This week at Rabbitstick I fell way off the paleo diet wagon into a world of foggy-brains, swelling lymph-nodes and runny sinuses.
I haven’t eaten this badly in over a year and a half. This week I ate potatoes, cheese, granola, rice milk… I can’t remember what else. I didn’t eat wheat though, that would have killed me entirely. I didn’t come prepared, and it hurts. It works as a good reminder that I need to eat well or else I will find myself rendered nearly useless. So much so, that I have decided to give up my corn addiction as well! You know what that means? I may as well give up on my nixtamalization experiments. I’ll write a feral failure blog about them so they will not get lost.
I didn’t quite adjust to the climate either. From hot hot highs to nearly freezing lows, the week felt like 12 hour intervals of climate induced hot/cold therapy, only it didn’t feel like therapy but torture. In all honesty the weather didn’t feel that bad. It felt a lot better than last year! Though a I still spent a few afternoons delirious from heat exhaustion mixed with carb-induced-fogginess.
Aside from eating shit, and feeling out-of-sorts from the weather I made some sweet tire-sandals, a felted wool bag and… um… Well, nothing much else interested me. I had some awesome impromptu campfire conversations about collapse, agriculture and rewilding. My friend Kiliii recommended that I soak the hides I smoked one more time using some of his brains (he said, “Hell, I’m not using them!” a little brain-tan humor). The nice thing about pre-smoking: I don’t have to smoke them again. After I stretched them dry they felt nice and soft all around. I tried to get someone to help me tailor some short shorts, but everyone I asked just said, “cut up a pair of shorts that fit you and use it as a pattern.” So I STILL don’t have my buckskin short shorts!
Mostly I spent the week wandering and thinking about how much we need more localized Rewilding Camps to create communities and replace the pay-to-learn wilderness skills rendezvous and schools. I spent some time brainstorming a “how to organize a rewild camp” page for the rewild.info wiki.
Let’s look at my goals for Rabbitstick:
1.
Primitive tattoos?
Penny Scout gave herself a sweet tattoo on her ankle using a hawthorne needle and charcoal.
2. Flint-knapp a knife.
Nope.
3. Seek help to complete my buckskin short shorts.
Sought help. Didn’t find it.
4. Take LOTS of pictures.
Didn’t do it. Other people took lots though, and they will post them on the Backtracks website.
5. Video interviews.
Too lethargic from eating civilized food.
6. Learn about drying meat.
No one offered it.
7. Work on traps
Totally forgot about that.
8. Learn to nixtamalize corn.
Didn’t remember to do this one either.
9. Fire Pennys pots.
Penny busied herself with tattoos and sweet wool booties.
I don’t really feel bad about not getting some of this stuff done. Really, I just feel glad to have gotten out of there and back to a place where I can eat well. We now return to our regularly scheduled weekly laundry list. I decided to wipe the slate entirely clean except for the first three items. Laundry List for week 25:
Sew Urban Scout Buckskin Short Shorts
Experiment with flint-knapping bottles
Experiment with drying meat
Help mother and stepdad around their house
Hunt for a trailer/RV
Gather and dehydrate as much fruit as possible
Don’t eat corn, write feral failure blog on Nixtamal
Write blog on making tire-sandals & wool booties
Keep on Rewilding and I’ll see you next week!
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12 responses to “Week24: The Paleo What?”
I feel anxious to make a knife for myself as well.
Do you already have pressure flakers? The guys I saw knapping bottle glass used “Ishi sticks” the long pressure flakers that fit one end under your armpit so that you can leverage more pressure to get the really long flakes that go all the way across the face.
I have started making myself a pressure flaker and gathering supplies for making some copper billets.
I just use antlers to pressure flake. I know a guy with a box full of them, I can maybe mail you one.
Any advice on how to gather flint? I’ve found that kind of information difficult to find so far, and frankly, I don’t know if I could really distinguish flint from other rocks very well.
Actually, dont cut any of your good shorts. My advice is to take one of your shorts, fold it to the seam to show one side of the sleeve, get a parchment paper. Trace around the seams including the crotch area. Then draw an extra inch for seam allowances. THen put the pattern on your leather, sew around it! Rip off the pattern, and voila.
[…] Uh huh. Right. And how does this apply to those of us (I’m looking at a certain someone in the room) who crave corn chips (a contracting food) under stress? […]
Jason- I know in Northwest PA chert was the type of flint we had. Locally it is dull gray in color, sometimes weathered on the outside, with a smooth glassy texture when broken, but still opaque. I’ve never found any pieces large enough to knap though I heard there might be some in the banks of the reservoir. I also heard there were large pits in Ohio where the natives collected it, and I’ve read that the Mowhawks were known as “keepers of the flint” among the Iroquois suggesting perhaps that they had the best source and traded it with the others. In summary it might be difficult to find a good piece without travel or trade, luckily for us bottle bottoms, glass insulators, and broken toilets will be in abundance post-collapse. You might also see if anyone uses quartz to make blades, being that it’s similarly silica based and I’ve found some pretty good sized pebbles in our Allegheny Plateau conglomerate.
You might try Jasper.
http://www.explorepahistory.com/hmarker.php?markerId=734
I would love that! I owe you some promised Jewel Juice, anyway. Email me the address you want me to ship to.
I need to make friends with some rednecks here to get in with the hunting crowd and get access to the deer parts they don’t give a shit about (i.e., non-muscle, lousy trophy head) that I could use for billets and pressure flakers. But the hunter crowd here seems as foreign to me as the football fans. It’s another fanatical sport to them.
I think flint and chert both tend to form in or with limestone. So any streams and rivers that flow through cave territory could provide a flint forage.
ishi sticks are great. They make it a lot easier to get long flakes. That way you don’t end up with icicles instead of arrowheads. Personally I think it is easier to start with glass or obsidian than to go right to a harder material like flint. Obsidian or glass are going to be way easier to learn on. If you can afford it, order some of that to learn on.
Rix, you could try posting a flyer at your local hunting store to the effect of “Looking for deer hides and parts”. Some hunters may be looking to get rid of that stuff.
Good point, Sass. Thanks!
Please try to combine #4 (Take LOTS of pictures) with #9 (Fire Pennys pots). Carry on.