Lives set to a wilder rhythm

David Petersen and Thomas Rain Crowe had a common dream. It was to step outside the gridlock of modern life and set up in the woods.

Twenty-three years ago, Petersen purchased an acre and a half of land 15 miles outside of Durango, Colo. He built a cabin and lives there today with his wife. At 59, he works with the conservation organization Trout Unlimited.

In 1978, Crowe moved into a cabin in a remote corner of western North Carolina and lived there for four years before the world crept in, forcing him to move. Today Crowe, 55, is a writer, publisher and an avid gardener in the rural community of Tuckasegee, N.C.

Like Thoreau, both men have written about their experiences. Petersen’s “On the Wild Edge: In Search of a Natural Life” and Crowe’s “Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods” were published this spring. Both books explore the satisfactions and dilemmas posed by wilderness and self-sufficiency in the world today. In a telephone conference call May 11, Outdoors asked each author to elaborate on his experiences. Here are excerpts from that conversation:

Petersen: I spent the ‘70s living in Laguna Beach, and there came a time when things went downhill overnight: Real estate prices tripled, it got too crowded, too noisy. And I’d met the lady I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, Caroline, my wife now for 25 years. While I had this urge from childhood to live in the mountains -- and I’d grown up hunting and fishing -- I didn’t come to Colorado to do that. It was more of a running away, of a trying to escape something instead of trying to go toward something. I didn’t have any goal in mind other than just living in a clean, wild place and trying to construct a life that would allow me as much personal freedom and control over my time as possible.

Crowe: I was also in California in the 1970s, first in San Francisco and then in the Sierra along North San Juan Ridge in a back-to-the-land community that Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Terry Riley and others had put together over the years. Snyder really encouraged me to come back to North Carolina where I grew up, to spread the word of bioregionalism instead of just preaching to the choir there in California. So I was really running toward something instead of running away from something. I figured it was a pretty good time to try to live self-sufficiently, since I didn’t have any obligations, commitments or relationships. The timing was perfect.

Petersen: My first great memory of that place was in October 1981, my first elk-hunting season. I drove out here by myself and built a fire and laid my sleeping bag out on the ground about 10 yards from where the cabin is now and went to sleep and got up two to three hours before daylight. I hiked up the mountain that morning, about five or six miles. By 9 I’d killed my first elk and packed it down myself. I still think about that night alone when there was nothing there, just me and the aspen grove and the animals and trees, no neighbors, no nothing. That sort of set the mood for me.

Crowe: I became rooted to this place through my friendship with Zoro, the old mountain fellow who was my main teacher and mentor through the whole experience. He took a shovel one day and dug up a big rhubarb plant and put it in an old burlap poke and said, “Here, take this home and plant it in the field there by your cabin, because that field at one time was full of rhubarb.” As I put that rhubarb in the field, I really felt connected to the place, and the culture and the history.

Petersen: It’s not to say I didn’t make a few mistakes. When building the cabin, for instance, I used post-and-beam construction because it was easy. You sink upright posts 3 feet in the ground as the main supports, then string the wall beams horizontally along those. One day I realized I’d cut a post a couple feet too short, but rather than pull it out and do all that work, I just went along the line and cut all the other posts off to match the short one. I must have had sunstroke that day because losing that 2 feet of roof along the high edge reduced what was to have been a loft room to a crawl-space attic and reduced the slope of the roof sufficiently that it doesn’t slide snow well. It is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done.

Crowe: After my first year, I had two big beehives. It was toward the end of summer, maybe the early part of the fall, and I was going to check how much honey the bees had made. I dressed up in jeans and a coat and had all kinds of protection -- the gloves, the veil -- and when I went to lift the top super of the hive, it was attached to the one below it and the bottom layer came crashing down on the top of the brood chamber. In just seconds, I was absolutely covered with bees, and I starting running. I got about halfway out into the field before I realized the bees had covered up my veil, so I couldn’t see where I was going. So I stopped. My heart was beating so fast I could barely breathe. I figured that it was all over: Either I was going to have a heart attack or get stung to death. Then I had one of those epiphany moments, and I stopped all my flailing and jumping around and just stood still. In a kind of standing meditation, I was able to get myself to calm down. As I did so, the bees started flying away -- back to the hive.

Petersen: My primary aspiration has been self-reliance more than self-sufficiency. I find self-sufficiency an impossible dream in this modern world. You can’t get away from it entirely, and frankly, there’s a lot of good stuff there that you don’t want to get away from. There’s a lot of bartering that goes on here as well. I will trade labor and meat and things like that to people who have orchards and people who do have great gardens.

Crowe: When I was living next to Zoro’s field, barter was really the main method of currency that I used, and very rarely did I have money in my hands. I helped start a farmers market here a few years back which connected me with other people. It’s almost impossible now to even entertain the idea of being totally self-sufficient.

Petersen: The important thing, no matter where you live, is for a self-directed life, a recognition that by choosing simplicity in whatever ways you can, you reduce your reliance on materialism. I think of it as distraction. I think of owning things as albatrosses around my neck. You go to work to buy them, you’ve got to maintain them, all these toys, and they really keep you from what I feel is the true business of life. You become a slave to your possessions.

Crowe: I like David’s phrase “a healthy neglect of money.” I’ve always been able to live pretty simply. I’m far enough from the city here in the country, now, that I can be as close to the mainstream culture or as far away from it as I want. I don’t have television and I don’t have a cellphone, and I’ve never worn a watch. So in that sense, I can be as far away from the culture as I want, but at the same time, I’m about an hour from a small city that offers as much culture as anyone would ever want. On the other hand, there’s a 4,000-acre high-end development going up about a mile and a half down the road.

Petersen: That’s precisely what I was trying to get at when I chose the title “On the Wild Edge.” It’s not a dropping out. It’s positioning yourself where you can pick and choose. But at the same time, I don’t want to paint a picture that this is the best way to live and encourage even more people to come booming out of the cities. As you’re talking about your new high-end development, that’s the same thing that’s happened to this place since the mid-’90s. And there’s just not enough room for everybody to live in the country. It seems the majority of people that have moved here in the last few years are bringing their city attitudes with them. The big houses, the Humvees, the SUVs, all of that is just the same here and in a way, people are really conspicuous consumers here in the country just like in the city. So I think that it’s the “wilderness of the mind” that is the most critical thing, more than the geographical location.

Crowe: These folks from Florida and New York that come to build their summer homes, you’ll hear them talking in the stores, saying things like, “Well, I can’t stand the noise here; it’s making me crazy.” And it’s the silence they perceive as noise.

Petersen: It’s the roar of their own minds set free without any distraction, I guess.

Crowe: I think that we’ve been brainwashed as human beings and have been taught to fear the wild as opposed to accepting it and embracing it and learning to understand it.

Petersen: I once was a stringer for Backpacker Magazine, and the idea that to really enjoy the outdoors, you gotta have the right tools, you gotta have the right clothes, you gotta have the right wheels and gears and motors and technology, and to me all of that just separates us from nature. Only Moab is a bigger mountain-bike capital than Durango. I pass them -- the mountain bikers, that is -- on the trail up in the forest, and it’s not just that you shouldn’t be here because I don’t like it, it’s because you’re going so fast, you’re not seeing anything, you’re not hearing anything, you’re not smelling anything. Just get off that thing and relax, walk, go sit under a tree somewhere for a while. You get so much more out of it.

Crowe: The biggest lesson I learned in the woods was pace -- living at the pace of nature (the “speed of life,” I call it) and what you can learn moving at that pace.

Petersen: I think if you’re living a lifestyle that is amenable to you, you don’t really separate out labor time. It is all seamless. I don’t make any distinctions between what is work and what is not work -- shoveling snow, writing, walking in the woods, cutting firewood. The concept of leisure time is out of place in this lifestyle. You don’t have a lot of it because there’s always something to do. And if you’re enjoying what you’re doing, it’s not work. There’s no Monday through Friday.

Crowe: As a matter of fact, living on nature’s clock you lose track of all that. I literally lost track. I lost months, even years, and rarely knew what day it was because it didn’t matter. Living in the wild, you’re living with the cycles of the sun and the moon and the seasons and you don’t need all those numbers and all that math. Every day is a new beginning. One’s life is vital and alive as opposed to static and predictably safe.

Petersen: Just this morning, my wife and I had an argument over what day this was. It comes back down to what Gary Snyder calls “the real work,” the work that we do for ourselves. If I go out in the woods and I fell a tree and cut it up and bring it back and split it and stack it and carry it into the house a little at a time in the winter, every piece of wood I put on that fire does two things for me: It draws me right back into those warm summer days in the woods and into the good labor of getting it. I get the same exact satisfaction out of thawing a slab of elk meat and eating it.

Crowe: Zoro once told me that “if you want to learn about nature, God, or anything that has to do with the wild, don’t go looking for it. You can’t find it by looking for it. Just go to some place in the woods, just one place, and sit down.” I think that was one of the huge lessons for me early on in my experience. And I did a lot of that. I went to places and just hung out. I had time, I was on my own clock, so to speak, and I could manage my own time, so I spent time doing things like lying out in the sun, just like an old dog, if I felt like it, letting that late afternoon sun just creep into my bones.

Petersen: For a long, long time, to sort out my priorities in life, I’d pretend that I’m lying on my deathbed and I’m fully conscious and aware, but I’ve only got a few minutes to live, and I’m thinking about the most meaningful things in my life, things that have stuck and made it all worthwhile. About 45 minutes, a hard walk up the mountain from the house, is a little spring. There’s a bench on the hillside and you drop off this bench down about 50 yards, and it’s like a different world. It’s dark down there because the hill rises to the west. So it’s most beautiful and romantic in the evenings, and this is a place where I’ve sat for hours and hours, days and days, pretty close to a month a year, for 20 some years, elk hunting. There’s a little spring pool and a little trickle-y brook that comes down out of it and, after about 100 yards, disappears back into the ground. I have seen many, many bears come and take baths and go, I’ve seen pine martens, I’ve killed probably 15 elk in this place, I’ve watched probably 1,500 others come and go. It is the center of my universe. And when I’m sitting there in my house, watching the wood stove in the winter, I frequently, in my mind, wander back up the hill to this place.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Forest solitaire, demystified

One’s a Luddite, one’s an ex-Marine, but both like the same chain saw. Where these cabin dwellers converge and diverge:

On gardening

David Petersen: A yard full of squirrels and rabbits and deer makes it impossible.

Thomas Rain Crowe: Rabbit fences keep the critters out.

On writing

Petersen: The author and editor of 12 books, he never intended to be a writer.

Crowe: A poet and translator of 11 books, he has always aspired to be a writer.

On shoes

Petersen: He wears rawhide moccasins.

Crowe: He wears buffalo skin boots.

On the military

Petersen: He served as a Marine.

Crowe: He was a conscientious objector.

On chain saws

No contest: Both agree that a Stihl is the best.

On morel season

Petersen: He picks morels in May (when hunting for wild turkey isn’t so good).

Crowe: He picks morels in April (when the hummingbirds arrive).

On popular culture

Petersen: A lot of it, he says, is ash.

Crowe: Cultures and governments come and go; the natural world is constant.

On influences

Petersen: Aldo Leopold, Paul Shepard, Edward Abbey

Crowe: Thomas Berry, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry

On wood stoves

Petersen: He heats with a modern steel-box stove.

Crowe: He heats with a stove manufactured by Quaker Stoves and Ranges.

On forests

Petersen: He could never live outside an aspen forest.

Crowe: He prefers the thick tangle of a hardwood and deciduous forest.

On movies

Both men have been influenced by Akira Kurosawa’s “Dersu Uzala.”

On local birds

Petersen: mountain chickadee, nuthatch, flicker, woodpecker, grosbeak, wild turkey

Crowe: blue jay, dark-eyed junco, black-capped chickadee, Carolina wren, towhee, titmouse, white-eyed vireo, common crow, pileated woodpecker, red-tailed hawk

On Thoreau

Petersen: Thoreau had more of an influence on the editor of his book.

Crowe: His book would never have been written without Thoreau.

On computers

Petersen: He has been writing with one for almost 20 years.

Crowe: He had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the computer age.

On favorite quotes

Petersen: “A child of 5 would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of 5,” Groucho Marx.

Crowe: “A world devoid of natural beauty is a world devoid of sanity,” Aldo Leopold.