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.