April on Steen's Mountain, Oregon, 1988. (Also see posts 01, 03, 06 and 10.) That isn't a statue in the background with the icicles on its sides. That's poor Tar Baby. He was born near Astoria on Oregon's coast and he never saw snow before. Burros are tough critters though, and the three brothers didn't seem at all distressed by the weather.
As I keep mentioning (for the benefit of newcomers to this blog), my lifetime goal has always been to learn how to live in comfort as a Stone Age hunter-gatherer in symbiotic cooperation with all the other species of the wilderness. But as I also keep admitting, I am not at all a purist. It just is not practical in most areas of the globe right now. So let me give a plug here for genuine US army ponchos. Yes, some industrialist destroyed part of the natural environment while manufacturing them, and they are an artificial thing with no real counterpart in the wilderness, but they can sure make life more comfortable, or maybe just help keep you alive, while you're learning essential things like making fire without matches.
The ponchos started out as a substitute for a raincoat, a raincoat big enough and flexible enough to cover your pack as well as you. But the good feature of genuine army ponchos, besides their lightweight but tough waterproof material, is the snap design and arrangement. Each snap is male on one side and female on the other. You snap the sides together when you use it as a raincoat, or you can snap one poncho to another along the ridge to make a serviceable tent as shown in the photograph.
A neat trick is to lay the poncho on smooth ground; lay your sleeping bag (yes, I often carry one of those also) on one side of it; fold the poncho over the sleeping bag; and snap the poncho to itself. I did that on an elk hunting trip one time and woke up after a cozy good nights sleep with three inches of new snow on top of me. (When the weather looks questionable you keep your head inside, like a turtle.)
You do want to be careful how you snap the poncho together. Since each snap is both male and female, you have a choice. Ann's daughter Cheryl was trekking with me along the Snake River in Oregon one time when, at the end of a long hike, we had no time to make a decent camp and rain clouds were gathering overhead. I showed her how to make the poncho into a tube around her sleeping bag, as above.
It did rain, a real downpour. I was cozy warm and comfortable. I didn't feel at all guilty about using an artificial poncho. But then I heard a wail of misery from Cheryl. She had snapped her poncho together just backwards so that the rain falling on top of the poncho was all being funneled right inside onto her sleeping bag.
We quickly transferred her into my dry bag, and then I stumbled around in the rain and the dark making a camp under a huge rock that had a concave bottom forming a sort of low roofed cave. The rock had once rolled down from the canyon wall above. We spent the next several rainy days in the cave. The roof was cracked making me apprehensive of being buried alive (which was why we hadn't camped under it originally), but it was a snug and comfortable shelter. You couldn't stand--but who cares when it's raining outside.
I've often went on a backpacking trek with only one, or preferably two, army ponchos to make a shelter with, even in the dead of winter. I find them much preferable to the so-called "pop" tents. You can't put a real warm fire inside a pop tent. But you can build a fire immediately in front of a poncho lean-to adequate to help you survive any weather. The second poncho is often used under you to keep you off the wet ground.
As I reminisce right now about my long relationship with ponchos, I remember the first trip I really used them. The trip that so endeared them to me for life. Back around 1954 I went on a solo (except for my Brittany spaniel pup, Jake) float trip down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho's Primitive Area. Before I even reached the start of the Middle Fork, while still floating down the creek from Bear Valley, my war-surplus yellow air force life raft acquired an irreparable long rip in its bottom. (I later found out that other rafts of that model also had deteriorating fabric.)
I wasn't about to give up on the trip, so I cut the bottom completely out so it wouldn't trap water and be a hindrance. Then I lashed poles on top of the rectangular inner-tube kind of thing that was left so that I had a place to tie my gear. But bouncing around through rapids kept my gear continually wet, including my down sleeping bag and my pup tent with the sewed in floor. I never got any use out of either of them. The rubberized bags I stowed them in were not really waterproof. A down bag takes forever--days and days--to dry, and it is unusable while it's wet. That's something to remember--use synthetic "Hollow Fill" sleeping bags on boat trips. They dry much faster.
Fortunately, I had good wool clothes. You can wring the water out of wool, put it back on, and the damp clothes will still keep you warm. Several times I have gone to sleep under a poncho lean-to and in front of a roaring fire when I had damp wool clothes on. You wake up a few times during the night to rebuild the fire when it dies down, but in the morning your clothes are dry and warm again and you've managed to get a good night's sleep. You cannot do that with a pop tent.
On that float trip in 1954 I spent the entire month of August sleeping in only my wool clothes and under a poncho lean-to. August is a warm month, but I've slept the same way in the middle of winter and once during a memorable early spring freezing rain in the Selway-Bitterroot wilderness area.
During that Selway trek there was absolutely no dead wood available. The only flat place I found to camp that night was frequented by many elk hunters every fall, and they had scrounged up every scrap of dead wood for their fires. I found out that green wood burns fine as long as you keep your fire stoked up roaring hot. The green needles from fir or pine will help you start the larger wood on fire. That's also something to remember. In fact, I advise doing it sometime for practice just to give you confidence in case you might ever have to. And remember to carry a stout and sharp steel boy's axe for cutting the green tree down and into logs. I credit mine with saving my life on two similar occasions.
It was around 1956 when I went on a cross-country ski camping expedition to the Owyhee Mountain ghost town of Silver City, Idaho, with two kids, high school seniors, to celebrate our newly acquired ability to stand up on skis. When we reached our departure area and started loading up packs, the boys realized they could not possibly carry their cumbersome winter bedrolls along with the heavy canned food they had brought. I suggested that we leave all our bedding in my Model A Ford and make our trip into a winter survival exercise. We took only my two ponchos for shelter.
We kept a fire going in front of our lean-to each night. Whoever woke up from the cold rebuilt the fire. The town kid was wearing a fancy nylon ski outfit, and he was the one that most often built up the fire and cuddled right next to it. By the end of the trip he looked like somebody had well seasoned him with a giant pepper shaker. Glowing coals spit out by the fire instantly melted black holes in the shiny blue nylon. The ranch kid and I were wearing heavy wool and we didn't have a visible mark. Wool will burn, but not instantly like nylon.
That was a great trip and those were great kids. I wish I still had a memory and could give their names.
Ponchos are great for backpacking light, but if you, like me, want to be really comfortable in any weather, then you want an enclosed tent with a fire right inside--like a teepee. Traditional teepees require a lot of poles which are a pain to pack around. I've spent some effort designing a similar tent affair which doesn't require nearly as much wood in the skeleton. I'll touch on that tent more in later posts.
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Installment 16 (the last one) of:
IN OPPOSITION TO CIVILIZATION
by Andy Van't Hul
I know that some concepts I have discussed in this essay will be difficult to accept by minds that have been brainwashed by the cult of civilization, and that is virtually every adult today. Brainwashing is a very real phenomenon. When some concept, such as "Thou shalt not kill" is hypnotically repeated over and over to a person, especially a young person, there is actual physical growth, enlargement, of the synapses of the involved neurons in the brain of the person hearing the message. In time the information, even if it is totally false, becomes embedded like bedrock in the brain and may be essentially impossible to uproot. There is no logic involved. It is a purely "cause and effect" physical phenomena. The repetitive words eventually cause a physical modification, submicroscopic but very real, of the brain.
Brainwashing is the systematic, repetitive, presentation of propaganda (which can be true or false) in a manner which hypnotizes the subject, the victim, into accepting that propaganda as fact. The person, who might accurately be labeled the hypnotist, doing the brainwashing may, or may not, have self-serving intentions and they may not even realize that they are brainwashing. The hypnotist may be convinced (they may have been brainwashed themselves) into genuinely believing that they are doing a great service for the subject--and they could actually be doing a good service in some cases. Parents habitually brainwash their children, and parents are nearly always just trying to help the kids.
Brainwashing is just another word for hypnotizing. The words are synonymous, they are exactly the same thing, and they are the most effective means of propagating all religions and all political systems. It is interesting that self-hypnotism is not only possible but may even be the predominate form of the phenomena. Most exceptional athletes are probably the result of self-hypnotism.
Religions are preeminent examples of well-organized and very effective brainwashing regimes. Individuals are recruited into them at a very young age and usually by their parents, whom they would instinctively trust and obey implicitly. The recruits are taught to memorize the "holy" words and chant them, usually in unison. By repetitively chanting the admonitions and listening to their own voices the recruits are self-hypnotizing themselves. The larger the group the better as it markedly reduces self-questioning and doubt. Brainwashing is most effective on the young and the key ingredient is repetition, repetition, repetition. Logic is not required at all and could be seriously detrimental to the process since it encourages the individual to think.
Political movements such as Nazism, Communism, and Democracy, and even business organizations, all try to get young recruits and get them chanting their self-hypnotic slogans, but religions have been exemplary in refining the system to its most basic and effective elements and rigorously, single-mindedly, pursuing those elements. This has come about primarily through thousands of years of trial and error driven by the irresistible cleric incentives of a very easy life and fawning followers.
Other animal species do not have the verbal ability to brainwash or be brainwashed. False information is not propagated from generation to generation in their species. Lucky for them. It is our Achilles' heel. It is the Pandora's Box of calamities we have opened upon ourselves with our stupid cleverness. I sincerely hope that some future mutation will give us the wisdom to sort out some of the most damaging falsehoods and kick them out of our verbally transmitted culture.
I'm guessing that some of the biggest evils of civilization had their inception almost from the birth of agriculture. Most higher animal species have a mix of instincts that might be called the "alpha male syndrome" (AMS) whereby individuals are driven by a consuming lust for power and control. AMS is certainly a great benefit in obtaining a mate and reproducing and that is why it is so widespread in most animal species. AMS was common long before civilization came about, but it met a need of civilization perfectly. Civilization required a rigid set of rules and strict enforcement of those rules. Civilization required a ruler. AMS leaped forward to assume that role. The egotistical, power-mad, strongman loved to order people around and punish any "wrongdoer" that dared to object. That leader, or leaders, became variously known as cleric or politician but there is little or no difference between them and they've often been the same person.
A leader of civilization has enormous power and, as we all know, "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Humans are natural born predators, and now that our wild prey has been essentially exterminated, we amuse ourselves by preying on each other. A leader does not necessarily have to enrich himself at the expense of his subjects, but they virtually all do. Leaders of civilization became shepherds, herding and especially milking their flocks of mindless sheep. A couple of scams became so surefire successful that they have become enshrined as expected institutions in our civilized culture.
All forms of life, even ants, have an instinctive aversion to dying. If some individual was born without this genetic aversion he would just lie down and die whenever the going became difficult or unpleasant, and his non-aversion genes would not be perpetuated. A long time ago some very clever charlatan hit upon a scheme for capitalizing on this death aversion instinct, and the ruse became so instantly and perpetually successful that it became the classic cleric scam.
The cleric is a typical con artist and he/she nearly always goes through elaborate rituals to con, to convince, the victim that the cleric has an inside track to some all-powerful supernatural being that can perform miracles such as prolonging life. The cleric scam is sort of an imaginary life assurance policy. If you pay the cleric (ten percent of your income is often subtly, or not so subtly, requested) during your lifetime here on earth, the cleric assures you that when you die here on earth some imaginary continuation of yourself will be transported to an indescribably wonderful place up in the clouds, far removed from the pollution and misery of civilized life on earth, for eternity. It is really hard to imagine anyone falling for such a racket, especially since the cleric is never able to produce a clear video showing your recently dead friends enjoying their new accommodations in Heaven, but the aversion to, and the denial of, death is so strong that the majority of people actually do fall for the scam, even with our scientific knowledge today, and thus there is tremendous competition, dog eat dog competition, in the cleric trade. Billions upon billions of dollars are involved. Wars are fought.
Now, I don't feel any compulsion to be a protector of the masses. The fact that they waste their money is no concern of mine--but just how they waste it often is. The cleric scam affects us all in a horrendous manner. Back when Ronald Reagan was president of the US he appointed James Watt as Secretary of the Interior. Watt pulled off a project that was definitely damaging to the environment and, of course, the environmentalists raised a howl of protest. Watt's reply was essentially, "Hey, its no problem. The second coming of Christ is going to happen any day now, and none of us will need this environment on earth anymore". That incident actually happened! Unfortunately, the various versions of the cleric scam have made that statement the opinion of the majority of people on earth, even of most world leaders, and thus there is no sense of real need to preserve the living environment that our great, great, grandkids so desperately require. Reagan and Watt were at the very highest echelons of the US government--and the men in those posts now, as I write this, have exactly the same attitude (they deny the existence of human caused global warming and they recently "edited"--and in the process reversed--a government scientific report on overgrazing of public lands). When the most powerful nation on earth doesn't see any need to protect the environment, we're in big trouble.
As a necessary step in pulling off his scam, the cleric must convince his followers that the "God" he speaks of is "all-powerful". If the God is all powerful, then of course, anything and everything that happens is God's will and design. The environmental mess we have on earth today thus isn't any person's fault. God willed it--and he will cart us all off to eternity in heaven where there isn't any human-caused stinking mess. Such thinking is absolutely insane! Planet earth and Earth Entity are the only heaven that we and our descendents will ever have. When we shit in our nest (and every one of us is contributing to our environmental disaster by buying fancy houses, cars and electronics) our granddaughter has to grow up in the filth. If we destroy the nest, she dies!
I don't know which came first, but the cleric scam soon formed an unholy alliance with the politician scam. The politician scam didn't require any creative con game to be pulled off, it was more like strong arm robbery, but resistance to it was muted by the cleric's concept of an eternal life far away from whatever mess was left on earth.
What the politician did was to survey the surface of planet earth into clearly delimited parcels and then offer to "sell" those plots to the highest bidder. The purchaser was given a legal title to the lot--but only for as long as he paid yearly taxes on it to the politician. Essentially any destruction, any rape and plunder, to those portions of planet earth and Earth Entity within the parcel was allowed as long as the required taxes were paid. The politician didn't care at all what the buyer did to it. He was a pimp, selling his mother, Mother Nature, as a prostitute. The politician even protected the purchaser from angry neighbors who got upset when they saw their neighborhood destroyed. Like James Watt, the politician figured he was going to be in Heaven before long and he wouldn't have to look at the mess or smell the stench.
The living creatures, plant, animal, and microbe, on those plots were vital components, organs, of Earth Entity, the living environment that we are each a part of. They were part of our life! Who gives some politician the right to sell, and then collect taxes on, a part of our life? That is exactly like selling the Brooklyn Bridge to some naive bumpkin. And when the environment, the life on a plot, is destroyed, an essential part of our life is destroyed with it. That natural, self-maintaining, wild life that was destroyed should have been a legacy to our children to help provide for their existence. Some crook, some outright criminal, sold a part of our life so that he could collect the taxes and live in comfort while that part of us is destroyed. How can we be so naive and mindless as to let that happen? We should boil those clerics and politicians in oil for promoting their scams! Tar and feather the bastards!
Hate is very bad for your health. Don't do it. And don't chase the poor mayor with a baseball bat. The massive die-off will get rid of him soon enough. The cleric-politician system has been going on for thousands of years, and the guilty parties have built up so much pseudo-logical rationalization during that time, in an attempt to deflect criticism and to keep from feeling guilty, that a few of them today have brainwashed themselves into thinking that they're actually helping people. My motive with the inflammatory remarks above is not hate mongering. I just anticipate where the opposition to this essay will come from (when the clerics and politicians realize that the thrust of this writing is to eliminate their bread and butter livelihood), and I'm just launching a "preemptive strike". "Your best defense is a good offense."
Civilization does require a ruler, a government, to impose apparent harmony, but as I've constantly reminded, civilization is our only enemy. A natural hunter-gatherer lifestyle does not have a sheriff and jail. There is bound to be an occasional flair up of tempers during competition for resources, especially if those resources are in short supply, and maybe there will be an actual killing with a club, and that is exactly what the human species requires again in order to keep its population in proportion with all the other species. The human species does not require politicians or clerics of any sort. All the youngsters need is a father figure in their clan to demonstrate the use of the club.
I believe that it is entirely possible for humans, after a period of readjustment, to once again live a simple, happy, life as hunter-gatherers in symbiotic, mutually beneficial, cooperation with all the other wild species. That is the ultimate goal that we should all be striving to achieve for our descendents. I admit that the short-term outlook appears traumatic, to say the least, but I view it as an exciting challenge. I only wish that I could extend my life a hundred years or two and help guide and lead the struggle to regain a noble position as a respectable and useful component of Earth Entity's life instead of being a loathsome disease to her. I believe we can conquer this terrible cancerous disease called civilization and again become a happy, contented, beneficial, member of Mother Nature's life as hunter-gatherers following our well-proven inborn instincts. We lived that way for millions of years. We can do it for millions of years again.
I am sure that agriculture is going to collapse, and civilization with it. The refugium law of population biology guarantees it. Commercial fishing, arguably a form of farming now-a-days, is already in a tailspin from which it will probably never recover--a failure precisely because of a lack of refugium for the species involved--and many people of the world are dependent on that source of protein.
A factor exacerbating the world hunger situation is the declining production, and consequential rapidly escalating price, of petroleum. The US is a major exporter of grain to hungry countries. But the US, and also other exporters like Canada and Australia, produces this grain through the use of petroleum. Essentially, they are converting oil into food. But as the price of that oil sky rockets, the price of the grain exported must also increase--and poor people in the importing countries just do not have the money to buy.
Another major agricultural concern is the rapidly declining availability of water for irrigation. The huge underground reservoirs are being pumped dry. Rivers no longer run to the sea. Hydroelectric plants, city household water use and industry are in direct competition for water, and they are frequently given higher priority. This is an area where the wild card of global warming could suddenly have a big effect.
Of course, my crystal ball is clouded. I don't know how events are going to unfold. A new disease may play a big part. AIDS may even do the job eventually. It's the right sort of disease, biologically speaking, and it hasn't peaked yet. Experience in Africa shows that it can have a significant effect on agricultural output as many people become too weak to work but still require food. I am only certain that agriculture and civilization are going to crash.
One thing we really must be doing right now is work to change our verbal culture. Of course we are not going to change the mindset of the masses and rescue the environment that way. But the civilized masses are bound to die--all six billion of them--when some trigger starts a domino effect of nation after nation succumbing to agriculture collapse.
Among the surviving individuals will likely be those who prepared themselves for such an event, and part of that preparation should be a verbal culture oriented toward a long-term symbiotic existence with the natural wild species of earth. We must have enough guts to speak out now and contradict the self-serving politicians and clergy so that our kids and grandkids can learn a culture that is not damaging to the environment. We have to spread the word that the cult of civilization-farming that we've been seduced into following for the past ten thousand years was a terrible mistake and we must now change our ways to cure the cancer that is threatening the very life of the Mother Nature we have evolved with, the Mother Nature that we are each an infinitesimal component of.
Mother Nature is your life also. Will you help? You can start just by making this essay available to others who might be interested in reading it. Put a link on your web site and mention the essay starting at the first post.
This is the last installment of:
In Opposition to Civilization.
Comments are welcome.
(But they may not be posted or answered promptly)
Other essays will follow.
