Stone tool year, 1977, in the extreme northeast corner of Oregon. That's an elk antler I'm using to grub out the rocks and debris from the bed area in the teepee I'm making. There's a stone axe leaning against the teepee pole to the left. I realize that the impending apocalypse will not really put us back in the Stone Age. Any time our descendants want a piece of steel they can just chip away at some concrete artifact, and a steel reinforcing bar will soon appear. Making and using stone tools is a psychological thing. You prove to yourself that you do not need the factories or any other vestige of civilization. It really gives you a sense of self reliance.
I apologize for the long period of inactivity of this blog. I'm not online. I can't get online where I'm at, if that's any excuse. However, I've just started publishing some of my writings as e-Books for Amazon's Kindle reader, and in the book advertisements I mention this blog as a means of introducing myself, so I'd better bring it back to life.
Gypsy, 1990. That's her foal, Nomad, in back of her. Gypsy was the first mustang I bought at the BLM Wild Horse Corral in Burns, Oregon. Wild horses cost 75 dollars each then, and young foals were thrown in free.
Gypsy had never had a rope on her before, and you can see how she's fighting the training box (see post 24). BLM vaccinates and freeze brands all the mustangs, but they run them through a squeeze chute to do that. I put the halter and lead rope on Gypsy with her in the BLM squeeze chute and took her back to the ranch in the trailer at the left edge of the photo.
After Gypsy wore herself out fighting the training box I tied her right next to the box--with her nose touching it--and started working with her head. In less then one hour she was eating hay out of our hands in the nervous, compulsive, manner horses have under such stress.
Gypsy was two years old, just the right age to work with, and she was a very intelligent horse, easy to train--unlike the six-year-old set-in-her-wild-ways Maude (see posts 12, 18, 24, and 30) I had worked with the year before. I have more photos of Gypsy, illustrating different aspects of training, for later posts.
post 37, Squaring INTEGRITY's mast. See also posts 03, 09, 17, 22, and 27. INTEGRITY is in the background and it looks like she already had a mast, but that was a telephone pole in back of her. She also looks smaller than she really was. She was 30 feet long and ten-foot beam. Just right for a live aboard that one man could handle.
The photo of post 17 shows us horsing the fresh-cut log down the hill. In this photo I'm making saw cuts to a profile I've chalked out on the log. Then I used an axe to chip out the waste between the cuts to make the log square. Later I made the mast eight-sided and finally draw-knifed it round. All healthy exercise on a beautiful day.
post 36, Cooking Basket
Cooking basket made on canoe survival trek, 1987. See also posts 01, 13, 20 and 28. When you're forced to get by with minimum gear--or no gear--you can do quite a bit of basic cooking by putting the food--small pieces of meat skewered on slender sticks or pancake shaped pieces of bread dough or whole tubers like potatoes--directly on hot coals. However, that method wastes valuable fat that drips off of the meat. It also is not suitable for boiling a porridge of crushed grain (grass seed of one variety or another).
The best way to conserve nutrients, such as the fat on meat or the vitamin and mineral rich skin on a tuber, is to boil the food. If you don't have a metal pot with you and don't have a soapstone mine handy for carving a soapstone cooking pot like some Eskimos did, you can still make a cooking pot out of a tightly coiled basket or a carefully crafted wooden box. Making a tightly fitted plank cooking box is probably beyond the patience and skill of most amateur abo buffs but anyone can make a tightly coiled basket that will do the job. (You boil water in the box with hot rocks just like in the basket.)
The basket in the photo has a coil made with a finger-diameter bundle of the soft inner bark of sagebrush. Sagebrush doesn't grow on the islands of the lower Columbia (I happened to carry some I had gathered at the Glass Buttes Knap-In earlier) but cottonwood inner bark would have worked just as well. The sagebrush coil is very tightly sewn to the preceding coil of itself with the inner bark of willow. The willow sewing bark goes completely around the coil being added, but it goes through the middle of the preceding coil. For a needle I used a slender stick with a split at the rear to accept the end of the willow bark.
No matter how tightly you sew the basket it will still need waterproofing on the inside. Pine pitch is the waterproof material, but it's much too runny when it's hot to seal the leaks. You have to add finely powdered charcoal to give it body.
An important matter is that you must make sure all the turpentine is driven out of the pitch before you use it in the basket. Otherwise the terrible taste of turpentine will make the basket unsuitable for cooking or storing edibles. To get rid of the turpentine, heat a rock very hot and then put a lump of pitch on a more or less concave surface of the rock. As the pitch sizzles and boils, the volatile turpentine will be driven out. Then pour the hot pitch into the basket and add some powdered charcoal. You may have to do that a few times to accumulate enough waterproofing material. When you hope you have enough pitch in the basket you put in a couple of very hot hen egg-sized rocks and tilt the basket back and forth to roll the rocks around in order to melt and smear the waterproofing pitch and charcoal around thoroughly.
Of course you can't use the basket directly over a fire. You put the water and food to be boiled in the basket and then add a couple of red-hot rocks. After the rocks transmit their heat to the water you fish them out and add a couple more red-hot rocks. It is a bit tedious for someone used to an electric stove and stainless steel cookware, but the system does work--it brings the soup or porridge to a boil--and it does conserve most of the nutrients originally in the food.
Early morning on
roundup day, 1988. See also posts 02, 04, and 08. In the southeast corner of Oregon the event and the photo would have been the same 100 years ago, but the photo wouldn't have come out in color.
I really enjoyed working alongside the cowboys, and I sincerely appreciate the fact that they allowed me to. Mark Twain once said, "Clothes make the man" but he was dead wrong. No amount of fancy clothes are going to make a cowboy.
Rebuilding the L shaped porch of the Deveroux's farmhouse, winter of 1988-89. When winter set in I left my burros and mustangs at the ranch in the southeast of Oregon where I had been training Maude (see posts 12, 18, 24 and 30), and I came back to Brownsmeade in the northwest corner. The porch I'm rebuilding was shown in the photo of post 03 that depicted packsaddles being constructed the year before. The roof of the porch was still good and is here shown being propped up by four by four timbers so that I could remove the rotten bottom portion and lay in a proper foundation for the new porch.
Civilization/agriculture is destroying Nature, there's no doubt about that, and when I take any civilized job at all I clearly recognize that I am being one of the Zombies mindlessly doing the destruction. Every inch of concrete poured is an inch of ugly dead scab depriving the earth of life. What is really weird is that we feel proud of doing a good job at whatever Nature-destroying endeavor we are currently involved with even as we realize the hypocrisy of it.
All "higher" animals, such as us mammals, are each a mechanical machine of bone and muscle directed and controlled by an electro-chemical computer brain. But by a most unfortunate quirk of evolution the human version of the computer is hardwired from birth in a manner that has become sadly destructive to Mother Nature--to the total mass of interdependent symbiotic life on earth.
The essay "In Opposition to Civilization" serialized in the first 16 posts of this blog delve into the phenomenon in more detail. I have other writings I may serialize later. The photo above is an admission that I'm as guilty as anyone else. A guy has to eat. You adjust your brain to Zombie-time and do whatever you gotta do to earn the groceries until your next brief escape from the rat race.
But take heart. Civilization is hurrying as fast as it can to destroy itself. After it collapses and the six billion Zombies become fertilizer a new wilderness, a new Mother Nature, will rebuild itself. If we, and our descendents, are strong enough, and versatile enough, to survive the transition there is always hope that the human brain will mutate yet again (I am sure there are already mutated individuals lost in the crowd) and humans will cease being a cancerous sickness to the symbiotic mass of interrelated species we call Mother Nature. Spontaneous remission of a cancer is possible.
THE GUEST ROOM, the dinghy for COMPROMISE, 1992. See also posts 01, 02, 05, 11, 19 and 25. The preeminent characteristic of a good practical dinghy is that she must have stability. With a four-foot beam and a flat bottom, THE GUEST ROOM was wonderfully stable under even the worst conditions. She became a veritable ferry when loaded with guests and provisions.
Her bottom and seats were three-eighths marine ply and the sides were one-quarter inch. One man could carry her. The front and aft seats were filled with Styrofoam to ensure lifesaving floatation even if badly holed. There were two by four sled runners on the bottom for dragging her up gravelly beaches. Those sled runners had hand holds cut in them so if the dinghy ever did capsize in rough seas a guy would have something to grab onto, and he would have a chance of righting her again. THE GUEST ROOM normally lived upside down athwart the aft deck of COMPROMISE on timbers secured there. In that position she was a convenient day bed, and the sled runners became rails to hold the occupant secure.
In the photo the brackets are not yet installed for the removable rowing seat in the center. With that center seat removed, as shown, the flat floor between fore and aft seats was four feet by six and a half feet, which made an adequate bed for a friendly couple. The dinghy, turned upright at her stern deck position, and with an improvised army poncho covering, could then be used as a guest room. She could also be used as a bedroom on the water or drug ashore on an island.
COMPROMISE was designed specifically for gunk holing the vast shallow waters of the lower Columbia while I tried to learn survival lore, both Stone Age and modern. Of course I ran aground on a few occasions. There are horrific tides and tidal currents near the mouth of the Columbia. THE GUEST ROOM normally lived upside down athwart the aft deck of COMPROMISE where she was secured by two ropes, half-inch diameter nylon, fed through the runner handholds and tied with quick release knots. If COMPROMISE ran aground, I would yank those knots loose and flip THE GUEST ROOM into the water where she would land right side up and still secured by stern lines. I would position the big fisherman kedge anchor in the dinghy's sculling notch and hastily row it out, the half-inch nylon anchor rope feeding smoothly out of a gunnysack on the deck of COMPROMISE. With a hell-for-stout homemade winch on the foredeck of COMPROMISE I was then always able to winch COMPROMISE to deeper water.
The key was speed. The system was designed specifically for that.
The photo shows THE GUEST ROOM being built in the loft of the barn where I was building COMPROMISE. The barn made an ideal boat shop. This was another example of wonderful people helping a guy achieve his dreams. I did some plumbing and put in a new electrical service entrance for the owner, a single middle-aged lady. She allowed me use of the barn and adjoining area, and for a while I housesat while she traveled across country visiting relatives.
post 10
Tar Baby and Charlie Brown taking a rest, 1988. Tar Baby has the black
muzzle, possible because of his inbred status. They are not confined in
any way--and we're in the middle of nowhere in the southeast corner of
Oregon's High Desert. If your wellbeing is dependent on others, animals
or people, it is wise to have a good relationship with those others--and
to understand the limits of that relationship.
Gentle Ben, the oldest of the three brothers, is not in the photo--and
he does have a rope on him. Whenever Ben was not confined he would
methodically start walking toward "home" with his two siblings trailing
right behind. Where Ben considered home was diagonally clear across the
state in the northwest corner. The one time Ben got loose I had to
track them for a couple of miles before I caught up with them. But they
were not trying to escape from me. If they had been I never could have
caught them.
As you can see in the photo, grass is scarce in the desert, and it's a
very big advantage if you can let your animals roam free to find their
own. Then to catch them again, it helps if you have a little treat to
give them. I like to have everything I carry serve multiple purposes.
Instead of carrying oats for the burros, I just carried flour for making
ash bread that both the burros and I liked.
To make ash bread, you open your flour sack and make a little
depression, like a cup, in the flour. You pour a little water in that
depression and then stir the water and adjacent flour into a thick
dough. You then work that dough (coating it with dry flour if it's
sticky) into a disc maybe a quarter of an inch thick and four or five
inches in diameter. You scrape the burning wood of your campfire to one
side and lay the disc on the hot ashes where the fire just was. You
then scrape some more hot ashes, with a few live coals, onto the top of
the disc. If you started with a small "Indian" fire, like I often use,
you may want to repeat the cooking procedure, moving the burning wood
again and turning the disc over in the process.
The only ingredients are flour and water. You do not add any grease or
shortening. That would make dirt stick to the bread. The dry bread is
remarkable clean after cooking and shaking the ashes off. A few ashes
won't hurt you at all. The bread is kind of a hard cracker, but it's
good and it keeps forever.
If you don't have store-bought flour several starchy food plants of the
wilderness can be dried thoroughly and pounded with rocks as mortar and
pestle into suitable flour. Experiment to minimize adding rock dust to
the flour. Biscuitroot was the most available and suitable plant in the
High Desert, but the starchy root is only easy to find during the few
wet weeks in early spring when carrot type leaves and yellow umbel
flowers reveal its location. The rest of the year you have to have
sharp eyes and hunt for the tiny and inconspicuous withered seed stalk which will
be the only visible remnant of the plant. (Caution--some relatives of
this plant are deadly poisonous.)
The ash bread did not form a significant amount of the burro's food at
all. I just gave them a little bite, maybe an inch square, and not
every day. But that bite made them feel that I loved them--and I did.
And I never had any trouble walking right up to them, wherever they
were, and putting their halters on.
-----------------------------
Installment ten of:
IN OPPOSITION TO CIVILIZATION
by Andy Van't Hul
When examined from a species extinction point of view, the invention of
gunpowder was certainly one of the most damaging and dreadful
innovations ever conceived of. The very first time an application of
fire caused a mix of chemicals to explode forcefully, the experimenter
should have instantly received a sustained shock from a cattle prod to
let him know that he had committed a boo-boo and he'd better not play
with that stuff anymore. But instead, the exact opposite happened. His
buddies all crowded around in fascination at the feat and begged for the
recipe. Instead of being punished for the great crime of causing the
future extinction of many species, the inventor received a massive
pleasure hit of happybrain that most certainly encouraged him to try to
invent ever more powerful explosive mixtures.
First, we decimated all of our prey
species with our hi-tech weapons. Even Stone Age bows and arrows
exterminated many species. Then we switched to farming with the clear
cutting of vast forests and the building of huge dams that disrupted
river ecologies. Our agriculture system is a total disaster now with
extreme soil erosion, trace element deletion, chemical poisoning,
desertification etc. I could write another thick book just on that
subject. In order to really comprehend how seriously in trouble
civilized humans are today, it is important to realize the damage
agriculture has caused and is continuing to cause every day to the total
life support capacity of earth.
In my analogy comparing Earth Entity to
a human body I say that humans are wildly proliferating cancer cells
sickening EE. A cancer in a human body does not cause damage only by
the sheer number of cancer cells. The cancer also causes tissue
breakdown and toxins to develop. Agriculture, the cancer affecting EE,
is massively doing the same thing to EE, to Mother Nature.
The erosion of topsoil is obvious and
atrocious, but the trace element deletion may be just as bad, and it is
not visible--until you see the end effects such as the mindless cretins
and the women with huge goiters on their necks. Those symptoms, common
in China and the Philippines, are the result of farming-caused iodine
deficiency in the soil. Crops suck trace elements out of the soil, and
those trace elements, locked in the grain kernels or etc. are then
shipped great distances to a city or an animal feedlot where the grain
is fed to a hog or a person. Nearly all of those transported trace
elements end up in feces which then never leave the locality of that
city or feedlot. Those trace elements are no longer available to the
food chain--but they are tremendously important for good health--and
they took literally millions of years to accumulate, by gradual
decomposition of minerals, in the soil. Back during the millions of
years we lived as hunter-gatherers we never displaced those trace
elements. They were always carefully hoarded by Mother Nature and
recycled from life to life right in their original locality. We have no
way of measuring the damage we are now doing to the soil, to flowerpot
earth, with agriculture--we just know that it is immense. In previous
writings I have spent some space and time on the damage agriculture is
causing to the environment--but like I said above, the subject is so
extensive that it demands its own book, or several volumes, and those
books are already published and available in any extensive library. To
keep this essay from becoming too rambling I will not try to reproduce
the bulk of that material here.
To be continued.
This is a work in progress.
Comments are welcome
(but they may not be posted or replied to
immediately)
Stone tool year, 1977, in the extreme northeast corner of Oregon. That's an elk antler I'm using to grub out the rocks and debris from the bed area in the teepee I'm making. There's a stone axe leaning against the teepee pole to the left. 
