Epic Survival: Extreme Adventure, Stone Age Wisdom, and Lessons in Living from a Modern Hunter-Gatherer (2017)

Chapter Twenty

A BAREFOOT WILDERNESS RUN

The sun had not yet come up. I walked outside wearing shorts and a light shirt to go for a run. I didn’t need shoes for this run. I was in a place where I had never been, and I wanted to connect with this new land. My legs have always taken me to the places I needed to go. Today, I hoped they would carry me somewhere special.

I started slowly. I didn’t know the area. It felt slightly foreign, but as with all places I have been around the world, it was also somewhat familiar. The ground was rough but forgiving. The more comfortable I felt, the more I lengthened my stride. Soon, I forgot I was running. The ground was simply moving under me—the zazen of running—which allowed me to take notice of my surroundings.

The first thing I noticed was a large tree that forked in four directions. It seemed to be pointing to the right toward a trail, so I took it.

The trail narrowed. On the right, there was a massive area of ancient bedrock protruding from the ground. As I passed, I saw mica flecks and lines in the stone that had been shaped millions of years ago. I wondered how many different bands of tribes had walked over the rock. Nearby, on a sweet birch tree branch, two squirrels wrestled for space.

I pressed on to see what the immediate future held. The trail dipped down and then popped up. Eventually I passed a pond. With each step, I felt small pebbles nudging between my toes. They weren’t sharp but rather round and worn, oddly soft in way, likely from being walked on for generations.

The sun was mounting the sky. I spotted a smaller path and exited the trail to explore it. A near-perfect canopy of trees was overhead. I stayed close to the water. Water always leads to more life. I felt alone, but I wasn’t.

From all sides, people were emerging from connecting trails. They were very much like me; they were out enjoying the natural world.

Following the water, I hooked to the left. The sun had crested the horizon, and it hit me squarely in the eyes. I was heading east. I ran another mile or so, and continued to hug the water. It moved me to the south, and the sun was no longer in my eyes.

I could hear more people joining me. I didn’t look back, but they were there. They weren’t chasing me, or threatening to pass. Even though I knew they were on their own, it felt like they were joining me.

With the sun fully hidden by trees, I looked up. I saw in front of me, not more than a half mile away, one of the most beautiful structures I had ever laid eyes on. It was yellow stone, so perfectly shaped that I slowed down for a better look. I held my breath at its beauty. I kept looking up, up, up. It was as tall as a mountain.

The structure was two massive rock towers rising from a common point with a plateau in the center. In the sunlight, the towers glowed. It was nothing like the rock formations in the western United States, as it was perfectly sculpted.

Marveling, I continued my run. I passed a line of oak cattails. On the other side, I heard dogs barking, but I couldn’t see them.

I looked up again. In front of me was a row of shiny structures. Everything looked like pure glass, and each one reflected off the other. Just behind them, one towered above the rest. The structure rose straight up so high only man could have conceived it.

I stopped and moved off the trail. I looked around. Hundreds of people were there, running and walking. People were walking their dogs. Just past two guys tossing a Frisbee was a metal cart with a picture of a hot dog on top. I watched a few joggers pass. None of them looked down at my bare feet.

It was my first run in Central Park, and my first morning ever being in New York City.

Millions of people were waking up around me and going off to make their futures. But these few hundred in Central Park realized that the natural world was right in front of them. Central Park is the one piece of land in New York City that has been comparably less disrupted than the rest of the city.

The people in the park seemed to fall into two categories. Some were going places, with purpose. Others were simply enjoying their steps. They were breathing the air, taking in the beauty of nature, and perhaps wondering how a row of hundred-year-old magnolias could form such a perfect canopy. The consensus, however, seemed to be that if you can survive outside the park, you can survive in it.

When you realize what the wild can do for you, there is a desire to mesh it with the modern world, even if you are not going to quit your job and become a hunter-gatherer. We know what nature can do for people who live in urban environments. We know it can build their awareness, their physicality, and their senses, and all of these can be adapted into their everyday lives. In our society today, the earth underneath us has become a distant thing. For the most part, we live in a concrete world removed from the true ground. These people could easily trap themselves in a concrete existence, but chose to step off the concrete and onto the land.

I stood there, staring up at the most beautiful buildings I had ever seen. They were designed and built with architectural integrity. But in my mind, no man’s artistic creation, no feat of architecture, will ever compare to the beauty of the earth.

As I looked around, I wondered, How do I fit with these people? I live near a town of a couple hundred people. The people around me now live in a city of eight million. We have completely different baselines.

My hunter-gatherer lifestyle has led me to struggle in this reality on occasion. Relationships with women, for one, have been a challenge. In a bar, I sometimes have trouble communicating in modern-speak with members of the opposite sex. Not long ago, a stunning young lady came up to me and told me I was strikingly handsome. I’m not sure what I said, but it wasn’t the right thing because she smiled and walked away.

Even when a woman understands my lifestyle, there can be complications. Once a girlfriend was living with me in my primitive dwelling in Utah and a mountain lion that fascinated me would visit every night. She became freaked out, so I scared off the mountain lion. We soon broke up, but I never saw the mountain lion again.

The rules of everyday life can often be foreign to me in comical ways. For example, when I was in Los Angeles last year I checked into a nice hotel. I was pleasantly surprised to find a refrigerator stocked with snacks and drinks. I was even more surprised to find that after I consumed many of the items, the hotel restocked them like my mother refilling the fridge. Problem was, when I checked out I got hit with a $551 minibar bill. I had no idea the snacks weren’t complimentary.

As I travel to different cities, there is not the same type of weight on me as I see on many other people. Being in survival situations has taught me what it takes to live. That connection is very powerful. It has developed all my senses. I have experienced heightened hearing, clearer eyesight, and cleaner smell. My sixth sense comes alive, and it makes me realize the potential of what I can be as a human being. All of that breeds contentment.

Still, I often look up at the sky and ask the creator where I fit into all of this. How wild am I supposed to be? How human? How much are these supposed to be intertwined? I always come to the same conclusion: it is going to take a lifetime to find the answers.

But what pushes me forward, what inspires me, is seeing people who want to connect to the earth in any way, as these people in Central Park were doing. I believe it’s important not to wait for tomorrow, but to start today. If someone has an interest in nature, they should start by going out and getting in it. If that takes ten minutes out of the day, take the ten minutes. It can’t be a matter of “I’ll wait for the weekend.” A weekend is an awesome time to get outside, but making it a daily practice is better. In our culture today, for most people, if they don’t do something on a daily basis, it will slip out of their routine, which is just human nature.

For me, tapping into the natural laws of one environment is very applicable when you travel to a different environment, no matter how dissimilar to yours. I have lived off the land in a jungle of Kauai, in the California desert, in the Sierra mountains. I have explored the plains of Tanzania, the rain forests of Costa Rica, and the jungles of  Vietnam, and now I had run in Central Park. What I have learned from traveling to all these places is that the earth is vast, but it’s not such a big place.

Even though my reference point with the land was vastly different from that of everyone in Central Park that morning, I felt as if I was sharing my connection to a new place with the people who knew it well. It didn’t matter that they weren’t on a walkabout in Arizona, or on a mesa in the Kaiparowits, or at ten thousand feet on the Pacific Crest Trail. They were enjoying the wilderness that was right in front of them. And I felt that if I kept running through the trails of Central Park, some new secrets of the earth might reveal themselves to me.

As a kid, I was always exploring or climbing. (Personal collection)

The pit house in the community of Salt Gulch, Utah, that I built and lived in for five years. (Donna Simpson)

In the Panama jungle, filming Dual Survival. (Russell Fill)

Preparing to hunt with the atlatl and dart. (Russell Fill)

On the road for a Dual Survival shoot. (Russell Fill)

On the cover of Wilderness Way.

Addressing a group of students. (Ace Kvale)

Starting a fire as the Fremont Indians did using the hand drill technique. (Ace Kvale)

A small coal is nurtured and brought to life with a gentle breath. (Ace Kvale)

The picture shows the focus in the instant the arrow is released. (Ace Kvale)

Three atlatls made by me and two darts made by A.J. Applying artistry and attention to detail creates an extension of the maker of the tool. (Personal collection)

Blistering sunset over the Kaiparowits Plateau. (Personal collection)

Rainwater filtering through and running on top of slick rock in the southern Utah canyons. (Personal collection)

This shot illustrates the powerful life-giving energy that storms can generate over southern Utah. (Personal collection)

The geological process sculpted by nature over thousands of years. (Personal collection)

In the summertime the canyons of Utah can reach over a hundred degrees, but in the wintertime they are blanketed with snow under freezing temperatures. (Personal collection)

This image illustrates how flash floods can carve out canyons over time. Despite the cottonwood trees, there is no surface water. (Personal collection)

This is the ideal, all-purpose bush knife that I have used for many years. (Personal collection)

The finished product. (Personal collection)

On a walkabout in the southwestern United States. (Personal collection)