my side of the wilderness.

It all started with NIMBY. I was stumbled across this website the other day when I was researching, of all things, steampunk art. NIMBY is a "DIY industrial art space" in Oakland, CA that caters especially to large-scale artistic and engineering projects. But the thing that caught my eye wasn't the giant robotic spider or the 30-foot-tall illuminated clown face; it was the organization's slogan: "Refuse to live vicariously."

And that's what did it.

We all have bugs in our system. Dreams--some feasible, some nearly impossible--that we hide in the soft, fleshy folds of our hearts and rarely let see the light of day. Some want to climb Mt. Everest. Some want to open their own restaurant. Some want to hurtle themselves at the ground from the top of a cliff with only a rubber cord standing between them and eternity.

Me? I just want to get lost.

Call it what you will--a transcendentalist fantasy, a danger complex, a death wish. I have always had an obsession with stories of survival. Two of my favorite books as a kid were My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George and Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, both stories about kids who find themselves alone in the woods and must learn to survive. When I got a little older, probably in conjunction with my OCD fear of global nuclear war, I became interested in the post-apocalyptic and zombie genres (both of which center around an individual or group surviving after the collapse of modern civilization). I devoured books and movies such as Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank, The Postman, the "Of The Dead" series, 28 Days Later, and Waterworld.

Finally, all that merged with: an inherent distaste for the alienation and detachment that results from much of the technology we use, a stubbornly independent spirit, and a deep, abiding love for manual labor and its fruits. (My favorite part of the Chi Alpha mission trip to Mexico was hand-mixing cement and digging ditches.)

Put it all together and you have a very deep yearning in my soul to pitch a tent in the woods and start working on a fishing pole. I don't want to live vicariously anymore.

I remember having a conversation once with a friend where we were talking about what we would do in a post-apocalyptic scenario. It went something like this:

ME: "But...don't you think it might be kind of, I don't know, cool in a way if all our modern luxuries were stripped away and we had to start over living in cabin and growing our own food and stuff?"

FRIEND: "Umm...no, not really."

So maybe I'm a little bit alone on this, but my reasons are simple enough. I want to learn about and be connected to the natural world. I want to see the exact source of the food that I eat and prepare it with my own hands. I want to live, even for just a little while, without the distraction of a single electronic device. And when the zombie pandemic strikes and America is riddled with atomic bombs, I want to be able to escape to the middle of a Canadian forest and know that I can survive.

So that's the plan, essentially. I'm going to spend a lot of time this spring preparing: taking a first-aid course, training Lucy, researching all aspects of wilderness survival, and learning from my friend Liz who did this exact thing the summer after she graduated high school. And then in June I'm going to take my dog and load up my car and drive somewhere--maybe Tennessee, maybe Colorado--find a national park, and set up camp for about a month. I'm not sure yet exactly how much I'm going to bring in the way of supplies, but I do know that I want to only eat off the land. So that means fishing, hunting, gathering, and probably some weight loss while I learn through trial and error. I'm also going to bring a spiral notebook and my Bible (along with some plant identification books and the Army Field Survival Manual) and keep a daily log of the journey, which I will hopefully turn into a long work of nonfiction over the rest of the summer.

(don't worry, I won't be nakey...at least not most of the time.)

So, am I crazy? Maybe.
Is this a really extreme way to go about fulfilling a pipe dream? Probably.
Is it completely and absolutely necessary for me to do this? You betcha.

The funny side note to all this is that a few months back, my brother Danny had a prophetic dream about me that involved me looking out at the world and Jesus telling me "This will all look different in June." I had totally forgotten about the dream and had already scheduled this trip in my mind for June when he reminded me of it on the phone tonight.

So don't worry. God's got my back on this one. Just pray that my parents don't have instant coronaries when I tell them.