post 05, wet scrape hide, COMPROMISE bottom

Playing Stone Age aborigine, winter of 1976-77. Here I'm using a stone scraper to wet scrape (de-hair) a deer hide in the mountains of northeast Oregon. I spent a year, including the entire winter (the temperature got down to minus eight degrees Fahrenheit), in a tent or makeshift shelters there while I focused intently on teaching myself Stone Age technology. I made Stone Age tools from natural, wilderness found, materials by using stone tools. My good friend, Jim Riggs, a pioneer in teaching that subject, taught a summer field-trip course on it at Eastern Oregon State Teacher's College in La Grande then. I never took Jim's course, but as close friends, I did learn a lot from him.

Doctor Errett Callahan (I think he got his doctorate on flaking stone) was teaching the same sort of course back in Virginia then, and he sent us information, especially on preparing cores for flaking, that we found very valuable.

I also had a copy of "Outdoor Survival Skills" by Larry Dean Olsen. I think Larry's book was the first attempt at a comprehensive collection of Stone Age how-to info and it was, and I'm sure still is, an excellent book. I felt pretty smug when, from my own hands-on experience, I recognized a small error in the edition I had. The book illustration of a sinew backed bow showed a lumpy sinew backing. When you are working with leg sinew from a deer or other animal, and you are separating the fibers of the dried and pounded sinew, you must use your thumbnail and pull off any little tufts at the ends of the strands so that each strand tapers to a fine thread at both ends. If you do that, when you align the sinew strands and glue them onto the bow back with warm hide glue the sinew will lie smooth and the finished backing will look almost as smooth as Formica. If you can't pull the tufts off, then your strand is too thick and you must separate it some more. I'll discuss sinew more another time. I haven't looked at an edition of Olsen's book for almost 30 years now (I don't see any available in this country), and that old photo of lumpy sinew backing has probably been changed by now.

I'm a pragmatic person and I realize that we will have steel available to us, preserved as reinforcing bars in concrete, for tens of thousands of years even if the factories of civilization disappear completely. So why bother with Stone Age technology at all?

I'm sure the most important thing to be gained from a facility with Stone Age technology is self confidence. When you can make a fire, tools, weapons, clothing, shelter and prepare food with only natural materials found in the wilderness you will never worry about becoming lost in the wilderness. Wherever you are in the wild, it will just be home. That is the way it is for all the wild animals there, and that is the way I think it must become for us humans again if we want our species to continue living for a long time on earth. Our very existence depends on the wilderness. It is part of us and we are part of it. We must understand that and protect the wilderness as we would protect our own arm or leg.

If rocks are exposed, such as at a stream bed or a barren hillside, I can often find a usable rock and convert it into a sharp, functional, cutting tool in a matter of minutes--maybe less then one minute. I have killed porcupines with only a club trimmed to shape from a branch with a hand axe type big stone, and I then butchered the carcasses with simple stone flakes. I could easily skin and butcher even a big deer or elk with such makeshift cutters. Given enough time, I can make a fire from only wilderness found materials, but that can be quite difficult during wet and very humid periods if you don't already have suitable materials collected and stored in a dry place. If I was desperately hungry (or maybe if I was afraid that an enemy would see the smoke) I would just eat the porcupine or other animal raw. When it comes to staying alive, you do what you gotta do.

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Building the massive bottom of river explorer COMPROMISE, 1992. I wanted a live-aboard boat that I could run aground and beach during high tides so that I could explore islands--even if I wasn't familiar with the beach.

The timbers were well aged doug fir from an old dismantled warehouse. I bought them as a lot, and they were deposited in the middle of the county road by a dump truck. The bigger, nine by ten inch by twenty foot, ones were around 500 pounds each and a heck of a job to handcart into the barn (in the background) for dry storage. They had to be kept dry because the curved frame visible in the photo was pieced together, epoxied, and then pinned with five eighths diameter galvanized steel rods driven into pre-drilled nine sixteenths holes with a heavy sledge. The epoxy would not have adhered good to wet wood.

The freshly cut sloping and curved shape visible on the heavy frame was done with my old chainsaw fitted with a simple home-designed and homemade attachment that followed an angle iron or flat bar-on-wood guide. My attachment design allowed me to angle the blade and also, with the use of the bar-on-wood template, saw curves (only large diameter curves, of course).
I split the smaller, eight by eight inch, timbers into four by eight planks with the chain saw (another photo) and used one and a quarter inch diameter trenails to secure the planks athwartship to the heavy frame. The trenails were lubricated with epoxy and driven in with a heavy sledge. The trenails were eight sided (made on a table saw) so that they could be a tight drive fit but still allow air/epoxy to escape the hole along the flat sides.

The four by eight sawed planks were the bottom of the boat on the outside and the bottom of the cabin on the inside. There was no bilge, nor any need of one. The new sawn surface created by use of my chainsaw attachment was smoother and straighter than the original timber surface, so I used the new surface as the floor inside the boat. I left the surface as sawn for good traction.

In the photo, you can see a groove sawn into the side of the bottom plank and a cedar spline in the groove. The cedar splines took the place of oakum calking. I bedded the splines in roofing mastic as I fastened the planks. Roofing mastic is the best boat sealer I've ever found and it's dirt cheap because it's a waste product of the petroleum refining industry. I might have used 30 gallons of it, bought in five gallon pails, on COMPROMISE altogether. (Yachties with an aesthetic fetish might complain that roofing mastic bleeds through any paint and makes ugly stains.)
A wooden boat is liable to have some leaks the first time you put it in the water. I was ready for them with an ordinary grease gun filled with the roofing mastic. With an extra long one eighth inch drill bit I drilled a hole (from inside the boat while the boat was in the water) down to where I thought the leak was originating. I replaced the grease fitting adapter on the grease gun with an eighth inch diameter piece of copper tube. When I inserted the tube in the hole I could pump mastic right down to the leak and stop it. Then, when I removed the tube from the hole, I would plug the hole with a match stick to keep the mastic from oozing back out.

As you can judge from the photo, the boat was heavy, but weight can be tolerated in a sailboat as long as most of the weight is very low.

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Installment Five

IN OPPOSITION TO CIVILIZATION

Andy Van't Hul

In order to ensure our survival as a species, in order to ensure that our grandkids have an environment that their genes have evolved with and are adapted to, our very first priority must be to make sure that our present Earth Entity, the mix of WILD species that we have evolved with, survives without further damage. I am here talking entirely about wild species, not domestic farm animals--or even tank hatched salmon that just spend their juvenile days in confinement. The wild species are what we evolved with over millions of years of time. The domestic animals are genetic aberrations, species that we have drastically corrupted, during only the past 10,000 years since we have adopted agriculture. To make it easy to raise animals in confinement we have "domesticated" them. We have determinedly bred out, eliminated, the genes for fight or flight that Mother Nature had provided them with for survival in the wild. Those domestic species, like the mindless cow and the sheep, can no longer survive without the constant care and protection of humans.

We've also domesticated the human species. Just like we bred the self-sufficient ferocity genes out of the wolf and turned him into a cocker spaniel lap puppy that can no longer survive without humans, so also our "law and order" elimination of anyone with "uncivilized" behavior has seriously crippled our own genetic stock.

An individual easily aroused to fight, and deadly in combat, may, like the wild wolf, still be a gentle and doting father and a most valuable member of his species. And conversely, a perpetually timid and non-aggressive individual may be a lousy father, totally unable to protect his family. The artificial laws of civilization have not been good for the preservation of our survival genes. Civilization creates mindless sheep, easy for a ruler to manipulate, but unable to think for themselves and survive severe situations.

The recognition, above, that wild species must be saved, is certainly not unique. Nearly all knowledgeable people realize that. The environment that we require has two basic components. One component is lifeless flowerpot earth which furnishes the minerals, water, and air that support life. The other component is living Earth Entity, the mix of symbiotic wild species that we have evolved with and that furnishes us with the food to nourish our bodies and manufactures the oxygen that keeps us alive with each breath. Earth Entity is an intricate and very complex self-maintaining and self-repairing living system that evolved by trial and error over three and a half billion years of time. It is ridiculous to imagine that we can design some artificial, agricultural, replacement with a very few domestic species designed to keep only our human species alive. We have discovered that any replacement system for Nature that we design; we also must keep in repair. And we have found that just the repair and maintenance of our artificial systems is a hopelessly complicated task. We desperately need the vast mass of wild, self-maintaining, life that Nature designed during three and a half billion years of trial and error.

All environmentalists jump on that band wagon of preserving wild species. But in most, or nearly all, cases our preserving efforts have just resulted in a sort of semi-domestication--a further destruction--of the species targeted. A condor in a zoo, or an American buffalo confined in a fence, or an ape that allows humans to walk up to him in his African reserve, are no longer wild, self-sufficient, species. Our efforts have been pretty much useless and counter productive because we haven't been doing the right things. We first have to understand exactly what is causing the problem so that we will realize precisely what must be done.

Earlier, I compared Earth Entity, the symbiotic, interdependent and interrelated, conglomeration of all life on earth to our human body, which is a symbiotic, interdependent and interrelated conglomeration of single cells. Our cells are of many different categories, such as muscle, nerve, bone, etc. just as the individuals making up Earth Entity are of many different species, such as oak trees, grass, salmon, deer, etc.Our different body cell types all evolved together over millions of years. Now, they desperately all need each other. It's ridiculous to imagine a functioning body composed of only bone with no muscle or blood. And all the cell types must be in proper proportion to each other. Over the eons of evolution, the cells of our body have learned to regulate themselves and control their neighbors in order to stay in symbiotic balance. Our different cell types don't consciously try to help each other, but just by following their own basic instincts they do help each other exist.

But sometimes something does go wrong with natural symbiotic systems. A liver cell in a person might mutate during one of the frequent accidents of reproduction with the result that the basic instinct of the cell, and its offspring, become changed. The new type of mutated liver cell might reproduce constantly without regard to whatever forces limited the reproduction of its ancestors. This sort of thing actually happens sometimes, and the unfortunate person is diagnosed with a cancer. The cancerous liver cells reproduce in a rapidly multiplying, exponential, fashion and soon usurp the food supply and living space needed by the healthy cell types around them. The healthy cell types, such as pancreas, spleen, kidney, lung, etc. are desperately needed in order to keep the patient alive. When those healthy cell types are so starved and stifled by wildly propagating invading cancer cells that they cannot carry on their normal functions, the patient dies, and all the cancerous liver cells die with the patient.
When I started this essay I said I would keep it concise, and I will, but I just know that you aren't going to feel comfortable with some things I have to say. Like cartoon character Danae, I have to tell you what you must know, not what you want to hear. And in the interests of conciseness, I'm not going to spend a hundred pages trying to gradually prepare my audience for an unwelcome bottom line. So brace yourself for heresy, and try to open your mind wide enough to visualize a radical assessment.

Throughout this writing I've drawn an analogy between a human body and the symbiotic assemblage of all biological life on earth, which I call Earth Entity. To me, that analogy explains our human situation, and our relation with the world around us, exactly. For millions of years, as hunter-gatherers, we humans and our predecessor species were a symbiotic, and therefore healthy, member organ of Earth Entity. As a predator we weeded out the genetic rejects of our prey species and kept those species strong and healthy.

But some time ago, a chance mutation occurred to our species. Our genetic instincts were modified, and the human species eventually became a cancerous disease to living Earth Entity almost exactly paralleling the human liver cancer example above. I know that you don't want to believe that, and I realize that it's normal to go into denial and refuse to accept unpleasant facts, no matter how obvious they are. But we, in our present civilized form (which we only assumed 10,000 years ago), are precisely the disease sickening earth. If we wish any hope of remission, of curing the disease, I think the first step is to clearly understand what has happened to us and how it has happened. If we do not halt our cancerous destruction of our environment, if we do not stop extinguishing the wild species that constitute that environment, we will shortly become extinct ourselves.

To be continued.

This is a work in progress.

Comments are welcome.

1988. Saddling up for the roundup in the first light of morning. This is at a small cabin several miles from the ranch proper. The horses and men were brought in by truck.
The stock pond in the background was obviously man made, but there must have always been a spring with good water here. I found arrowheads in the vicinity to indicate that this area near the top of the hills was a traditional Indian campground. When I stayed in the cabin a week or so the next spring I found plenty of biscuitroot, a staple food of Indians in rocky, semi-desert, parts of the US Northwest. I also saw wild horses up pretty close here. If civilization disintegrated, a small clan could subsist in a place like this (within a 20 mile radius) as long as they determinedly killed off any interlopers who tried to poach the limited food supply.
The outhouse (in the middle of the photo in the background) had graffiti neatly written on the wall: "A reliable set of bowels is more valuable then any amount of intelligence." I agree. In a natural (wilderness) environment, the physical attributes of a person are just as important as the mental attributes.

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The re-canvassed canoe, ready for the water. When you tack new canvas onto a canoe, it will never fit perfectly without wrinkles. You just do the best you can. Then, when you add your waterproofing, or just wet the canvas good with water, the canvas will shrink as much as ten percent and the wrinkles will disappear. Just make sure the canvas is securely fastened so it doesn't pull loose during that shrinking operation.
My philosophy of learning wilderness survival skills is a pragmatic compromise, like most everything else in my life. Canoes should be built of birch bark laced with spruce or larch roots and stuff like that. Or, in the far northwest part of the US where I was then, they should be carved out of a solid cedar tree. But that would make for a very long, expensive, project, (a big enough cedar tree would cost a fortune today--if you could even find one) and I didn't know if I would ever have use for such skills or be able to teach them to anyone else. I wanted to get on the water and find out about available food and living conditions on the islands.
When we dropped Jim off at his cabin on the way back from the Knap-In, I had gathered a bunch of congealed pitch from the big ponderosa pine trees there. I tried heating some pitch and applying it to a sample of canvas, but that was just not practical. It just globbed into lumps that wouldn't penetrate. So, in my pragmatic manner, I melted pitch and stirred raw linseed oil into the hot pitch. That mixture could be easily brushed onto the canvas while hot, and it penetrated through nicely. After I had the whole canoe coated and was examining my work, I noticed that some areas had a wet appearance. I knew that even the wet linseed oil would oxidize into a hard film eventually, but like everybody else, I am impatient. If I had been in the middle of the wilderness, I would have added pulverized charcoal to thicken up the wet areas. But I happened to have dry portland cement handy, and it did the job nicely when I brushed it into a wet spot. I thought the natural color of the pitch coated canoe was just right.
It only took a few days for the linseed oil to set up in the warm sun of early spring, and then the canoe was completely waterproof. It never once leaked a drop.
I knew there would be cold, wet, miserable days during a northwest Oregon spring, so while I waited for the oil to get hard I experimented with making some kind of shelter out of a couple of pieces of canvas I had. I lucked out and came up with a very satisfactory tent design, which I will describe later.

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Installment four of:
IN OPPOSITION TO CIVILIZATION
by Andy Van't Hul

In the previous installment, I mentioned Mother Nature being upset by a terrible catastrophe. This is not a catastrophe as far as planet earth is concerned. Planet earth is just a lifeless accumulation of solid, liquid and gaseous molecules held together by gravity. I compare planet earth to a flowerpot. It contains a mixture of soil, water, and an atmosphere at a temperature that can support life, but it is not itself alive. But residing on earth, living in and on the flowerpot, is a mass of interdependent, symbiotic, biological life I call Earth Entity, the present physical embodiment of Mother Nature.
My being, my body, is an infinitesimal component of Earth Entity just as an individual muscle cell is an infinitesimal component of my body. I could not live without the support of all the natural, wild, species and individuals of Earth Entity just as an individual cell of my body cannot live without the support of all the organs and cells of my body (unless a similar environment is provided in a laboratory dish).
I often think and talk of Mother Nature as being God, and the interactions of Nature do come as close to a concept of God as I can visualize, but she is certainly not an all-powerful God. In spite of her massive earth-encompassing size, Nature, Earth Entity, is composed of various sequences of exactly the same four nucleotides and twenty amino acids that I am composed of. She is every bit as vulnerable to rifle bullets and mercury poisoning as I am. I am her and she is me. All life on earth is one life. And all life on earth is interdependent. When a species becomes extinct on earth, it is almost exactly the same as when a surgeon cuts out an organ of our body. Our body can continue to function without an appendix, or tonsils, and even without a gall bladder, but if the surgeon gets carried away and takes out our kidneys or our liver, we're done for. The Earth Entity that we've evolved with is every bit as vulnerable. If some monster microbe, a Frankenstein creation of our biotech labs, became able to infect and kill all varieties only of grass species, the chain reaction of species extinctions (including humans) on earth would be dramatic. The particular Earth Entity that we evolved with would be dead.
There is an important difference between the concepts of Earth Entity and Mother Nature. The present Earth Entity has the physical construction and characteristics as determined by the assortment of species existing today. We might label her Present EE. Of course, there was an Earth Entity back in dinosaur times that we might label Past D. EE. But Past D. EE was considerably different then Present EE. My ancestors evolved slowly in step as Present EE evolved, and I am physically and mentally equipped to survive with the mixture of wild species that exist on earth today. I do not believe that, in my present configuration, I could have existed alongside the dinosaurs of Past D. EE. I am too big now to hide from dinosaur predators, and I'm afraid that I would be no match for them in combat, even if I had a strong spear or a bow and arrows. Of course, precursors to humans, my remote ancestors of some sort, did exist back then, but they were much smaller then I am and they were able to hide.
I mentioned a terrible catastrophe facing life on earth today, and I really worry whether Present EE can survive that catastrophe, but the climax I predict will certainly not extinguish all life on earth. If Present EE does succumb during the trauma, some assemblage of life forms, a Future EE will certainly take her place.
However, I seriously doubt if my grandkids could survive as part of a Future EE if she were much different then Present EE. Cockroaches are edible, and even nutritious, but we humans are not an ideal predator for cockroaches. Our bodies have evolved for a system where pheasants and quail preyed on cockroaches, and we then preyed on the pheasants and quail. A Future EE might have cockroaches, but if she doesn't also have the pheasants and quail as intermediate links in the food chain, then a large predator such as us just may not be able to cope.
Evolution is inevitable, and we can all take part in it--as long as it's gradually enough for us to change. If the mix of species changed dramatically in just a few decades, the way it is obviously in process of doing today with all the species extinctions, Present EE might quite likely die (or be replaced) and humans could very easily, would probably, become extinct with her.
When we were little kids our parents taught us that we should not be selfish--but let's get real. We are selfish and we are egotists. Every individual of every species is. It's a very important element of our basic instincts. We don't care if those damn cockroaches live or not. The only thing that can be important to us is that our descendents survive to carry on our unique human genes. Our ancestors fought for three and a half billon years to keep our genes alive, and it's our job to continue that fight. Propagating their particular species genetic code is the primary goal, the only important goal, for every individual of every species.
For fairly simple species, like flies, just having offspring is enough for propagation, though they usually have to have a great many offspring to hope that some might survive. More complicated species may have to protect and assist their offspring through adolescence and pass on a learned culture so that their offspring will discover how to survive in the environment that happens to exist. We humans have very recently become so complicated that we have made of our species a special case. We parents must now make a concerted effort just to insure that our offspring will have an environment that they can possibly survive in.

To be continued.
This is a work in progress.
Comments are welcome.

Making packsaddles for the burros on the front porch of Deveroux's old farmhouse in Brownsmead, OR, early 1988. I had done quite a bit of remodeling on their town house in Astoria, so when they moved into the town house in November the Deverouxs let me housesit the old farmhouse for the winter.

The boards that I'm carving on are the ones that lie against the burro's back. It's important that they conform to the shape of the back as much as practical. My burros were in a neighbor's corral right across the road, so I would walk over and do a fitting ever so often.

Of course, you put a saddle blanket under the saddle, but no blanket is going to compensate for a lousy fitting saddle. An animal irritated by a galling saddle is going to be hell to work with.

Speaking of blankets; for really great saddle blankets, check out the thrift stores. Quite often people goof up and wash their good wool blankets in hot water. The blankets shrink up to half size--but they are then very thick and strong--and the thrift store sells them dirt cheap because they're too small for a bed. But folded once or twice they are just right for a saddle. At night you don't need them under a saddle, so you use them as a mattress to keep you off the damp ground. They also sew up into wonderful winter coats. Just buy a cheap junk coat at the thrift store and disassemble it for use as a pattern.

The curved knife on the board was sold in a farm feed store for trimming hoofs, but I think it's the same thing that the mountain men called a crooked knife and used for all their carving, concave or convex. The two-handled draw knife shown is quite a bit better then the crooked knife for flat or convex work, but it's expensive (and too bulky for mountain men to carry), and it's not essential. I just happened to have one from earlier boat building projects. (They're great for trimming a mast.)

The adz shown is a wonderful tool. I made this one while camped on an island during my canoe expedition down the Columbia the spring before. I'll describe making it in a later post about the canoe trip.

The finished saddle on the floor is black because I slobbered raw linseed oil on it and then used the heat of a fire to help the oil penetrate into the wood and start oxidizing into a hard film. Boiled linseed oil oxidizes into a hard state quicker because it has chemicals added to it (it's called boiled because they boil it in the process of adding the chemicals) but the raw linseed oil (without chemicals) penetrates deeper into the wood. The boiled (quickly oxidized) oil just saves

time on projects--and everybody is in a hurry.

The round, two-grit, axe stone next to the draw knife is what I carried on all my outings--unless I was experimenting with using only materials I found in the wilderness. There are rocks with suitable texture in the wilderness that can be used as sharpening stones--but they are damn hard to find. If you want to use a knife for shaving or for doing surgery, then you would want to finish the sharpening with a Hard Arkansas stone after the axe stone, but I haven't bothered to carry one for many years now. The axe stone was good enough for me.

Actually, you can get a metal tool sharp enough for nearly all practical work just by pounding the edge thin with a hammer and anvil (rocks). That's how the Scandinavian farmers sharpened their sickles. When making a tool, you always pound the edge just as thin as you can before you start grinding with a hand stone. (If you have access to power tools, you're in a different ball park.)

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Newport Oregon, 1981. Hauling out the old ALICE C, which I remodeled into junk rigged INTEGRITY and sailed to Hawaii with Ann Ehrlich.

Ann and I went to a wine tasting festival in Newport. I'm not a wine tasting type of person, but I was working for JV Northwest at the time, and we made big stainless steel wine fermenting tanks for the wineries. I only lasted in the crowded tasting pavilion for ten minutes and I had to escape. Ann and I went down and prowled the dock.

I had just learned the bare basics of sailing that summer in 22 foot SCHOOL MARM, but I wanted a live aboard that could handle the ocean. I wanted to learn if it was practical to just sail off to a sparsely inhabited island when civilization finally disintegrates completely. SCHOOL MARM was just a quiet-water day-sailer.

I didn't have any money, so I didn't even look at regular boats. My only option was a piece of junk that could be salvaged. I've lived with recycled junk all my life, so I had faith that I could handle it.

When we came to the ALICE C she obviously fit the "piece of junk" category. The plywood deck and cabin was rife with rot. The commercial fishing gear on deck was rusted garbage. But she had a For Sale sign on her and she was 30 foot long, 10 foot beam, just right for a single-handed ocean boat. And the lap strake hull had classic, beautiful, lines if you ignored the flaking paint.

I climbed aboard and went down inside. She was an old steamship's lifeboat with solid mahogany planking copper riveted to oak ribs. The rot was nearly all in the plywood deck and cabin that someone had cobbled onto her when they tried to make her into a fishing boat. I wrote down the number on the sale sign and headed for a telephone.

The telephone number was out of service so we went to the Port office and asked the secretary about the boat. She said the Port was in the process of taking legal possession of the boat to pay for past fees. I gave her a number in Portland and told her to call me when they had a clear title to her.

Only a week later the secretary did call to say they had the papers on the boat. Ann, my good buddy Joe Pindel, and I went down to take another look at her.

Bud Shoemake, the operations manager at the Port, told us that the boat had been a drug house for a crew of hippies that never paid for moorage or the occasional pump out the leaky boat needed. He said the Port had a $1,200 bill against the boat.

That was way more then I had. I told him that I could give him $150 cash for the boat. He shrugged and said, "Let's talk to the Harbor Master".

The Harbor Master, a business man type in suit and tie, came down to the Port office. Bud told him that I offered $150 cash for the ALICE C. The Harbor Master looked me up and down. I had the same long hair and full beard then as I do now. He leaned forward and asked, "Just how are you going to get that boat AWAY from here?"

I assured him that I had access to a big four wheel drive pickup and an adequate trailer. I was sure that JV Northwest would let me use their wine tank delivery rig. I gave him the $150 and the boat was mine.

Maybe 14 years after that, when I had sailed down to Newport and was living in COMPROMISE, I worked part time at that same Port as a jack-of-all-trades fix-it man in exchange for warehouse space and grocery money while I worked on still a different boat (SUFFICIENT) project. I came to realize that junk boats are regularly available, but by then I had the experience to see that not many are worth the effort of rebuilding.

A few days after buying the boat, Joe and I came down with the JV rig to pick her up. That's me with the rope, pulling her onto the trailer. But once loaded onto the trailer, the pickup couldn't pull her up the ramp. The boat had a heavy marine engine in her then and also several inches of water. Bud came over with the huge Port forklift and pulled us up the ramp. All four trailer tires were flat. They hadn't ruptured--they just didn't have enough air pressure.

Right there, at the top of the ramp, we used the forklift to lift the big inboard engine (which I knew I would never use) out while we drained the water with the handy lifeboat-style drain plugs. Then we drove over and nestled the boat right alongside the big Port dumpster to make disposal handy while Joe and I ripped off the rotten plywood deck and cabin. It took us all day (we had arrived early in anticipation) of very hard work. Bud loaned us big crowbars and sledge hammers.

With all the junk off, the bare hull was light enough for our rig to handle, but it was late by then and Joe and I just drove over to a motel to sleep for the night.

The next morning, while we were dressing, Joe, in a plaintive voice, asked, "Andy, could you help me? Could you please tie my shoes?" He was so stiff and sore from the previous day's work that he couldn't bend over that far.

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Installment 3 of:
IN OPPOSITION TO CIVILIZATION
by Andy Van't Hul

Laws of biology are kind of like links of a chain. Like the rest of Nature, they are all interrelated. Just above (in installment 2) I mentioned that excess individuals must be born to insure the genetic quality of a species. But a population of any species must not continue increasing indefinitely or it will soon run out of food--a fact which many countries will attest to now. There must be a mechanism that identifies and gets rid of the rejects in order to keep the population low enough so that it does not damage its environment--especially so that it does not damage its source of food. Also, the rejects must be eliminated so that they do not further contaminate the gene pool with their reject genes and cause escalating decline of the species.

Therefore, a law of biology says that there must be natural adversities, hazards, in the environment to eliminate the rejects, the surplus individuals, hopefully while they are infants or juveniles before they are mature enough to reproduce. A natural, normal, healthy life is an obstacle course, a test of genes. Where there is life, there must also be death. The two are inseparable. Death is not bad. It is entirely normal and necessary.

A division, or restatement, of the above adversities law is that every species absolutely must have at least one capable predator species to keep its population in check. Each member of the food chain or pyramid is one of those mentioned predator species who is keeping the members of the prey species it feeds on from becoming overpopulated. It's a truly beautiful system. Rejects of every sort become the food to nourish the hope and promise of healthy, strong, new generations. Death is necessary to maintain life.

But what happens at the very peak of the food pyramid? If the lion is king of the jungle, then who preys on the lion? The answer is simple and explicit. When a predator species has no other predator, when it becomes overpopulated and hungry, it must go to war and thin down its own ranks. All cats do that. Bears do that. Wolves do that. Chimpanzees do that. The instinct is strong and common in all carnivores and omnivores whether they are social animals or not.

Humans? Well, we used to. Humans have the same strong instinct and we do go to war. We kept our population in check for millions of years that way back when we were all hunters and gatherers. There was a strictly limited amount of wilderness food available to us then, so it was a matter of go to war or starve. But it's plainly apparent that we have not been doing an effective job of policing our own population since we adopted agriculture. We are already so drastically overpopulated that we are doing obvious and horrendous (and not repairable for many generations) damage to the entire ecological structure of earth--to the very environment that provides our own food. The situation is going downhill so fast that scientists in all disciplines are clamoring in alarm. We have a huge problem, and it's staring us in the face right now. Whether we try to make preparations or not, something dramatic is certain to happen, and quite soon. Some terrible catastrophe has upset Mother Nature's normal beautiful harmony of beneficent species co-existence.

Life has existed on earth for three and a half billion years. All biological life, microbe, vegetable and animal, are but structural variations of the same four nucleotides and the same 20 amino acids. All species of every sort had a common beginning and evolved together in an interdependent, symbiotic, fashion to create one huge life mass (I call her Earth Entity, a.k.a. Mother Nature) just as the individual single cells of our body, the nerve, muscle, bone, etc. cells arose from a common one cell (fertilized egg) beginning and evolved together in a mutually assisting manner to create the much smaller life mass that we call a human body.

Biological evolution, in spite of the beautiful order and complexity it has created, is an entirely accidental and random process. Its cause is simple. To create a new individual of any species, a basic step that begins the process is when one or more chains of nucleotides, strands of DNA or RNA, create a duplicate of themselves. The DNA or RNA is the physical structure of the genetic information that determines how a body is constructed and how it will function after construction. DNA or RNA can be imagined as a computer code assembled from various sequences of only four different chemical molecules called nucleotides, very similar to how an electronic computer code is assembled from various sequences of only two different (on or off) states of switches or signals.

DNA or RNA replication is normally very precise and perfect, but it is strictly a chemical process and chemical processes require that the right molecules must be present in the right proportions along with just the right source and quantity of energy. If those conditions are not met, such as if a stray and undesirable jolt of excess radiation energy strikes the assembled molecules during the reproduction, then the daughter DNA or RNA could end up a somewhat different sequence of the four nucleotides then what its parent was. The variant daughter may (or may not) be capable of functioning as an information carrying gene, but if she does function she will likely function differently with the result that the new individual created ends up with a somewhat different body construction or assortment of instincts then its parent(s) had.

The mind boggling synchronism and interdependence of all life forms on earth ("You cannot touch one bit of Nature without touching all of Nature.") is merely the cumulative result of essentially infinite, three billion years long, trial and error with the criteria for success being simply and strictly reproduction. What worked reproduced its genetic blueprint for another generation. What didn't work became very welcome food for what worked. Death is not a waste--it is the spare parts from which to create new life.

We like to imagine evolution as a gradual march toward perfection--with ourselves being the result, the perfect being, of course, but that analysis is just an expression of our innate egotism. Evolution is merely the cumulative product of an infinite series of reproduction errors. Some of those mistakes had happy endings and some did not (at least not from the dinosaurs point of view).

To be continued.
This is a work in progress.
Comments are welcome.

Well reefed down with a stiff breeze astern, COMPROMISE comes barreling in to the dock (Warrenton, OR). In another couple of seconds I'll let the halyard fly and crank her hard to starboard to round up into my slip.

A junk rig may not be the best for racing, but they're sure wonderful for single-handed sailing in sticky situations. When I rebuilt my first live aboard, INTEGRITY, from an ancient lifeboat (already converted into a fishing boat) into a funky sailboat, I put a more or less conventional sloop rig on her. That worked fine for the always quiet water on the Columbia in front of Portland, OR.

Then I sailed her down to the mouth of the Columbia, "the graveyard of the Pacific". I was headed on to Hawaii (which I did sail her to eventually) but one quick experience with the fluky strong winds and fluky strong tidal currents at the graveyard convinced me that I had to postpone the trip and re-design my rig.

INTEGRITY had no engine of any kind. A big problem with single handed sailing a sloop rigged boat is that it takes some time and effort to reef (shorten) the sails or to hoist more sail. With the vicious, unpredictable, combination of river and tidal currents at the Columbia's mouth, there was just no time to mess around with sails. One minute there would be a gusting wind forcing you to reef sails and the next minute there would be no wind but a hellacious current driving you toward a sand bar. The current was faster then any small boat could sail (and faster then some diesel engines could propel a boat--as innumerable boaters have found out).

The beauty of a junk rig comes largely from the lazy jacks, a system of ropes on each side of the sail that extend down from the top of the mast to fasten to, and support, the boom at the bottom of the sail. You pull the sail up with a rope called the halyard. With a junk rig, when you release some of the halyard, the sail just quietly accordions down in the lazy jacks and nestles on top of the boom (the weight of the battens pulls it down). There is no fighting with the sail at all--even in a strong wind. There are no knots to tie.

Then, when the gust of wind is gone, and you quickly need more sail up, you just winch up some more halyard. The amount isn't important at all. Any amount works.

I sailed INTEGRITY into the West Mooring Basin of Astoria one time when I was birthed there. I had full sail up, and I needed every inch of it to fight the current and get inside the breakwater. But as soon as I was inside, and the current lost its grip, there was a big sailboat tied to the dock right in front of me where there should have been a vacant space for maneuvering. I yanked the halyard free and let the big sail come crashing down while I swung the tiller hard over. I squeaked by without touching the big boat. If I had had a sloop rig it would have been a disaster.

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"Marlboro Cowboys". They still have old-fashioned roundups in the far southeast corner of Oregon. There is no fence to corral the herd, only cowboys on horseback. They heat the branding irons, real iron, over a sagebrush fire. The whole crew is getting as much kick out of what they are doing as little kids.

Speaking of kids, the boy that roped the calf was only ten years old, but roping calves right along with the men. The girl, twenty years old, notching ears, got up at four am to cook a big breakfast over a wood burning cook stove for the ten men in the crew. Then she saddled her own horse and came out to work the roundup right along with the men. (The men did clean up the breakfast mess and wash dishes.) I was the one (not in the picture) who handled the irons and actually put the brands on the calves in that roundup.

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The Second Installment of:
IN OPPOSITION TO CIVILIZATION
by Andy Van't Hul

Each of us is an egotist. It's a normal and undoubtedly necessary genetically inherited trait, and it isn't something to be ashamed of. If our ancestors didn't believe that they were each the most important individual on earth they might have graciously given way to an individual they saw as more important, and then they would not have survived and we would not be here. When the language structure of many primitive tribes is studied, it is found that they considered only their own ethnic group as being really human. In our present sophisticated "global" culture, we are taught that we must hide such feelings in order to be socially accepted, but the feelings are still present, deep down, in all of us. From my encounters with wild animals, especially feral horses which I had close and extended contact with, I am sure that they feel the same way. In their wild state they must believe that they are really the superior beings, and I'm sure it aggravates them extremely when we impose our will upon them.

This universal egotism is often a tremendous obstacle to a realistic understanding of the human condition. As long as we insist on believing that our species are demigods or semi-gods, exempt from the natural laws of biology, we will live in fantasy land and never see a clear picture of our world and our place in it. I am a firm believer in following our instincts, and I do realize that the egotism is a good thing--but we must also stay in touch with reality. We are each the best--but we are still a biological species constrained by the natural laws of biology. Humans must follow the same guidelines that apply to the amoeba.

All biological life on earth started when a random linkage of energy created nucleotides chanced upon a coherent information sequence, a gene, which caused that gene to encourage other nucleotides floating nearby in the primordial soup to cuddle alongside and link up in an identical sequence. That snippet of DNA or RNA, that gene for reproduction, was the critical step that started all life, whether vegetable, animal or microbe. All life on earth evolved, or at least conceivably could have evolved, from that first gene. All life on earth is one life. A study of the organelles inside our individual cells proves that the salmon and the oak tree are our distant relatives just as surely as the cusps on the teeth of some people today prove that they had a Mongolian ancestor.

The various sciences have so-called "laws" which are maybe never rigorously proven but which are agreed to exist because no instances are ever observed to refute them. A typical example from physics is the Second Law of Thermodynamics which implies that we can never invent a perpetual motion machine that can continuously operate without the input of energy. A brief look at a couple of laws of biology exposes basic and irreconcilable flaws in our verbally transmitted social culture, flaws that must be corrected if we would ever hope to live in harmony with the natural world about us; if we would ever hope for the serene pleasure of having truly satisfied the deep inner cravings established by eons old--since-life-began old--genetic instincts.

The essence of biological life is reproduction. Reproduction was the key genetic trait that started it, and reproduction is what keeps it functioning. Reproduction is the primary goal of all our natural instincts of all life. All species have a strong instinct to reproduce at the maximum rate that is practical in their environment. I am amazed at what an efficient, single-minded, reproduction machine my cat is. That is what Mother Nature designed her for, and Nature did a magnificent job. And the cat obviously gets great pleasure from each step of carrying out her role, from catching food to sex to nursing her young. Nature designed her to be a truly happy machine as long as she was following her basic instincts and doing the right things. When Nature is functioning the way it was designed, it's a very good system.

A law of biology is that, on average, individuals must reproduce at a much greater rate then would just be necessary to replace the parents. The reason for the much greater rate is that, in spite of the lie perpetuated by the US Declaration of Independence, all men, or all individuals of any species, are not created equal. There are hundreds of known serious genetic defects. With heterosexual reproduction, the way humans propagate, you might imagine the genes of both parents as numbered Bingo marbles shaken up in a glass to mix them good and then only half of them poured into the fetus. Each parent has two genes for each trait (only one gene for each trait is passed on from each parent), but perhaps only one of those two corresponding genes causes any observable effect--good or bad. Just by looking at a potential spouse, you can only rarely notice if they harbor a harmful gene. The end result is that each child (except for identical twins) represents a unique mixture of only half of the combined genes of its parents. There can be, and nearly always is, considerable difference, maybe dramatic difference, between siblings and between parents and child.

One large family (16 kids) I'm personally familiar with has genetic problems resulting in generally low IQs. Several of the kids are functionally illiterate even though they spent the legally mandated years in school. Many of them cannot cope with high tech society so, as adults, they still live in their parent's home. However, one son became a school teacher, and he saved enough money at that profession to buy his own commercial fishing boat which became a financial success. The capable portion of the family genes carries on.

The frank truth of the matter is that the average individual (of any species) born does not have high enough quality genes to ensure the continued genetic strength of its species. There are just too many undesirable gene combinations that can occur. A considerable excess of individuals must be born so that there will still be sufficient healthy survivors after the rejects have been weeded out. Every livestock breeder recognizes that fact. He must cull his breeding herd relentlessly and continuously. If you only allow one child per family, the way China is trying to do, and if you save all those offspring, good or bad, for breeding stock (which is presumably happening) you will eventually and inevitably end up with a nation of sickly babbling idiots. It would be difficult to present a rigorous proof of that statement, but every naturalist and population biologist will attest to the fact that in Nature's wilderness the universal condition is that many more individuals are born than would be required to just replace the parents. It is a de facto law of biology.

To be continued.
Note: This is a work in progress.
Comments are welcome, click on "comments" below.

Living on the water in Compromise, maybe 1994.

A weed-choked dock on quiet, misty, uncrowded, waters was my heaven. Compromise was a 30 foot live aboard with a massively (four inch) thick flat bottom that I designed especially for river gunk holing. She could be beached anywhere on an unfamiliar island when the tide went out without fear of damage.

But she could, and did, also sail the ocean (junk rig). The large rudder blade (shown here in the up position) pivoted down to act as a keel. (The bottom of the hull had to be kept flat for beaching.) The mast was relatively far back to keep the center of effort above the center of resistance. Quirky--but workable. She was named "Compromise" for many reasons.

The very heavy rudder was laced to the hull only with rope--no pintles or gudgeons--but the lacing was done in a side to side manner (the rope always going between stern post and rudder) so that the rope did not rub or chafe. After five years of use the half inch diameter rope still showed no signs of excessive wear. (I feel sure that most metal fastenings would have failed with so much weight and the stress of sailing.)

The steering ropes tied to the side tillers went to a wheel in the companionway, and all sail ropes went there also. You handled the boat from a secure inside position with only your head and shoulders outside the hatch. The deck was flush--no cockpit to fill with water like a bathtub in heavy seas.

The cook stove was a cast iron diesel burning stove that I modified to also burn wood, charcoal, or coal. It was wonderful in the often cool and rainy weather of Oregon's coast.
The timbers visible on deck were the supports for a nine by four foot hard dinghy that I could (and often did) flip in the water and launch in seconds to row a kedge anchor out if I went aground with the tide going out while gunk holing. There was a stout, homemade, anchor winch on the foredeck that saw use during such occasions. I didn't spoil my adventures by pampering my boats. I designed the boats for the adventures.

The metal trailer hitch ball on the top of the heavy stern post was for a yulu. I could scull the heavy boat without much effort at better then a knot in quiet water, but the yulu jumped out of the water and couldn't be used if the waves were at all rough. The ten horse ancient Seagull outboard also drowned out in rough water. There was no inboard engine. You had to sail.

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Charlie Brown on Oregon's High Desert, maybe 1988.

They were three brothers, Gentle Ben, Charlie Brown, and Tar Baby, and they were the best buddies a guy could ever ask for. I traded some masonry work, a brick hearth for a wood burning stove, for them when they were three, two, and one years old and completely untrained. (Tar Baby was the son of his half-brother Gentle Ben.)

I strongly recommend burros for pack animals. They are thoughtful, patient, gentle and forgiving. Burros think before they do, and therefore they very seldom get you or themselves into trouble. Horses (which I've also worked with extensively) just do immediately, without thinking, and they can create situations that maim and kill.

I've heard the complaint that burros are slow, but I trained the brothers to walk fast right from the start, and they always willingly walked as fast with heavy packs on as I cared to walk without any pack.

I made the pack saddles (another photo coming up) and the rest of the gear. Note the halter. It's a half inch nylon rope tied around the neck with a bowline knot and with a loop of the same rope over the nose. It's cheap, it's very simple, very strong, and indestructible. I've used the same design when breaking big, strong, wild horses and I've never had any trouble with it.

There is a trick. Regular three strand rope is bulky when knotted and it's abrasive and liable to chafe. When I made the first halter, I was scrounging for material, and out of desperation I took a length of old rope that had been used for staking out a cow. Such a rope, if it doesn't have a good swivel installed, always gets hopelessly kinked up and ruined as the animal mindlessly circles around and around. I untwisted the three strands where the rope was kinked and, since they were essentially impossible to twist up again, I braided them back together. The braid was still just as strong, but unlike the twisted original rope, the braided part was soft so it would not chafe and it tied into very compact, but strong, knots. I'll let you use my invention for free. Just untwist your three strand rope and braid it back up for the headpiece of the halter. The still attached lead rope is maybe more durable if left as three strand.

Notice that the ground close to the burro has close cropped grass, but beyond there is sage brush as far as the eye can see. I'm convinced that this condition is cause largely by over grazing, and I've written essays setting forth my reason for thinking so; essays quite unpopular with the ranchers who lease the land from the BLM (government).

Notice snow on the mountain far in the background. The time was late March, the best time to traverse the desert because the snow is off the ground, but some water can still be found. The days were warm enough but the nights were chilly. The water would freeze in the drinking jug (gallon plastic bleach bottle) at night.

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Re-canvassing a canoe. I think 1987

When I went to the second of the annual Glass Buttes Knap-Ins, which are held in Oregon's High Desert, I carried a backpack of bare basic camping essentials--and a life jacket. I got kidded a lot for carrying a life jacket to a gathering of Stone Age buffs in the middle of a desert. I explained to the guys (seven guys and one gal at that second gathering if I remember) that I was in the market for a small, inexpensive, man-powered boat for a survival training trip camping out on the islands in the lower Columbia. It had to be inexpensive because, like always, I had almost no money.

When we wrapped up the Knap-In, Jim Riggs (the Knap-In host) and a couple of other guys and I stopped at Burns, Oregon to look at some beautiful buckskins a guy had tanned. In the corner of his shop I spied a paddle. I asked what kind of canoe he had. He told me that it was an old canoe with rotten canvas, and he was ready to haul it to the dump.

Of course, I got my inexpensive man-powered boat. You just gotta have faith. We lashed it on top of the Carryall and took Jim home to his cabin in the woods where I quickly gathered a bucket full of congealed pitch from the big Ponderosa Pine trees there. The pitch would be for waterproofing the new canvas when I put it on the canoe. The Carryall owner was headed for Seattle, so he dropped me and the canoe off at my buddy, Joe Pindel's, house in Portland, OR, on the way.

The little building in the photo was a garden shed that had been gathering junk for a generation or two in Joe's backyard. I cleaned it out spick and span in exchange for the privilege of camping in amongst the garden tools. I cooked with charcoal over a tiny cast iron hibachi. It was early spring with beautiful weather. I was starting on a new adventure, and I loved every minute of it.

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The First Installment of:

IN OPPOSITION TO CIVILIZATION
by Andy Van't Hul

We would all like to stumble upon a gold mine with an inexhaustible supply of large nuggets, easy to find and easy to gather. Or winning a lottery would do as long as it was a really big lottery.

But most of us have enough common sense to accept the fact that, for us, there is no free lunch. We are willing to work for what we want. But what do we really, really, want?--and how do we get there? Life is a maze. There is no lack of sign boards. That is part of the problem. There are whole libraries of sign boards--all pointing in different directions--and nearly all of them misleading. A most common predicament now-a-days is to struggle up a steep, rocky and thorn strewn path for a lifetime only to finally realize that we didn't really want to go where we got to. And by that time, it's too late to try to get anywhere else!

Life is getting more complicated and less enjoyable every year. I've read a lot about aboriginal, Stone Age, hunter-gatherer, people. A hundred years ago there were still a few small communities of them, Eskimos, African Bushmen, Amazon Indians, etc, scattered around the globe. The first European explorers to see and write about a group of such people commonly described them as being remarkably physically fit and usually also remarkably happy, in spite of their somewhat strenuous life. (That happiness often faded quickly, sometimes within just days, after coming in contact with Europeans.)

Those hunter-gatherers knew exactly what they wanted out of life. They wanted food in their stomachs. They wanted shelter from the rain and snow. They wanted a spouse to help them raise kids. And those simple people knew exactly how to get what they wanted. The first step was to shoot a deer and skin it. Every adult was knowledgeable of that process--and they rather enjoyed that process. The kids sensed the enjoyment and were anxious to learn how also.

Those people spent all day and every day in a healthy environment with clean air and pure water. They lived in beautiful surroundings of grassy meadows and huge trees and serene, burbling brooks. Or maybe their particular environment was the arctic or the desert--but it was still clean and beautiful in its own way, and they loved it. They didn't want to live anywhere else.
Today, we push our kids to study some subject that they are not interested in so that they will be prepared to eventually get a lifelong job (often in a polluted environment) that they don't want to do. Can we blame them for trying to mentally escape by smoking pot and hanging out in video game parlors?

I have two nieces staying in my house right now. One has a recent degree in business administration and banking, but she can't find a job. She's been working as a maid. There are just enormously too many people in this country, and half of them can't find jobs. The other niece is seven months pregnant and has just left a miserable existence with a boy friend who couldn't find a job. He sought escape in alcohol. Both girls are depressed. And they are good people who always tried to do the right thing. Today, their stories of frustration and unhappiness are told in countless variations by billions of people.

In spite of all the hype, modern civilization is not a good thing! It's gone sour. It is not working.
If I make some mistakes while reconfiguring my computer, and if I accidentally goof it up and turn it into a frustrating jumbled mess that doesn't function anymore, thankfully my computer has a program called "Restore" that allows me to reset the way it operates back to a previous time when it used to function smoothly. We desperately need to "restore" the human mode of life on earth.

I don't have all the answers, but in the twilight of my years now, I do clearly see some. And, in general, the answers I see are just the opposite of what is written in our huge libraries of misleading information. In this writing I will attempt to be explicit, but concise, so as not to bore readers. If some people want greater depth, I have more extensive essays.

To be continued .

This is a work in progress.

Comments are most welcome concerning either essay or photos. Click on the comment button.