Robert Lewis
My experiment was about to begin.
I had been reading about John Muir and wondering. How did people in the early days do basic things? How did the American pioneers, my ancestors, do the simple things of survival? What did daily life feel like while walking the Oregon Trail? How did they start a fire? How did they sleep out without a roof? Everyone’s ancestors got through their days without the comforts we expect.
For a hundred thousand years and more, our ancestors did these things to solve these problems. They lived good lives. They relied on their skills of the world and their knowledge of doing the right things. How to get food. How to find a safe sleep. How to wake up to a cheerful tomorrow. How to do it all again and again.
Night was setting in along the Appalachian Trail. The woods were losing their definition. I lit the candle. If John Muir had any light on his dark nights in the Sierras, it was an open fire, a candle, or nothing. He was my guide, and his story was the inspiration. The experiment was to see what it is like to spend a night in the woods like John Muir did, free of comfort.
The settling murkiness gave the woods a solemnity they did not deserve. The afternoon had been quiet and full of light filtering through branches. Now, the failing light played on my mind.
Minutes before nightfall, I struck the wooden match and lit the candle. Did Muir have matches? It is doubtful but possible. Years ago, in a small museum at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, there was a display of pioneer matches. A small block of wood that had split on the horizontal and the vertical into rows of sticks or splints. The tips of the sticks had been dipped into a mixture of chemicals that dried to make matchheads. Gold rush pioneers carried these blocks with them.
Muir might have carried one of these blocks of matches. I could not know for sure. Attempting to follow the practices of a man long dead was difficult. It was guesswork and a lot of picturing in my head.
One can start a fire with a certain kind of rock and a piece of steel. The rock is flint. He may have used a flint. Striking a piece of flint with a steel knife or rod causes sparks. The sparks are strong enough to ignite dried grass or leaves or charred cloth. One carried these tools in a small box called a tinder box. This was an ancient method of starting a fire. Even Ötzi’, who died 5300 years ago in the Alps, used this method. The items found with his mummified body tell us this. He carried flint, iron pyrites, and a collection of different plants for tinder.
I did not have flint or pioneer matches. I settled for a modern strike-anywhere match. Compromises were inevitable. It was the spirit of this experiment that was most important.
Muir explored the land we call America more than any other person of his generation. He was the driving force behind our parks systems and a co-founder of the Sierra Club. He traveled light. He traveled much lighter than modern ultra-light hikers travel.
The man was relentless in the austerity of his camping and hiking choices. Often carrying only some biscuits and tea in his haversack, he could end up going days without food. Sometimes, his hunger could test his humor. His disdain for his own dependence on the conveniences of life is clear. “Can scarce command attention to my best studies,” he complained, “as if one couldn’t take a few days…without maintaining a base on a wheat-field and grist-mill. Like caged parrots we want a cracker.”
Cracker. This sounded good to me. It had been a long day hiking to this place. I was hungry. The dark was upon me. There was no entertainment. No companion. No book. No screen. My sole entertainment and only comfort would be food.
I didn’t have crackers, but I had biscuits. A biscuit, to be clear. I needed to save the other for the morning.
So, a biscuit and tea. My second thought: not tea. Tea would keep me awake. I would have enough trouble sleeping. I had never slept in a hammock. Half the challenge would be getting into it. The other half of the challenge would be the “dangers of the night.” The primitive part of my being could sense those dangers lurking right over there in the shadows. Sleep might be hard to achieve. So, no tea this night.
A large boulder near the single, small candle was my seat. I pulled the biscuit out of its waxed paper wrapping and wondered if they had waxed paper back in those days. I wasn’t sure. I did know from reports that a nice piece of blue gingham sufficed for the wrapping.
Damn. So far, wrong fire source and wrong food wrapper. Ah, but I remind myself it’s the thought that counts. It’s the intention that matters. It’s the process. Muir traveled light. I was definitely traveling light.
Water came from a canvas-covered tin canteen, Army surplus style. It was clean and cold. The biscuit went down easier with the water. No butter. Only a dry biscuit. Biscuit and way.
Bread and water, I thought. Like a prisoner of my own doing, I stared at the candle as the last taste of biscuit faded. The chill of evening air flowed down the hills to my campsite like a light breeze. In a moment, it became cold and dark. I remembered now that when camping near the bottom of a slope, one should expect the cold river of air to come. I pulled my coat collar up and my hat down.
I had chosen a wool fedora like the hero in adventure movies. The Army surplus store in a nearby village sold me a beautiful woolen khaki officer’s long coat. I say beautiful because it was flawless and impressive. The collar could fold up to cover the back of my head. The bottom hem hit me mid-calf, leaving only the boots exposed. The long coat was thick enough to be my sleeping bag. I wore cotton thermals and, over those, woolen pants and a buttoned, collared wool shirt. All Army surplus. My assumption was that Muir relied on wool as well. My boots were plain leather workman’s boots.
The candle’s point of light blocked out my ability to see into the darkness closing around me. It was a small, bright sun in a vast universe of woodsy space. The candle and I floated in that space of moving, flickering shadows.
Now what? I sit there wondering. Before boredom could set in, my stomach came to the rescue. It cried, “Feed me, why aren’t you feeding me?” My mind said, “Shut up, you’re not getting anymore ‘til breakfast.”
Then something else happened.
A movement near my foot a few feet away. I turned toward it in alarm. Something jumped. I jumped, too. It jumped again. I jumped again. Yet it came no further. It seemed to be lurking in the shadows, getting ready to pounce. I stared through the dark at the intruder. The candlelight was a trickster. I half-laughed at my foolishness. The thing I feared was nothing more than a large rock animated by flickering shadows.
It seemed sensible to try to get some sleep. I could dream of biscuits and tea in the morning. I pulled out my string hammock.
Woven of what resembled kite string, the hammock was in the pocket of my long coat. It balled up so it fit in my hand. I had real doubts that this ball of string could ever hold me. I attached one end to a branch of a small tree and the other end to another tree.
The hammock would not hold me, I feared. Putting these thoughts aside, I tumbled into it like a fish caught in a net. The net held. With a great deal of awkwardness, I managed to curl up as best I could. The long coat wrapped around me, I pulled the hat down snug. There, swinging above the hard ground, I closed my eyes and hoped for sleep.
It started raining.
A light rain, a heavy mist, in truth. But in my mind, it was a storm. Blown this way and that, I rocked in my rockabye cradle of string. The candle sputtered out. Alone in the full darkness of a mysterious and dangerous wood where rocks jump, I closed my eyes.
Minutes went by, hours. Seconds, most likely. Come on, sleep. Where are you? Lying sideways, half-conscious, I stared through the netting and into the dark woods. After a while, I noticed two dark vertical shapes near the woods some 50 feet away. The more I stared at the shapes, the more they took on forms. The forms of humans. Men, standing in silence at the edge of the woods…looking at me. This was the Appalachians. My mind raced through disturbing scenarios.
Alarmed, I thought of strategies to save myself. Every strategy began with getting myself the hell out of this string hammock. That would be a feat in itself. The killers would be upon me in seconds. Months from now, they would find my body. My children would grow up without a father.
Are they moving? Yes. They are moving! The men are walking towards me! I watched in horror. I watched in horror. And I watched in horror. And I watched, and I watched. And they never got any closer.
I remembered the rock that jumped. In an instant, the killers became nothing more than a couple of tall stumps. My sanity returned to me. In a great act of conviction and defiance, I turned myself over in the hammock. Turning my back to the killers and the rock, I drifted off as the rain eased up and stopped.
The small morning campfire I managed to build was the cheeriest fire. The smoke played around me before rising to the clear sky. Bits of sun sparkled through branches. Birds and squirrels chirped and skittered about.
I filled the tin cup with water and set it into the fire to one side, and waited with a happy mind for the water to boil. As it began to simmer, I checked my gear. Not too wet. I admitted to myself that the rainstorm was, after all, only a mist rising in the night. It did seem like a storm at the time.
The biscuit was dry. The matches were dry. I was, for the most part, dry as well. All was good with the world.
I pushed the tin cup away from the fire with a stick. Into the hot water, a small handful of black tea. No tea bags. I figured loose tea would be more authentic.
The tea steeped until the water cooled enough to stir it with my finger. No spoon.
Black tea and a biscuit for breakfast. One of the best breakfasts I or anyone else has ever had.
This happened decades ago. So many times, I’ve thought of this John Muir experiment. When I have shared the story, I get the feeling people think I’m a bit crazy. I may be. Why would a grown person in the modern era do such a thing? I’ve often wondered about that. Why?
All these years later, I still find myself drawn to primitive solutions. There is something deeper to this than camping.
Learning all these skills is not, as they say, rocket science. No, it’s better than rocket science. The average person is born into the world and learns to stand upright as an individual. This takes good parents, common sense, and a lot of skill.
Yet, how many of us today could rise to the challenge of a night in the wild with little shelter and less food? Did the certainty that these people held take them through even harder times? It was a certainty in themselves. Do we have that certainty? Wouldn’t a certainty in our ability to survive on little to nothing serve us in our relative luxury today?
Muir lamented that he “…couldn’t take a few days’ saunter in the Godful woods without maintaining a base on a wheat-field and grist-mill”.
We also want to feel independent of this crazy world of tech and confusion. Somehow, in our guts, we understand the value of doing simple things by hand. We see the benefit of doing things well. Surviving on the merits of our own skill is a clear victory. We understand these things at a gut level.
To have mastery over our hunger and our comforts, even if for only a day, is powerful. The mastery redeems us. It makes us see ourselves as the free and independent humans we are at our core. This is the basic assumption of natural law. We must be free to take our place in nature. Indeed, we have that capability.
So that morning, I ate the biscuit. I washed it down with hot, black, bitter tea. The harshness of the tea burned like a metaphor for life. It was a burning that John Muir must have known. Our ancestors must have known it. Harsh. But not bitter in a bad way. Strong and true, it was the essence of this experiment.
Good breakfast, I thought.
I turned to home. A solid feeling of being well-grounded that had settled upon me. My bones, my core, felt a sort of stout-hearted freedom from ordinary concerns. I could handle whatever came my way.
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About John Muir
John Muir, a prominent naturalist and conservationist, is celebrated for his profound influence on preserving America’s wild landscapes. Born in Scotland in 1838, Muir emigrated to the United States and became a tireless advocate for protecting natural wonders, most notably Yosemite Valley and the Sierra Nevada Mountains. His adventurous spirit and eloquent writings, like “My First Summer in the Sierra” and “The Mountains of California,” were pivotal in establishing the National Park System. Muir co-founded the Sierra Club, an influential environmental organization, and his enduring legacy lies in his unwavering commitment to preserving the country’s wilderness and the belief that people should connect with and cherish the beauty of the natural world.