Aaron Wolf is Alive

Crowley Tarot - The Fool

Finally a rainy day and I can spend some time updating my blog.  As mentioned in my previous post I’ve set put upon a three year journey to see how much I can learn about primitive living and survival skills.  Along the way I’ll be documenting my experience as best I can and providing survival tutorials and updates on lessons learned in hopes of helping out others who – like me – finding the daily grind and routines of modern life unsustainable and are desperate to find some other mode of existence.

While my ultimate goal is to live a full year in a minimalist survival situation without any modern conveniences, for now I’m setting up a home base camp at Lothlorian nature sanctuary in Needmore Indiana.  Lothorien is the perfect place for me right now, a community of nature loving folks with a passion for creating a sustainable community living in harmony with nature.  This may sound like a lot idealistic mumbo jumbo to some but by my reading of the current state of humanity the future – if there is any future to humanity – is much more likely to be arrived at though communal experiments like Lothroien then from Washington think tanks, New York bankers, or LA marketing execs.

So how’s it going?

While my first couple weeks in the woods have certainly not been without challenges overall it’s been great.  Most of my time has been dedicated to building the shelter which I’ll be calling home.   It’s about a 15’ around by 6’ tall dome shelter which will have a canvas floor, debris walls and a cattail roof.  I’ve built similar shelters before but this one is a bit larger and using cattail mats for roofing is a new experience for me.  Getting the shelter built is taking a bit longer than I anticipated however I am making progress and the shelter is coming along nicely.  I’ll be providing full details on shelter construction in an upcoming post.

Food

My knowledge of wild edibles has increased tremendously – thanks in large part to the very knowledgeable Lothorien community.  Braze, another earth steward at Loth, has been invaluable in helping me identify wild mushrooms and providing me with a wealth of knowledge on some of the amazing health benefits of mushrooms and the symbiotic relationship mushrooms have with their host trees.

Between the garden and collecting wild edibles I think I could get by if I was in a full survival situation however to be honest most of my food is still store brought or generously shared with other elf folk here – mostly on the weekends. Usually I’ll eat some oatmeal for breakfast and some roman noodles supplemented with mushrooms and veggies from the garden or some other while edibles for dinner.   Occasionally I’ll get out and hit up the McDonalds value menu (can’t beat 99 cents four a McDouble).   Lunch is generally whatever I can find, once nice thing about using cattails for a roof is that cattails are edible.  While processing cattails I’d often find myself taking a break to cut out the asparagus like stalk found in the lower base of the leaves.

Having said that I am defiantly losing weight (which is probably a good thing) and will have to make finding and storing food a top priority once my shelter is built.  One slight hindrance to finding food at Lothlorien is that hunting and trapping are not permitted here so I’ll have to take trips out to Deem Wilderness  to practice my hunting and trapping skills.  This should not be a problem as Deem Wilderness is less than 10 miles from here as the crow flies.

Technology

Before going homeless I spent part of my last paycheck on a Asus 100HE netbook.  I’ve successfully tethered my blackberry to the netbook and am fully online.  I’m currently using Verizon  which charges $125 for a four hundred minute plan with mobil broad band.  I’ll probably switch to Sprint when my contract is up to save some money.  Plus Verizon has more or less admitted that they are tracking every Verizon customer.  I many even give up on having a phone at all and just go with a mobile broadband.

One of the mysteries I’m working on – which I don’t think even Tom Brown can speak to – is how to keep connected to the internet while living in the bush.

It’s still not very convenient for me to pop online though therefore the irregular posting scheduleand the lack of new photos.  I just have not had any time to get sitting in fount of the computer into my weekly routine but that should change soon enough.

Attitude

Generally I’d say I’m in a dam good place right now.  Yes there are difficulties and lots of uncertainty about my current circumstance, but over all I truly believe in what I’m doing.  Since I’ve started this journey, all of about four weeks ago, I feel like many things have fallen into place.  It’s as if I’ve found my path and for once in my life the universe is giving me a few breaks.  While there is plenty of discomfort, occasional loneliness, and a lot of second guessing so far life in the woods has giving me something I never got from society – just rewards for my efforts.   I think I might be happy.