It’s What’s For Dinner

Last night I sat by a fire with our friend Nate, who’s been staying with us for the past couple weeks. Nate was stewing beaver over the flames. “You really gotta cook ‘em, or they’re tough,” he told me. He was wearing a pair of shoes he’d sewn from a deer hide he’d tanned, and splitting firewood with a knife he’d made. About the beaver, I believed him: Nate’s eaten his fair share of beaver, often during the weeks-long snowshoe treks he makes through the northern Quebec wilderness. He recently put together a beaver fur vest, which goes pretty well with his buckskin pants.

About a half-dozen years ago, when he was 30, Nate up and quit pretty much everything else he was doing to devote himself to learning wilderness skills and building relationships with the natural world. “I realized I didn’t really know anything that really mattered,” is how he explained it to me. So for the past six years, he’s been living in tents and cabins and yurts and immersing himself in a self-directed course of study for all the things you can’t learn in school. He has made snowshoes, a toboggan, and numerous articles of clothing, generally from the coats and skins of wild animals he has killed. He is helping Fin and Rye construct a pair of shave horses, starting with a length of birch they split with wedges. He loaned the boys each a drawknife and their spare moments have been consumed by carving and shaping. Right now, Nate is learning blacksmithing. He’s also building a birch bark canoe, and is taking fiddle lessons. That’s just what I know about. He does not spend much money, and seems quite content to not know where he’ll be living this winter, much less next month.

I like having Nate around, and not just for what he offers the boys. The other day, while a massive thunderstorm blew in, the sky dusky and lightning splashing everywhere, the wind furious and gnashing, I could just hear his fiddle riding over it all. He was playing to the storm, and I stood there on the threshold of the french doors, feeling the weather and listening to Nate’s song. Or perhaps I was listening to the weather and feeling the song, or maybe there wasn’t any difference between the two. All I know is that it was pretty freakin’ awesome and Penny and I stood there even as the rain began pelting down so hard it actually hurt, watching the trees writhing in the wind and listening to the music carrying from the little cabin where Nate has taken up residence.

I have enormous respect for people who take their lives into their own hands, particularly in ways that are not widely celebrated in our society. It takes courage to do such a thing, to conduct oneself in accordance with beliefs that do not enjoy widespread support. To return briefly to the subject of logic, I see that Nate is living by his logic, and no one else’s. And having him here, greasing his chin on campfire-cooked beaver and passing his days immersed in one project or another, any of which could be dismissed as illogical and therefore impractical in the context of the contemporary market economy (I mean, really… making your own shoes??) is like being in the presence of a living reminder that I am free to fashion my life as I wish.

And I can’t think of anything I’d rather be reminded of.