Survival - from my book Changes

Chapter 4

Survival

It was about 1998 when I woke up one morning feeling like I needed to learn how to take care of people in the woods.

My first thought was what to feed people.

I wanted to learn which wild plants were edible and medicinal.  Plants that were abundant without having to buy them in the grocery store or grow them in a garden. I found out that the wild plants and weeds were more nutritious than the vegetables we typically put in our gardens.

I also found out how difficult it is to learn about plants without an experienced teacher.  I could find different plants in my yard and other places, but I didn’t know how to find them in the field guides.  I bought field guides that showed pictures and descriptions of plants, but then I couldn’t find the plants in nature to match.

It was frustrating and I felt stuck.

I worked on plant identification on my own for a couple years, letting the weeds grow in my yard so I could study them.

I even took one of the weeds from my yard to the county extension office to find out what it was and if it was edible.  The little plant looked kind of like a dandelion, and I thought maybe it was a Florida version of dandelion.  It turned out to be Asiatic hawksbeard, which is in the daisy family, like the dandelion, but it was not a dandelion.

They didn’t know if it was edible or not, but I had already been eaten it, thinking it was a kind of dandelion, without any ill effects, it so I figured it must be all right to eat.

The Asiatic hawksbeard  is a dandelion look alike, in that the leaves look similar and the flowers look similar, but the difference is that the stem on the hawksbeard is branching, and they are not hollow like the dandelion.  The dandelion stem does not branch, the stem is very hollow, and has a milky sap when broken or cut.  Also, the leaves of the dandelion are not hairy, where many of the dandelion look alikes are hairy, like the cat’s ear plant in Oregon.

Anyway, all this lead me to finding a book at a sporting goods store that was to change the course of my life.

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In Orlando, Fl, where I was living at the time, there is a huge sporting goods store. I asked a young man working there if they had any books on plant identification.

He said, “I think you will like these,” and showed me a couple books written by Tom Brown Jr.  One was called The Tracker and the other was called Tom Brown’s Field Guide to Wilderness Survival.

He said Tom had also written a book on plants that I might like, which I found later online and ordered.

I bought the two books and started reading The Tracker, but it was boring to me at first because he gave an intricately detailed account of tracking a bird in the snow, which did not interest me at the time  So I switched over to his Field Guide to Wilderness Survival.

That book was so full of interesting stories about Tom Brown and his friend Rick, and the old Apache who was their mentor, that I fell in love with the books.

I decided to give his book The Tracker another try. After the first few pages, it turned out to be an amazing book full of stories that filled me with wonder and curiosity, and lit a fire in me that burned bright.

Over the next two years, I read all Tom’s books , which numbered about 14 at the time, about his adventures and about wilderness survival skills.

In the back of one of the books there was a notice about a wilderness survival school run by Tom Brown.

I wanted to go to that school.

My youngest child had recently been born and I decided that in a couple years I would plan to attend classes there.

By the time my youngest was two years old, I was fortunate that my husband was supportive of me going to Tom Brown Jr’s Trackerschool.  And, I was excited because the Standard Class, which was the prerequisite to all the other classes at Trackerschool, was being offered just down the road from me at camp Wewa in Apopka, FL where I was living at the time.  That meant I could drive there every morning and come home at night.

I called to register for the week long class and found out they had changed the location to a primitive camp in New Jersey, where Tom’s teacher Grandfather Stalking Wolf had taught Tom and Rick.

By then I was determined to go so my husband helped me figure out how to get there by plane and bus.  He was worried about me going alone and offered to pay for a second person to go with me, but none of my family or friends wanted to go.  I would be on my own.

That was intimidating to me because I had never done anything like that on my own before, but I was determined to make it happen.

Looking back, I smile about how I prepared for camping.  I bought two sets of pajamas and some slippers and a robe for nighttime, and if I had to go to the outhouse during the night, I imagined there would be a little brick bathroom like they have at the state parks, that had a nice bright light to light the place up.

Turns out I slept in my clothes, and the primitive camp was nothing like a state park.