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THE REAL WILDERNESS
"This" Magazine
July-August 2002
David Armstrong THE SKIES ARE TURNING RED, THE SEVENTH SEAL IS
BROKEN, DEER hunters are stockpiling porn, and financial collapse is imminent.
Bin-diving becomes de rigeur and your breath smells like cat food. The truth is
irrefutable: the end times are nigh. Do you don your sandwich board and stake
your corner, or take flight--and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous
misfortune? What the hell are you going to do?
I did some time stalking around the Pine Barrens of New Jersey dodging automatic
machine-gun fire and monster trucks with welded I-beams on the front as they
drove indiscriminately over one of the last stands of wilderness in the Garden
State. Arguably the best survival school in the world, The Tracker was founded
by Tom Brown, a grey-haired-bulldog-drill-sergeant with the bedside manner of a
hand grenade. Brown started the school to pass on the wealth of information he
garnered in his youth under the tutelage of Stalking Wolf, a Southern Lippen
Apache elder.
There, at The Tracker, I learned skills that would allow a "return" to an
environment that was as foreign to me as it was frightening. Brown proved to be
one of the most arrogant, terrifying and knowledgeable human beings I have ever
met, and my experience at The Tracker was one of the richest and strangest of my
life. People from all walks of life and far-reaching places, both earthly and
otherwise, assembled to ingest as much information as possible in a week's
stretch. Each course drew 100-plus students into a crash course in survival
techniques and group dynamics. The motivations that carried us there were as
diverse and bizarre as we were. Some wanted out of the system, and others
anticipated the end of the world. Burned-out corporate lawyers built bows and
arrows, studied plant lore, and sniffed scat alongside Ozark carnies with
too-tight genes. Navy Seals and Swiss computer programmers shared their feelings
about the "magic of silence" while we all celebrated the carnival of the absurd
that is American marginalia.
I took seven of Brown's courses over four years, in hopes of deepening my
nascent connection to nature. The fourth, The Scout, taught advanced stalking
and wilderness survival skills--a true test of the lessons received in the
prerequisite courses. I found myself corralled into a group whose self-anointed
leader, a paternal Midwestern kung fu expert with chronic halitosis and a mean
temper, steered our group of 10 through a kind of manic purgatory until mutiny
was our only recourse. As we stumbled through the forest trying to avoid
exploding firecracker tripwires and flares, we were, in turn, stalked by Shadow
Scouts, who in turn were stalked by Spirit Scouts, in a seemingly unending
hierarchy of expertise that reached ridiculous proportions.
Our romantic notions of a return to nature were quickly dashed by the stark
reality of surviving in an environment from which we had been thoroughly
divorced these past 2,000 years. Ubiquitous tics, broken beer bottles, and the
inevitable issues that arise when people are allowed to celebrate their neuroses
in a terrifyingly uncontrolled environment, made me, at least, realize that the
real challenge might lie elsewhere. What began to dawn on me was that I was less
interested in learning to escape what everyone around me claimed was
"inevitable" and more intent on learning how to see everything as "natural."
First, I decided, I would try to survive the prodigal journey home.
Seven courses later--my faith in humanity flexed, contorted and strained to the
limit--I wanted to see if I could survive the city before heading into the
woods. The city, with all its demands on our senses and the constant urging to
be a drone, was the true wilderness. I wanted to find out if any or all of what
I learned in the Pine Barrens was translatable into urban terms.
What I found amazed me; our cities abound in hidden repasts. With enough
foresight and creative adaptation, even the hardships of winter can be embraced
without resorting to bobbing for offal or sleeping on heating ducts. Ironically,
some of the most powerful and delicious plants thrive in quarries, on the edges
of highways, and anywhere else the Earth has been the most abused. Mustard seed
and Colt's Foot crack our sidewalks. Mullen and Queen Ann's Lace flower in
profusion wherever they're allowed. Our yards and parks are rife with medicinal
plants, as yet unclaimed by Monsanto's patent lawyers, that--if they weren't
marinating in a biochemical broth--could sustain and heal us. Witness the
suburbanites' impotent war on dandelions that are both edible and highly
nutritious.
As a rule, lawns--being the preferred repositories for pesticide and herbicide
disposal--are to be avoided. Stay away from golf courses, with their swinging
patrons and alien hues. Graveyards make for better harvesting of what gardeners
commonly refer to as "weeds," and besides, there's no shortage of compost.
Having survived survival school, I can personally attest to the exciting, nay,
liberating feeling that comes with the conceit that you can waltz into the woods
wearing nothing but a terrycloth bathrobe and a confused expression--and not
only survive, but thrive. And the truth is, we needn't wait for Armageddon to
learn what stubborn vestiges of nature's garden have survived the paving of
paradise. Your ability to find shelter, produce fire from sticks and stones, or
pass unseen and unheard, is limited only by your imagination.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Red Maple Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group
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