The most recent episode featured a highfalutin camp sink that costs over $200 on Amazon. My conscience has been beating me up about that. Although it is a very nice sink setup, I personally would never pay hundreds of dollars for such a thing, and I wouldn’t recommend anybody else spend that much, unless you’re just rolling in spare money. (The sink I showed off was sent to me for free, otherwise I wouldn’t have it.)
So I’ve felt like I owe it to the audience to come up with an equally-effective, possibly-simpler solution that offers the same conveniences and luxury for around $20-$30.
You might be happy to know that I ran out to Walmart tonight and collected a few simple things for about $10, and I think I’ll have a really fun video for everybody over the upcoming days that fits the “practical” aspect of The Practical Woodsman a lot better for this sort of gear item.
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...
