Monday, May 7, 2007

post 28, Canoe Trip Tent


Canoe Trip Tent, 1987. See also posts 01, 04, 07, 13, 20, and 28. The photo doesn't look like much, but it brings back fond memories to me.

The brown canvas on the left was about an eight by ten foot tarp I bought for two dollars at a yard sale. The white canvas on the right was roughly the same size. It had been part of a teepee liner that a friend gave to me. To start constructing the tent I would stake the lower corners of those canvases to the ground. The next step was to tie the top ends of two poles (the canoe mast and the handle of the dip net) together and set them up as an A frame with the top mid point of each canvas tied to them. The canvases didn't reach the very peak of the A. They were about a foot short and this eventually created a diamond shaped smoke hole to allow for an indispensable inside fire.

At the front and rear of the tent the top corners of the canvases overlapped to keep rain out. Short doorway poles gave shape to the tent and cords (one visible) leading to stakes held the doorway poles up. Army ponchos (see post 16) closed those doorways. The white triangular canvas at the top was the lateen canoe sail, still lashed to its yard and boom, draped over a stick tied to the A apex. The sail kept rain from coming in the diamond shaped smoke hole. If there was any breeze at all the sail also created a suction (you had to adjust it for wind direction) to suck the smoke out.

That tent was one of the most comfortable dwellings that I have ever lived in. Northwest Oregon is often very wet and chilly for long periods and you really need a nice warm, drying, fire right inside your tent. A friend stayed with me for a week or so on that trip and the tent size proved large enough for the two of us.

Late one afternoon, almost at the end of that trip, I could see that a storm was building up, so I dug a substantial drainage ditch around the periphery of the tent and I pounded all stakes in firmly. I was already in bed and asleep when I was wakened by the shriek of wind and the crash of a deluge of water as if Zeus had emptied his bathtub over my tent. There was still glowing coals in the hearth, so, still in bed, I reached over and brought the fire to life again with some little twigs. The tent canvas was straining against the wind, but there was no sign that it would fail. There were no leaks. I cuddled happily in bed and enjoyed Nature's symphony until I drifted off to sleep again.

A few days later I was in Astoria studying a potential house remodel job to earn some much needed grocery money. Several pop tents, spread out on a balcony to dry, caught my attention. The lady of the house, Peggy Deveroux, noticed my interest. She explained that a few nights before, the night of my storm, her son had been on a Boy Scout outing. A terrific wind and rain came up suddenly and blew over or collapsed every one of their pop tents. The boys, clad only in their underwear, threw their camping gear in their vehicles and hurried back to town.

I said that the tent was one of the most comfortable abodes that I have ever lived in, and that is the sincere truth. I don't need a chair to sit in. I'm a lie-down person. And I do not want a soft mattress under me. They goof up my back. I need a firm bed. Good Mother Earth is ideal. I carefully feel for and throw out the rocks, sticks, roots and other lumpies and shape the earth a little with a slight depression for my hips. Then I use something like a waterproof army poncho to cover the dirt. My friends John and Sue used a thick wooly sheepskin under them, and they claimed it was ideal, but they usually hauled their house around in a Volkswagen, so the bulk and weight of the sheepskin was less of a factor.

Accustomed as we are to modern houses and conveniences, we can surprise ourselves when we contemplate what little is actually required in order to genuinely enjoy life. But we should remember that our genes are only a few percentage points away from being identical with those of a chimpanzee. And I'm sure that the truly wild chimpanzee gets great enjoyment from life, probably a lot more enjoyment then us (he doesn't have to be a slave to some obnoxious, environment destroying, job to pay for house and conveniences) even though he has no physical possessions at all.
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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.

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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)