Folks, for the past year I’ve had plans for an epic excursion into the backcountry for the week of Thanksgiving here in the US. It was something I’ve really been looking forward to all year long.
The day before I was to head out, I got hit HARD by the flu. I’m still dealing with it now as I write this on the third or fourth day. Healthy all year long all the way up until a single day before my excursion, it boggles the mind.
Naturally, I was looking forward to sharing that adventure with everybody, and the wilderness area where I planned to go is a really special, unknown area to most people, with waterfalls, interesting rock formations, and thick forests.
The only comfort from this is that I got sick before I went into the backcountry and not during my time in the backcountry. I’ve been thinking all week of how miserable that would be and asking myself how I would deal with a situation like that. Am I prepared for that possibility, or are there weaknesses in my preparedness there? I’ll tell you this: When you have a 102°F (39°C) fever at home and you can’t get warm even with the wood stove blazing, it gives you an idea of how much worse that experience could be out in the woods in the wintertime with only your sleep system and a campfire. Add on that the idea that work around camp can’t be put on hold if a person is to survive such a thing. So no matter how weak and miserable you’re feeling, you still have to be able to keep fuel on the fire, cover distance whenever possible to get back to civilization, and so forth. All of these expenditures of energy not only delay the body’s ability to recover, but can in fact make an illness go from bad to much, much worse very quickly.
So what to do? How to handle such a situation? What things should a person always have on hand in the case of such a scenario?
Even though I’m really disappointed about my plans getting ruined this week, maybe something good will come out of it. I think this would make an exceptional topic to discuss for The Practical Woodsman podcast.
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
