Pumpkin vs. Wild

It is a time of luscious abundance here at the pumpkin house. The hens are laying, the greens are in constant need of thinning, and the tomatoes are about ready to pop out of their skins. Garlic and shallots are drying in the sun on the front steps in papery shades of silver-white and green-gold.

I've put very little work into the garden this summer, with all my rushing

about in day camp crazyland. But I feel like I'm finally reaping the benefits of my last few years of gardening experience. When I look at this garden, small though it is, and compare it with my shady little community garden plot in college, I feel a sense of satisfaction in seeing how far I've come. Just having found a good place to put the raised beds to begin with, and having prepped them properly, has made this year so much more fruitful than the previous ones. Of course, moving south has helped too . . . up in Bellingham even when our tomatoes were healthy, they never made it to ripeness before the frost. Here's to longer, hotter summers!

Meanwhile, with the end of summer camp comes the beginning of the weekend immersion programs in which I will be a student instead of an instructor (there's a little more of an explanation in the previous post, if this is confusing.) I get to do two trainings a month: one focused on wilderness survival skills, the other on permaculture and restoration ecology. As is probably obvious from previous postings, I'm already more of a homesteader than a woods(wo)man, and this combination should allow my to deepen my more rooted, place-nurturing skills, while going completely out of my comfort zone to learn survival skills so I can wander in new places forming relationships with the wild things.

This weekend was wilderness survival.

We made digging/throwing sticks, debris shelters, and bow drill kits. Mostly we learned about sticks: how to find the right sort of stick for different tools, how to carve it and how to use it. If it had been a college GRE it would be Sticks 101.

We split into small groups to build debris shelters. These are not shelters the way people often think of shelter -- not huts or houses or any kind of place you would hang out. We're thinking of shelter in its most basic form: something that protects you from the elements. A debris shelter is more akin to a sleeping bag than a house in its purpose; it wraps tightly around your body, insulating you with layers of moss, duff and twigs, to keep you safe from the cold and wet night.

The process of building a shelter makes you look at your surroundings differently than you otherwise would. I'm used to walking through the forest looking for edible plants and mushrooms, but as I was gathering materials for our shelter I walked over an oyster log dozens of times before I noticed the pearly white mushrooms beneath my feet. (Luckily I hadn't crushed them, and they made a delicious pre-dinner snack later on.)

Instead, I was focused on the shapes of fallen wood -- what was straight, what was forked, what was thick enough to provide structure, what was brittle but not rotten, and (my favorite) what was covered in soft, pillowy moss for bedding. The forest became a maze of useful materials waiting to be gathered, cut, sorted and assembled. Oh, and thanked. Although we tried to gather only dead materials, there is nothing dead in the forest that doesn't already have new life springing from it. I was constantly aware of the destruction our construction left in its wake.

It was also an interesting group process. I think the four of us were keenly, and sometimes painfully, aware of our differences in experience and capability. Especially towards the end, as we were all becoming tired and hungry, we were quietly but certainly grumpy with each other. But I think we all knew that we were lucky to have each others' help, no matter what our level of expertise. It took us several hours to build a single shelter -- in a true survival situation, we would have needed four.

We worked all afternoon on a shelter that turned out to be too small for the largest person in our group. Every team was to choose a group member to sleep in their shelter, so we did a last minute modification for the night, extending the front with a squared entranceway. Our shelter was still ridiculously uncomfortable and our guy bailed halfway through the night.

In the morning we took the whole thing apart and built a bigger frame for it. The re-building was easier and more rewarding than we could have imagined -- since we had already gathered most of the materials, all that we needed were new forked sticks and a longer, straighter ridgepole. I think having a night of sleep and a belly full of breakfast also boosted my morale. Of course, we won't really know how well our new version works until next month when another one of us spends the night in there.

The rest of yesterday was devoted to fire. This was the most challenging thing for me so far. I've gotten pretty good at the one-match fire, but the no-match fire is a tough nut to crack. After I had made my bow drill kit I set about practicing, but my form was bad and I ended up using a lot of arm strength. I ran out of steam before I could make anything beyond smoke.

I did try practicing my fire-starting again this morning, but I was stiff and sore from my earlier efforts. I made some coals but I didn't last long, and the only things burning were my arm and shoulder muscles.

There is a pretty stark contrast between the homesteading and plant gathering that I usually do, and the survival skills we're learning. Here at the pumpkin house, most of the things I do involve the creation of something tangible -- a garden, a chicken coop, a meal, a ceramic pot, a basket. I work on it for a while, inside or outside, and then I can take a shower or plop into the hammock and read.

Not so with the wilderness survival skills. They are hot, sweaty, and dirty, and if you were really a purist about it, there would be no creature comfort relief. And the skills involve a lot more physical strength and coordination -- not my strong suits, but then, that's why I'm doing it.

Hence the "Pumpkin vs. Wild" title. Of course, the eventual goal is to blend the two (homesteading and wilderness survival) together, to garden with native plants and create habitat for half-wild creatures who can be our neighbors or our food as circumstances dictate. But for now I'm trying to learn one thing at a time, while my greed for knowledge springs me out of bed early each morning.

Wrapping up the Summer

This morning I slept in past sunrise and savored the knowledge that I am done with the 10 mile bike commute that has dominated my summer mornings for the last two months. When we did eventually roll out of bed, Chris and I sat on the front porch eating pancakes made with salalberries, blackberries, dock seed flour, homemade kefir, and eggs from our own feathered ladies. We felt like good little homesteaders.

Now the day has turned hot and windy, and I've managed to spend all morning and most of the afternoon doing life laundry: catching up on emails and phone calls, cleaning the house and buying groceries now that this month's food stamps have finally rolled around. My final piece of catch-up work, though, is to back up and tell the story of this summer.

Yesterday was my last day working at TrackersPDX as an environmental education apprentice. I assisted with the summer day camp program, teaching homesteading and wilderness survival skills to kids ages 5-14. It was intense to work full-time outdoors with kids; considering the long bike trip there and back, and with my gardening job thrown in the mix, I can fairly say I spent almost every daylight hour of the summer outside. I've never felt so strong, so stiff, or so sunbaked for so long. It feels great.

I need to reflect in some way, so I'll start with a list of what I learned:

• to make blackberry vine cordage, ivy baskets, a bamboo bow, dock seed flour, yarn netting and finger crochet, plaster casts of animal tracks, coat-hanger/loofa critter-catching nets, and bamboo bullfrog spears
• to adapt my storytelling to variously themed camps, changing the characters to be Forest Ninjas, Oregon Trail settlers, or Safari Trackers. And to find songs to match different camps (bullfrog and crawdad songs were awesome for Wild Safari and Wilderness Survival camps; Appalachian mining songs turned out to be good dwarfish music for Middle Earth Camp)
• a lot of good games to keep kids busy during transition times
• to use mud, ash or even blackberry juice ridiculously smeared on kids' faces as "camouflage"

This summer I had the opportunity to work with some incredibly talented instructors, each with their own very unique style, and each with different strengths that inspired me. Some had incredible storytelling ability, and were able to weave the week's experience into a narrative that held the children captive in its spell. Others were simply awe-inspiring in their knowledge of their subject -- there are a couple of awesome wilderness gurus at Trackers. And others were experts in crowd management, a skill you never truly appreciate until you're teaching six-year-olds to carve with knives or throw ninja stars.

There were also a couple of instructors who challenged me, and a couple of weeks that seemed to stretch forever. I thought a lot about what made these weeks more challenging; partly there were some groups of kids that were particularly difficult to coordinate. I discovered that while I love working with young children one-on-one, I enjoy working with older groups of children in the context of outdoor education. Five- and six-year olds are too spacey and in their own worlds, so you end up spending a lot of time just focusing and herding them. There was one instructor I worked with who did this with exceptional talent and grace, and I would love to get there one of these days, but for now I really savor working with older groups kids who can learn more complex skills.

I spent a lot of time finding the balance between being fun and goofing around with kids, and being assertive about safety. Once you establish a good rapport with a group, a good stern face is so important! It isn't about discipline necessarily, but about good communication -- the kids have to know what's a joke and what's serious.

I'm excited to do the weekend immersion program now and learn a more in-depth, adult version of what we've been teaching. Meanwhile, I want to always be thinking about how I would teach those skills in a way that would be accessible and fun for kids . . . if I do this again next year I will have a full set of tools to make it an even more awesome summer. For now, I'm kind of excited to go back to part-time nanny work during the weeks, and have some more time for the pumpkin house farm and other projects.