I’m going to describe a wilderness moment for people who’ve never experienced it. Many of you know what I’m talking about. If so, please forgive the oversimplification.
If you’re walking in the forest with someone who’s in the habit of being alone in the wilderness, watch them. They’ll check their bearings from time to time; especially when off trail or in confusing terrain. This isn’t a formalized Boy Scout / Army Ranger “check the compass and read angles” approach. It’s the subtle moment when a fella takes a break to look around. He’ll check the view the way he just traversed. It always looks a little different when you backtrack. He’ll glance at landscape scale markers. Does that mountain peak look a little different? Is it still to the west? He’ll check finer scale indicators. Is the creek still within earshot? Has the aspen grove given way to lodgepole? He’ll check small things too. Is the ground sandy? Wet? Sloping?
An experienced woodsman will do this in a way that’s easy to miss. I have a natural inclination to disguise the routine checking of bearings. I think other outdoorsmen do the same. It looks like I just paused to sip some water, or tighten up shoelaces, or piss on a fern, or look at an elk trail… and I did. But I was also reorienting himself to my environment and my place in it.
The point is those who travel alone are always paying attention. That’s how they get to travel alone. To fail at “paying attention” will eventually lead to a screw up. From there it’s only a short step to requiring a search party… or a pallbearer. This is probably why most people never walk alone.
If you’ve never seen it, and most people haven’t, you’ve missed a lesson about life.
The Silicon Greybeard just did a repost of something he wrote in 2017; A Repost on Being Worn Out by the Situation We’re in. This somehow fits perfectly with what I tried to describe; except it’s on an intellectual/political scale instead of in relation to nature.
He talked about his disillusionment in 2017 and how that encouraged him to write about more positive and personal things:
That “frustration and disillusionment with a world gone mad” is why I shifted my emphasis from writing about the problems…
…to the technical stuff like the shop things, radio articles, and space stories I’ve been highlighting lately. They’re the things I’m most interested in.
Interestingly, I’d posted something similar at about about the same time.
Way back in 2017 (which is centuries ago in internet years) Silicon Greybeard noticed the parallels and quoted from my blog:
Some time year ago (with many fits and starts and personal failures en route) I began to steer away from “serious” commentary. The world had enough overwrought hand-wringing. I thought it was good for the soul (in particular my soul) to let most of it go.
With some caveats I think we’ve been drifting toward the same concept. We saw things going to shit but got tired of saying “hey… that’s a bad idea that’ll make things go to shit”.
It’s boring. There’s no point in telling the stampeding herd to turn aside before they go off the cliff. If they lust for death and misery what can we do to stop them? So, we shifted to what interested us and left the herd to go off the cliff without further comment. (I’ve been only partially successful at that.)
That was a decision I originally made during a periodic “bearing check” in late 2016 and early 2017.
Do you remember 2017? That’s the year of Silicon Greybeard’s post (and mine)? I remember. At the time, doom was impending. It had drawn nigh, approached, loomed, and threatened. The more obvious it became the less necessary it seemed to mention it.
Now, even normies and Kool-Aid drinkers sense something is wrong. They never figured it out with logic. Perhaps they lack the will or the mental horsepower? They finally picked up the scent of failure and experienced the pure emotion of collapse. They think shit might get weird if current trends continue.
Except, there’s no “might” or “current trends continue”. It’s a done deal.
I remember other done deals. I remember wondering why TARP during the tail end of Bush Jr.’s circus of a presidency didn’t devalue the dollar. This led to wondering why Obama’s continuing mismanagement didn’t kick it off the cliff.
Now I know… it happened; just as it was always fated to be.
The currency has been devalued. It will decline as long as we treat it like we have been treating it. Perhaps it took a while and perhaps a few extra self-inflicted shocks were needed to get the ball rolling, but it was a done deal long ago. I couldn’t know when the math would take over. But I knew, in the long term, math never loses. That’s a bearing check for ya’.
I used to write about inflation. Now I don’t. Why would I? The anticipation is over. If folks didn’t see it coming or if they’re slow on the uptake… well that’s not my problem. It got too boring to tell them about it and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
There are other bearing checks. One thing that’s interesting is that I refer to 2019 as “the before times”. At first that brought cynical jeers. Now, it doesn’t. Nobody of any political viewpoint finds it funny. No matter how much Kool-Aid you’ve drank, you can’t make 2022’s reality seem superior to clear memories from 2019.
That’s a bearing check. You have to stop once in a while and look around you. Look forward, look back, look around, smell the air. Where are you in relation to the environment around you?
In 2016, I started my Squirrel stories. The bedlam of the last few months of Hillary Clinton’s campaign had me worn down. The irrefutable guaranteed 95% statistically certain campaign that unquestionably would lead to the complete thrashing of incompetent showman Trump just didn’t match what I saw with my own two eyes. The vast gulf between what I was being told and what I was seeing was almost physically painful.
Meanwhile, people were taking it too seriously. They needed a break. So I tried fiction and it seemed ok. I don’t know if it helped many, but maybe I gave y’all a laugh and that never hurts. It made me feel better. If I were a faster writer, the whole book would be written by now.
By 2017 I was explaining why I’d stopped talking about inflation, or federal debt, and I even quit flogging the stupidly subsidized Chevy Volt. Large (or at least amplified) parts of society were huffing this shit too deeply. They indulged in a psychotic break from which they apparently will never emerge. They went apeshit for at least three years before COVID became a new flavor of the same old apeshit. They never calmed down. They never recovered. I guess they can’t.
I thought people needed a break. I started writing camping stories; I called them “Walkabouts“. Three years of freaked out maniacs launching one attempt after another to slay the dragon of Mar-a-Lago had worn me too hard. I needed a break. I figured everyone else did too.
Do you remember the last events of 2019? Think hard. Covid wasn’t yet a thing and we’d never seen an empty shelf at the store. Right around Christmas came a failed impeachment vote against trump. That’s approximately the moment when “the Before Times” ran out. Before that winter’s snow had melted my dog was dead and a mild virus from Wuhan had induced an already jittery people to bask in their own self-affirming abyss of fear.
So where are we now? We’re one year past the attempted vaccine mandate of 2021. I cannot let that go. Every time I try to mention politics, I lose my cool and start frothing at the mouth about it. Mostly because it happened just one year ago and everyone is already trying to memory hole it. I don’t memory hole things because I don’t wish to wander around lost. Every time I write about it I regret it. I don’t need to mention it. We were all there. If you were there and didn’t see it, then nothing can make your eyes see what your emotions won’t accept.
Look forward, look back, look around, smell the air. Where are you in relation to the environment around you? I took time to reorient late last year. I centered. I let the madness wash over me but not uproot me. I (thankfully) held firm.
But I do need to refocus on the positive. My last post disappointed myself. Squirrels in 2016, walkabouts in 2019. I know the path. Yet sometimes I stray.
The good news is I pay attention, even to myself. And thus course correct as well and as quickly as I can. I have another camping story in the hopper. I have another chapter of Attack of the Lesbian Activist Squirrels just about ready to go. I return to the path.
So long as I focus on the positive it seems to work out. I try to avoid pointing at the stupid and saying “look at that festering pile of steaming moronic self-destructive idiocy… doesn’t it suck?” The people who recognize it as shit already know. The ones that don’t will roll in it now matter what I do.
Also, an experienced woodsman is never lost, but sometimes they’re a little late getting back to camp.
I love upbeat posts like this. Squirrels, truly one of life’s essentials. Well, that and checking yer bearings. Thanks for a light at the end of the tunnel. Not worried about it being a train. The system will im/explode. Nothing we can do about it but try to stabilize, protect our AO. There is a LOT of shit worse than dying.
Maybe your lack of effort on memory holing the vaccine mandate is making sure you don’t forget how stupid our leaders were in deciding they knew better than us what is for our own good I can’t think of anything in recent history with more evidence that our leaders don’t care at all for our welfare. We exist for them to push around, the struggle is deciding who gets to dictate the procedure.
I do agree, positive focus is far more beneficial. We have to be reminded that the politics is just a game. There are much better reality subjects out there and appreciating Nature is more productive for our souls.
I think it was Daniel Boone: “I never found myself lost in the wilderness. I was mighty confused for three days, once. But, never lost.”
Checking bearings? Yeah… out in the hills, just being mildly aware of the terrain can help you stay found. Keep some sort of track of creeks and ridges, and the compass bearings will look after themselves.
In the wonderful world of so-called civilization? I started vaguely paying attention to what was really going on (instead of just what the Party told me) in the late 1980s. Within a few years, I was griping about anarcho-tyranny and feudalism – things that are just now coming to the attention of the “politically aware”, and which still escape the falsely-conscious.
Ain’t much I can do about The System, so I try to keep oriented, be prepared to deal with life, and have fun as opportunity allows. And at least we’re not in California anymore.
Leave the handwringing and caterwauling to others. Your insights and ruminations on things societal or poilitcal are well thought out and even more well written, but what’s desperately needed are more Walkabout tales and more squirrels. Epic sagas of trial, tribulation and triumph with firewood, chickens, bacon, homebuilt yachts and Honey Badgers. More chats from the shop with a pot of coffee on the woodstove and a couple fingers of cold remedy near at hand. When I need to check my bearings, this is where I start.
A camping story starts going live tomorrow morning. 🙂
Listen, watch, prepare.
Personally….I’m slowly crossing the Rubicon in my own life. Since I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to be an adult. I watched my dad and mom, aunts and uncles, cousins living their lives to the fullest and I wanted to be “older”, an adult. Thought that was a grand idea when the “adult influencers” in my live believed in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. I knew that was the life!
Now I sit here, 67 years old, trying to survive on the paltry scraps of social security and my failing IRA. Reading about how MY COUNTRY has been stolen from me. About how my youthful ambitions were for naught. Reading how “others” are expecting to BOHICA me…. because they are “entitled”.
My metamorphosis has been gradual…because I continue to refuse to give away those youthful thoughts and ideals.
I realize now that; ain’t nobody coming on a white horse to save us. Even Trump can’t save us. Only the folks that just wanted to be left alone to live an ideal can save us. And they/I’m pissed.
An excellent, thoughtful and reasoned perspective on the situation instead of the ZOMG!!!! We are all DOOMED! DOOMED, I tells ya from the talking dickheads on TV and the “meeja”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7NlFWh7Sz8
We all need to take a moment to step back, stop and think “Wait a minute …”. Your essay reminds us of that.
10/10 with a gold star and a half day off at Christmas.
A gold star?!? Hell yeah!
Thanks for the heads up. We swapped some emails back then in ’17.
I started waking up back after my wife had her cancer in ’97. I had read some stuff years before about the Fed and I noticed the price of gold had been at a 20 year low. At the same time I was wondering how to get more out of my 401k and immediately ran into the Fed again. (I had put some of it into trying to ensure we could survive if she survived – which she did) It doesn’t take too long going over how the Fed has been devaluing the dollar since 1913 to see the road we’re on doesn’t have a happy ending.
I always said that nobody would be more surprised than me if I woke up in 2025, living an idyllic retired life, playing as much as I want, in a bountiful, peaceful world, rather than sitting in what’s left of my house staying up all night guarding it. All the while saving two bullets for the two of us as a last resort.
I can only think that way so long.
“Walkabout” is appropriate to what I took from your meanderings. The Australian aborigines navigate via ‘stories’. The, unintelligible to outsiders, ‘mystical’ stories tell them where things are, including vital/scarce water, and how to get from A to B. The uninformed mistake the trappings, the language and metaphor, for the content and intent, and isn’t that as succinct a description of so much we see ‘going wrong’ around us … forever. (Form over function, style over substance, etc. is the definition of ‘modern’ it appears. Most will, can, never see beyond the superficial, so the ‘mystical’ trappings of InstaFaceTwitTok are the predictable result).
(Interestingly, I suspect it’s not just that most people ‘don’t’ walk in nature alone, it’s that they ‘can’t’. I’m reminded of the, possibly apocryphal, total panic and terror that experiencing real wilderness had on Thoreau. That is the reality for the vast majority, wilderness isn’t something to experience and enjoy, but something to be feared. I have acquaintances, self-declared ‘nature lovers’, that you can see the increasing anxiety when they stray further than a hundred yards away from a beauty-spot parking area. I don’t think they have ever strayed from a beaten, sign-posted, path, and … never will).
I’m not sure when exactly I started to see behind the curtain, certainly by 2000 I was ‘withdrawing’ (even further, never having been a ‘true believer’) from the cargo cult seemingly affecting every aspect around me. Perhaps it was noticing that consistently, whatever the hysteria inducing ‘event’, 25% of people just don’t ‘comply’ (seem immune, or normal, my people) and carry on (in what I see as) normally. The internet phenomenon of having a zillion ‘friends’ online but knowing nobody in reality, merely reinforcing my attitude.
Oh, I internet surf with the best of them (and my eBay account is way overused – so many ‘things’ I want, like my shiny new Stanley 40 scrub plane, $38!?! Yey!), but (much like music, I could never understand how/why anyone would become fixated on a single band or genre. I like, maybe, one or two songs by a performer/band, and probably hate the rest, whilst having ‘eclectic’ tastes, everything from obscure folk to symphonic metal. I view those ‘groupies’ as indoctrinated, subordinating their own likes to the god of fashion. Not so much sheep as birds in a flock unconsciously following some ‘ineffable’ directions) I’m selective.
I (mostly) gave up discussing, or arguing, ‘weighty’ ideas as a bad idea years ago, since it’s apparent that (other than those ‘weird’ 25%) most aren’t just ‘against’ anyone challenging their opinions, but constitutionally incapable of seeing there ‘are’ differing opinions.
So? I do what I (for years) do, walk the hills, garden, make stuff (old-fashioned hand tool joinery mostly) and, if I’m lucky, I occasionally meet like-minded souls. Hey, it’s almost like the real world always was.
Oh, and as others have said before me, keep up the camping stories. it’s nice to be reminded that there are other normals out there, doing normal stuff.
It’s nice to think I’m a normal doing normal stuff. 🙂