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From Backstraps to Beets: The Hunter-Gatherer Blues

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Protein on the move. Photo by the author.

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

                                                                        ~Robert Heinlein

Many of us have a strong interest in knowing where our food comes from. My own interest runs perhaps a little deeper still—into the growing and hunting of what my family eats–because I believe they remain critical skillsets in the exercise of resistance while we remain trapped behind the lines of a dominant culture with different priorities.

But even if you don’t share my interest, it would seem difficult to argue that, as a practical matter, knowing how to grow and harvest one’s own food, and how to process and preserve it, isn’t just as important as knowing how to drive a car, read a book, or buy a plane ticket.

The efforts we are making to that end, here on our tiny ranch on the eastern slope of the Cascades, aren’t easy. They aren’t even cost-effective. Given that a McWhopper goes for about dollar, I can have a pile of pizzas delivered anytime I want, and frozen turkey by the metric ton is available at Costco every day of the week—why bother with the time and expense of building a greenhouse or raising chickens? And worse, after years of costly and determined effort, we still get the vast majority of our food from a local grocer.

All of which troubles me.

That kind of dependency troubles me because we are never much more than three missed meals away from the collapse of law and order—proof of which can be seen on CNN after virtually any natural or man-made disaster around the world. But even here, in a mostly secure nation, it’s inescapably true, for the vast majority of us, that without our local grocer, and the complex and astonishingly fragile system that keeps food coming into the aisles, we would eventually, in all likelihood, starve to death.

That’s dramatic, of course, but probably not as far-fetched as it sounds, given the unpredictable, turn-on-a-dime nature of life on planet earth, and more importantly it serves as a constant reminder that a life of utter dependence is a sucker’s game.

Particularly when it comes to food.

Industrial food producers “will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, pre-chewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so.”

                                                                             ~Wendell Berry

One challenge of writing about our personal efforts to grow and harvest food is that the topic falls easily into the habits of a reader’s pre-conditioning, and therefore elicits a lot of eye-rolling. That pre-conditioning is accomplished by means of consumer-marketing imagery that we have absorbed into our tissue like radiation poisoning after decades of internet, television, and radio advertising. It is so pervasive, in fact, that now we barely even notice that all of that promotional carpet-bombing is designed to compel our surrender into dependency.

Just eat the Doritos, and forget about growing kale.

Food riots bring out the best in us.

We are, many of us, walking around with a veteran consumerist’s thousand-yard stare, which can be seen clearly in the aisles of any Target or WalMart, where the shell-shocked and emotionally flat-lined queue up daily to buy mostly disposable products manufactured by sweat-shop slaves in Chittagong and Rangoon. Especially when there is a “Fire Sale” or its cousin, the infamous “Year End” sale, and my personal favorite, the “Blowout Sale.”

Sometimes, the imagery is even amusing. A mention of gardening might, for example, conjure images of the Blue-Haired Gardening Gestapo, those mean little old ladies who lead community garden tours while wearing badges denoting their frocking as “Master Gardeners,” and who go about tsk-tsking anyone who hasn’t bloomed the Dracula Lotax, a notoriously difficult orchid, in their own designer arboretum.

Hunting—and firearms in general—comes with its own set of baggage. It’s a world where every armchair outdoorsman secretly thinks he’s Peter Hathaway Capstick, and seems to attract a strange confluence of Fire in the Belly, Neo-Tribal, Uber-Tactical, Club-Faraday crazies. These are the folks who, virtually without fail, serve to lower the level of any meaningful hunting or gun conversation by swamping it with over-heated diatribes about what caliber we should all be shooting, or with epic tales about the main-beam score of their last bull elk.

But I don’t hunt for trophies, and I’ve probably given far too much thought to double-tapping the next square-range commando who assails me in a religious pique over the virtues of all things 1911.

At any rate, the hunter-gatherer discussion remains useful, even essential, if we care about building meaningful resiliency into our lives, or merely wish to avoid a complete metamorphosis into oversized insects ordered around by our smart phones.

Here on the Figure 8 Ranch—which we named because naming things has a way of elevating our appreciation for them—we have, over the last few years, made a conscious, challenging, and often frustrating effort to grow, or to hunt, as much of our own food as we reasonably can.

That effort begins in the greenhouse in early spring, when we sow seeds, and ends in the late fall when I head out with a rifle into the woods or onto the high desert to find an elk, or a deer, or both—who I pray, as the Wintu Indians of California thought of it, is willing to die for me that day.

The Figure 8 garden, choking in wildfire smoke.

My belief in the importance of growing food, I realize now, started long before we ever moved into the woods of Central Oregon, and is inextricably linked to the circumstances of my own upbringing.

I was raised on the sagebrush desert of northeastern California, at precisely that point where the northern Sierras form the western boundary of the Great Basin. It was, and remains, a rural and largely ignored part of the country. My mother managed a large garden each summer from which we drew our vegetables, and we raised sheep, cattle, pigs, and chickens for protein. My step-father worked at the sawmill in town and my mother, when she wasn’t churning butter out of cream from our milk cow, raised four kids.

We never had a lot of money, but we never worried about going hungry either.

None of that autobiography is important except that, I think, it demonstrates to some small degree that how we teach our children to live often ends up becoming how they actually live. If no one ever teaches them, for instance, how to grow a vegetable, or to fish for trout, or to hunt a deer, they probably won’t be passing those skills on to their own kids, so that within a single generation the bedrock of our long-heralded American self-reliance—growing and harvesting food—is either breathing through a ventilator or stone-cold dead.

Mostly, and when it is probably more important than ever, I fear that it is dead.

Several hundred pounds of meat. For the cost of one .280 Ackley Improved hand load.

“The capacity of people in the cities to do things directly for themselves is extremely limited. They can’t produce food. They can’t produce building materials or the materials needed for clothing. They’re so cut off from the natural sources of their livelihood and so far cut off from fundamental skills, most of them, that they can’t directly do much of anything.”

                                                                             ~Wendell Berry

To be sure, there are people out there doing the same thing better, smarter, and more successfully than we are. Some of the people I draw inspiration from, such as the YouTube sensation WranglerStar, are doing it at a very high level of intelligence and accomplishment that we can only dream of, given our own limitations.

But our own efforts remain relevant because we are probably more like everyone else—forced to keep one foot closer to the grinding centers of population and commerce in order to keep the lights on and the freezers humming.

Even so, and the unavoidable irony notwithstanding, we are still making a genuine effort at food production. And in this endeavor, effort counts. It counts because every failure is instructional to an extreme degree in the enjoyable pursuit of eventually getting it right.

Which is why, when we sat down for dinner not long ago and ate an entire meal consisting of food we had either grown in the garden, or hunted off the rimrock, I felt no small measure of satisfaction. It was a victory for the quieter kind of activism I admire most—the individual taking direct action to responsibly improve their own condition. No petition, no pussy hat, no sandwich-board required.

Truth is, I am mostly interested in acts of solitary activism, in the spirit of Thoreau at Walden, or Rick Bass in the Yaak Valley of Montana. Because I no longer have much faith in the gargantuan, far away, machine-bureaucracy apparatus known as the Federal Government, or its long term intentions to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution, you won’t find me banging a gong in support of one retail political candidate or another. In other words, I have no political home, and staying off the reservation demands that I ride a wide circle, keeping as far as possible from the diseased blankets and steel trappings of the soldier’s fort.

Raising a vegetable can be, and hunting certainly is, political in the eyes of many. So be it. For my wife and I the act of planting seeds, tending a garden, and eventually harvesting a basket of vegetables, or of hunting an elk out of the junipers on the high desert, and finally putting them all together on a plate at our dinner table, is a ballot cast for precisely what matters most to us. It is a vote for intimacy with the details of our lives, and for the maintenance of our diminishing freedoms.

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Craig Rullman

Craig Rullman

Craig Rullman is a writer, photographer, filmmaker, and occasional buckaroo. He is the author of The Bunkhouse Chronicles: Field Notes from the Figure 8 Ranch, and Director and Producer of a forthcoming documentary film -- The Outside Circle: A Movie of the Modern West.

Comments

  1. Brian H. says

    Good stuff again. We had a decent harvest on what we grow on our place last year but excessive heat definitely had it’s effect. Rolled snake eyes on our elk tags but we were hunting in some country new to us. Industrial food freaks me out to. I’ve often thought “what does a person Somalia or some stone age part of one of the ‘Stans think when they first walk into a Walmart?”.

    Reply

    • Craig RullmanCraig Rullman says

      Our catastrophe this year, and there has been one thing or another virtually every year, was wildfire smoke. We lost the month of August to oppressive and thick smoke, which really socked the tomatoes. The squash didn’t mind, which was a win. I think one of those souls probably feels something like I did when I walked into a book store in Saudi Arabia. The only thing on the shelves was the Koran, but with lots of different covers and bindings.

      Reply

  3. Jim Pfleging says

    ..And here I was thinking I was cool for watching Wranglerstar. I’m finding confidence that I am not yet off the rails up here in The Maine. For that I appreciate your writing and politics. Mandatory reading here!! If only I could get my wife to appreciate ‑5°. But I am left wondering.…is that a gutshot?

    Reply

    • Craig RullmanCraig Rullman says

      You are in fine company with your Wranglerstar viewings, and are most certainly not off the rails. 🙂 I think that family is doing a lot of things extremely well and with admirable foresight. Good eye…it looks like a gut shot but isn’t–and I would admit it. Made me a believer in the .280 AI, I can tell you that much, given it was a 600 yard shot.

      Reply

  4. deuce says

    “in the aisles of any Target or WalMart, where the shell-shocked and emotionally flat-lined queue up daily…”

    To coin a Tompkinism, might they be…“shelf-shocked”?

    Great post, Craig. Didn’t know about WranglerStar.

    Reply

  5. Saddle Tramp says

    My hands are held up high!

    I am professionally guilty (even today) of complicit involvement with industrial food. I have been my entire working career. It just happened to work out that way. I have been the antithesis of “Local”. Happily? No! I have hauled organic products of all kinds though.

    Personally, I was raised on a lot of home grown vegetables. This goes back even to vegetables out of my Great Grandparents gardens. My kids were raised on vegetables out of our garden. My oldest daughter is the most locally grown (only) and exclusively as they come. I do the best I can. Number one the taste, quality and value are just better. When it comes to food I absolutely agree to do all you can on your own. The demand for change is increassing. Do I want to see the economy collapse overnight? Hell no!! Do I want to see a return to pioneer days? Not really. I try for the best of both when I can. Each to their own. I have to admit that I am hauling a load of sugar from a over 100 year old cooperative in Nampa, ID. Amalgamated Sugar. I am double damned now. I am not out to mock myself, but I am not going to bullshit you either. I too am caught in the net. I do see hope ahead though.,.

    Reply

  6. Saddle Tramp says

    P.s.
    My last truly long haul run was from the Port Of Elizabeth, NJ right on the Hudson River. A load of Chinese apple juice thatcI delivered to Otay Mesa, CA to go to the Motts Apple Juice plant in Mexico. Stuff moves around I strange ways. I took hundreds of loads of orange juice from Florida to California. Kosher grape juice from California to Marlboro
    NY to a Jewish winery. On and on…

    Reply

  7. Lane Batot says

    Sure, we are all in it. But you can CHOOSE to do things the Old Way, and “walk-the-whiteman’s-road” as little as you have to. And no escape? I escape every time I head out into the woods! And every time I read something, or watch something on film that takes you back, or teaches you something of how things used to be(and may be again, someday.….). One hasta think of “escape” in increments, rather than total exile. Everything that is preserved that way, by practice and passing it on to others, in books and films, on blogs!–will help to keep it viable. And I’m SURE it will be needed one day–just cain’t begin to predict when that day will come. And heck-yeah I shop at the Wal-Mart–cheap and convienant, and allows me MORE TIME to git out in the woods in my “spare” time! And heck-yeah I order books and DVD’s from Amazon–all about critters, injuns, life in the “wild”–access(that I can afford) like I never dreamed of in the past! It’s just like the old time injuns taking whiteman’s things and adapting them to THEIR culture and lifeway–like guns, horses, blankets, you name it. Get a hat, and cut the top out of it and put some feathers on it! That’s how I look at it–every time I’m at the Wal-Mart, I’m on a RAID! Take advantage of the easy foraging when and where you can(something any decent Apache could understand)–just don’t forget the Old Ways of doing things, for when that easy pillaging dries up.……

    Reply

      • Lane Batot says

        .… that “figure 8” garden is a mighty fine looking set-up! And how long does a big elk like that last you?

        Reply

    • Paul McNameePaul McNamee says

      One hasta think of “escape” in increments, rather than total exile. Everything that is preserved that way, by practice and passing it on to others, in books and films, on blogs!–will help to keep it viable.

      It’s just like the old time injuns taking whiteman’s things and adapting them to THEIR culture and lifeway–like guns, horses, blankets, you name it.…–just don’t forget the Old Ways of doing things, for when that easy pillaging dries up

      ‘Struth.

      Reply

  8. Saddle Tramp says

    Yes Lane…

    I recall an Indian Chief instructing his daughter on the White Man’s ways telling her to use what works and discard the rest…

    Craig and Jim and RIR offer the best selections around. We all fine tune things to our own predilections as it should be.

    Reply

  9. Saddle Tramp says

    Agreed. Ain’t nothing easy or straightforward. You get through the day is all. I was blown away by the moon this morning. Left Ely about 4:30 this morning right as the eclipse began. Just after 6 I came up a grade out of a canyon and there she was hovering just above a Mesa starting to light up again. I could not have had a better place to see it…

    Reply

  10. Paul McNameePaul McNamee says

    We let our garden stand fallow last year, though it went ahead and grew a forest of cherry tomatoes all on its own, anyway.

    I’m looking forward to tilling and planting and seeing what we can raise this year. I want to dedicated a section to growing the three Sisters — corn, beans, squash — in the Native American style (letting the cornstalks be the bean trestles.)

    Reply

        • Lane Batot says

          I’m reading a superb historical novel right now–by none other than James Alexander Thom– titled “The Red Heart”, about a white girl taken captive and raised by the Lenapeh(Delaware), which gets into the “three sisters” and the old Indian ways of planting quite a bit–highly recommended!(and I got it cheapo on that thar Amazon.…).…And was that Blue Moon EVER spectacular last night! Cold and clear here(midstate N.C.), and everything just GLOWED in it’s light.……

          Reply

  12. Pat_HPat_H says

    I’m trying to formulate both a cogent comment here and the start of a post on my own blog on the general topic you raise here.

    It’s somewhat hard to do.

    At the end of the day, I wonder, are those of us who lean toward hunter gatherers even now doing that for one simple reason? And that would be, that is what our species does?

    The further we go from our natural state, the more miserable… and for that matter, weird, we become. Staying as close to that state as we can insulates us from both of those miseries.

    Reply

    • Craig RullmanCraig Rullman says

      I think it’s interesting that we are now being conditioned to talk to robots. Alexa, etc. Recently I saw a television commercial where a man was speaking to a robot who was more intelligent than the man. There is now an entire whorehouse in Europe made up of interactive sex dolls. Yuval Noah Harari discusses this at length in Homo Deus. The next step after killing God is to make ourselves into God, which might be seen in the blending of human beings with machines and artificial intelligence. Cyborgs, essentially. My leaning is away from robots, and so I go slouching toward wilderness.

      Reply

  13. Chris P says

    Craig,

    Very well written. I can appreciate the skill required to obtain one’s own meat. My father started me duck hunting at age 10. I have not looked back since. I have not purchased ground beef in over 3 years as I have been lucky enough to harvest a deer or and elk. Hopefully I can meet up with you for a hunt soon.

    Reply

    • Craig RullmanCraig Rullman says

      I look forward to it. I’m hoping to get drawn for elk again before the year 2050. That’s a joke and I shouldn’t complain, as I’ve pulled a nice tag 2 out of 4 years, but success breeds greed sometimes. Stay safe.

      Reply

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