It was actually Saturday, June 30th the day I found my new home. I’d spent the two previous nights at the university I used to attend with my friend Jessica who is living on campus for the summer. That morning I foraged my old stomping grounds and in a short distance came up with pinneappleweed, mallow “cheeses”, elderflower, and purslane, and on the way out I stopped alongside the road to harvest some daylily buds. So far I’m quite pleased with the campsite I found. It has a “driveway” where I can park my car away from the “main” road, hidden from view. That way no one knows how long I’ve been living there, or that I am there at all. In National Forests you are only supposed to camp for 14 consecutive days before you have to move to a different site. Some friends of mine came to visit me the first night in my new home. They didn’t bat an eyelash at the fact that I’ve moved into the woods. No one has. This kind of behavior is expected from me.
My new home has two stories, each with its own fireplace. On the top is the good weather bedroom, bad weather bedroom, and home gym. Facing south there is a ledge that drops off creating several rock overhangs. A trail to the right takes you down here. On the bottom level is the living room, kitchen, and study. I have a ridiculous number of bathrooms. I also have free garbage pickup, and a blueberry orchard that extends for hundreds of acres. The one thing my camp lacks is a close water source, but it hasn’t been much of a problem. I leave all my dishes out to catch rain and catch melted ice water from my cooler, though I’ve found overall that refrigeration is overrated. I was going to dig a hole in the ground for my cooler, but that would be a pain in the ass so I started keeping my food in the shade under these rocks where the temperature hovers around 60 degrees. For the most part animals are like people, they want fat, salt, and sugar and don’t really go for the raw vegetables so I just leave those out. I keep fruits, nuts, and grains in my “dry” cooler and meat, eggs, and dairy in the “wet” cooler.
The first night I cooked the daylily buds along with some steak for dinner. Bad idea. I puked everything back up an hour later and had mild diarreah for a few days. According to Wildman Steve Brill you should “eat small amounts of the plant the first time. It gives 1 out of 50 people indigestion.” Well, indigestion is putting it mildly. The really stupid thing is that I knew daylily, in significant quantities, did this to me. I just didn’t think I ate that many or my brain wasn’t working properly or something. Many of the items you see in these photos were scavenged. One cooler, one tarp, the grill, the folding chair. On the fourth of July I was driving down the road when I spotted a recliner with a free sign on it in front of somebody’s house. I thought, “Why not?” Did you ever wonder what the three day old track of a lazyboy through dry leaves looks like?:
My goal the second weekend at my camp was to rework an old deer hide of mine that had turned out stiff. This was a deer that my cousin shot two Novembers ago and I proceeded to dryscrape braintan, but I got lazy and didn’t stretch it long enough so it dried all stiff and had lots of rough spots too. It has just been sitting around my house ever since. So when I moved out I brought it and some frozen pig brains with me. The brains would go bad soon with no refrigeration ensuring that I would have to work on it. I decided that I would pre-smoke it which supposedly locks in the softness already gained and makes re-stretching easier. I dug a hole, built a fire in it to generate coals, and collected punk without a hitch, but then, even though I was paying close attention the whole time, I had a scary moment when my smoking skirt (a piece of old jeans) caught on fire. Luckily I put it out before it scorched the hide. Thank god for smoking skirts.
I meant to smoke the hide, rebrain it, and restretch it all in one day, but I was feeling lonely and miserable so it turned into smoking one side of the hide and giving up, then soaking in the brains over night in my “skulls” bucket, (the one I usually use only to clean nasty skulls, but I figured brains are close enough) and stretching on Sunday. I had another feral failure moment when I went to stretch because I bought this cable as recommended by Matt Richards in his excellent book Deerskins Into Buckskins. Well, I didn’t have any tools with which to tighten my cable clamps. I just couldn’t get them tight enough with my fingers to keep the cable from slipping so I had to abandon the whole thing and stretch by hand. I don’t know if I’ll ever stretch by myself again, if I do it will probably be in a frame. I had brought a boombox into the woods to keep me entertained for this very reason, and I stretched for 5 CDS worth of songs (thanks Urban Scout, Jessica, and Andy for providing the music)! It was a hot day perhaps 80 degrees, but I was ready to curl up in a ball and weep by the time my hide was finally dry. But the greatest thing is my hide came out soft! I still haven’t done a final smoking, but I find that I can’t keep from touching it marveling at its softness and flexibility. What a transformation. Oh, and Mr. Pumice Head helped me to sand out any rough spots. My goal for the next week is to fire all the pots I made back in May.
Tragic but beautiful…just like me…er…?
