So today I went to my first primitive skills class.....
I've been informally schooled in primitive skills previously...for a while I even had the Wise Old Mentor everyone seems to want (and could have, if they looked a little bit,) who taught me about permiculture and sustainability...her name is Dorothy Kendel and we met by chance when I was hired one summer by mutual friends to care for her garden...she had had an accident and hurt her leg, and was thus on bed rest. I was twenty and unemployed; I was really searching at the time for my Wise Woman; I was looking for an Elder to tell me how to live. Enter Dorothy Kendel. She was 82 when I met her. Up until the accident with the leg, she had been mostly self-sufficient, growing nearly everything she ate in her garden and still heating her tiny cabin with a wood stove. She was the second vegetarian I ever met; a animal activist to the core, Dorothy rescued dogs and cats nobody else would take because of health conditions or bad behavior. Dorothy would always quickly turn the situation around with good food (her animals eat meat based diets, despite the fact that she herself is vegetarian,) lots of love, and homeopathic remedies, plus phone "visits" with her favorite homeopathic doctor, who lives in New Hampshire.
Dorothy and I hit it off right away; I loved the vegan lunches she lovingly made for me, over which we would pour our hearts out to each other. Dorothy's permicultured garden made so much more sense to me then the neat rows of veggies in the garden my mom planted every year; perimculture wasted no space and Dorothy's method of using hay for mulch meant there was virtually no weeding to do either! I loved that her little cabin, which had previously been a hunting cabin, was cluttered and none too clean; books and preserved food fought with dogs and cats for space...and my what books Dorothy had! She read about everything I loved; trees, birds, gardens, politics, health, wild foods...Dorothy had an amazing library and seemed to know everything about everything; she was as eloquent a speaker about world events as she was about the daily routines and moods of each of her animals...and she noticing the goings-on of her wood-dwelling neighbors as well...she made me aware of the habits of deer, of raccoons, of birds.
Dorothy was my first "primitive skills" teacher. Well, actually, maybe Cloud was my first, but I'll save his story for another post. Since Dorothy, I've learned informally from most of the people I've met; Preacher taught me to gather mussels and herbs for tea and crabs with our bare hands during two glorious weeks at Cannon Beach, Theressa is now teaching me about bees. My dad taught me about the weather patterns and to talk to the trees you've planted and how to care for them. My mom taught me which birds say what and other bird ID tools. My sisters taught me where to get the best wild raspberries (ok, so maybe my own family taught me my first primitive skills.) It was with my family that I first ate roadkill venison and helped save a redtailed hawk that had been hit by a car. It was with my family that I first went camping, first watched the sunrise from a tent, first watched bats come out as dusk settled over the hills of Prattsburgh in Upstate New York.
My family are naturally wild people...we are descendants from a long line of Upstate New York farmers...an area of New York that is so poor it is considered part of Appalachia. Before that, branches of my family farmed in Scotland and Ireland and Germany. My Scottish lineage has been traced all the way back to that wild Scot known as Robert-The-Bruce (I have uncles bearing both names, which are family names, Uncle Rob and Uncle Bruce.) So wild hills folk are part of my heritage. Wild, tribal living is in my blood. So naturally, I learned from family that I was hearty, that I was daring, and that I belonged to the earth.
But today, I actually took a real primitive skills class; and I felt as though I had come home. Ponding yucca leaves into fibers and then twisting the fibers into rope; watching a young man with wild hair named Patrick use flint and then a drill bow to make a fire, learning self defense moves and watching willowy Wood throw Patrick easily to the ground; all of these things and more reminded me that deep down, deep inside, courses blood evolved in Scottish hills where generation after generation where so untameable, the Romans deemed Scotland one place "not worth the effort; the people are too savage..."
Unfortunately, Western Civilization eventually got the wild Scots...but not before my great, great, great grandparents left for Upstate New York to sow their wild oats on new ground...
Love ya,
Carrot
Rewild, Rethink and Respond...
