Woodcraft Priorities

Television has done a lot to promote what goes on in the world of woodcraft.

The promotion is a good thing.

It has raised a lot of interest in crafting ... whether you call it woodcrafting, bushcrafting, wildcrafting, survival-crafting, or whatever-crafting … this business of getting out beyond the security lights, showers, flush toilets, and other rental amenities where most people go to camp for a few days. My preference is to refer to the craft by its American title … woodcraft. 

If I were Canadian, European, or from the Land Down Under I would lean toward their bushcraft designation. But it really doesn’t matter what you call the craft. It is what it is and it defies all our attempts to name it. It overcomes the barriers imposed by nationalities, languages, and continents. It spans the ages ... from the Stone-Age to the Modern-Age.

Historically, here in this country, the craft was called woodcraft by those who practiced it.

The titles of two books come to mind.

Woodcraft and Camping by George W. Sears a.k.a. “Nessmuk,” a series of magazine articles first published as a book in 1920 … and The Book of Camping and Woodcraft by Horace Kephart with the first edition copyrighted in 1906. Two classics. Both of them written … lived before they were written … at a time when woodlore and woodcraft skills were a much more common commodity than they are today in our more sophisticated times. Both are really good reads and well worth adding to any woodcraft library.

My sticking to the American designation is likely partly a dose of American mule-headedness. A large part of it though is simply out of respect for the guys and gals that lived the life blazing and hewing out the woodcraft path here, leaving behind legacies of lives well lived.

The generated interest is a good thing. The revival of interest in woodlore and woodcraft is a really good thing. It has people thinking about and doing outdoors things. It has people expanding their horizons and venturing in creative self-reliant ways. Ours is the benefit anytime we push or test ourselves outside the little box created by our preferential comfort zones.

The same promotion that is a good thing is also a bad thing.

It creates a lot of dramatization and glamorization for the sake of entertainment, ratings, and commercial advertisement value. The entertainment factor opens the doors for a lot of misunderstanding … especially where personal safety is concerned.

They get away with a lot on the TV shows and do a lot of stunts that can … and likely will at some point … get somebody killed. Here, in the real off-screen world where most of us practice the craft, personal health and safety are at the top of the list of issues to be concerned about. We do not take a medical team with us when we venture off the beaten path and the last thing we desire is for a search and rescue team to have to locate what’s left of us when we don’t get home when we are scheduled to. There are enough challenges without taking dangerous chances.

All of the promotion has also created some superb arm-chair specialists and authorities in the craft.

The necessity to be prepared in the event sometime, somewhere, somebody becomes a true to life on-the-spot reality to be reckoned with should never be underrated or neglected by anyone. It is going to happen sometime or another, somewhere or another, to somebody or another.

Here is the simple two-pronged reality of the matter.

The first prong is that the greatest majority of us, short of a zombie apocalypse or some other dire geographic or social catastrophe, will never have to rely on our developed skills to survive some dire consequence or situation that is honestly life threatening either in the short-term or the long-term. Personally, simply considering the possibility of some things, I would much rather be schooled up ahead of time in the event that it just so happens that it’s me and mine matching the unlikely description of somebody.

The second prong is that the more we focus on developing and utilizing these skills in wilderness settings … the more we understand how to utilize natural resources in wilderness settings … the more confidence we have in ourselves where our skills and knowledge is concerned … the sharper and better our sense of relationship and connectedness with the natural world becomes.

This sense of relationship and connectedness is where the natural world begins losing the appearance of something to be conquered and survived. It is here that it begins taking on the appearance of a friend and companion. It is, granted, one that will give us a good whipping if we aren’t paying attention to its lessons. “The wilderness is too big to fight. Yet for those of us who’ll take advantage of what it freely offers, nature will furnish every necessity. These necessities are food, warmth, shelter, and clothing.” Bradford Angier.

Knowing how to endure and survive a wilderness situation is one thing. Most people with reasonable capacities can learn a good long list of woodcraft skills fairly easily. All it takes is a willingness to learn, a commitment of time, and a couple or three hundred bucks invested in some simple gear to get started on something that can be a real life changing life-adventure of rediscovering woodlore and woodcraft. The learning and mechanical doing of the thing has to become a priority though or, like a lot of things that are good ideas, it will likely never mature into anything beyond a half-hearted short-lived hobby.

Knowing how to honestly appreciate and enjoy wilderness is altogether another matter.

For brick and mortar breed filth and crime,

With a pulse of evil that throbs and beats;

And men are withered before their prime

By the curse paved in with lanes and streets.

And lungs are poisoned and shoulders bowed,

In the smoldering reek of mill and mine;

And death stalks in on the struggling crowd –

But he shuns the shadow of oak and pine.

NESSMUK

I think this is where the real rub is. I can teach a list of skills to anyone with an interest to learn and is willing to invest the time. But this business of becoming a woodsy … this preference for the fresh air, sights, and smells of outdoor spaces? There’s not a course for that. It’s something that people are either born with an affinity for or develop an affinity for.