It passes for a tribe

As it turns out, people who are in the habit of chipping spearheads from flint and building fires with fire ploughs are somewhat difficult to reach by way of email. Who knew?
However, in response to one reader’s curiosity, and to make good on a pledge I made to some folks at this year’s MAPS Meet, I’ve followed some leads I heard about last week.
As one might imagine, there is considerable variation in the focus of primitive skills events. The spectrum of skills to be learned range from some of the earliest human technologies, to "frontier" craft. Some instructors even teach "re-technology", the practice of using found objects to craft simple tools (for instance, using some steel salvaged from the body of an old car to forge a knife or a hoe). While I’m certain that there are many other events like these, some formal, some informal, these are a few that I have recently heard mentioned. If readers know of others, I invite them to share them.

MAPS Rendezvous: Alas, you’ve missed it. The good news is that it has been held annually for several years, so you can mark your calendar for next year. The MAPS Rendezvous is typically in early June and has been held in Virginia and in Maryland, near the Pennsylvania border. The Rendezvous generally runs midweek through Sunday for about $200. The fee covers breakfast and dinner each day, campsite (or one of a limited number of bunkhouse beds) with bathhouse, and instruction; certain courses also have a small materials fee, generally not more than $5 (a couple of classes do have higher fees).
MAPS offers other events throughout the year, throughout the mid-Atlantic region.

Rabbitstick: At the risk of looking like a geographically illiterate Easterner*, this one is as close as I’ve been able to get to the Pacific Northwest (all apologies to Kiki and Cristi). This is a late summer/early fall event in Idaho and costs $245 (early registration). Fee covers campsite, instruction, 2 simple meals a day and all campground services (including sanitary services, firewood, potable water and parking). The site makes reference to some materials fees up to $100.

Wintercount: This event is run by the same outfit that offers Rabbitstick (above). Wintercount is a late winter event near Phoenix, AZ. At first glance, the other details seem to be the same as the other event.

National Rendezvous and Living History Foundation: This organization runs several events throughout the year in the Eastern and Midwestern US. These events run $55 each (for non-members), plus some additional fees for those who plan to sell things.

NMLRA Old Northwest Territory Primitive Rendezvous
June 22 to June 30, 2007
10712 Chatham Road Spencer, Ohio

NMLRA Northeastern Primitive Rendezvous
July 13 to July 20, 2007
Near Naples, New York

NMLRA Midwest Primitive Rendezvous
July 20 to July 28, 2007
Black Hawk Memorial Park, Woodford, Wisconsin

NMLRA Eastern Primitive Rendezvous
September 22 to September 30, 2007
Muddy Run Park, Holtwood, PA

It’s worth mentioning the Burning Man events, as well. These are not primitive skills events, per se, but I’ve observed some overlap in those who participate in these events.

*Author’s note: E.R. Dunhill is well aware of how far the Snake River is from the readers in question; E.R. Dunhill used to be a professional cartographer.

Found

I’ve never been so happy to have blistered hands. I’ve caused myself such irritating injuries more times than I can recall, between a childhood of gardening and putting myself through school by working as a groundskeeper. But Friday, I earned this pain building a fire from scratch- no matches or lighter, no gun cotton, no 9-volt + steel wool, no lens aimed at the sun. Rather, at this year’s MAPS Meet, like in years past, we used scavenged hand drills, bow drills, and fire ploughs.
For the reader who has never tried this, I fear that while the "how" will be perfectly comprehensible, the genuine "what" will remain a mystery. I’ll leave those details of the experience in the shadows until a later time (although, this may remain one of those mysteries that forever confounds my pen).
Instead, I’ll focus on what emerged. Making tools and building fires, one of which handily survived a raging downpour, wove a community. I was a stranger to most of the other students and teachers at the event when I arrived. But, in a few days, and in many cases, in only a few hours, these became my little brothers and sisters, my aunts, my uncles. Each personal strand became part of a greater fabric.
The event underscored again some of those fleeting human qualities and pursuits that many of us don’t realize are gone, because we’ve never seen them. Knowledge, like how to speak Yucatec or Gaelic, how to fashion tools from simple materials, and how to predict weather, are vanishing; those skills don’t buy anything. The awareness of where water comes from and where it goes, or why we grow certain plants for food is already lost on many of us. Many of us assume that because these ways of thinking, observing, and interacting are dissolving into history that they must not be of value. Though most of us make this judgment without any firsthand knowledge of what we are losing.
The truth is that these thin streams of knowledge bear directly on many pressing problems. These pursuits encourage understanding of other people, other cultures. They promote an understanding of the fundamental connection between ecology and economy. And they teach people to recognize the difference between the illusion of abundance and the joy of genuinely having what we want and need.

Simple machines

The hill in front of the split timber and stone kitchen is covered with shiny SUV’s, rusty but usable cars, and a couple of minibuses. At the edge of the parking area, two feral boys with mud in their hair crouch over a rickety fire drill. Beyond them, a man who is a dead-ringer for Rip van Winkle talks to a smiling young woman while she unpacks a frame backpack. Everywhere, the air is permeated by the scent of the big fire being prepared for wet clay pots, just beyond the clearing.
I amble up to the big tent with the banner that reads “MAPS Meet Registration” (that’s the Mid-Atlantic Primitive Skills group). The woman at the registration table tells me that she’s too busy to sign me in, but that I’m welcome to set-up my tent and come back after breakfast. As I head toward the camping area, I pick-up a copy of the weekend’s events: talks on fire-building, herbal remedies, tool-making, and primitive cooking, among others.
Over the morning meal, there are conversations about work, globalization, politics, and the environment. Once everyone is fed, there is a round of announcements, before the crowd diffuses to their respective demonstrations and classes.
It’s at the primitive shelter talk, where a congressional-staffer, her two sons, and a handful of college students gather to learn about fires an lean-tos, that I first make the connection: This event is part of an information system.
Indeed the compulsion to both seek and distribute information seems as old as the technologies of fire, flint, and fiber. Each of the presenters at this event are elements of a database that potentially spans large expanses of time and geography. In teaching, they are at once networking this knowledge and creating redundancy within the system. This act increases the reach of the network and helps to ensure that the information will not be lost as various elements fail.
I had laughed at the irony of registering for the event and paying via the WWW. What were people who light fires with sticks and milkweed twine doing with DSL? In spending the weekend among these teachers and learners, I’ve found that the differences between skinning one’s hands on pieces of flint and writing a blog are mostly cosmetic.

Pendulum

I am struggling with a curious backlash. Having cut my teeth and built my education and career around technologies that long ago might have been called witchcraft (thankfully, I don’t weigh the same as a duck), I find myself increasingly drawn toward older and simpler technologies, or pursuits that involve little or no technology at all. The irony of recording all of this in a blog is not lost on the author.
I’ve been pressing my nose into dusty old books, like my Moore’s Historical Geology, printed in 1931. Dr. Moore does a charming job of correlating rocks and fossils without the benefit of plate tectonic theory. I’ve been drinking coffee made with water boiled on my stove and steeped in a French press. Grounds be damned. I think my wife is starting to have fiscal suspicions about my periodic musings about the merits of vinyl and turntables.
Nest site (Blogger is being very cross about images, as I post this)
Yesterday, I ran across a link from the Shenandoah National Park website that live-links to a webcam aimed at a falcon nest site. Such a thing should be antithetical to my present leanings. I watched the clouds roll-in for a moment and returned later to finds the falcons briefly at home. Seeing them from a hundred miles away, preening, preparing for their little falcon-errands, was somehow moving.
This led me to wonder if my bout of techno-malaise is perhaps off-base. Is it a vestige of youthful rebellion? Maybe I'm simply being contrary. After all, technology is my friend. It runs the lights, puts stripes in my toothpaste, staves off the end. I hoped for an instant that the question was closed, until I recalled that technology also blackens the sky, blights the earth, and populates mass graves.
Now, as I lord into a big blue pack all of the things I will need to sustain me for a weekend, I am reminded of my first backpacking trip. On that trip I stood at arms length from a red-tailed hawk, who has been with me for the 10 years since. I can still see his feral gaze and smell his wild, murderous musk.
This memory began to lend some clarity to the problem of the scrying box and the distant falcons. Like words, the images of the falcons are signs of natural facts. In total isolation or abstraction, they could be meaningless, even profane. But they are truthful, connected in my mind to something significant, an event that follows and influences me.
I see that the angst against technology is not neigh-saying. Nor does it throw the baby out with the bath. It seems now to be an attempt to replace "What's new?" with "What is best?"