Tracker of Plants

The weeks have flown by here in Portland. Some things I’ve done:

-The first week I mostly spent being introduced to Urban Scout’s friends, following him around to various meetings, and eating tacos. I also caught up with my old college chum Meghan over dinner. See, I do have friends I didn’t meet on the Internet!

-One day we drove to Oxbow Park and went tracking with Willem and Lisa. Then Lisa showed us a sweet secret swimming spot on the Sandy River. We had some fun painting ourselves in green clay and honing our horsefly killing technique: Wait for them to land…smack! Then pound that husky sucker into the sand.

-During week two I bought my own bow for archery club, met Urban Scout’s mom, and hit the bars with another internet friend of mine, Vincent Caldoni.

-Scout and I drove to Seattle with his friends Peter and Melonie for a huge Daft Punk concert. We had free tickets and backstage passes because Peter played one of the robots in their feature length film, Electroma. Notables included a lunch stop in Olympia, getting stuck in traffic next to a crazy burning man van, the Tacoma Dome, Shorty’s pinball bar, and some aggro jock fans who wouldn’t let even a cute girl like me get any closer to the stage. What did I think about Seattle? Whatev, same civ another city. Mainly, the three-hour drive reminded me of my forty-hour drive across the country and I kept thinking, damn, I can’t believe I’m in Seattle.

-Rewild camp started the third week. We prepped by soliciting food donations from local businesses. In case you don’t know, this was a free, open-space event, a primitive skills anti-school, organized by Urban Scout and made possible by everyone who attended. The way it works is people put up workshops they want to teach or discussions they want to lead on a marketplace, a board with times and places, and you sit back and see who shows up. For example, I led a successful class on tincture making across from the archery range. I didn’t teach anything else formally, but found I was able to contribute lots to the event. I do know things! I am useful! I noticed this happening not only for myself but among everyone. This sharing of knowledge rather than formal teacher student relations resulted in the feeling that we were “just hanging out”. The plan now is to turn our lives into an ongoing Rewild camp.

-On Saturday Scout and I drove to the beach to attend his friend Justin’s wedding. As it happened my appendicitis (this sharp pain I occasionally get in my right side) was acting up, so we abandoned a thinly veiled proposal for a kinky foursome by some other guests and decided to drive back to Portland. Our choice turned out not to be so disappointing when just out of Lincoln City Scout saw a road killed deer. He pulled over to check it out and it turned out it had just been hit. The driver showed us the dent in his black SUV.

“Do you want it?” we asked with out hands around the ankles ready to throw it in the trunk of the wagon. But he was more concerned with his car than anything else.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said dazedly.
”Don’t worry, we’ll take care of it.” Next we called Scout’s friend Tony and he set us up with a guy who was more than willing to give a skinning and no-parts-wasted butchering lesson from 11:30 pm-3:00 am.

Every day I get asked when I am coming home by Pennsylvania folk and if I am moving here by Portlanders. The answer is always, “I don’t know.” Yeah I miss home. I miss the forest, I miss my skull collection, I’m definitely going to miss driving 59 past the reservoir on those crisp sunny orange days when fall sets in and spontaneously deciding that whatever important thing I had to do I can’t possibly go inside and no one can make me. Yet, it seems there’s no chance of me returning home on the immediate horizon. I was going to come back, sort of. I was considering in enrolling in the fall semester primitive skills program at Hawk Circle up in NY. I’ve been thinking about going to this school for awhile because of the length of the program and the proximity to my bioregion. If I went in the fall I would get to go bow hunting and learn to make stone and bone tools, ash splint baskets, pottery, and a lot more.

The bigger picture was to do that and then somehow (multiple 0%-APR-for-one-year credit cards?) buy this old camp for $9,500. It’s a trailer with an addition, on a secluded quarter acre lot in Cherry Grove (past Heart’s Content smack in the middle of the National Forest.). I would then start to fix up the place into a white trash/bohemian/ DIY hipster pad…paint things pretty, put up my tipi as a guest house, plant gardens and start making money teaching, trapping, tanning, knife sharpening, babysitting…preferably all at once. Right now the bedroom portion of the trailer has 10 bunks for sleeping. I showed off my dream house to Urban Scout when he was visiting and he said about the bunks, “Hey, you can start your own Fight Club.” Great idea, I secretly thought. If I can’t bring me to the rewilders, I’ll bring the rewilders to me. But do I have the panache to start a movement in NW PA? I’m more of a creative genius, not a charismatic guru. I have great ideas, but most of the times I’ve tried to convince people to follow my lead I’ve failed miserably.

Scout always makes fun of me because the first thing people ask when I meet them is, “Ever been to the West Coast before?”
“No. This is my first time”
“So how do you like Portland?”
“I don’t really like cities.”

He says that’s an instant conversation stopper, but I don’t care. I’m not going to lie. Small talk has never been my forte. But Portland is a green city, you say. All the little neighborhoods give it a small town feel. Guess what? I wouldn’t care if every house had a permaculture yard. If every gas station dealt exclusively in biodiesel, or if every restaurant and grocery store sold only local organic food from small family farms. It’s still too fucking big and it’s still not home. I feel claustrophobic here. You can’t just walk twenty yards to all the firewood you need. You can’t leave your car unlocked with the keys in it. You can’t skin your deer where the neighbors will see, or target shoot (guns or arrows, your choice) in the back yard. Honestly, a bunch of anti-civilizationist primitive skills people all living in the city is a little ridiculous…I mean, isn’t it?

So what am I still doing in Portland? Well there are some things in the city I couldn’t find at home, and I’m not just talking Lasik surgery, quality tattoos, and egg donation clinics. This is a really uncharacteristic thing for me to say, but it’s the people. I’ve never been what you call a people person. I haven’t had a best friend for 15 years. I pretty much didn’t talk in public until 8th grade. I could talk. I just chose not to. Selective mutism they call it. So yeah I’m a social phobic, but maybe also I rarely met anyone I could relate to? It sounds so cliché but I feel like I could fit in here. Plus there’s something going on right now. Something good. Like with the roadkilled deer, things are coming together in those unexpected ways that make you believe it was meant to be, and there are enough people here willing to share their skills for free that going to Hawk Circle makes no sense.

I had a dream last night. I was sitting on a dock looking out over the Pacific Ocean. The sky was dark and overcast. The waves were large but not ominous and threatening like they are in my reoccurring tsunami dreams. I said to Shaun (another native Pennsylvanian and primitive skills practitioner who lives in Portland), “It feels exciting.”
He looked out at the horizon and replied, “I thought the exact same thing when I woke up this morning.”