A couple years ago, when we first moved to Seattle, I took my first class from Wilderness Awareness School. Not one to do things half-heartedly, I jumped right in to a 36-hour Primitive Wander. We headed out into the woods with only the things we could fit into a small daypack. No sleeping bags, no tents, two protein bars for food, and EITHER a wool sweater or a wool blanket. It was July, so there were plenty of berries to eat as we wandered, miner’s lettuce in the shady groves, various edible greens that we were shown along the way. Not enough to stay full by modern American standards, but certainly enough to keep from starving. When we arrived at the spot where we would spend the night, next to this beautiful little falls in a creek, some of the group discovered some freshwater mussels. They steamed them open over the fire, but I think it says something about the amount of berries I was able to harvest that I wasn’t hungry enough to try mussels.
We picked out our spots to sleep for the night. I had opted for a wool sweater rather than a wool blanket, thinking that it would be easier to keep wrapped around me than a blanket, but I quickly realized that I chose wrong. Even in July, it gets pretty darn cool at night in the Pacific Northwest. I think it was in the 50’s, and it had rained most of the day so the ground was wet and cold. I spent an hour or less huddled against a huge Douglas Fir tree before I realized that some fabulous soul had kept the fire going. Most of the other folks in the expedition knew each other, so had grouped up to sleep under combined blankets spread out along the bank above the creek. But John, one of the group leaders, had stayed next to the fire and was keeping it going. John and I spent the night taking turns keeping that small fire going. We were sitting across the fire from each other, and I don’t think we ever exchanged any words, but it was an incredible bonding experience. I would get just warm enough to doze off for 10 or 15 minutes while he watched the fire. When I woke up, not able to get truly all the way asleep, I would sit up and tend the fire while he dozed off for a few minutes.
Nights like that last a long time. I had been imagining for hours that I was seeing light on the horizon, but it was still darn cold and I could still see a lot of stars when I realized that our firewood supply was not going to last until the sun warmed up our camping spot. I tried willing the sky to get light faster, or the fire to burn warmer and more slowly, but it came down to the fact that the fire was going to go out before the sun came up. The other instructor, Chris, had slept quite peacefully next to the fire all night. I suppose he must have been better acclimated. But at about the time that I was finally wrapping my mind around the fact that it was going to get colder before it got warmer, Chris rolled over and stumbled away from the fire into the bushes. I figured that he had to go pee and didn’t think much of it, except that it was surprising to see him move after having laid next to the fire like a log for most of the night. I went back to staring at the sky wishing that it would lighten faster. A few minutes later, Chris returned from the woods with an armload of firewood gathered while he was out there. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a more profound sense of gratitude. I can’t really describe the feeling of great relief and joy that came over me when I realized that I would be able to stay warm (relatively speaking) until daylight. For months after that, every time I walked into a warm house from the chilly outside, I remembered how thankful I was for the warmth. Even years later, I still tell the story when I talk about the really important things that I feel like I’ve learned from learning survival skills.
For the last year, we lived in a place heated only by a woodstove. We would complain about how cold the house was when we bot got home from a day in town, and it would take a couple hours to warm the drafty trailer house from the outside temperature to a temperature that we thought was comfortable. That experience also made me really thankful for the ability, in this new apartment, to just turn the thermostat up or down if you would like the temperature to be adjusted. But the last three days has put a new spin on some of my thinking. Our power went out Thursday night and stayed out until Sunday afternoon. On Friday and Saturday nights, the lows were in the low 20’s, which is quite a cold snap for this part of the country (we rarely get temps below freezing).
Thursday night we spent a fine night snuggled up in extra blankets, fully expecting the power to be back on by morning. When it wasn’t, we got dressed in the morning chill, but that wasn’t too far outside our regular experiences, since our woodstove-heated house was usually cold by morning also. But by Friday night, when the power still wasn’t back on, and we started to be able to see our breath in the house, we realized that the power might not come back on at any moment. I had us hooked up with a little fort around the bed to keep warm with a couple candles, I had my yarn and knitting hooks ready to go, and we headed downtown (where they have power) to get a warm meal. But after talking with Preston’s friend in Seattle, we decided to just head up there and sleep in a warm living room on a comfortable futon for the night. We ended up spending Saturday night up there also, this time bringing Eric along, since I felt guilty escaping to the warm city while leaving him in his freezing cold apartment in the same complex as ours.
Sunday night, pretty sure that the power was still out, we decided that we needed to brave the cold and spend the night at home so that Preston could get to work in the morning. There were 700,000 people without power in the Pacific Northwest, but Preston’s work wasn’t one of them, so he still needed to be there Monday morning. As we drove along Evergreen Parkway, we could see that the streetlights were still out, but some of the neighborhoods had power again. Evergreen State College was all dark, so when we rounded the corner to the College Court Apartments, we couldn’t believe our eyes to see a streetlamp glowing over our driveway. And then we saw a light on in Eric’s bedroom window, and a stairwell light glowing in our building, and the feeling was very much the same as the feeling I had when I saw Chris coming out of the woods with an armload of firewood. Incredible joy and gratitude. Of course, I wouldn’t have died from the cold. But I was so thankful that I wouldn’t have to deal with it. Some of the power line crews had been working 40-hour shifts (after which they have a mandatory break) in order to restore power. They have called in back-up crews from as far away as Kansas (and a bunch of states in between here and there) to help with the repair work. There are still thousands of people without power.
And all this had me thinking about a conversation I had with a friend of Preston’s a couple weeks ago. She works for one of the local tribes, and we were talking about having jobs that made us feel as if we are making a difference in the world. She said that we are presented with this concept of “dropping out or selling out” as if those are the only two options. If we are utilizing or participating in the current cultural system, then we are sell-outs, and our generation tends to see the only viable alternative as completely dropping out. I have a lot of respect for people who go that route. I read Living In A Van Down By The River regularly, and I love his outlook, and his approach to dropping out of a system that he couldn’t participate in. But I think I’ve got a little too caught up in the thinking of the anti-civ folks who participate in the discussions there, and I’ve been struggling for months with this polarity between participating in society (and therefore being a “sell-out”) or not (and going to live in my truck in the woods somewhere). Preston’s friend’s statement resonated deeply with me, and I was reminded that I generally choose not to believe in polarities. I don’t have to be either a drop out or a sell out. (And to give Casemeau at Living In A Van due credit, there was a really interesting discussion of a closely related topic, “What Defines A Dropout?” over on his blog recently.)
I like being able to turn the knob on the thermostat in order to live in a warm house. There are ways to make that a sustainable thing to do. I don’t have to live without heat in order to avoid having a negative impact on the world. But we do need to have a system within which turning on the lights doesn’t create terrible polution and bring us closer to depleting our natural resources. It is possible for power to be created from completely renewable resources. Around here, we don’t get enough sun in the winter for things to be run exclusively solar, but between wind, hydro, and solar power, there’s no need for coal-generated electricity. I’m not saying that I’m off to be a traveling windmill salesperson. I’m just saying that I’m seeing some more options somewhere between middle class amnesia and complete disengagement from the current system.
In another blog I read, the author lives in a camp trailer that is largely self-sufficient. He designed it to live in for a week in the Black Rock Desert for Burning Man, and then hasn’t moved out of it since. It’s parked on some friends’ property here in the Pacific Northwest. He points out that if you can make it through a week with no power in early September in the desert, then making it for a week with no power when you’re within walking distance of the store is no problem. That’s something like the middle ground I’m looking for. I don’t want to live in a camp trailer, but I do want to live in a house that I can design to be self-sufficient. Getting a good-paying and morally sound job in order to afford to buy/create that house and that life is not selling out.
