s marriage to her wife.
She’s planning to hit this year’s Floyd Fest in the Virginia mountains near where Katie was raised. There’s Soulshine Farm Music Festival on Green Mountain, North Carolina, and Wormtown Festival at Camp KeeWanee in Greenfield, Massachusetts, created by the folks who run festival outfitter Wormtown Trading.
Maybe she’ll head west to one of Colorado’s bluegrass fests, or to Red Rocks, where a guy she met at Floyd Fest works and lives three miles down the road. San Francisco sounds nice. And then there’s those giant redwoods she’s read about.
“It’s limitless,” she says. “I’ll just take my time and kind of let the road lead me somewhere.”
So next time you’re at a festival and Kamp Happiness has pitched camp, stop by. At night, you’re likely to hear some folks picking. Some mornings, they might have quiche or pancakes and “redneck mimosas” or Momostangs (champagne, Tang, and sometimes whatever is left on the bar – mason jar optional).
You’ll definitely feel Katie’s vibe.
“Kamp Happiness is so important to me because this is the way I see the world, this is the vibe I try to project to the universe,” she says. “I’ve met so many young kids new to the scene who come into camp uncertain and shy to hang out and leave the festival with renewed confidence in themselves and their place in the world and all it takes is a little love, acceptance and kindness and it makes my heart glow to see it happen. Isn’t that what we all want?”