People who live in the Wilds

I was watching the "Alaskan Bush People" latest episode called "Surviving the Lower 48" and began thinking about this.

When you live very remotely your senses change a lot from people who live in suburbia or in the city. Your senses adapt to wherever you live on earth or you don't live (you don't survive there).

Being aware of this is important because going from one to the other could be hazardous for some people because they are out of their natural element.

For example, Alaskans are culturally different from Californians, people from Minnesota or people from Texas or New York. They all live in somewhat completely different cultures. Yes. They share a common language with different accents but mores are somewhat different each place and even within each state moreys are different from area to area because of politics, religion or no religion at all and other ideas exclusive to those areas. However, we ARE one country and when it comes to war or protecting our nation we all fight together to keep all our states safe.

But, we are all very different in how we see things.

It took me back to becoming a part of the "Back to the Land" movement from the 1960s through the 1980s and 1990s when I bought beautiful but inexpensive land for around 8000 dollars in 1980 and sold one of our vehicles (I was married with a son from my first marriage and married again with two step kids so we were raising three kids born in the 1970s at that time.)

So, we bought land for cash and then sold one of our vehicles because unemployment was then around 10% and things were difficult for most people then a lot like during the Great Recession more recently. So, by buying land and building our own home ourselves we saved about 65,000 in rent for the next 5 years. But, since that beautiful land with a water spring on it and a fantastic view of Mt. Shasta and pine and Oak and Cedar and Fir trees all over most of it we were quite happy there for those 5 years time.

Some people likely couldn't handle living around bears and deer and porcupines and skunks and fairy diddles (flying squirrels) and blue jays and grey jays (camp robber birds) and golden mantle ground squirrels etc. all the time. But, the most difficult to live around were actually porcupines because they would try to eat the glue out of the plywood to an out building. But, by the time I ran down to scare the little bugger away he just ran off into the dark out of my site. This happened about 20 or more nights with me often trying to get up to scare him away until he did this to a neighbor and the neighbor literally blew his brains out with a rifle. Though I was sad the porcupine was dead I was also grateful not to be awake any more nights trying to scare him away from eating out the glue of plywood in an out building because he was eating the lower part of a roof made of plywood that he liked the glue in that glues all the sheets of wood together in a plywood sheet. So, it sounded like someone scraping fingernails on a drum head and the noise carried blocks away and always woke us all up sometime between 1 am and 6 am in the morning.

If you want to attempt to live this remote (in any state in the union) you have to be willing to deal with both animals and humans in the wilds. And the animals are nothing compared to the humans you often have to deal with.

I have noticed that the craziest people I have ever met in my life either live in deep urban city areas or they live really remote. I'm not quite sure why this is but that's where you sometimes find really scary people.

Luckily, I'm 6 foot 5 inches tall so most people generally have left me alone in my life. All I have to do is to stop talking and stay quiet and people get kind of scared and leave me alone. So, my presence usually protected my family quite well. Also, I prefer not to have guns around my kids then because I didn't have lock boxes for them at the time. So, I usually kept guns in a storage locker and only brought them out in real emergencies. But all my neighbors were well armed but I always kept knives and a large club or baseball bat in case of emergencies.

Remember this is 1980 to 1985. There were no cell phones then at all. There were no telephones then at all within 10 miles of our 2 1/2 acres of land. And there were no  police or anything like that or even a gas station for about 10 miles away too. So, pretty much if anything happened you were on your own to deal with whatever it was then.

So, if your mental or physical health isn't excellent I wouldn't recommend doing something like this.

Also, doing this alone isn't always the best idea either. I have friends who tried to live alone like this and this usually didn't turn out well eventually. Although I still have one friend who has basically lived remotely like this now since 1972 who is in his 70s now and still doing this. He swims in mountain lakes in the winter time to stay fit with a dry suit on as long as the ice hasn't completely covered over the alpine lake at 6000 feet he prefers to swim in to stay fit.

So, often people who live this life are going to live longer than city people do simply because they love the remote country life. So, if something or some accident doesn't do them in they just keep going as long as they can.

This life isn't for everyone and I was sort of glad to leave it behind in 1985 because I realized I'm more of a suburban kind of guy in the end. I like the Internet and having TV's around. I like to have an off road motorcycle and I like to travel a lot. I love the remoteness we lived in then but saw I was starting to change and becoming more feral every year living in the wilds like that. So, moving to the San Francisco area and buying a business was good for all our children's futures and educations then.

But, my wife and I partly broke up eventually because we left this life. So, even though it was good my children got an education in college and high school that was good in the city it also ended our marriage eventually leaving our country life we loved in being so remote.

After we broke up my ex-wife eventually bought a ranch in Southern Oregon that reminds me a little of where we lived in Mt. Shasta except she often has horses and goats and electricity and phones and the Internet now.