My buddy Jeff trodding along even though he came down sick with the flu while we were out in the mountains. I caught this stunning picture of him making his way with my dog Emerson accompanying him. Glorious time of year to be in the backcountry. Beauty overwhelms the senses every direction you look.
I will probably begin video uploads from this adventure next week. In the meantime, keep on the lookout for a video upload sometime today of every piece of gear from my pack and my dog’s pack that we carried out with us on this trip. Plenty of images from the trip are included.
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...
