Eskimo Psychogeography III

From Authentic Alaska come these three fragments of Eskimo forage psychogeography (earlier, earlier + Eskimo cookbook). They clearly create a connection between the necessities of subsistence and the joys of exploration.

Berry picking: "My dad give us a choice: pick berries or stay home, clean up and have dinner made by the time the berry pickers got home. I always opted to go out for the day and pick berries... Of course we would never go berry picking if it was raining or if no breeze was keeping the bugs away."

Searching for mouse caches: "While the idea behind looking for nivi is to gather food, searching for them also is relaxing for the mind, body, and soul. It gets you away from home for a while to enjoy the last days of fall before winter comes."

Searching for sourdock: "But before you think you can cut sourdocks and cook them make sure to look for them on a nice, windy day while the sky is bright. While you enjoy the fresh air, walk slowly and gaze at the tundra. Observe if there are any six-inch to four-foot-high, red, cone- shaped flowers, indicating sourdock."

No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees... to become lost in the wild

“Two years he walks the Earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the great white north. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.” - Christopher McCandless 

The thing that most annoyed me about Jon Krakauer's book 'Into the Wild' about Chris McCandless failed attempt to become a self-barbarized hunter-gatherer in the Alaska wild is that it is structured like a Discovery Documentary: small chapters, small episodes, dramatized reconstructions in mute colours, talking heads against dark backgrounds, everything in focus to catch a grimace or, even better, a tear. However McCandless is the Robinson Crusoe of our times, the Dharma Bum of contemporary romanticism: the lone genius returning to nature with a wild food plant guide in his backpack, willing to live off the landscape. Defoe portrays Crusoe as someone who conquers nature by strict discipline and hard work, McCandless seemed to worked from the premiss that nature would feed him if he behaved correct towards it. The thing that killed him (he famished) was that he relied on book learning instead of first going through the needed education of place: apprenticing with the people who live(d) out there in the wild: native American, Eskimo people, trappers, etc. It's the old thing: individualism versus communalism. 

To eat untamed

In his 1991 book 'The Island Within' Richard K. Nelson writes about his live as a writer trying to live as a subsistence hunter on the Alaskan coast, trying to practise what he learned from the Inuit and Athapaskan people he lived with. At one point he describes the suspicions against wild food that almost everybody raised on supermarket food feels:  

Because he's grown up eating wild foods, Ethan regards them as normal and ordinary. But I remember feeling quite differently when I went to live with Eskimo people. It seemed strange to eat meat and fish and plants that had no connection with a tamed landscape, that came unpackaged, without being factory purified and processed and preserved, without even a symbolic distance from the outdoor realities of dirt and insect feet. Looking back, it was as if wildness was a form of pollution. Plants and animals used as food should be tended, cultivated, manicured, machined, transported, sterilized, boxed, displayed, priced, and purchased - removing all taint of open field and unfettered wind. But now I'd rather have food that comes from the wood and the waters, washed by the ocean and the rain, blown by the winds, and crawled across by bugs whose feet are probably cleaner than my own.        

Science Fictional Alaska & owl soup

'Coming into the Country' (1977) is John Mcphee's classic book on the Alaskan wilderness. It consists of three parts of which only the first is an absolute must-read. On rereading it I am still amazed by its science fictional quality: Mcphee's Alaska is a distant world, completely alien to everything I know. Here are two examples to give a feel for the unfamiliar worlds that exist on this planet.

In the first paragraph Mcphee writes about forest eskimos, really the Koyukon Indians also described by Richard Nelsen (earlier and earlier).

Their male-order likeness to the rest of us does not go very deep. They may use Eagle Claw fishhooks from Wright & McGill, in Denver, but they still know how to make them from the teeth of wolves. They may give their children windup toys, but they also make little blowguns for them from the hollow leg bones of the sandhill crane. To snare ptarmigan, they no longer use spruce roots - they use picture wire - but they still snare ptarmigan. They eat what they call "white-man food," mainly from cans, but they also eat owl soup, sour duck, wild rhubarb, and the tuber Hedysarum alpinum - the Eskimo potato. Some of them believe that Eskimo food keeps them healthy and brown, and that too much white-man food will turn them white. Roughly half of their carbohydrates come from wild food - and fully four-fifth of their protein. They eat - and more to the point, depend on - small creatures of the forest. Rabbit. Beaver. Muskrat. Thousands of frozen whitefish will be piled beside a single house. At thirty below, whitefish break like glass. The people dip the frozen bits in seal oil and chew them.

And about bears (also see):

One could predict, but not with certainty, what a grizzly would do. Odds were very great that one touch of man scent would cause him to stop his activity, pause in a moment of absorbed and alert curiosity, and then move, at a not undignified pace, in a direction other than the one from which the scent was coming. That is what would happen almost every time, but there was, to be sure, no guarantee. The forest fear and revere the grizzly. They know that certain individual bears not only will fail to avoid a person who comes into their country but will approach and even stalk the trespasser. It is potentially inaccurate to extrapolate the behaviour of any one bear from the behaviour of most, since they are both intelligent and independent and will do what they choose to do according to mood, experience, whim.