Ceremony, survival day 4

We all woke up seperately, one at a time, before first light. Upon waking each wandered up, looking for a vantage before dawn. The East became pale, and the mockingbirds and robins sang in the valley. One by one each of us scrambled up the rock face and found the others at the high promontory, looking toward the dawn.





The dawn broke cold. When the dawn chorus wound to a close we finally rose and set about the work of breaking camp. We poured water on our fires, stirred the coal beds, and poured more water. We gathered up our bundles of dogbane and seep willow, bundled up our clothes and water filter, and walked out.

We had stashed some snacks at the cars -- coconut juice, and fruit, and even some nuts. Many of us chose to forgo the food, however. We were feeling light and and alive with the energy of the acorns and the food plants, the waters of the land, the dawn light and the birdsong. The thought of eating commercial food so soon actually made some of us sad.

We piled into cars and drove the hours-long way back to the place that the elders would receive us. We were greeted with song, offered water and cleansing herbs to wash of our road dust, and gathered around a fire. We told our story and we were questioned about our journeys. We feasted with elders and friends and families in our nature connection community.

Our gathering lasted into twilight with us circled around a little blaze under great old trees. Just as the last word was said, the first drops of rain began to fall. As we picked up our fire circle, blankets and personal items, the rain came light and soft. Once everything was moved and all were indoors, the rain came as a torrent. Finally it hailed, and the drencher settled in for the night.

Group Mind, Survival Day 3

We awoke at dawn of course, but few stirred from their fires. I curled by my coal bed, now white with ash, and listened to song sparrows and other greeters of the dawn.

Some of us were still up and moving, though -- notably the man who'd tended all our fires. He looked the most pleased of any of us to be sitting in that campsite that morning.



Then a stream of cursing jolted me fully awake - one of our German cohorts, a fellow with a fondness for foul language, was sitting bolt upright and patting out imaginary flames on his jacket sleeve. As he woke fully from his dream of burning cloth, he looked across the fire to another Native Eyes student. She had been awakened by his blue streak of curses, and now sat upright as well, staring at the charring, glowing hole, a hand's breadth wide, that her fire had opened in her sweater sleeve.

Later we realized that, though we remembered to bring our minds together in thanksgiving at every oportunity, we forgot to separate them.


We lazed and dawdled until someone went down to the creek to taste the acorn. When they came back, bag dripping and full of what we could finally call food, everyone began to move. We revived two of the night's fires, found some good flat-ish rocks, and began stoking.


One fire had lots of coals. On this we heated rocks that were about a quarter of an inch thick. We tested the heat of the rock by licking a finger and touching the surface -- if it sizzled, it was ready. We squeezed most of the water out of the acorn and plastered in on to the hot rocks. Soon the acorn turned dark and the edges of the acorn cracker peeled up. Then we flipped the crackers to cook out the water from the other side. This method was fast, but required constant fire to make more coals. The rocks didn't hold much heat.


At the other fire, we had found some bigger, bulkier rocks. We set up a sort of tripod of tall rocks around the center of the fire and placed our fairly bulky flat rock on top, over the center of the fire. Then we stoked the fire high to heat the mass of the rock. This setup took much more time to get started, but held heat for much longer than the small flat rock setup.

Both fires cranked out acorn crackers for the whole morning. The crackers themselves tasted bland at first -- which is saying a lot, since we were three days hungry by now. But chewing them for a while brought out a lovely nutty sweetness.

As we cooked, stoked the fire, and munched, we also talked. We discussed the year so far, and asked the question, "how can we make the rest of this year of Native Eyes as amazing as we need it to be?"


One of our companions who was not part of the entire Native Eyes year and would be leaving after the survival trip, had wandered off around dawn to find a sit spot. All through breakfast and lunch (the two kind of blended into each other) we were involved with our Native Eyes conversation. The topic didn't concern our absent companion, so we weren't concerned that he was missing the discussion. We saved his portion and kept talking into midday. Then, as the energy wound down around our topic, we realized that he had been gone for many hours. One of us said he would go holler for the wanderer, but got involved again in the last words on the Native Eyes subject, so no one sent out a call.

After we said the final words in our discussion, and all were ready to move on, we looked up to see our wandering friend walking into our camp.


With the bag of acorn empty of even the finest crumbs, our conversation played out, and our companion returned, we needed something to do with all the acorn-energy. We decided to finally do some exploring and move camp. We had our bowless fire drill kit still assembled, but we didn't want to have to spin up another coal that evening. So we gathered punky chunks of wood from the downed pines. Some, about as long as my arm, we used whole. We pushed one end of the punk sticks into the fire to catch a coal, then walked with that end up and out of the wind. It smoldered well until the wind came up and set the punk sticks flaming.

The smaller chunks of punky wood I ground to powder on our acorn grinding stones. I found some long concave chunks of bark and lined them with cattail fluff. Then I poured the punky wood powder over the cattail fluff, taco'd the powder in fluff, and surrounded the whole thing with a layer of bark. I stuffed a live coal in one end and tied the bark tight to restrict air flow. We carried our fire with us.


Our wander spread us out over the land. With no trail and only springy grass to take a track (actually the grass took a track pretty well, but didn't hold it for long), we kept in contact with raven calls.

Finally, we found it. The place. THE place to spend the night. A minute, narrow valley between the two masses of sandstone that sat in the grass like giant rounded loaves of dough. It was sheltered from the night winds and within an easy walk of two downed valley oaks for firewood. Dead manzanitas, too, were scattered on the sandstone. It even had water, though not the fast-flowing crystalline creek that we'd slept by previously.


After resting at the new site for some time, Team Ground Squirrel decided that we'd like to go check our traps. We took a circuitous route to admire the scenery and look for more food on the way.


When we found this beautiful pond turtle neither of us could even consider taking him back to camp for dinner. For all that his kind are our native testudine, I'd never seen one this close, and rarely seen them at all. I've only gotten this close to the pet shop kind of turtle, red-eared sliders. We admired the gold glint and patterning on his skin, and in his eyes, before leaving him in peace.


More spectacular landscape brought us back to the ground squirrel meadow, where we found trap after trap disturbed but unoccupied. Perhaps the nooses were too large, or too noticeable?


With the light taking on the gold of afternoon, both my companion and I felt the magnetism of the sun-warmed earth. We lay in the grass to rest, and my companion began to snore. I relaxed into the ground and dreamed.

When I awoke, I awoke fully and completely. I sat up, feeling refreshed, and said something to my companion. He replied that he had just woken up too and was ready to move on. We stood up and saw another Native Eyes student approaching from the direction of camp. We joined him on his walk to the creek.

Why did we both feel the overwhelming, bone-deep need for a nap at that time? Why did we both snap awake in such synchrony? If we had been asleep when the other Native Eyes person came down, would he have been able to notice us, flat out in the grass?


We returned to camp with our empty nooses and set to gathering firewood. We had two gargantuan piles by dusk, one of manzanita and one of oak. We would sleep warm.

We gathered around our fire after the last light had gone. We gave thanks for the journey we were on, and checked in with everyone. Then we settled ourselves around two fires for the night.


Before we slept we also experimented with a self-feeding fire technique from YouTube. We found that manzanita and weathered oak burn too thoroughly and too quickly. The tower of wood that, according to the video, should have taken hours to burn down took about thirty minutes. But it was spectacular.

Msafiri Time, Survival Day 2

At dawn I found myself soggy from the steam. I stripped off my warm clothes, laid them where the sun would soon warm them, curled myself by the fire and fell asleep again. We awoke in fits and starts that morning and the sun was high before all of us were on our feet.

I'd had a nauseating and head-splitting migraine in the night. A salt packet in my water and some aspirin from the first aid kit finally cut through the most acute pain, but I still felt sluggish and ill from mild hyponatremia (a good reason to pack salt in your first aid kit on multi-day wilderness trips, especially if fasting is involved). Still, I wanted to find a new campsite for the night.


One of the other participants kept talking about his adventures walking up a similar creek and finding trout in the shadows and backwaters of undercut banks. The day was warm and I wanted to go upstream anyway, so I decided that my willow walking stick would become a fish spear instead. I split the end, sharpened the tines, wedged in two small sticks, and made some dogbane cordage to keep the splits from opening too wide. The whole process took about thirty minutes. And then, with spear in hand and sun warm on my shoulders -- I took a nap on the sandbar. I was exhausted by the work of making a simple fish spear.


As I snoozed others were cracking acorns and grinding them to a coarse, bitter flour. The rhythm of pounding stones and cracking shells drifted me to deeper sleep.


We found that some of the acorns from a particular Valley Oak tree on the Peninsula had exceptionally little tannin and had been dried in a too-hot oven. They turned out to be slow-roasted, sweet, and only very slightly tannic. We roasted them further in the fire to soften them and turn more starches to sugars, and ate them out of hand as we pounded the bitter acorns to flour.

I slept into the afternoon. After drinking small amounts of lightly-salted water all day I at least felt ambulatory, and had some appetite for the roasted acorns. My stomach told me in no uncertain terms, though that only a few of the roasted un-leached acorns would be acceptable.


By afternoon, my eagerness to explore finally outweighed my sluggishness. Another participant was just leaving to set some snares for ground squirrels, and I decided to come along. He had brought some lengths of wire twisted into nooses.

We knew we'd arrived at a good ground squirrel meadow for a number of reasons. The grass was crisscrossed with runs to and from large round holes, some holes dipping diagonally into bare earth mounds and some straight down into the grassy meadow. The squirrels themselves scattered and dropped into these burrows when we approached. And now and then a beeping alarm would sound from an unseen sentry at a burrow.

We scanned the horizon for golden eagles as we worked, wondering if the more distant flicker and squirrel alarms together meant that an eagle was approaching. We set something like eight or ten traps in all, dangling a loop over a run or over a burrow. We staked the wires in the ground, and hoped that the headlong rush of squirrels bolting for their holes would cinch the snares.


I was still so dazed and low energy from fasting that halfway through the snare expedition I forgot where we'd already set the snares. I had trouble pounding in stakes. I started to get angry at the world for letting me get so hungry, tired and ill. I wanted to just stop and lie in the grass until someone took care of me.

Then I remembered something one of my mentors liked to say about the "sacred order of survival." Everyone has a different order to these four necessities, depending on season and environment: shelter, water, fire, food. Sometimes, as in our case, fire can be your shelter. Or it can be your source of clean water. Sometimes a debris hut will save your life. But in all cases, my mentor listed a fifth necessity for survival: attitude. The will to what you need to do, to survive or thrive. And my mentor put this requirement before all else.

Before this trip I thought that fifth, really first, requirement, was a no-brainer. What living being could be so out of the flow of life that it lacks the will to live? It turned out that I might. I wanted to give up all efforts to find firewood, filter water, find food, and make camp. I wanted to lie on the ground until someone else took care of me, made me warm, fed me good hot food.

I took stock of myself: almost to the point of tears with anger at not being taken care of, not having my needs met. And I understood that if my friends weren't there, or were not as skilled as they are, that attitude could possibly have me dying of chronic hypothermia in another few days. And others in the group were also relying on me to keep myself together and support them if they were to break down as I just did.

This whole thought process took no more time than a pause in pounding in the stake. I sat up again and kept pounding.


After our afternoon nap, we began the walk back to camp. On the way we found some Blue Dicks flowers, and my companion showed me how to ID the flower (a tight cluster of blue six-petaled tubular flowers at the top of a long stalk with two long narrow leaves, folded acutely along the midrib, attached at the base), dig deep with a digging stick, and follow the long, delicate, subterranean stem of the flower to the corm. The corm turned out to be about half the size of a marble, with little cormlets clinging to the side. We broke off the baby corms and the root crown (a part at the bottom of the corm that resembles the root end of an onion, and breaks easily from the main corm) and replanted them in the turned earth. Then I ate the corm whole and raw.

Important note: If anyone is planning to eat Blue Dicks, please first consult an expert in plant ID and make sure your specimen is flowering. There are deadly bulb- and corm-bearing wildflowers in California. Please also know the laws concerning gathering wild plants in your area.

The little mouthful of living carbohydrate energy transformed my worldview. Where before, maintaining a positive attitude was a Herculean feat, now my energy buoyed up on its own. Though there weren't any more diggable Blue Dicks, I dug nine more thistles for our evening meal, and walked back with more energy and enthusiasm than I'd felt since before the first morning.


Back at camp the acorn-pounders, after submerging the bag of acorn meal in the creek for the night, had become wood gatherers. Team Ground Squirrel lent a hand gathering dead wood, and soon we had a veritable beaver dam of dry wood on our sandbar. After long discussion, we arrived at a plan for the night: four fires, one for every two people, arranged in a square on the sand. Everyone would lie in a radial pattern with feet to the center and fires between pairs of people. Space constraints kept the plan from working quite as it was sketched, so we wound up with five fires for the night. Our intention was to tend each fire individually, with people waking as their fires went cold and adding more wood as needed. We snuggled up to our little blazes and went to sleep.


But almost no one woke up that night. One person, his fire awareness honed by years of solo camping with no sleeping bag, woke up to add wood to his fire. As he reached behind him into the wood pile, a hand came down in front of him, holding the very piece of wood he had reached for, and placed it in the exact spot he intended. Our eldest Native Eyes student had decided to stay up all night and tend all five fires for us as we slept.


We slept sound and warm through that night.

Msafiri time

Survival Trip Day 1:

We gathered the previous evening at the Pie Ranch Barn Dance to feast, celebrate our community, and embark on our survival trip with intention and support. We spent the night under the spreading branches of a Coast Live Oak on the property of one of our Native Eyes fellows, rose in the morning with no food, and set out in two cars to Los Padres National Forest. Eight of us, almost the whole of Native Eyes, had elected to go into survival mode -- or as one of our mentors calls it, sustainability mode -- for three nights. We had discussed at length, in a series of meetings throughout the year, why we wanted to go on a survival trip, what we hoped to get out of it, and what we wanted to bring. Our collective intention was never recorded in writing, but was something akin to, "full immersion of body, mind, heart, soul, and spirit in the natural world, with health, happiness, and safety within reason."

Our initial intention had been to make a toolkit of primitive technology and bring that with us -- to coal-burn containers, craft some figure-four traps, make stone cutting tools, and gather and preserve wild foods. We wanted to try sustaining ourselves as a village, using long-term relationships with the land, living off previous season's bounties and learning to harvest this season's riches. But as our timeline accelerated, we found ourselves without handmade items and wanting containers, knives, and other technologies. Most of us brought water bottles and knives. We packed in water filters, because we knew the water to be unsafe. We all wore warm things. Some of us brought backpacks with warm clothes. One brought a blanket. We made sure to bring a first aid kit with a light for emergency use. And we had gathered acorns, some from the same centuries-old Valley Oaks that populate the low places of Los Padres. So we brought unprocessed acorns in the shell. And nothing else.



Even before reaching a parking lot, we had pulled over and grabbed some buckeye wood. There was also a vivacious patch of miner's lettuce under the buckeye. With no other food yet that day, we tore into the greens ravenously.

We reached the parking lot, left the cars, and started walking. We simply walked away from the cars, along a trail that many other hikers probably took -- we didn't have any destination in mind to walk toward. Sometimes we passed Grey Pines and one or a lot of us would stop, pick up some fallen cones, and start bashing them with rocks in search of pine seeds. Not finding any, the foragers would soon catch up with the rest. In the end we found four pine seeds. Shared among eight people, none of whom had eaten anything but miner's lettuce, they were still a delight. We also dug thistles for later, tucking the spiny burdens here and there in our clothes.


We came to a creek. Along the edges, tall willow-like canes grew from the sand, with a few flowers and bark that looked oddly familiar. Coyotebrush? We started cutting dead sticks as soon as we recognized it: Baccaris salicifolia! Mulefat! As good as a Bic lighter, some say. And right alongside, an opposite-leaved herb remeniscent of milkweed. We gathered this, too. Dogbane is a rare treat in the Bay Area primitive technologist's toolkit.


We decided to cross the creek. We never discussed it, but I think we all thought it would be a good idea, though I'm not sure why. We rock-hopped and then waded, one by one, with our shoes and warm clothes fastidiously held away from the water. Then on the last crossing, someone slipped. Into the icy water went the warm clothes and shoes.

We laid the clothes out in the sun, which was by now past it's zenith and into afternoon. We sat down on the sandbar and got to work on mulefat-on-buckeye hand drills. Everyone spun and sweated. I got a blister. We even tried to use the sunglasses we'd found by the creek as a fetish to bring fire. None of it worked. The buckeye that we'd been so happy for this morning turned out to be weathered grey and spongy, and the mulefat had, though dead and sun-baked, still been rooted by the creek. With the sun lowering steadily, I set off to find a handhold for a bow drill.

I wound up following a deer trail on a whim. It went into some soft, sandy ground, and as I ducked around the poison oak that grew so enthusiastically by the run, I looked down. In front of me, on top of all the deer tracks, was a round print as big as my palm. Asymmetrical, big heel pad. But not totally clear. I trailed it for a while, wondering if it could in fact be the dog I'd seen earlier. But the characteristics were consistent. I returned to camp.



Back at camp they were still working away at the hand drills. Most were, anyway. Into the hubbub, I said, "Hey, I think I may have found cougar tracks. Do you guys want to go trail a cougar?" With the sun low, perhaps two hours away from setting, clothes still damp, no shelter and an expected 34 degree night coming on, what else could we do? Everyone jumped up (well, more like staggered, as we were all quite hungry by this time) and went to see the cat sign.



We followed until the trail went to packed earth, and kept following the worn-in deer trail. At the next muddy spot, there the tracks were again, fresher than all the deer tracks. We guessed it was a male, possibly a large one.


Then we found, further along the trail, a big scrape in the earth made by the cat's two hind paws. We sniffed the mound. Half of it smelled sharply of cat pee and the other half absolutely reeked of fresh, meaty cougar scat. We did not dig through the mound, but left it for others in our party to see. If he was pooping meaty scats, it might mean that there was a kill nearby. Now we had another reason to follow: we hoped to steal the cougar's meat.


As soon as we decided that we wanted his meat, we lost the cat's trail. But our search brought us into a wet meadow, bordered by a kind of tree we hadn't seen since driving in: buckeyes. Woodrats in the the buckeyes had stripped some limbs, and the wood seasoned well up off the ground in the dappled shade. When we cut into the limbs, the wood was a smooth, buttery yellow-white. With offerings to the tree and big grins, we selected our pieces and set off back to camp. We had good wood for our fire kit.

On the way back I stopped to rest by another sandy wash. Slanting light picked out skunk tracks, and ground squirrel, deer, lizard, beetle and grey fox tracks. My own tracks trailed among these, larger but really no different. All passing through the sand in search of a living, all leaving our traces. All lit gold in the sun of the afternoon.



At the sandbar we whittled out a board and spindle, and made a long cord of dogbane. Wrapping the cord three times around the spindle, one of the more indefatigable participants took the ends of the cord and began spinning the spindle. In minutes, our bowless bow drill yielded a coal. Others had been working hard gathering pine, and importantly, downed valley oak, as firewood. We had big piles beside the sandbar to fuel us through the night.


Meanwhile, we had been discussing the lack of plush accommodation on the landscape. The sky told of dry weather for that night at least, so we only had cold to consider. We would spend the night at the sandbar to make use of the sand and fire as our shelter. We dug a trench about six inches deep, with the idea of spreading oak coals along the trench, covering them with sand, and sleeping all eight of us side-by-side on heated sand. Then someone piled in stones they'd gathered from higher land away from the water, and we made our fire on the stones.


The fire took a long time to burn down. We roasted cattail shoots, all eight that we were able to find that day, and tried various ways of eating thistle. My favorite is to bake the whole plant near coals, then to eat it from the root end up. The heart of the basal rosette and the leaf bases become sweet and succulent with heat.



We snoozed, curled in our warm clothes, nestled in soft (if a bit damp) sand, by our bonfire. Time passed. Some talked. Some watched the stars. Some dreamed.


When the blaze finally settled we had the stones glowing like coals. We hadn't dug the trench with stones in mind, and now we only had a little flame left to light our work. We built up a second fire for light, spread the stones and coals as best we could (some were too heavy to move with sticks), and piled on sand. Where smoke had wisped before, now steam billowed into the night. The sand was wet. We curled around the little fire as we waited for the sand to dry. And waited. And waited.



Finally the steam seemed to lessen, and some of us braved the heated stretch of sand. We quickly found where rock poked through, and piled on more sand. And waited again for the sand to steam off. When we finally lay down, the Big Dipper had revolved quite a way around Polaris, and all were very ready to sleep. Still, the heat and steam came up. We could only lie for so long before the heat became unbearable, and we'd have to move.

Eventually some of us slept, steam or no. The rest lay by the smaller fire, alternately tending and napping, and keeping mostly warm through the frosty night.