Alaskan Walden

The bush in Alaska is what the outback is to Australia. It is
reputed to be a mysterious no-man's land closed off to mere mortals and
survivable by only those with secret knowledge. Technically, any place
that is not accessible by road is considered the bush, which can be
viewed the other way around as any place still the way it was before
there were roads.

The vast majority of the land remains in its pristine state, complete
with large populations of wildlife, such as bears and moose, that have
been erradicated elsewhere. Alaska's distance from the Lower 48 states
and its severe winters have kept it five hundred years behind the
Conquistadors, but the conquorers are now arriving in Rvs and pick-up
trucks. They arrive in droves in the summer months to fish for Alaskan
salmon and to hunt in the fall. No one can look at the pattern of human
development across the Earth and fail to appreciate that any excursions
to the Alaskan bush are on borrowed time.

When someone mentions the idea of getting back to nature and living off
the grid in the Lower 48 they are likely to receive a few chuckles.
When someone moves out into the Alaskan wilderness to live
self-sufficiently, no one laughs, instead it causes a crisis of faith.
People's belief in the system in which they live is brought into
question and the years they dedicate to a job in order to pay utility
bills and mortgage a house and new car are brought to the fore. "If he
can live on his own in the harshest environment on this planet and be
happy and healthy, why am I suffering in such indefinite misery to make
a living for myself and my family?" People are desperately afraid of
knowing if the system in which they invest so much of their lives is
not, in fact, a complete and utter hoax.

I will attempt to be as objective as possible, but the reader should be
aware of the extreme apathy I felt towards the American status quo
before attempting my experiment in Alaska which enabled me to endure
with enthusiasm things that others might consider hardships. A few
years earlier a group of mentally deranged men had taken over passenger
airliners and flown them into the World Trade Center towers in New York
where I had once stood on the observation deck as a teenager and
marveled at the skyline through the binoculars on a swivel for a
quarter. My country, the country that I had sworn alligence to in
kindergarden with my little hand clasped tightly over my chest, had
just invaded Iraq and its government in Washington D.C. no longer even
maintained the illusion of democracy or thinly veiled their interest in
oil profits. I no longer loved my country, I despised the very idea of
a country. I had no further use for a government to make decisions on
my behalf, I wanted to take responsibility for my own life. I sought to
live life on its own terms in the natural state where money meant
nothing.

Most distressing, was that I found myself becoming a cynic, and my
optimism was something that gave me the most pleasure in life. I was
losing my faith in myself, which had always sustained me in the
toughest of times, I needed something real that I could believe in
again. Something so real that it was beyond doubt and the compass that
points to those sorts of things led me to Alaska.

To begin with, moving out into the bush you do not need any formal
education or special permit. No official stands at the riverboat
loading dock and checks your credentials. It is a self-selecting and
ruthlessly Darwinian process. I located the property I bought on the
Internet, of all places. Fifteen acres for $12,500 that a couple in the
ski resort and tourist town of Girdwood has bought in the 1980's and
never seen and now wanted to unload to rid themselves of the $100 a
year in taxes.

The piece was a logistical nightmare, the only access was by riverboat
along the rapid Talkeetna River and then a 2 mile overland hike over
moose trails through birch and spruce forest that was home to the
state's highest concentrations of bears. During the fall, after it
snowed and before the Talkeetna froze solid enough to ski on, I would
be stranded up at the cabin site and then again in the spring until the
river was navigable by boat again.

The property occupies a plateau 100 feet above a small creek that flows
into the Talkeetna. In the summer the creek churns with unbelievable
returns of all 5 species of Pacific salmon; king, silver, pink, chum
and sockeye or red salmon as well as Rainbow and Dolly Vardon trout.
Naturally, the Talkeetna and its tributaries, especially near-by Clear
Creek attract fishermen from all over the world. Each spring they set
up semi-perminent fish camps along the river and operate fishing guide
services for tourists and visiting sportsmen.

During these months there is constant tension between the bears and
humans. Most of these trigger-happy and inexperienced fishermen cook
hot dogs and clean fish near their camps and every year bears are
killed under Alaska's liberal self-defense laws. Last year a woman shot
a bear in self-defense that was seventy feet away, wounding it to die
in the willows.

The bears often travel the plateau where my property lies to avoid any
fishermen on the creek. I have only been raided once, when my homestead
was still just a tarp camp. Black bears got a bag of pancake mix and
lemonade mix and to balance the meal ate a bottle of vitamins.
Replacement cost? $7.

It is a humbling experience to listen to the bears breaking branches
and moving near-by without being able to see them in the dense brush.
When they are visable, it is usually by surprise at very close range,
yet I have not used my bear spray. It is very intimidating for humans
to encounter a wild animal that has no fear of them. While the smaller
black bears will scurry away at your approach, the giant brown bears
are utterly oblivious to humans. Is it possible to coexist peacefully
with bears? Absolutely, but it requires a degree of respect and effort
- such as not leaving edible garbage lying around and storing food in a
heavy duty bear resistant food container away from your tent when
camping - that most people cannot be bothered with. Most people take
advantage of the myth that bears are ferocious killers in order to
justify killing them and add value to the bear skin rug in their
den.

I took my first load of five gallon buckets and Rubbermaid containers
of gear that I would pack on a frame pack over the difficult trail to
the river landing on June 30, my birthday and the day I signed the
title papers for the property.

The experiment, the modern Alaskan Walden Pond experiment of Thoreau,
that I was attempting was never to demonstrate my superior abilities or
woodsman ship over anyone else. Instead, I wanted to be able to
honestly report that what I had done was in fact so simple and
enjoyable that it would encourage other people to try it, or at least
inspire others to incorporate some kinds of self-sufficiency into their
own lives. To be completely honest, however, I have dedicated a great
deal of thought towards what special skills proved useful to me that
the average American might not possess. I have hunting experience and
strong familiarity with firearms, I am a carpenter as well as a
mechanic with the aptitude for rigging things to work without
replacement parts, as well as knowing how to run a chainsaw and fall
trees, cut and split firewood, being an airplane pilot I have a good
sense of direction and the ability to read maps and a compass. I was a
firefighter with strong first aid skills. These things are so natural
to me that I did not even consider them when making my decision to go
out into the bush, but I could see how the endeavor could be daunting
to someone without one or more of them. Do these things amount to the
special permit that the official checks for at the riverboat landing? I
will leave that to the reader to decide.

Is courage a necessary qualification? I'm not sure exactly what courage
is, to me I think it is simply the ability to avoid being paralyzed by
panic. A great example is when I encounter a bear, I no longer function
of my own volition, I switch immediately into some sort of
semi-conscious state where I watch myself readying the bear spray or
the gun and studying the bear's body language to see what it is going
to do. The instant the situation is resolved, my heart begins to beat
quickly and my hands shake uncontrollably, exactly as if I had narrowly
missed a serious car accident. I could see how someone could be gripped
by the sight of a large bear at close quarters and both unable to
protect themselves and to transmit that to the bear and possibly
provoke an attack.

The real courage is required to face the many myths that we are raised
with in American society that make us so helplessly dependent on the
society that employs us and feeds us and houses us. The cold, for
instance, is said to be so intense in Alaska that it will kill anyone
foolish enough to try and live without electric baseboard heaters. In
reality, even at extreme cold temperatures, such as 30 and 40 below
zero, a wood burning stove will keep you quite cozy even with only a
thin tarp for a roof. Ironically, many people in Alaskan cities stake
their very lives on the unreliable and expensive electric heat. Cutting
and splitting firewood might be physically demanding work, but it
offers an honest return for one's labor.

Another myth is that humans need access to an infinite food supply at a
supermarket in order to survive. Nothing could be further from the
truth. I eat better balanced and more nutritious diet, consisting
primarily as Thoreau's did, of rice, at the cabin than I have access to
in town or when traveling. I address many questions about what I eat,
so I will elaborate. I adhere to the modified Mediterranean diet
outlined in the work of Dr. Andrew Weil, especially his Eating Well for
Optimum Health.

Thoreau, who often ate in the near-by town of Concord, Massachusetts,
listed his provisions at the cabin on Walden as such; Rice, molasses,
rye meal, Indian meal, Pork, flour, sugar, lard, apples, Dried apple,
sweet potatoes, pumpkin, watermelon and salt.

While purely a matter of personal taste and preference, my staples at
the cabin, to give the reader an idea how much food is required to feed
a human being for a year are as follows: 50 lbs. long brown rice, 25
lbs. dehydrated black beans, 25 lbs. penne, 25 lbs. garden rotini, 25
lbs. elbows, 50 lbs. pancake mix, 50 lbs. soy butter, 2 gallons extra
virgin olive oil, 50 lbs. oatmeal, 5 lbs. brown sugar, 5 lbs. sugar,
100 quarts soy milk.

To this I would add gravy mixes, spaghetti sauce mix and tomato paste,
garlic, peppercorns, sea salt, Emergen-C drink mix, grated Parmesan
cheese, Tabasco sauce, maple syrup, Tamari sauce and flour to make
Chapatis, or Indian flatbread.

Whenever possible, such as during air drops or once I can get into
town, I try to add as much variety as possible. I get as much fresh
vegetables and fruit as possible, soy burgers, soy breakfast sausages,
buns, whole wheat tortillas and mineral water.

In addition to this, Dr. Weil also suggests anyone can benefit from the
following vitamins: 100 mg twice daily of Vitamin C, Vitamin E 400 to
800 IU of natural form (d-alpha-tocopherol together with other
tocopherols), selenium 200 mcg, mixed carotenoids, 25,000 IU, a
B-complex vitamin with 400 mcg of folic acid, 1,200 to 1,500 mg of
calcium as calcium carbonate.

This diet provides all of the nutrients needed for good health and can
also be supplemented by the occasional ptarmagin or spruce grouse and
fresh caught salmon. There are moose for the taking at any time in the
winter, but the work involved with quartering and butchering an animal
that large is prohibitive and would result in far too much meat for me.
A moose will clean out to 750 pounds of meat. Thoreau had his
semi-daily wanderings into Concord to ease the monotony of his diet of
rice and hoe cakes, I have air drops. My mother and friends in town
will occasionally put together a few five gallon buckets of supplies
and take them to the airport in Talkeetna where they are dropped from a
Supercub over the property with long trailers of surveyor's tape to
help find them in the snow.

I find it revealing that people who live in cities rarely have more
than a few days groceries in their modern house with amenities and are
so dependent on the public utilities for water and electricity that
they do not think to put away so much as a gallon of water to drink if
those public works should fail. Without sounding like a doomsdayer,
since I myself do not live in fear of any sort of natural catastrophe,
I find it liberating to have a buffer of safety of a few weeks supplies
and the ability to gather and filter my own water. I have a small
generator that I use to run a TV and even an Xbox video game system so
the power along the power lines of the Parks Highway and in downtown
Anchorage go on and off during power outages without notice while I pay
a fraction of anyone else's power bill in gasoline.

In fact, when Halo 2 was released in November for Xbox the Talkeetna
was still not frozen enough to ski. My copy was dropped to me in a
bucket from a Supercub. Undoubtedly one of few of the millions of
copies sold to be delivered in such a manner. The point being there are
ways around the inconveniences if one is resourceful enough.

A healthy diet and an active life are the best defenses against
illness, but I am often asked what I keep for a medical kit in case of
an emergency. My first aid kit is quite small compared to the
overstocked medicine cabinets in most modern houses. In a small mesh
bag I carry: assorted bandages, a length of duct tape wrapped around a
Q-tip, eye drops, Chapstick, aloe vera gel, Arnica Montana gel, Arnica
Montana 30 c. capsules (for bumps and bruises), Tea Tree oil, tweezers,
Willow bark tincture, Tylenol and Bach flower Rescue Remedy.

In addition to this, some people might require insulin for Diabetes,
other perscription medications, an insect bite kit such as Ana-Kit or
epiPen for severe allergic reactions and asthema medicine.

As I stated, I bought the property where I live for $12,500. I paid a
$2,000 dollar down payment and signed a note for the remaining $10,500
payable in $200 monthly payments. How much did it cost on top of this
to take up residence on the property? The economics of this experiment
are an important point, the major expenditures are as follows:

Honda 4-cycle generator $750, military surplus potbelly stove $85,
Poulan 14" chainsaw $120, military cot $65, propane countertop cook
stove $50, 20 gallons gasoline $40, 15 gallons propane $35, axe and
splitting maul $50 and kerosene lamp $10.

In fairness, I already owned or was given by friends many other items,
which the most significant were my rifle, shotgun and backpack and my
frame pack and all the tarps I needed were given to me. The total of
all these things above was $1,205 together with the $2,000 down payment
gives a total of $3,205.

With the numbers satisfied, let us compare then that abstract commodity
known as quality of life. I do not believe the number of years in a
person's life to be a good indicator of the quality of one's life.
Instead, let us look at the amount of stress a person suffers under in
order to meet their day-to-day needs for food and shelter. After that,
let us look at the number of hours in a given day that a person can say
they are truly happy over a period of time that becomes a pattern that
a person can call their life.

In cities a person is awaken by an alarm clock on weekdays and commutes
to a job that they convince themselves to be agreeable to the extent of
their dependence on it in the intricate web of monthly income and
expenditures. There are bills to pay and arrangements to satisfy,
credit cards, auto loans, rent or house mortgages and a person's time
is constantly pulled between these obligations and attempting to keep
some period of time for themselves during the day. I try not to use
statistics to make points, but we can only suppose some percentage of
people to be irretrievably behind on these bills with no relief on the
horizon.

On top of this financial stress, and often compounding it, modern
Americans face epidemic levels of obesity, heart disease, high blood
pressure and cancer from the fast food and microwavable dinner diet
together with not enough activity which has emerged along with this
ever increasing demands on the modern American's time. There is nearly
ubiquitous alcohol use and abuse, violence and hopelessness's constant
companion, suicide.

If they realize it or not, people are little more than figures in
elaborate economic models too complicated to reform and top-heavy
enough to topple at any hour. They struggle to be individuals with
their own unique hopes and dreams and ideas, to fall in love and to
find that elusive "something" that lies so out of reach few know where
to begin looking for it.

I lived that life for a long time. Like everyone else, I believed to
the very core of my being that the game was winnable if one simply
behaved well enough and worked hard enough for long enough. I know now
that the game is Three Card Monte. I no longer have any desire to
return to it, even if I could. Not for $1,000,000, not for Bill Gates'
fortune. I am damaged goods.

In the wilderness I do not feel in danger, on the contrary, I feel
safe. I feel so hard to get to and it brings a huge amount of relief.
As I meditate on one thing or another while splitting wood, sometimes
on nothing at all, not noticing how big the wood pile grows.
Afterwards, I'll melt some snow in a kettle on the wood stove for water
and possibly ski over to the edge of the plateau to see if Mt. McKinley
is free of clouds enough for pictures. On cold mornings the birch
forest is covered with a crystalline frost like the Christmas I wished
I had as a child.

There is no stress. Some days there's so little stress that I do not
feel compelled to do anything and I will sit by the stove and type on
the laptop or tune up the violin and work on a new waltz.

So, what did I learn from the experiment? If it was such a resounding
success, what findings can I show to the rest of the scientific
community? I saw in what I have done a future available to humankind
where more people began to grown their own gardens and do their part to
cut down on excessive packaging by buying and storing their own bulk
foods, at the same time creating a cushion of security for themselves
and their friends and family. I saw people beginning to realize that
the only way to win the game is not more money, but by simplifying
their wants. Something that no only benefits each of us, but also
benefits all of us.

Thoreau wrote that a man is made rich by what he can live without, a
sentiment that the philosopher took from his studies of Hindu
scriptures, and then repeated by Gandhi. It has not lost any of its
truth, instead it has grown more important as human life on Earth faces
the most difficult challenge of all. The conquest of the planet is over
and nature has been decidedly vanquished in every quarter. There is no
longer anywhere left for humans to expand to. With this generation
living today begins the ultimate challenge of living together with one
another within the limits of the natural resources of the land we
share.

What real world solutions to this utopian dilemma are there? It would
be very possible to live entirely self-sufficiently within a crowded
city, in fact, it requires extra effort on people's part that has been
socially conditioned into us to live as they do now. The answer is a
building comprised of entirely self-contained living units. What would
these "stand alone" or "closed loop" buildings look like?

Rather than being connected to a centralized power and utility system,
every resident would be capable of meeting their own needs for
electricity, water, heating, waste management and even food production.
Instead of centralization, these living units would gain their
efficiency through diversifying their fuel requirements and their
reliability by backing up one another. I've outlined ten steps to
transition an existing building into a self-sustainable living
community; 1. Power could easily be provided by a quiet, fuel efficient
generator such as the one that has performed flawlessly for me in
Alaska. 2. Additional power could be provided by a solar panel mounted
on a deck or roof to supply a series of deep cycle batteries for light
electrical need and save fuel for the generator. 3. Heating could be
provided by a natural gas or propane hot water heater that also
circulated hot water through a radiant heat flooring system of copper
coils. Sink and bathtub drains could flow into this same floor system
and a series of filters could clean the water and return it to the
water holding tank. 4. What about a toilet? Every toilet could be
removed and have the drain sealed and in its place have a odorless,
simple composting toilet, such as those at www.envirolet.com 5.
Telephone? Cell phone and a WiFi Internet connection.

All of these things could be done to an existing building. 6. A major
modification, which as a builder I have done more times than I can
recall, is the addition of large planting decks and rooftop
greenhouses. 7. These, together with a rainwater catchment system that
fed cisterns in the basement. 8. 100% Recycling and composting bins and
tumblers. 9. A building community committee of residents that selected
new residents and organized resident volunteers as well as made
decisions regarding security, operation and maintenance. 10. Former
maintenance spaces or extra apartments in these buildings could be set
aside for home offices and cottage industries to allow as many
residents as possible to work from home; machine shop, auto shop,
electronics, bakery, arts &; crafts, naturopathic and emergency
medical clinics, laboratories and so forth.

There would obviously be little financial benefits from buildings such
as these, so what would be the incentive for building and living in
one? In a word, freedom. Many people are under the mistaken impression
that freedom is the privilege to make choices on your own, when in fact
freedom is the both terrifying and liberating act of taking
responsibility for your own life. It is the point at which you no
longer have anyone else to blame and you have become a government unto
yourself. No one, no thing, can ever enjoy the benefits of freedom as
long as they are dependent on someone else for their most basic
necessities. Once these are met, then all other human interactions
become voluntary. With such a universal human equality the things that
made us each different and unique would have far more value than the
amount of money would could produce on an assembly line at one company
or the other.