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.

Youth Nature Awareness

Native Eyes was off this week, so I'm updating with a Story of the Day from the Riekes Center Nature Awareness group of youth that I lead every Friday in Huddart Park. No photos for this one.

We began the day by each randomly choosing one of eight Guardian roles and making a statement to the group about how we'd fulfill those roles: Our Hydration Guardian would ask people if they'd drunk water at lunchtime, the Poison Oak Guardian would point out poison oak when she noticed it, the Ranger Watch Guardian would announce when she heard a ranger's truck, etc. Our Bird Language Guardian committed to watching and listening for junco alarm calls throughout the day.

We started off on a wander to find friction fire materials and tan oak acorns. Everyone was loud and boisterous, and speaking at eachother in city-volume voices. We played some rowdy games to burn off energy. Then we settled down for a snack and I told a story of one of my first bird language experiences, in which birds told me that a predator was near but I didn't listen, and then I scared a fawn into the waiting jaws of a bobcat (the predator that the birds had been shouting about) because I forgot to be attentive, quiet and respectful in the woods.

As we finished the story, all the juncos that had been feeding to the west of us started chipping excitedly, and moved in a wave overhead toward the east. They disappeared into the woods and were silent. Our Bird Language Guardian excitedly pointed out the junco's activities to the rest of the group. A minute or two later, the NEWTS appeared from the west. After the NEWTS moved through, the juncos returned. The whole group, with huge grins on all faces, discussed this newly-noticed pattern that the birds had shown us and speculated about how we might use it to sneak up on the NEWTS in the future.

We continued on our wander, finding few fire materials and no acorns anywhere we went. We did go through some tall and healthy manzanita bushes, though, and picked a good supply of the berries to make cider.

We wandered around back toward the parking lot making sure to take a different way, and on the way found a very fresh trail of coyote tracks, along with a fresh addition to the coyote's latrine where the trail joined the road. The scats were of many different ages, and we realized that we could read a little of the shifting life of the coyote in their differences. We decided to check back often for more coyote news.

As we approached the parking lot, motion caught my eye off the road -- a grey squirrel. But he had something in his mouth. We all stopped to watch, wondering what the oblong white object was. We watched him sit there, looking at us, gnawing on his white object like it was a corncob. When he was done he sidled a little ways off, turned his back to us, dug a shallow hole in the duff, and buried the object. When he was well up his tree we clambered up the hill to find out what the object was. A bone! It was aged and dry, and covered with short grooves gnawed into the surface by the squirrel. We wondered where it came from, and why the squirrel wanted to chew on it. We put the bone back and thanked the squirrel for sharing his secrets with us.

Back at our fort in the woods, we took some time to go to our sit spots. After everyone had gone to sit I rustled through my bag for a snack, crackling wrappers and muttering to myself until I realized that I was the only one making any noise. Everyone else was completely silent at their spot. In place of the usual sounds of fidgety people and quiet chit-chat between neighbors, all I heard was the wind in the treetops and the soft calls of feeding juncos. I sat very still and listened.

When we gathered again, I found out that some of the youth, in particular our Bird Language Guardian, had been surrounded by feeding juncos at their sit spots. They wanted to stay quiet and still out of respect for the birds. Others had been sitting still, making cordage and listening to the quiet sounds of the birds feeding by their classmates. None of them wanted to come back in when I called.

In the past, I've tried to get groups to pay attention to junco alarms by calling the birds Ninja Birds, doing skits about them, and otherwise building up their roles as the stealthy guardians of the forest. But never have I seen such successful bird language awareness in a whole youth group as today, when just one person in the group was asked to pay attention to just one kind of call from just one kind of common bird. The whole group ended the day with new respect and understanding of the role of birds as the communication network of the woods.

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.