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.

Shelter

We started this week with a discussion about the year so far. We have done some fun, challenging and rewarding things this year, and lately we seem to have lost some steam. Our conduct on the land has become lax, and our focus is lacking. We took the morning to check in with this pattern. We all had recognized a laxness in ourselves and others, and we discussed its origins and possible resolution. We took the morning discussion time to renew our focus on nature connection and the Native Eyes community.

When our discussion came to a close, we received a challenge: mock survival! We had the afternoon to find a shelter site, get fire from the land, find drinkable water, and feed ourselves, all off the Venture Retreat land. We stated with a stroll down to the redwood circle.


Our first work on the shelter was to design the space and figure our dimensions. Hard work! The sky said it would rain later that night, and rain usually comes in on south winds. So we chose a more or less northerly side of the redwood circle for our structure.


We settled on a fire-heated design in two sections: the tall guys on the right of these photos, and the short people on the left. We framed it with sticks and brought some gravel from the pile nearby to protect the roots of the trees from our fire.



A downed redwood branch provided green boughs to line the shelter.


A palm tree up by the main house gave us fronds, and the redwoods gave us much duff to pile over the fronds.


We layered as much duff as we could find on top of our construction. It was still pretty thin, so we knew we'd have to invest work in heating the space with fire. We made a heat reflector out of stones right behind our fire area, and then wove a larger windbreak and heat reflector out of boughs and firewood.


While the shelter progressed, some of us took time out to wander the creek for food plants, scout for fresh water, and find friction fire materials.


We worked for a long time on our red elderberry hand drill, but to no avail. I was feeling hungry and tired, and in need of a break, but we had no coal yet. While we still worked on our hand drill, the instructors reminded us that we were still part of the RDNA village, that we were in dinner time, and that we would be joining the Essentials and Cultural Mentors in the main house after dinner. I took this as a chance to go tend to some of my physical needs.

When I returned, I found that some of our scouts had located a cache of buckeye wood down the road, and we put together some bow drill kits. We were still in survival mode, though somewhat adulterated by the break to drink water and nibble food. We discussed the break in continuity of our survival scenario with the instructors and eachother, somewhat heatedly, bringing up past patterns that have gotten in the way of our learning journeys this year. In the midst of the discussion, one of our number was bowing steadily on his fire kit. When our discussion resolved and all had clarity, with dusk wrapping close and the need for warmth punctuated by the chill, we had our coal.

Because we hadn't had much warning, we chose to still eat some of the food we brought with us that evening. We walked our tinder bundle from our shelter back to the Native Eyes fire circle (a process that caused one of us to be newly renamed Running Flame) and lit our cookfire. After much discussion we chose to stay at our fire, eat and tell stories, and to rejoin the village the next day. As our meal ended, the first drops of the nights downpour sizzled into our cookfire coals.

We brought burning sticks from the fire circle to our shelter and kindled our fire there. All crawled in and snuggled close, most forgoing sleeping bags and and we started the firewatch for the night. For the first part of the night, rain rolled of our shelter. All inside stayed quite dry, if not warm. I took firewatch in the middle of the night, woke and tended fire for my sleeping compatriots. By then the rain had stopped, and the whole landscape was black clouded night, save for the gold of our fire on the faces of my friends.



The design left much to be desired: smoke swirled in under the low roof and choked sleeping people at times, so the fire tender had to keep handfuls of small twigs ready to kick up flame and burn off smoke. Our feet were universally freezing by morning. And the tall folk hadn't slept with faces to the fire, so some of them stayed very cold.

Still, the night of fire-tending and sleeping rough in a shelter of our own making seemed to kick loose the stagnant energy of the last few weeks, to tighten up that slack that we'd started our day discussing. At the end of my mostly wakeful stint as fire tender and my fitful and chilly sleep, I woke feeling rejuvenated in spirit, if not in body. The winter wrens woke us before the sun and we greeted the day with an awe and reverence that I hadn't even known had been lacking.

Bedding Down

As soon as we arrived we began trailing deer at Commonweal, searching for the freshest trails, hunting for them in their day beds. We spread out in ones, twos and fours over the landscape. Some took the ridges where, before the rains, the bucks were most often bedded down.

One pair, youth and adult, wandered the east ridge seemingly aimlessly. They would stop, close their eyes, point in a direction, walk that way, and then stop again and do the whole thing over. They zigzagged without pattern over the landscape as they tried to feel the location of the deer's beds. After a long time of wandering and thinking about deer the youth stopped. "I was feeling it in my brain," he said, "but now I feel it right here." He pointed to his gut, and to the direction from which the feeling came. Walking that way, the pair found themselves walking right up to a single worn-in deer bed. It was full of deer hair.

Others went low into the valley. Those on the ridges found little, only a few beds. They came back to stories from the others of the low places filled with deer, more than 20 in the bird sit meadow alone. We'll know where to go next time.


After sharing stories of our wanders we took the last few hours of sunlight to attempt individual fires off the land, with no prep and in the wake of much rain, within the hour. Smoke billowed from bowdrills rigged with shoelaces or pine roots, but no coals came. We finally used a previously harvested elderberry and cedar hand drill kit to make the evening's fire before the sun set and the fog came up .


That evening Jon Young joined us in the shelter for stories around the fire. He talked about tracking and body radar, told stories about trailing tigers, and related his experiences with the hazards of learning tracking too quickly. Unraveling, he called it -- specifically, the unraveling of one's "truths" about the world, false hopes, baseless beliefs, and dearly-held identities. Just like that Weezer song: "if you want to destroy my sweater, hold this thread as I walk away..."

Jon went on to mention a practice he called anchoring, in which two women and two men 10 years older, and one woman and one man 20 years older, commit to supporting a young tracker on their learning journey. He said that anchors can help ease this unraveling process that tracking and nature connection precipitates.

...

The next day, we launched into tracking at Abbott's Lagoon. Some of us were practicing the Honoring Routine on the way and as if to test our patience the way was well guarded by little brown birds. We walked slow, stopped where they were feeding, and went around them. This little one stayed feeding at the edge of the path as our whole group detoured in a four-foot-radius arc around him.


We arrived at the first tracking station. Barefoot human, bobcat, deer, skunk, sparrow, and worm tracks were all crisply evident, and older coyote and human shoe prints lay under a patina of rain and weather. Skunk and cat tracks fell over the otherwise crisp-looking barefoot human tracks. Some of the tracks had been washed away, or filled in with sediment, by water flowing over the land after the rain. But none of the crisp-looking ones had any raindrops in them.

We asked many questions at first, and came up with many more by the end. Who had been hopping, or running in step with a partner behind them, up the path a day ago? What would prompt a human to do either of those odd things? We tried many ways to reproduce the barefoot gait, but still had more questions. Was it a small man or a woman? When were they here? Could we tell the sexes of the other animals? When had they passed? What mood had they been in?


After a short midday lunchbreak and wander to shake of any residual focus-lock, we went trailing again. Our assignment: to trail (or backtrail) the freshest deer trail across the dunes to it's most recent bed.



We started on a clear trail but lost it in windswept flats. We then tried the youth's body radar technique. We wandered for a bit, found a worn deer trail into dunegrass, and found some beds that had not been slept in since the last rain a few days ago (until we got there). Though the beds were at the tops of dunes and were windswept from a human perspective, the grass sheltered and sun warmed beds were lovely at the level of sleeping deer.


We pointed and followed our brain-borne ideas some more, then something seemed to shift. Two of our party had strong unity on their direction, and seemed to feel differently about that direction than before.


We beelined to a brush-covered hillside where the bare ovals between the brush were full of chocolate-chip deer turds. We examined them for hairs, and found quite a few. We also found that quite a few ticks began creeping up our legs whenever we stopped, and that what looked like coyotebrush was actually a clever disguise for tendrils of poison oak popping out everywhere. Ticks and profusely budding (and browsed) poison oak were enough evidence for us of recent deer habitation. Without taking the time to find fresh tracks we hightailed it out of there, picking ticks as we clambered down the dune.


The evening sun stretched over the land and told us it was time to come in.


After sharing stories of our hunts, we departed Abbott's Lagoon. We gathered up again at PINC for an evening watching the Great Dance. Avatar has nothing on this movie. Nothing I can say here would be fair to the movie, it's makers, or the people and land it portrays. See it. That's all I can say. These two saw it. Look how happy they are!

Tending the Village Fires

This Tuesday we went questing up the Candelabra Trail in Butano Park for mountain lion sign. We found it, and much more stuff besides. The Candelabra tree is a destination worthy of anyone who's ever dreamed of living in a treehouse. The scrapes we found were of varrying ages, with one quite recently-refreshed mound.




We also collected huge amounts of tinder materials of all sorts, as well as lots of bow drill materials, mostly from the buckeye trees. As if to help, the buckeyes shone out from the greens and browns of the woods with their bright silver bark.



Back at camp, over our cookfire, we considered our conduct on the land. What does it mean to be scouts? What is the conduct of the scout? What conduct do we owe the animal and plant residents of the environments we explore? What ways of being on the land, what mindsets and behaviors, will best form strong ropes to the land and to our human communities?

The next day, we stayed at Venture for an exploration of our firemaking abilities. The whole village, Essentials, Cultural Mentors, and Native Eyes, gathered at the Native Eyes fire circle for the intro. Then we all picked up our materials and started practicing.



Native eyes had a special challenge: to help those among us and the larger group who were inexperienced in friction fire, and to push our own edges. We were challenged to make fire using natural cordage from the land, and to do so without using knives or sharp rocks.



We started by binding two fairly thick (inch and a half wide) alder sticks together for the hearthboard, and made a spindle of a similar stick. The idea was that mounds of char dust would settle on either side of the spindle, between the two sticks of the hearthborard, and be heated sufficiently to form two coals. It did not work as advertised. Quite a few of us worked up a good sweat, and nearly drilled through the board, with only smoke and black dust to show for it.



Then something told me to try my blue elderberry hand drill spindle. With the help of another Native Eyes person, we spun the spindle until piles of dust formed and smoke billowed. Still no coal that we could see. I picked up the spindle to inspect the hole it had made. The end of the spindle continued to smoke -- and glow. We had a coal.



One of the more experienced firemakers made a bow using a fresh pine root string. Inspired, we raced down to the creek. We found a huge Monterey pine standing at the top of the bank, more than fifteen feet above the creek level. It's roots had been exposed by the creek and dangled above our heads. Asking for one of the trees roots, offering a pinch of tobacco, we clambered up and dug out a living root from the creekbank. The root in the photo is already frayed.



Back at the fire circle, we rubbed the rootbark off and worked the root to loosen it's fibers. Then we looped it twice around a buckeye spindle in a buckeye board, and tried out a bowless bow drill.

I held the handhold, stepped on the board and pressed the spindle down. My companion held the ends of the pine root and pulled back and forth, back and forth, until, as sweat began dripping down his forhead, a small red coal sat smoking in the notch. The pine root held together for two coals, before it had frayed beyond usefulness.



Many people got coals that day, and many people experienced the frustration of friction fire. I think everyone experienced renewed respect for our ancestors, who used these methods every day to live.

Drums

This Native Eyes we had the darndest time making a fire. We broke some bowstrings, a bow, and wore down a few spindles before finally getting a coal well after sunset, and only after we'd all decided to cooperate on one kit.

The next day we had a mobile bird sit with the ducks on the Bolinas lagoon. They are highly sensitive meters of one's concentric rings.

A sideshow for the day, but my personal favorite part, was working with traps and snares. One of the Cultural Mentors set up a deadfall and caught some atypically large prey. We should have known that baiting it with field guides was a bad idea in a crowd of naturalists.




I also learned how to set up one type of rabbit snare. In a real trap, one would of course use fine, non-orange cord or wire.

For the rest of the day we worked on making drums. The method we learned from Matt Berry uses no nails or pegs, just the tension of the drum head and lacings and frame, like a mortarless stone arch standing with it's concerted but opposing pressures.

The process starts with skin.

We'd soaked it in lye.

And removed the hair, leaving the grain layer on.

Then we rinsed them clean, and cut out drum skin forms.


The remainder of the skin we cut into 1/4 inch lacing to bind the skins to the frames.


We made the frame with wood: three feet or more of wrist-width straight-grained even-width tree limb. I used a redwood bough.

We cut them into even lengths, then split them lengthwise as evenly as possible.

Then we mitered them to 22.5 degree angles on the ends to form a trapezoid.

Most brave folks used the chop saw. I used a miter box and hand saw.

Next we glued the frames together and chinked the gaps with swdust and glue, then bound them with electrical tape to keep the pieces in tension as they dry overnight.

We started a pot of hide glue by boiling old rabbit skins, fur and all, over a nifty portable wood stove. The glue wasn't ready by the time we needed to glue our frames, though, so we used storebought wood glue.

And there the process stopped for us. RDNA continued the process and completed their drums, but Native Eyes had to leave the next day. We'll revisit drum making later on, with the addition of the skin to our drum frames.