The Persistence Hunt: Day Two and Recap

For the those who have not been following this adventure, a small group of us traveled to Wyoming to attempt a persistence hunt.  You can follow earlier reports here: I'm going on a persistence hunt, The Red Desert, Day One: Fall back foods, and Barefoot Ted is a firetalker.

And now for Day Two...

Morning

Dawn struck.  Our first alarm clock rose in the East.

In ones and twos, the eight of us were rustled awake -- first by the silent sun, then by human chatter, then by the smell of food cooking, then by needing to pee, then by the social pressure not to be seen as lazy.  A dozen signals, multiple sensory pathways, slightly asynchronous, starting gently and gradually intensifying, each day a bit different.  Sell an alarm clock that does half that and you can retire on it.

The modern alarm clock is the primitive technology.  A thuggish tool that clubs us awake, brute force cortisol, lacking elegance and intelligence -- the caveman stereotype embodied by modern man.

The Sun rises over the Red Desert

My "irrational" fear of snakes was perfectly rational sleeping on the ground in the Red Desert.  Luckily, no rattlesnakes had come in search of a warm-blooded radiator during the night.  Only one guy on our team was disappointed not to see any rattlesnakes: Dennis, the one guy with a .22 Ruger and more importantly, a sleeping perch safe from serpents: the back seat of his car.

This horny toad was the closest thing to a rattlesnake that we saw

Fire and fall back foods

I got up and looked at the ashes of last night's fire.  Jules, one of the Luna Sandals vegan space monkeys, had started the fire by rubbing together a few pieces of wood.  A simple device that transfers energy from the human body into rotational force into friction into heat into an ember into flame into more heat into yams and back into us.  A net gain chain reaction.

Vegan Prometheus, Jules

We didn't limit ourselves to yams.  Our camping fare included guacamole (fresh avocados, tomatoes, cilantro, and red onion), roast chicken, beer, peanut butter, bread, jelly, apples, peaches, canteloupe, walnuts, almonds, beef jerky, buffalo jerky, bourbon, coconut oil, garlic, salt, pepper, vinegar, cacao nibs, Ulrich's mother's homemade cookies, bottled water, canned beans, sardines, coffee, dried cranberries, corn tortillas, eggs, banana chips, and bananas.

Kill or no kill, even the three vegan hunters in our group didn't have any problem surviving.  (And at least two of the vegans were prepared to eat any antelope we successfully hunted.)

Espresso

Philip Stark, a Berkeley professor and ultra-marathoner, was attempting to make espresso on our little gas camping stove, all while excitedly making elaborate future plans to learn primitive skills: bow-making, flint knapping, persistence hunting.  The joke told itself: making espresso in the wild...what a bunch of city slickers!

But the joke only makes sense from a distance, within the old frame of viewing things.  The reality is that crafting a bow, or any other ancient skill, is not so different than learning any modern skill.  And in fact, Philip's elaborate espresso-making process was positively primitive, requiring far too much care, patience, and skill to ever find its way into a Starbucks.  He would have been a good bow-maker back in the day.

And this gets to the point of the trip: it was not to reject the good things of civilization in favor of a life in the wild.  No, the point of the trip was to go on an odyssey, to learn about what it means to be human, and eventually, to synthesize and integrate what is good about each era of our past into a better future.

I don't know how many times I'll have to say it -- it's not a paradox to embrace both the hunt and espresso, wild and civilized, instinct and culture, animal and human.  Choosing one or the other is a false choice.  Philip embraced both.  We all did.

The Professor enjoys a fermented beverage

Hunting

Okay, okay, on to the hunt.

Let me start by saying that the pronghorn antelope is the fastest land animal in the Western Hemisphere, second in the world only to the cheetah.  Except that pronghorn have far more endurance than cheetahs.  So in retrospect, perhaps we should have chosen a slower species.

We could find pronghorn -- finding them wasn't the problem.  And the first or second pursuit wasn't so hard either.  But once we pursued, the antelope got super skittish, and would run, oh, a mile away.  Sometimes just over a small rise.  Sometimes flanking us to get downwind.

Someone commented: "It's as if these antelope know exactly what to do."  We were amateur predators, they were professional prey.

It was harder to keep them in sight than you might think.  None of us were trackers, and we didn't know the natural movement patterns of antelope in that area.  Even with binoculars, it wasn't always easy to keep them in sight.

Even so, the terrain was about as favorable as you could hope for.  Fairly flat, open, and just filled with sage brush (as inhospitable habitats go, it smelled lovely).

Note: a lot of the Earth's surface is hard.  Remember that the next time you hear someone say that we didn't evolve to run barefoot on concrete.  The world is not one big golf course, one big grassy lawn.

As for footwear, everyone was wearing a pair of Luna Sandals on Day Two.  Two of us had worn VFFs on Day One, concerned about cacti on the top of our feet.  But the VFFs got hot and and sweaty and felt heavy, and if I stepped on a cactus, the needles would get stuck inside.  So I switched to my Lunas on Day Two.  They held up great.  I'm excited for some of the new models they have in development.

A herd of Lunas

We all wore a piece of blaze orange.  Partly so no one mistook us for antelope, partly so we could see each other from farther away.  There were times when each of us were spaced more than a quarter mile apart, so it really helped.  

This pack of predators hopes its prey will die of laughter

After a few hours of "hunting", we headed back to the cars -- long since out of sight over various ridges.

Our endurance running over, we held a series of footraces.  In my first heat against Barefoot Ted, I had a clear false start -- invalidating my victory.  In my second heat, I was accused of another false start, but I maintain that it was simply a good start -- and a clean victory.  You decide.

I'm offering Ted a re-match at the New York City Barefoot Run (shameless plug).

The MVP Award

Dennis Shaver was the MVP of our trip.  Master of logistics, he packed 7 people and tons of gear into a Land Rover, got shit done, and worked longer and harder than everyone else.  He was the same guy who arrived in Mexico before the first MovNat seminars, and with a buddy and a few machetes, hacked the campsite out of the jungle.  Dennis has paced Barefoot Ted at the Leadville 100 over the years.

Dennis was also interesting because, if he'll forgive me for using him as an example, his life encapsulates the transition that our entire civilization is going through.

• Like nearly all of us, his family has no memory of living in the wild (hunter-gatherer).
• He was raised on a dairy farm in Michigan by a stern German father, who gave him, through nature and nature, a good work ethic (herder-farmer).
• He put himself through college, and went into industrial manufacturing, where the farmer work ethic served him well (producer-consumer).
• As the routinized, physical Industrial Era is giving way to the agile Information Age, he has turned his manufacturing company into a lean, knowledge-based enterprise.

If you ever need a company to do product development and prototyping, he's your guy.

Dennis and me making guacamole

Steamboat Springs

On Saturday afternoon we drove down to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where we hit the hot springs for well-deserved soak.