5 out of 100 Wild Huts prospected

100 Wild Huts is Kevin Langan's ongoing project to: "build 100 small survival shelters on any piece of ground that harbours enough natural resources for the build. I intend to sleep rough in each shelter for one night and blog about the experiences." He is down to five so far and already the range of designs is impressive. When he is done the result with be catalogue for primitivist-survivalists looking for inspiration. Great stuff. Langan is a long distance walker with a 132km Highland walk guide book to his name.

The wild hut project came to me in an email by Felix Wilson (earlier) who has been helping a friend in constructing similar one-night huts. But not in Glasgow but in Tasmania. Ray Mears is to art in the 21th century what Marchel Duchamp was in the 20th century.

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. 

Gary Snyer ate horse meat from the pet store

The 1967 Houseboat Summit (earlier) had Timothy Leary, Allen Watts, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder discussing the future of the psychedelic revolution which at that time was about to merge with/into the Back to the Land movement. Much is about drugs, religion and conciousness but a curiously large segment of the discussion deals with the need to learn the practicalities of homesteading; how appropriate it again seems now the 40 year love-affair with the city is collapsing. According to Charles Perry's book on the Height Ashbury this was quite the event at the time and while he states that not everybody may have read it, the transcript was definitly a thing to have and to keep. Against self-styled guru Leary (who appears completely out of his depth) Gary Snyder comes across as the much-respected outdoors-man with a philosophy: the dark mountain mobster who is listened to. But I may be biased.

The following two quotes by Snyder are taken from the transcript. From the first quote we learn how to live and that Snyder himself got through college by dumpster diving. The second quote tells about the need to learn from the native people, the gist of this was included here earlier.

Well, this isn't news to anybody, but ten or fifteen years ago when we dropped out, there wasn't a community. There wasn't anybody who was going to take care of you at all. You were completely on your own. What it meant was, cutting down on your desires and cutting down on your needs to an absolute minimum; and it also meant, don't be a bit fussy about how you work or what you do for a living. That meant doing any kind of work. Strawberry picking, carpenter, laborer, longshore...Well, longshore is hard to get into. It paid very well. Shipping out...that also pays very well. But at least in my time, it meant being willing to do any goddam kind of labor that came your way, and not being fuzzy about it. And it meant cultivating the virtue of patience -- the patience of sticking with a shitty job long enough to win the bread that you needed to have some more leisure, which meant more freedom to do more things that you wanted to do. And mastering all kinds of techniques of living really cheap... Like getting free rice off the docks, because the loading trucks sometimes fork the rice sacks, and spill little piles of rice on the docks which are usually thrown away. But I had it worked out with some of the guards down on the docks that they would gather 15 or 25 pounds of rice for me, and also tea...I'd pick it up once a week off the docks, and then I'd take it around and give it to friends. This was rice that was going to be thrown away, otherwise. Techniques like that.

...we used to go around at one or two in the morning, around the Safeways and Piggly Wigglies in Berkeley, with a shopping bag, and hit the garbage can out in back. We'd get Chinese cabbage, lots of broccoli and artichokes that were thrown out because they didn't look sellable any more. So, I never bought any vegetables for the three years I was a graduate student at Berkeley. When I ate meat, it was usually horse meat from the pet store, because they don't have a law that permits them to sell horsemeat for human consumption in California like they do in Oregon.

* * * * * *

If you're going to talk this way you have to be able to specifically say to somebody in Wichita, Kansas who says, "I'm going to drop out. How do you advise me to stay living around here in this area which I like?"

All right, say I want to stay where I am. I say, okay, get in touch with the Indian culture here. Find out what was here before. Find out what the mythologies were. Find out what the local deities were. You can get all of this out of books. Go and look at your local archaeological sites. Pay a reverend [sic] visit to the local American Indian tombs, and also the tombs of the early American settlers. Find out what your original ecology was. Is it short grass prairie, or long grass prairie here? Go out and live on the land for a while. Set up a tent and camp out and watch the land and get a sense of what the climate here is. Because, since you've been living in a house all your life, you probably don't know what the climate is.

Then decide how you want to make your living here. Do you want to be a farmer, or do you want to be a hunter and food gatherer? You know, start from the ground up, and you can do it in any part of this country today...cities and all...For this continent I took it back to the Indians. Find out what the Indians were up to in your own area. Whether it's Utah, or Kansas, or New Jersey.

The uncontacted

My favourite Amazonian pictures are those that show people in the landscape (like). Screw those close-up facials portraying some savage lost in thought or meditative gaze; the western concept of autobiography is not universal. Anyway.. these four images of 'one of the world's last uncontacted Indians' just released by Survival International are nothing but stunning. That resolution! Anthropologists prefer the word 'isolated' over 'uncontacted' but Survival is a charity that needs to make headlines so that is ok, but do read this old discussion on savage minds if the subject is of interest to you.  

The utopia experiment

The Utopia Experiment (April 2007-September 2008, pics) was conceived by Dylan Evans as a scripted experiment in post-crash primitivism in which volunteers lived in a small community in the Scottish Highlands as if society as we know it had collapsed. From the comment section following an article by Evans and twitter-buzz it appears that the results of the project were, euhm, confusing (?), with Evans himself pulling the plug because he thought his volunteers too weird and social group dynamics moving into unwanted trajectories. James Durston observed it for a month and wrote a report for The Independent. Go read it, fascinating stuff. After noting that his desk skills (typing, googling, etc) are inadequate for yurtian self-sufficiency Durston learned that one learns very quickly, and that soon after one can pass on these new skills to newcomers. This is not that strange because, after all, gardening, foraging, simple construction work, do not demand special skill or intelligence; they are part of our core capabilities as humans.   

I spend most of my time in the garden, mainly because I consider it the most urgent aspect of setting up a self-sufficient community. Others, though, have different priorities. Tommy is here to see how the artistic and cultural sides of the community develop, and gets straight down to painting a welcome sign. Graham, a 19-year-old architecture student, is keener to build things, and starts hammering together the compost bins. Carla is more experienced in communal living than any of us and moves between spinning wool, making cordial and salting the pork joints from one of our butchered pigs.

In fact there is evidence that, all through the project, new arrivals have been able and willing to slot into whatever gaps need filling, as well as discovering their own. Take Dougie, a 49-year-old from Aberdeen with wanderlust. Tommy and I quarrelled fiercely with him on two occasions after we thought he behaved rudely to visitors to Utopia. In those moments, I questioned whether someone so antagonistic was appropriate for the project. But during his week on site, Dougie collected armfuls of chanterelle mushrooms from nearby woods, picked winkles and mussels from the shoreline and introduced rabbit roadkill to the Utopian menu. Without him, Tommy and I, the only other volunteers, would have continued ignoring our surroundings as a potential source of food.

That kind of personal knowledge, I soon notice, passes quickly to other members of the community. Within a day I discover that dandelion roots and stinging nettles make nutritious side dishes when cooked correctly. A week passes and I am baking my own bread and making dinner for nine people. Two weeks in and I have built a bunkbed, made a chess set and put up a sturdy support for a clutch of runner beans. Indeed, it quickly becomes apparent that the major challenge at Utopia is not the learning, which is contagious: the more one does the more one feels liberated enough to continue doing.