Posts Tagged ‘survival skills’

Alone in the Wilderness Dick Proenneke

 

DESTINATION-  BACK AND BEYOND

 

 

I have often thought about what I would do out here if I were stricken with a serious illness, if I broke a leg, cut myself badly, or had an attack of appendicitis. Almost as quickly as the thought came, I dismissed it. Why worry about something that isn’t? . . . I have thought briefly about getting caught in rock slides or falling from a rock face. If that happened, I would probably perish on the mountain in much the same way many of the big animals do. I would be long gone before anyone found me. My only wish is that folks wouldn’t spend a lot of time searching. When the time comes for a man to look his Maker in the eye, where better could the meeting be held than in the wilderness?

If you have never come across the name Richard Proenneke (May 4, 1916-April 28, 2003), and there is a part of you that listens to the Wilderness calling, if you yearn for the way life should be, and enjoy the comfort of a hearth in a cabin on a snowy night, then you will probably be interested in his story.

Dick was born in Iowa, and spent time as a carpenter in the Navy during which he contracted rheumatic fever, and was bedridden for almost 6 months, vowing after to spend the rest of his life working on the strength and health of his body.   After being discharged, he went to school and became a very adept diesel mechanic – his skill were well known and sought after in Kodiak Alaska where he had eventually moved.  Dick’s heart was captured by the wildness of Alaska.  In the spring of 1967, a contractor that Dick was working for was under pressure to hire only union men – Dick always felt he was his own man, and he did the job he had to do without worrying about the hours or conditions.  It was the excuse he needed to plan his retirement at Twin Lakes, and at 51 Dick headed into the Wild and never looked back.

I was here to test myself,  not that I had never done it before, but this time it was going to be a more thorough and lasting examination.

It would be a tough argument  to win to find a person on earth that was more hardcore than Dick Proenneke.  I can imagine one bit of his experience as I’ve built my own cabin from scratch using wood from the surrounding property, but I had the benefit of a chain saw. Dick did it all by hand, including a stone hearth and chimney.  One thing that I found amazing when reading the book is that not only did he use only hand tools, to save on weight he only packed in the axe heads and other steel items and built the handles after he got there.  Who does that????  It would be such a daunting task for me I would certainly quickly feel overwhelmed to think that I had to build my axe handle before starting to build my cabin.

Thankfully Dick kept a journal of all of his activities which is now a book “One Man’s Wilderness”  and shot lots and lots of film, which is now a movie ” Alone in the Wilderness”, both of which are available at the end of this post.  I am so thankful that he had the forethought to know that there are many of us that would relish and envy his life.

The book begins with one of my favorite poems by Robert Service – I’m Scared of it All;

I’m scared of it all, God’s truth! so I am;
It’s too big and brutal for me.
My nerve’s on the raw and I don’t give a damn
For all the “hoorah” that I see.
I’m pinned between subway and overhead train,
Where automobillies swoop down:
Oh, I want to go back to the timber again –
I’m scared of the terrible town.

I want to go back to my lean, ashen plains;
My rivers that flash into foam;
My ultimate valleys where solitude reigns;
My trail from Fort Churchill to Nome.
My forests packed full of mysterious gloom,
My ice-fields agrind and aglare:
The city is deadfalled with danger and doom –
I know that I’m safer up there.

I watch the wan faces that flash in the street;
All kinds and all classes I see.
Yet never a one in the million I meet,
Has the smile of a comrade for me.
Just jaded and panting like dogs in a pack;
Just tensed and intent on the goal:
O God! but I’m lonesome — I wish I was back,
Up there in the land of the Pole.

I wish I was back on the Hunger Plateaus,
And seeking the lost caribou;
I wish I was up where the Coppermine flows
To the kick of my little canoe.
I’d like to be far on some weariful shore,
In the Land of the Blizzard and Bear;
Oh, I wish I was snug in the Arctic once more,
For I know I am safer up there!

I prowl in the canyons of dismal unrest;
I cringe — I’m so weak and so small.
I can’t get my bearings, I’m crushed and oppressed
With the haste and the waste of it all.
The slaves and the madman, the lust and the sweat,
The fear in the faces I see;
The getting, the spending, the fever, the fret –
It’s too bleeding cruel for me.

I feel it’s all wrong, but I can’t tell you why –
The palace, the hovel next door;
The insolent towers that sprawl to the sky,
The crush and the rush and the roar.
I’m trapped like a fox and I fear for my pelt;
I cower in the crash and the glare;
Oh, I want to be back in the avalanche belt,
For I know that it’s safer up there!

I’m scared of it all: Oh, afar I can hear
The voice of my solitudes call!
We’re nothing but brute with a little veneer,
And nature is best after all.
There’s tumult and terror abroad in the street;
There’s menace and doom in the air;
I’ve got to get back to my thousand-mile beat;
The trail where the cougar and silver-tip meet;
The snows and the camp-fire, with wolves at my feet;
Good-bye, for it’s safer up there.

To be forming good habits up there;
To be starving on rabbits up there;
In your hunger and woe,
Though it’s sixty below,
Oh, I know that it’s safer up there!

In 1998 Dick entrusted his cabin and cache to the Park Service, after spending some 30 years alone in the Alaskan Wilderness.  What an adventure it must have been.  The Park Service is maintaining it as a historic site, and there was an agreement that he could return to stay in his cabin anytime he wished.

Dick lived out the last years of his life with his brother in California, and passed on Easter Sunday 2oo3 at the age of 87, reportedly from a stroke.

An amazing man, and an amazing life…thankfully he allowed us to share some of it.


 

Posted by fuck0500 in Uncategorized

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Keeping Chickens

 

Keeping chickens for eggs and meat is not only fun, it’s easy and cheap too.  And, if you manage things right you only have to buy them once.  The first thing you need is housing for your chickens.  Chickens will thrive in almost any coop, and there are a myriad of options and plans available out there.  I used a fast framer kit which allows someone without a lot of carpentry skills to build a building without having to worry about cutting angles properly.

There are also lots of ideas on square footage per chicken – the coop I built was about 56 square feet, and typically chickens need about 3-5 square feet per bird to be comfortable, so technically my coop should hold about 10-18 birds comfortably, although over the winter I kept about 6 for my needs, and 25 for the summer months.    Murray McMurray hatchery is what I used to buy my chickens and equipment to feed and water them.  You have to order 25 birds at at time  and they come through the mail.  Murray McMurray also usually sends you a free gift exotic bird as well.  There are special feeders for the baby chicks so they don’t stand or poop in the food bin, and they need to have a heat lamp without a draft over them.  The lamp has to be placed so that they can move under it to get warm, and be able to move away from it if they get hot.  After about 4 weeks, they’re ready to move into the coop.  Baby chicks get medicated chick starter for food in the beginning. I keep mine on it for a couple of weeks, and then switch over to chick starter until they are old enough for laying pellets.
Here is a pretty good video on setting up a brooder, I like the plastic tote idea.

Murray McMurray’s website has lots of useful free information for the beginner, and there is lots of good information here.    There are several breeds of chickens that work well for both meat and eggs, my favorite is Rhode Island Reds. If you order 25 straight run (straight run is unsexed, cheaper, and about 50% male and female) and keep one of the roosters, in the spring you can hatch your eggs using a incubator or a broody hen, and raise them for the summer for the freezer in the fall, recycling your laying hens from the previous year.  Here is how my coop looked;

Henhouse

There is a window on the side and the back, where it gets the most sun each day.  In books you may find that people “light” chickens to keep them at 14 hours of light per day after natural light drops below that point, but I never have, and although egg production slows during the winter months it never stops.   The door for the chickens is on the left side of the coop – just a small door for them to come out each morning.  Your chicken door needs a good latch though – raccoons are excellent at figuring out how to open things.  On the front door there is a piece of wood that can be lifted off and underneath it is hardware cloth for ventilation during the summer months.  As long as your coop is well built, and does not have any drafts it does not need to be insulated.  Here in Maine the winters get pretty cold, and my chickens survive just fine.   If you feel that you really want insulation, it needs to be inside a wall, chickens will pick it all apart.  My chickens were free range, that is to say I did not have them fenced in and they were free to forage for the day, returning to the coop at dark, where I would latch them in for the night.  You need roosts in your coop – I used 2×4′s across the top.   Chickens eat absolutely everything and enjoy table scraps too.  I use layer pellets from the local feed store, along with scratch corn and leftovers from the table as well.  Your local feed store will have shells (such as oyster or clam) too – chickens need them to keep their eggs hard.  Chickens also need grit to help digest their food – if they are free range you don’t really have to worry about it, but if you have them penned you may want to throw some grit in once in a while.  Chickens are perfect if you are a gardener too as their feces are fantastic fertilizer and full of nitrogen.  It may be hard to see in the picture, but to the left of the coop is a run that I built that is about 8 feet long, and fenced in.  You can put a few chickens in there and place them between the rows of your crops, and not only will they weed your garden for you, but they will fertilize it as well.  Putting poop directly on plants will burn them, but between the rows it works great.  The perfect recycler.  For the floor of the coop I use wood shavings, making sure in the morning to shovel out the nights poop from under the roosts  – doing it that way lets the wood shaving last for a while before you have to clear them out and replace them with fresh.  There are lots of descriptions about particular sizes and shapes for nest boxes, I used a couple of old horse tack boxes – they were not very big, enough for a chicken to get into and turn around, and enough for them to feel hidden.  A good trick to get them using the nest box is to put a wooden egg in them, you can get one at any craft store.   It’s fun to watch chickens in the yard, and listen  to their various calls.  Some days they seem really intelligent, and some days the opposite.  They are hardy and easy critters to keep.

The act of killing a chicken to eat can be a difficult one for anybody, and some people can’t do it.  It is a fact of life, that something dies so that you can live.  Celebrate the fact that you are providing for yourself, that you chicken had a much better life than a commercial chicken did, and that there are no chemicals or hormones in the meat you are going to eat.  Here are a couple of videos on how to do it correctly.  For me personally, I didn’t bother scalding and plucking, rather I just took the skin off and quartered.  There is also some good information in slaughtering day for the meat chickens.

When I first decided to keep chickens, the book below was very helpful to me.  Give it a try – it’s fun and easy, and there’s nothing like watching a rooster strutting his stuff.

 

Posted by fuck0500 in Maine Life

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