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.

Native Creativity

We began this week with a visit to a pond. We waded the muck and cut cattails again, with a boat crew and the youth contingent all helping out to harvest more than we had the previous week.

We hauled the thatching material back on big garden carts and on our backs, and got about the project of finishing our shelter.


I was having a hard time being social and productive, owing to a perfect storm of challenges in my life. I needed time away from the thoughts of the human world so I took off and went wandering while the construction continued. I trailed renegade deer tracks out of the garden and up Wish Creek, squeezed through a deer-sized hole in the fence (I wanted to avoid the gates where I might encounter other people), and followed the creek up between the ridgelines.


The landscape was a riot of edibility, usefulness, beauty and of course toxicity. In four square feet of stream bank I found something like nine edible and useful species. I remember noticing miner's lettuce (yummy leaves), chickweed (leaves), cleavers (leaves), cow parsnip (stalk), Oxalis (leaves), stinging nettle (leaves), yerba buena (leaves), strawberry (leaves), and bracken fern (young fiddleheads). They were mixed liberally with highly medicinal and poisonous species such as hedge nettle, figwort, wild cucumber, and poison oak. Nearby the milkmaids and pink flowering currant were in full bloom and Anna's hummingbirds sang at each other across their flower patches. I was interested in the edibles since I brought no vegetables with me for dinner, but I walked on.


Following the creek I came to a fern-draped ravine. When I was 13 I dreamed of a ravine almost exactly like this one. In that dream I became a buck deer and followed a red fox into the creek canyon. In that dream, which I still remember with perfect clarity, I became lost and transformed in the maze of caves behind the watercourse. In this canyon I found my feet on a deer trail, and there in the churned earth was evidence of the trickster that had passed here before me.



I followed deer trails up and around ridgelines, along steep banks that threatened to crumble and avalanche from under me, and after a time began searching for tinder and food for the evening's fire and meal. I continued upward toward the pink-fringed, darkening sky. I carried no timepiece but something internal told me that my friends at camp had finished and would now be starting both fire and food for the evening.



Now with purpose behind my wandering, I crawled from the oak woods, through a blackberry patch that fringed a clearing, and into the light of the setting sun atop the west ridge. I was greeted by an old friend, Yerba Santa, waving in the evening breeze. All around me were dead bracken fern fronds, crisp with the day's sun. And under the cover of last years dieback, sprouting from the live rhizome, were fiddleheads. I had both my tinder and my dinner.

The photo to the left shows the three-part structure of bracken. It does show a fiddlehead, but one that has unfurled to a point at which I question it's edibility. The photo below is of a fiddlehead in it's most delectable stage. I collected a modest amount. I eat them sparingly, and only once or twice a year, since consumption of large quantities has been correlated with certain cancers. I have not yet found a report that identifies any constituent of the fern as carcinogenic, however, and they are a prized edible in many cultures.


The rest of Native Eyes had completed our shelter while I was away. I brought the small bounty of my wander back to camp, helped to light the fire, and shared the new taste of spring ferns with everyone.


I found deep satisfaction at returning from my solo time and bringing home what resources I found. I was satisfied in spinning up a coal from sticks harvested by my own hand and blowing into flame the tinder I carried from the ridgetop. And I was satisfied in sheltering under grass and the soft lines of tree limbs that may, in life, have served as a nursery to the hawks that circle over this valley.




The next morning, after a rainy and predator-oppressed bird sit, Ane Carla Rovetta joined us for art and taxonomy.


We started with a look at taxonomic divisions: domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species (if you're an animal). Following the Chordata phylum, we made simple sketches of frogs and discussed the changes that occurred in chordate evolution from aquatic to terrestrial forms. We sketched an egg and discussed the revolution of "enclosing the pond." And finally we sketched a bird.

As we began drawing the main units of bird motion, I heard an urgent squawk from outside. A scrub jay swooped in and said, with phrases in Jay-speak I haven't heard before but an unmistakable tone of voice, "something really intense just happened!" The jay kept squawking. Ane Carla kept sketching and talking about birds. Everyone else kept chalk to paper and sketched away, trying to keep up with Ane Carla's presentation. But with the jay's voice louder in my mind than Ane Carla's, I simply couldn't pay attention. I got up and snuck out the door to see what the fuss was all about.

White-crowned and song sparrows popcorned around the garden veggies, alarming consistently. The jay perched on a spindly shoot from a pear tree and stared down at a spot among the brassica patch, silent now, and intent. On the slope just feet from the garden, a remarkable sound: every wrentit alarming at once, the brush on the hillside seeming to purr and click with their agitation. A Bewick's wren added his alarm from higher up the slope, and a spotted towhee as well. Above us two redtailed hawks circled, one with a forked stick in it's talons. Could they be causing such a disturbance? But that didn't make sense. These redtails were over this valley all the time, and I have never seen them take birds. I have never seen the birds respond to the redtails this way, either. I waited. The jay got bored and flew off, and the sparrows calmed and dispersed like rubberneckers deprived of street drama. I was about to give up and go back to sketching when the sound of wings burst out of the brassicas. A tiny hawk no bigger than a robin, clutching round, brown feathery prey in it's talons, flew up and away to the shelter of a pine.

I went back inside and sketched a sharp shinned hawk.


We finished out the day with natural inks, paints, and chalks with Ane Carla. We cut our own turkey quills (dyed festive colors by Michael's Craft Supply) and made pens, sketched with acorn and iron, black tea, and black walnut. We ground pigment, made plant-based paintbrushes, and mixed paints with vegetable gum, or egg yolk, or milk binders. Finally we took the excess earth pigments, added a dribble of soap and water, and rolled them into sticks of pastel chalk. We rounded out the colorful, crafty, art-filled evening with stories told and performed by our own RDNA-ers.

Cattails as Construction Material

We started this week out with a nice dip in the pond. It was raining and the rest of the landscape was already drenched and slick with water. So we figured we'd finish the job and go jump in the lake. Actually, we were after cattails.





When we arrived at camp we found our firepit flooded. Everything was awash and the local gopher holes had turned to artesian wells gushing with water. Our little camp was transformed from meadow to a crisscrossing of clear creeks and treacherous mud. You can see the puddle in the firepit below.

To protect our Tuesday night tradition of cooking over the fire, we determined this week that we'd have to construct a shelter. We started by collecting cattails from the local spring-fed ponds and carting them back to camp, then arranged them radially around the firepit to see how much we'd gathered. Our cattail supply circled the firepit entirely.



We came to consensus quite quickly on our design and construction strategy, then broke into teams. One team gathered poles while the other tied the cattails together at the thick ends (base of the stalk) to form skirt-like arched mats.

When the mats were done and the poles retrieved, it was time to dig postholes. About eight inches down the postholes turned into wells. Every chop of the posthole digger sent sprays of mud. We set the posts in, wedged in place with sticks and stones, and called it a night.

...

The next morning we had an inspiring bird sit and spectacular debrief. The sit was marked by pockets and huge blankets of silence over the land, and at the end the Cooper's Hawk winged high straight over the meadow.

While we debriefed the bird language patterns around the hawk, a Redtail began circling and posturing territorially up the valley to the northeast. Jays yelled the "hawk on the wing" call,shack shack shack shack shack! The jays began standing sentinel looking south, flickers were on the move, and robins plowed in a wave out of the lower valley going northwest. Silence settled on. Soon, flying low up the valley from the south, swooping from behind the yurt to try his talons on the quail (no kill), came the Cooper's himself. As we stared disbelievingly at the hawk's wake, another large bird flew fast and high over our heads, coming from the Redtail's territory up the valley northeast of us. It sped over the still silent meadow with strong, regular beats of it's pointed wings and someone shouted "Peregrine!"

After some moments of exuberant exultation and staring wide-eyed into the sky, we had had enough of these distractions. So we moved the rest of the debrief into the yurt. (Really, though, the cold, clouds and wind came back so we went in to sit by the fire.)



In the afternoon, we got to work further on the shelter. We assembled the frame by lashing poles together with whatever string or twine we could find, and began setting up the skirt-mats on the frame. We tied them in place too.





We found that the rough thatch, though lying well and smoothly on the outside, hung through shaggily inside and dangled in faces and eyes. We wove switches and long twigs into the inner wall to hold back the danglies.

Finally, with dusk settled on, our frame was done. We'd finished the first layer of our south, east, and north walls. Our firepit had drained, and we used excess twigs and tules to make a raised mat to keep our butts off the still gooshy mud. The space was, if not complete, then still ready and useful.

With the extra poles chopped into firewood and laid as a raft to protect our little fire from the damp, we lit a hand-drill coal. Cattail down from the cut cattails, kept inside shirts against warm bodies all day, came out dry and ready to nurture the coal. We nursed the fire to life in a quickly-gathered tinder bundle, lit a teepee of dead twigs harvested from trees that had stood in the sun all day, and had our first ever cattail-sheltered Native Eyes fire. The fire, though made with some rotten and green wood, sent just a wisp of smoke straight up into the darkening sky.



The nearly full moon rose in the East over our shelter. The chill wind that snaked up the valley from the southwest did not make our fire waver. The fire still sent its column of smoke straight up and out the half-moon hole in our partial roof. There is something deeply, instinctively satisfying about sitting by a central fire and telling stories of natural mystery, with firelight dancing in our eyes, our shadows playing across round cattail walls.