Brain Tanning

I've fallen in love with brain tanning. What is brain tanning? It's when one turns an animal hide into either a furry pelt or a cloth-like material (buckskin) that can be used for making clothes, bags and other useful things. And one accomplishes this not by using toxic modern chemical concoctions, but the animal's own brain as stone age people have done since long before the advent of agriculture.

It's interesting to see the process of turning a furry little squirrel or rabbit or deer into dinner, tools, and clothing. It's amazing, really. I mean who anymore knows how to prepare their own food? Most modern Westerners can't even grow a garden. Fewer still know how to successfully hunt and butcher a wild animal. And I can probably count on two hands how many people can take the next step of turning the "useless" parts like skin and bones into clothing using nothing but their own two hands and a few simple tools fashioned out of rocks and animal bones.

Everything we need, nature provides.

Flannel is Cool

Tonight I stopped into Alfalfa's for a couple of items as I often do in the evening. Upon checking out a cute young female cashier who I frequently see said to me, "You always wear the coolest flannels!"

What's awesome about that? First, that sense of community. It's nice to go someplace and be not just recognized but acknowledged. There are a number of places around town where people smile and strike up a conversation with me simply out of familiarity. The second thing that's so awesome about what she said is that I live in a place where flannel is cool. She's not the first to compliment me on my flannel. When I lived in Texas it was a big joke that only lesbians wore flannel, but I always loved it. At one point in years past, friends came over and persuaded me I needed to get rid of all my flannel and plaid and restock my wardrobe with something more fitting the urban gay lifestyle. I took their advice, but over the years my wardrobe turned plaid again. I couldn't be happier.

Squirrel Stew

Tonight we're getting our first real snow of the season; up to 19 inches are forecast by tomorrow afternoon, along with temperatures hovering around 13 degrees. Tonight we've got the fireplace going and I made a big pot of squirrel stew and cornbread.

Think I'll work from home tomorrow and keep my fingers crossed for a snow day. I love this time of year.

Cabin in the Woods. Again.

Hate is a strong word. Regarding my last post, I didn't mean to use that word. I just get really frustrated sometimes, and I am grateful to have a great career, especially in this economy. But overall I meant everything else I said.

This weekend I picked a burlap sack full of wild fox grapes and turned them into jelly. I also picked a sack full of chokecherries which I plan to dry this week. I couldn't pick enough chokecherries to make jelly. It's so late in the year now there aren't many left.

Chokecherries were one of the staple foods for the nomadic Native Americans. They grow abundant and wild in the Rockies, though few people today even notice them. The Indians typically dried them into fruit leathers or used them in pemmican, and European pioneers liked to make preserves and jellies out of them. They're tasty, nutritious, abundant, and once prepared will easily last the winter. And chokecherries aren't the only wild foods that nature grows in her Rocky Mountain garden. To name but a few edible fruits, we've got bearberries, raspberries, blueberries, haws, grouseberries, cranberries, strawberries, gooseberries, currants, huckleberries, false wintergreen, saskatoons, plums, grapes, nuts and more. That's to say nothing of edible barks, ferns, bulbs, roots, shoots, mushrooms and greens. And then, of course, there's the wildlife: mule deer, wapiti, buffalo (now extinct in the wilds of Colorado), white tail deer, pronghorn, beaver, bear, chickaree, Abert's squirrel, trout, grouse, ptarmigan, turkey, a host of waterfowl and a number of other lesser known creatures all make great meals, clothing, tools and shelter.

There's something wholly satisfying to me about going out into the forest and bringing a wild animal or a sack full of berries back home and preparing dinner -- and especially if I can prepare it and store it away for dinners yet to come during those wonderful, long winter nights. Conversely, there's something both sad and terrifying about going to the grocery store to buy faceless food -- food whose story I cannot know, from a soulless entity I do not trust. I liken it to the difference between a lion hunting wildebeest on the open Serengeti, and a lion lying in a cage at a zoo being tossed a block of meat at regularly scheduled intervals. It's disgusting. It's disturbing. It's amoral. It is entirely artificial and counter to the way nature operates.

I still get the majority of my food directly from local farmers, which I love, but I'm getting a larger portion of my food from the wild these days.

Tonight I'm dreaming of my cabin, off the grid, out of the system. I can see it as if I were in it right now: the big stone fireplace, the bearskin rug, the hardwood floors. I'm standing at the window in my cotton night pants. I feel the cold on my skin through the glass. The hour is late, but the full moon reflects off the snow and lights up the valley. It is silent and still, like a painting. The dogs are snoozing by dying the fire. The root cellar is full of smoked and dried wild meats, fish, mushrooms and berries, supplemented with a few barrels of potatoes, flour, sugar, onions, squashes, salt and apples that I picked up at the farmers market in town last fall. I've also got dried and fermented vegetables and a couple of wheels of cheese, and shelves stacked deep with jams, jellies, fruit butters, pemmican, maple syrup and pickled peppers. I have no refrigerator; I have no use for one. I have no electricity; I have no need of it. I have no indoor plumbing; it serves no purpose.

But from where I stand at the window, hot cup of tea in hand, I can see my smokehouse and my outhouse and the stream that brings me an endless supply of clean, cold water. I can see the cords of firewood I carefully chopped, stacked and dried all summer long to feed my wood burning stove throughout the winter. I can see my wood shop, and the barn where I keep the horses on the coldest nights. Over the fireplace hangs my rifle. In the dining room sits the table and chairs I crafted of Douglas fir some years ago. On the wall hangs the snowshoes I made, and which I use on winter hunting trips.

And from up in the loft I hear the gentle, rhythmic rumble of a man in a deep sleep, nestled in thick, soft blankets, keeping my spot warm. I sip the last of my tea and set the cup down without a sound. In the ghostly light of dying embers I give the pooches a soft scratch behind the ears, but they hardly move. Up the ladder I slip into the shadows, out of my night pants, and into a cave of blankets. I press against my partner, and his bare skin is so hot I give a quick shutter at realizing how chilly I had gotten down by the window. We curl up like a couple of bears settling in for a long winter's sleep. I am in heaven.

Welcome Back Rant

As my last post indicated, I tried moving my blog to Wordpress. I got it in my head that I was going to build a more robust site with "how-to" pages and other resources, but it turned out it was just too much work. I have little interest in taking on more commitments, especially ones that are technology-dependent. I also got sidetracked by Facebook for awhile, but I got sick of people posting about the mundane things in their ordinary lives. No offense to them, I'm just not interested. I suppose my life is plenty mundane, or at least odd and incomprehensible, to most of them.

Blogger gives me a release, without the complication of building a resource, and without the distraction and even greater complication of Facebook.

So I guess I'm back, and though I do try to avoid all-out rants, today I think is going to be a rough one.

Why today? I'm at work and wholly depressed, which isn't a big surprise if you've read anything I've written over the years. I have a high-paying job with wonderful benefits that contributes to a cleaner, greener world, my peers respect me, my work environment is low-stress and my employer is generous.

And I hate my job. I hate it in the way that a lover of fine dining might hate giving up juicy steaks, fine wines, crisp fruits, tender vegetables, crusty breads and silken desserts for the futuristic meal-in-a-pill. It isn't that it tastes bad, or that it lacks nutrition (assuming humans could actually achieve this), but rather that it tastes like nothing and leaves the soul malnourished. I feel like a suburban drone, passing the days not by the rhythms of nature but by the wholly artificial ticking of the clock. I feel unstimulated. Unmoved. Unmotivated. Pointless. Wasteful. Sad.

I have to get out.

My coworkers praise my work, my work ethic, and my good-natured personality. But I'm just going through the motions. My body is here earning money to pay everyone else to provide my "living," but my heart roams the forested mountains in search of something real.

I watched a movie called The New World last night. It was a little slow as it was more a love story than anything, but it put me in a mood. It reminded me (as if I needed reminding) just how f*ed up white people and Western society are and always have been. If I came ashore in America in 1607 I would join the Indians and never look back. They had it made. The mere fact that they managed to live on this continent for 14,000 years and not destroy it, and we managed to take it to the brink in just a few centuries speaks volumes.

I despise money and the clock and the calendar. I despise the Western social hierarchy, the greed and the gluttony and the backstabbing. I hate fashion and gadgets and everything that Pottery Barn represents. I hate that we're not only willing, but eager to trade timeless, unspoiled wilderness for a metaphorical minute of suburbia. I hate annual performance reviews and standardized tests. I hate car culture and television and processed industrial calories that pass as food. I hate human stupidity and I hate being part of the whole f*ed up system. I hate religion, especially the "big three."

All I want is to live deliberately. All I want is to hunt and gather and grow my own food, to build my own home, to laugh with friends, to breathe clean air and drink clean water, to walk among ancient forests and to wonder and ponder over the midnight stars. I don't need "stuff" beyond what I can make from what the forest provides. I don't need "culture" or "entertainment." I don't even need to own land. I just need to live with the land, and after I die let someone else walk in my footsteps. That's all. You know, the way most humans have lived for three million years. Is that so much ask? Really? I don't want fame and fortune, I have no interest in keeping up with the Jones', and you can keep your plastic suburban fantasy. I want to extricate myself from it entirely. If I don't do something soon I will go mad.

I've thought about going back to school and becoming a biologist, but even scientists often irk me. As Ian Malcom said in Jurassic Park, "what you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world." I'm not at all comfortable with poking and prodding nature merely to see "what makes it tick." Some things, I think, are best left to the realm of the mysterious. I don't need to know what's happening on a cellular level inside of Clostridium botulinum, or even that it exists. Is it not enough to know that cooking certain foods keeps one from getting sick? Is it not enough to gain wisdom from observing and interacting with the natural world, rather than gain information by dissecting it under a microscope?

Why must I "get a job?" I'm not lazy, not at all. I love work. A few weeks ago I spent an entire day felling, limbing, bucking and splitting firewood in the forest using nothing but a double ax, an antique bucking saw and a maul. I used no fossil fuels except to drive my truck up in the mountains because I don't have and anyway wouldn't be allowed to use a horse drawn cart on modern roads. And anyway if it weren't for the "advancements" of society I wouldn't even need the cart or to cut down trees. Natives had small fires burning twigs and dung that kept them quite warm with no need even for harvesting firewood as we know it. Talk about efficiency!

That said, I'm not opposed to learning a trade. I need to work with my hands more. I need to walk and interact with things that are real, like wood and wildlife, not plastic and suburban cube-zombies.

When the weekend comes and I'm in the Rockies, I feel alive and happy and deeply interested. When the weekdays come I feel dead and numb, like my spirit is broken. Work is an endless procession of pointless days doing pointless work to live a life I don't want in the first place. How do I get out?

How do I get out?

Tales of the Mountain Men

I'm reading Tales of the Mountain Men, a collection of excerpts edited by Lamar Underwood.

I've been off work for eleven straight days. I've spent most of that time celebrating with friends and family, cooking, reading and snowshoeing (and shopping with mom, as previously noted.) Tomorrow I have to go back to the office. I'd rather pack up a string of horses and mules and ride for days deep into the mountains. There I would find my cozy little cabin nestled at the foot of the mountains on the edge of a wide meadow. I'd like to wade into an icy creek and set a beaver trap. I'd like to trap a few beaver, skin them out, tan the hides and sew them into a coat. I'd like to chop firewood for the stove. I'd like to eat fried beaver tail and winter pemmican. I'd like to hear the old wood planks creak gently beneath my feet as I gaze out the window across the snow-blanketed valley. I'd like to stretch out on the buffalo robe in front of the fire with my dogs and sleep away the long winter nights.

But that's only a dream. I live in cube land. I am a mountain man spirit trapped in the life of a cube bunny. Nobody ever said life was fair.