My 2nd wife and I became interested in surviving in the wilderness with only a knife and a blanket. This led over time to my wife working at one point in Idaho with a program that was to rescue teenagers from criminal activity. The program was payed for by their parents and they were sent into the wilderness with no drugs or any illegal contraband and expected to behave themselves with only a knife to get food with and a blanket to be warm at night. Of course there were counselors that observed and took care of and protected the teenagers from harm. But basically the idea was to teach these kids to live off the land and to get a new and more useful orderly attitude about what life actually is. And there was about a 75% to 85% non-recidivism of keeping kids from going back to using drugs or committing crimes at that time. So, these types of programs were very popular in the 1980s at that time. I believe the leader of this Wilderness Group was Larry Dean Olson. So, I drove my wife who had gotten a position with this group as a counselor in Idaho so I drove with her and two of our kids to Idaho and stayed on a ranch watching the kids for about 10 days to 2 weeks while one of our kids was with Grandparents back in California. Also, the Medicine man we had been studying with also got a job catching any teenagers that ran away. Since they were 20 to 50 miles from any civilization at all this wasn't hard for him because he was and likely still is a very good tracker on horseback. So, his job was to track down and bring back any teenagers that ran away from the group before they hurt themselves or died out there all alone in the Idaho Wilderness. Also, state permission was granted for these healing expeditions of teenagers and counselors. When they returned my wife showed me a visor hat she had woven from willow branches and twigs and leaves to keep the sun out of her eyes. She said she had helped the kids make these to keep the sun off of them and to protect their eyes since they didn't have sun glasses on this trip and possibly not sunblock either. However, she spoke about all the unusual things that they had eaten in the wilderness. Also, people brought in on horseback staples like potatoes and rice and they used boiling water from streams to cook with over small fires. Like I said before this usually cured most of these kids from their wayward ways just by gaining a new found respect for themselves, the world and their newly perceived place in it. So, a knife and a blanket is one way to train someone into seeing first hand what it is to really be a human in a primal environment.
A few years later when my 2nd wife and I were breaking up I used some of these skills by becoming a counselor to juvenile Offenders in a large city in Northern California. Though we didn't go out into the wilds I found that sometimes I could teach respect of themselves and of people around them. However, as a counselor to juvenile offenders aged 12 to 17 I had only a 25% chance in this environment from saving them from a life of crime.
So, a knife and a blanket is a better idea if you can afford it before it is too late to save a young person ages 12 to 17 because then you might have a 75% to 85% chance of saving them if you get to them young enough for them to learn self respect and respect for others.
Also, Larry Dean Olson is famous for this book and people like Paul Newman and Robert Redford seemed to be interested in it too.
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