George Sears (Nessmuk) and Henry David Thoreau

 

 Two Massachusetts writers who have had an impact on our lives here here.

The potato patch.

 

 

It wasn't until  Aki and I moved into the bush in '97, started to make hunting and survival knives that we learned of George Sears (pen name Nessmuk), his methods, bushcraft skills and the famed design, the "Nessmuk" knife. 

 

 "Go light, the lighter the better".   

We've sold many bushcraft knives fashioned after George Sears Nessmuk knife design. In total a few years of living here.

We read Henry Thoreau. He writes of freedom. 40 years later we're still reading. Testaments on freedom. Holding his belief in life close.... we persevere. We read his work aloud. Always amazed at how pertinent his insights remain.

Starting the green house with lots of greens. They go to flower and the bees come.

Before

After

 

Bees are amazing. Privileged to work with them.

Bumble bee and mustard.

 

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived". 

Henry David Thoreau

 

 

Aki sun dries, freezes, sauces and cans. We eat a lot of tomatoes.

 

Peas, Aki and fireweed.

Fireweed and rocks.

 

 "We do not go to the green woods and crystal waters to rough it, we go to smooth it. We get it rough enough at home, in towns and cities". 

George Sears, Nessmuk. 

 

Lots of rain this year. We lost our lakeside garden to the lake.

Salad Greens.

I viewed Thoreau's ideas as my own. It only made sense to me.

Living simply. Living with a light footprint. Feeding ourselves with the food we grow. 

So we live by isolation in the boreal forest while the world changes.

It felt serendipitous, a few years ago we made a connection. George Sears was born in 1820 at what is now Webster, Massachusetts. Less than 100 kms away from where Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817. They grew up at the same time and essentially the same place. They were neighbours.

Photographs by Aki Yamamoto

 

Thoreau, July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862, was a an essayist, poet and philosopher. He was a transcendentalist. Thoreau wrote a book Walden which we have our son reading outloud to us these days when people are following rules and avoiding each other. 

"Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and attention to practical detail.^[5] He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs.^[5]

He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.^[6]

Thoreau is sometimes referred to as an anarchist.^[7][8] Though "Civil Disobedience" seems to call for improving rather than abolishing government—"I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government"^[9]—the direction of this improvement contrarily points toward anarchism: "'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have". 

(I copied this from Wikipedia only to give a little insight into Thoreau) 

Aki and Scott

www.caribooblades.com

 

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. Henry David Thoreau
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/henry-david-thoreau-quotes

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. Henry David Thoreau
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/henry-david-thoreau-quotes

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. Henry David Thoreau
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/henry-david-thoreau-quotes

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. Henry David Thoreau
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/henry-david-thoreau-quotes

Winter

We do live in a unique area. In the bush, a couple of kms off a logging road.Complete isolation except for the odd plane or two yet we can journey into Williams Lake for our mail.

It is simple. If it isn't we are doing something wrong.

We plant potatoes in three different patches. Something will probably fail. Frost, hail, bad seed, bugs, mice, moose. We are not the only ones in the bush that like garden fresh vegetables. We`ve done a lot of experimenting. Some great failures. We are dependent on our gardens so we learn.

Plants are amazing. When we've thought they were mortally wounded they`ve come back, almost every time.
What doesn`t kill them (us) will make them (us) stronger in most cases.

After 14 years every sauna we`ve had, somewhere around 1000, has been rejuvenating. Personal hygiene and r&r or when things get tough is when we take a sauna. Aki is making one now. Beautiful sunny day...



For us it has been a process of living with what we need.
Rather than start with everything before we moved in here, we started with nothing and have added little.

It is our fourteenth winter. Most of the catastrophes you can think of have happend. The major ones like death, severe illnesses and accidents haven't. Crop failures, food spoilage, injuries, flooding, vehicle breakdowns etc... have.
Aki and I are heathier and stronger, not to mention more resolute in our convictions than ever. We have a 7 yr old who is thriving. Home schooling, chess and being raised in the forest.


In the past few years on our blog I've described the simple way we've lived with solar power. For 9 years we lived without a computer and internet connection. With a little of today`s technology, like a computer connected to the internet by satellite, and a small cash flow life in the bush is easier.

I suppose it's not for everyone.

Aki and Scott

http://www.caribooblades.com/

Smoke in Our Skies

It's been a spring and summer of sunshine, hot, dry and fires. In the last month smoke from forest fires blocked out the late afternoon sun for a couple of weeks. A forest fire just south of us was 53,000 hectares big. Very high ground water levels. The mosquitoes were extreme and lasted an extra month into August - still a few around.

For Aki, Kai and I it has meant a great harvest. This winter holds a palette of sun dried tomatoes, dried broccoli, cauliflower, broad beans, peas,herbs and kale. Aki is canning pesto, hot pepper jelly, Saskatoon jam etc, etc... .

Every knife and tool we've made this year has been produced with just solar power. We work with the Sun. The Sun basically dictates what we do, how and what we eat, what time we go to sleep, when we wake up, how many movies we watch and in the deep, dark winter, how many emails we can write. We'd much rather be guided by the sun than by Exxon or Shell.
We've been harping about solar power for 15 years to anyone who would listen. Not many were listening but a few were watching. To us it is mind baffling that everyone hasn't a panel or two. We all know the sun.
Today, silicon, which makes up roughly half the cost of making of most solar electric panels, has dropped from $400/kg to $70/kg in one year..... and the silicon Baron's are still making money. Kind of sounds like the oil companies. Right now you can get Sharp panels for 2/3 of what they were a year ago. .


At the time when we moved here we invaded Iraq. Now we're occupying Afghanistan. Sure is a disgraceful situation we find ourselves in. All for a pipeline. All for oil.

Anyone can.
Running your shop on solar electric power is easy. With this system we've run our cabin and shop for 13 years. We started with one panel, 2 batteries and an inverter.
We are 100% solar powered from the end of March until the end of September now. March and October are good for sun energy just not unlimited. We work full time making edged tools. Our power needs decline until December 21st, by the end of February we have the power we need from the sun again. It's December and January when we slow down and burn candles in the evening. If you're connected to a grid there is no fluctuation. We tried to keep up the production for these dark months only to fall behind and get stressed. This year we'll snow shoe, think more, and play more music.

We designed and installed our system. It was fairly easy.
We went with 6 volt golf cart batteries. They are tough (We've frozen them solid and they have come back). These batteries are inexpensive and easy to replace although we haven't had to. 8 batteries and they are all in good shape. Twice a year I'll clean them with baking soda and water, then top off each cell with distilled water.
We've seen people spend lots of money on batteries. You don't have to, tough golf cart batteries are the way to go, especially for a shop. If you live within a grid you don't need batteries.

We have 390 watts of panel. 2 are BP and one is made by Sharp, a 20 amp regulator and we have a 2,500 watt (with a surge of 3,500) inverter we bought at Canadian Tire.

We built a manual tracker. Three panels, framed, on top of a 20 foot steel pole set cemented into the ground. As we work we turn the panels to face the sun.
This has increased our power by 35%.
The tracker put us at the level of power we are satisfied with and gave us a very good ground.--- An excellent ground is really important. Ground your inverter, batteries and panels.

Trick is to work with the sun when it is out. We don't think of it as storing power. Use power when it is there in the sky.
At night we use stored power for light, music, watching movies, and small amp tools.

If you have a steady wind, a wind generator is the way to go.

It's quite amazing once you begin... A different way of seeing. It feels like a breakthrough. Life on another level. Being responsible for your own power instead of being forced to be part of the crime. We are all, in this part of the world, part of a crime.

Questions like, "what do you do when the sun's not out", or statements like, "solar panels are made by oil energy" seem true enough in an all or nothing way. When the sun's not out we relax. The real cost to the environment of a panel is paid off in as little as 5 years. Life is saved. Solar electric panels are guaranteed for 25 years.

Electric cars are a boondoggle unless you plug into the sun. Electric anything, otherwise your plugging into oil, coal and nuclear reactors.

Living with the sun as the source of power, growing your own food, taking time to think, taking only what you need and most of all being empathetic, not psychopathic.

http://www.caribooblades.com/

Don Quixote

Aki is reading Don Quixote. Every day or so she gives Kai and I an update on Don's exploits.

Reminds me a bit of Notes From the Underground by Dostoevsky in the way that you almost want to close your eyes before it happens again. Before Quixote attacks again, donning his barber's basin. Before the underground man delves deeper into the depths of human despair and humiliation.

 Two stories more opposite to each other.



Our shop in the evening.

Thinking one's onto something when everyone else thinks you're insane.

A tragic folly? Interesting to consider these two stories from our little spot in the bush, with no curtains on our windows. Here we are thinking we are perfectly sane...

We are 43 dozen eggs ahead of ourselves.

Most winters our chickens take it easy and almost come to a halt in egg production.

During one of the cold spells, one of the chickens decided to go out for a stroll, found a nice spot under our work truck, and found herself frozen to the ground. That evening when we went to close up the coop we discovered we were missing one, went looking but couldn't find her. The next morning (-26 C) Kai found her under the truck, clucking softly. It took several buckets of warm water and an evening in a box infront of the woodstove, but she seems to have recovered completely.

We are eating a lot of eggs.

The temperatures of Winters past.

Some Chilcotin neighbours say 30 years ago it would hold at -40 C for weeks and dip to -50, -60 some nights.

I found that the wood stove door became a regular workbench for me.

The beast that plows our road.

We don't feel insane but are still trying to understand the point.

http://www.caribooblades.com/

Just put in our seed order for the spring. Hope springs eternal.

The Heart of Winter

There
Is so much information.
Everything is information. I
Seem to hear everywhere. A barrage. Seemingly all
Out of proportion. Overwhelming. Confusing.
Frightening. Floundering, until I pick out a familiar sound. It could
Be a voice, the way a hammer hitsa nail directly on the head, a perfect connection.
Suddenly my own space expands.
I fade and block certain sound. I can
Pick up more familiarity,more sounds, until every sound I hear is familiar.
The sounds of a city become mesmerizing.
So much sound is communicated is untrue
misguided, illogical,
Nonsense, malice.
This information surrounds us, can destroy us…
Survival in any space depends on the way we adapt to that space.
The State of being free.
(or maybe we're just bushed)
Snow ice cream
Mix together in a big bowl:
1 egg
half cup sugar
half cup milk, cream or evaporated milk
1 tsp vanilla









Add snow and flavouring (maple syrup is good) and stir!