This year has been pretty magical!
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| A view from where I sleep: tons of food drying on the roofs! This was in September, when community food-drying efforts were in full-swing. Chestnuts, apples, pears, and probably more. This year the group put away 37 gallons of dried non-toxic, nutritious, free apples, and I put away some more personal fruit besides. |
I want to share a mostly-photo update about how life's going for me these days, and what I've been up to. The more intangible parts of life like relationships and thoughts and feelings about the future don't lend themselves to pictures like all the fun projects, but... so be it.
I decided to focus on a small number of projects this summer and fall so I could really hone in on a few key skills and practices. I tried to keep the list short, but I felt super busy and sometimes it seemed like a long short list! Here's what I focused on:
- Wild / Intentional food gathering: gather bulk wild foods and 'intentional' foods (i.e. foods where I know and trust their source: an organic farm where I worked, or my garden, the woods, etc). "Wild foods" include all manner of plants, animals, and fungi, including untended fruit/nut trees on private land where the landowner doesn't mind if I harvest. I want to learn to eat without depending on industrial agriculture, so this was a major step in that direction.
- Gardening: I garden differently, focusing more on encouraging aggressive wild edibles most people consider weeds. I did do some more conventional gardening too (though I use no chemicals!).
- Kamana: Naturalist studies, getting to know the living earth experientially, instead of just learning mentally from books.
- Phyplay: A term I invented which means 'physically exhausting play'. Often a mix of dancing, calisthenics, and wrestling. I followed progressive calisthenics programs focusing on strength and explosive power, and I feel good!
- Truck work: I bought an old truck last year with no computers in it with the goal of learning to maintain my own vehicle when it breaks down.
- Hide tanning: Both braintan and barktan/vegetable-tan of bear, deer, racoon, groundhog, and possum skins.
- Healing: Building self awareness of various behaviors and anxieties and how they lead me to relate to me or others in ways I don't like: mistrusting trustworthy people, hoarding when I could share with generous people, competing when we could cooperate, mindlessly trusting when I ought to act more cautiously, treating the living earth like it's dead, zoning out when I need to focus and be present, etc. This also includes learning to recognize these patterns in others and work through them productively.
I still studied and practiced things like herbal medicine and massage which I focused on last year, but never when one of those top projects felt urgent. I find it easy to lose my focus if I'm not careful.
Before I share pictures+notes about the projects, I'll share about the place where I lived: Wild Roots. Also: My only camera is a 7 year-old tablet with a scratchy lens, so the picture quality ain't high.
Wild Roots
Like 2016, I spent most of this year at a place called Wild Roots, located ~1 hour NW of Asheville, NC. The landowner, as far as I know, has never visited since buying it over 15 years ago. She got the land for some friends after getting a large inheritance, and seems happy for it to be a vaguely-defined learning community. So the folks that live here have to get along without resorting to the 'I'm the landowner, and I can kick you out anytime' card.
A few pictures:
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| Our outhouse, with rain catchment into a hand-washing bucket. Also a hide-drying place! That's one of my new deer skins from this fall. After fleshing it and dehairing it, I nail it up to dry so it dries flatter for easier storage. Stretching may also make tanning easier by keeping the fibers stretched out. |
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| A fancier outhouse, with our drying grates on the side. |
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| We cook over an open fire here spring, summer, and fall. The sheet metal keeps the fire space dry when it rains. |
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| The cooking space without sheet metal. A little suggestive... |
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| Dish washing space. We sometimes use ash water to wash dishes, sometimes we find dish soap. |
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| Food prep space, from scrap pallet wood and scrap 55 gallon metal drums for roofing metal |
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| I don't have pictures of all the buildings, but many look like this: timber-framed without walls. This is Jarhaven, where we store glass mason jars of bear meat, broth, and fat, plus other goodies. |
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| Water catchment everywhere! |
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| A mega luxury: a heated shower! Under the black barrel you light a fire, fill the shower barrel with water from rain catchment barrels, and when the water finally heats up, it feels reeeeal good. |
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| Close up up shower barrel |
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| Closer-up of shower spigot (the two cans near the top) |
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| We made this dam in early 2016 to have a bathing space in our stream. We have a no-chainsaws norm at Wild Roots, so we did this with cross-cut saws, axes, pulleys, ropes, chains, PV-hooks, big rocks, and about 5 men and women. There are actually 2 logs sunk into the banks on the dam at left. The log at right is just resting on the rocks - it's not important to maintaining the bathing space. |
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| Another view of our stream, called the Pounding Mill. Like Squeeky Frog, this is potable water with no processing needed - we've explored the whole watershed and found no toxic activity. I live on very little money, but having this stream, I feel like I live in such abundance! How many rich people have water so clean (and full of minerals and healthy bacteria)? |
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| This and the next picture show where I stayed this year: a platform+roof built by a few people several years before I arrived. Since they weren't here this year and it was empty when I arrived, I moved in. |
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| Last year I lived at a site at Wild Roots we call "Sky Island" under a tarp. Having a metal roof this year seemed a major upgrade. It blocked most of the rain, except a little drizzle sometimes. I never got cold or wet at night, even when temperatures reached the 20s F in late November. When it rained hard, I just had to dry the top layer out the next day. |
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| I draped my finished racoon and groundhog hides over the railing, and the garlic I gardened hangs to dry. |
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| A close up showing the garlic better. I like life without walls, though come winter time they seem pretty nice. Especially combined with a wood stove! |
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| "Squeeky Frog", a spring that flows into a stream right through the middle of Wild Roots. We can drink directly from the stream with no water cleaning. |
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| This stream intersects a path that goes to the meal area one way, and the vehicles+workshops in the other space. Whenever a water jug is empty at one location or another, and we're walking towards Squeeky Frog, we take it with and leave it on the side of the stream corresponding to its home (meal area or workshops). |
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| When someone walks over the stream and sees an empty bottle, they fill it like so and carry it with them. In this way, we get fresh water for cooking and drinking without any extra trips to the stream - it's a way of minimizing wasted effort I really like. |
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| Mushroom logs near Squeeky Frog. Lots of shiitakes and some oyster mushrooms graced our plates from these logs and others. |
We have a few other buildings, including a few cob buildings with wood stoves where people overwinter, some blacksmithing spaces, and so on. Maybe I'll show pictures of them another time.
Now a little about the culture at Wild Roots...
Bear meat, broth and fat form a huge part of our diet.
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| We have several large cauldrons we use to render the fat and cook the broth. Above, we're rendering fat. We used scavenged 55-gallon metal drums to insulate the fire. We also use scavenged pallet wood to burn. |
Every year we process somewhere around 1-7 bears, given to us by local hunters. Both years I've been here, we've canned hundreds of quarts of broth and meat from these bears, and render the fat. Sometimes we get two bears at once, and then we're just up dawn to dusk for many days in a row, skinning, gutting, quartering, chopping, canning, cleanup... and eating lots and lots of bear! Oh my gosh it's so much fun.
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| Sometimes we add magical things to these boiling witches' and warlocks' cauldrons. Not gonna say what - but I welcome you to come visit if you want next fall and find out. |
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| And when bears come in..... we eat LOTS of bear. Bear with a side of bear with bear on top. And a dessert of... |
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| We sometimes have 2-3 raging fires going into the night, with 1-2 smaller ones under the fat or for cooking. This picture doesn't do it justice, but it's a pretty magical time processing enough food for a year's meat/fat needs with friends, often with home-made cider or mead. Feeling exhausted, tending several raging fires with a few good friends making food for the year, stars overhead while we feast on the best food I know - damn that feels special to me. |
I didn't want to interrupt any work to take pictures, 'cause I really don't like cameras. Maybe another time I can show us breathing through the bear's trachea, inflating and deflating their huge lugs as we breathe through them. I felt so much awe for the bear in that moment! And of course we all had super bloody mouths and chins...
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| One of my new favorite foods: bear cracklins'. When you render the fat, you wind up with lots of fat-soaked solids you strain out before storing the liquid fat. Pretty tasty if you can keep the hair to a minimum. |
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| Bear Cracklins'. Yum. |
The food from bears feeds us year-round, but we only get bear during bear season. We never know when one will come in from hunters, so when one arrives we drop everything to put up that food for the year.
Scavenging and Improvising
A big part of the culture at Wild Roots is learning how to scavenge useful equipment/tools/etc from other people's waste, and improvising with what we've got to meet our needs.
As an example... if we only used scrap wood (often pallet wood) to run these fires, we'd constantly be running to town for more. Instead we also use waste vegetable oil from various sources, and it makes fires go big. Very big.
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| Here's an oil bucket with long-handled scooper. The scooper is a scrounged cooking pot attached to a wooden pole. The oil was free for the taking. |
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| We have a blacksmithing space, and forge (some of) our own metal tools. Here we made a hook to attach to the end of the pole. |
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| The hook lets the scooper hang over the bucket. |
I'll post soon soon showing personal projects...
