Prime Skills and Necessary Tools

I’ve read where the word origin of primitive comes from prime … meaning first. If we use prime as an adjective it refers to the first or main importance of something.

A lot of the focus in the woodcraft-bushcraft community, when it comes to cutting tools, centers on knives and axes for survival purposes. A good fixed blade knife and an axe are the bare bones essentials in the cutting tools department and these are honesty enough to accomplish an awful lot if they are all you have and know how to use them.

Cutting tools, cordage, and fire. These three, and the knowledge-skills base to utilize them, are everything we need to build everything else we need.

I do not know what or which prime skill was the first to be developed. I was not there to observe that life changing event. What I do know is that primitive man adapted to the environment, developed prime skills, migrated and adapted to harsher less familiar environments, and got along quite well enough to leave behind progeny that continued to develop the skills passed on to them by those that left them behind.

What developed as the foundation of those prime skills are cutting tools, cordage, and fire … three things we are so familiar with that we take them for granted in this modern age because of their ready availability in this industrialized technological computerized age. We are though, when it comes right down to it and despite all the technology and computerization, still as dependent upon those prime skills as primitive man was … we are still learning … we are still adjusting and adapting.

The significant difference is that all these centuries of learning and development have made our tools a lot more advanced. That, and the fact that modern technology and the efforts of a few craftsmen employed in the building trades, makes it unnecessary for the average modernite Joe and Jane to know how to build or repair anything. While we are at it we may as well throw in a third tidbit. We live in the age of instant gratification. We want things big and we want things now. Anything we can do to make big and now happen quicker is the route modernites are most apt to take. There is a fourth thing that comes to mind while we are rocking this rickety little boat. We are a “throw-away” culture. When something becomes outdated, worn out or not, we throw it to the curb for the garbage collectors to haul to the dump. A lot of products we purchase today are designed to be thrown away rather than repaired and made usable again. Throw away products keep us running to the store to buy up to date replacements.

Self-reliance, and the ability to be self-reliant, are far from the minds of most modern folks in a culture that has been groomed to be reliant upon the labor of others to produce everything they eat and manufacture everything they use. Self-reliance has itself become a primitive ideal. The skills necessary to live self-reliantly have become relics of the past.

I think this is one of the great modern day tragedies affecting us in the 21^st Century. I made up my mind long ago that I would not stay between the hammer and the anvil where this self-reliance tragedy is concerned.

Recognize a problem.

Educate yourself regarding a problem.

Develop a mindset.

Acquire the tools and develop the skills necessary to address the problem.

Do something about the problem.

That’s the way the self-reliance deal works. The onus is on the individual to work the deal. Self-reliance doesn’t happen on its own or overnight.

Total self-reliance is pretty much a myth. I’ll not say that it is impossible but it is definitely improbable for the vast majority of us. Becoming as self-reliant as individually possible, however, should be an ongoing personal working goal. Especially in the woodcraft-bushcraft community. There is so much more to the many-faceted craft than knowing how to get along if the bridge washes out or some other event happens that suddenly launches us into some sort of a get along as best we can to save our fanny with just what’s on our backs or in our pockets kind of situation.

This is not to diminish survival skills that we pull out and use in a dire unplanned situation. These are non-negotiable skills that everyone should possess and sadly most people do not. It is to suggest that woodcraft-bushcraft includes skills that we can use every day as part of a self-reliant lifestyle … skills that will serve us well and make our lives a lot more comfortable in the event we discover ourselves in an unplanned long-term situation or voluntarily opt for an off-grid human powered lifestyle. 

There is another side to this … a deeper intimate side that is better experienced than explained. It is hard to put into words the feelings of satisfaction and personal reward that come when a person takes a bit of raw materials and turns them into needed items with the help of a few human powered tools that do not create hearing damaging decibels.

You can buy new human powered tools and shell out quite a lot of hard earned cash in the process. Good quality ones are expensive. Low quality ones are affordable but cheap in quality. Scouting garage sales, estate sales, and flea markets for good quality used human powered tools can be an adventure. It takes time to find them … and they may need a little TLC to clean them up and sharpen them … but the time and effort invested in the process is well spent.

I’ve been collecting these few old tools for a good while now as part of our self-reliant homestead mentality. A few of the tools are antique family heirlooms that I discovered in the nick of time and managed to salvage before they totally wasted away laying either on the ground or on a damp concrete floor … both total disasters for metal tools.

As electric power tools give up the ghost I simply switch over to non-electric as their replacements. Using old school muscle powered tools as my preferred go-to tools is an interesting and pleasant transition away from the power tools I’ve used all these years. The old school tools accomplish the same job as their electrical counterparts. You just have to go about it with a different and more relaxed mindset.

Human powered tools are a refreshing break. I prefer the old used stuff if it’s still usable. It has a history to it. I enjoy bringing that past history into the present history that I am making and can’t help but to wonder about who used those tools before me, where they used them, and what was crafted with them.

The financial investment in my “old school” tool kit has been minimal. There are a few items that I need to complete the kit. A couple of them I will need to purchase. Some of them, like a shave horse and a spring pole lathe, I can build from harvested green wood and I will be working on these projects over the course of the next several weeks. The shave horse will be the first of the two builds. It’s a pain using a draw knife without one. Some of the items, metal tools including a couple of froes and small adzes, I can turn out on the forge I built a few years ago from a discarded brake drum that I found.

The combination makes for an interesting learning curve … knowing good quality tools from cheap, working with muscle powered tools as opposed to plugging some noisy hard on the ears contraption into a power supply, and the process of harvesting wood, processing, and crafting useful items from raw materials.

Crafting … wood-crafting … bush-crafting … wild-crafting … . Whatever folks are comfortable calling it. Wood … bush … wild. You know. Out “there” somewhere. Folks get that part easily enough. It’s the rest of it that needs filling in.

The crafting part is about being able to craft what we need for daily life whether it is something as simple as a log bench to sit on, a table to hold our plate while we eat, or something more complicated like a comfortable dwelling that far surpasses a tarp, thatched lean-to, or brush shelter. These are skills that have to be learned and developed. The learning and development requires a lot more time and effort than is involved in a weekend course that focuses on extremely basic fire, shelter, water, and food.

Making mistakes is a valuable part of any learning curve. There is no exception to this rule when it comes to the woodcraft learning curve. Especially if we allow the mistakes to become teachers and the bulk of the expense is primarily time invested.

Mistakes are always opportunities for improvement rather than signs of failure.

Personal experience, practice, and patience have always been, and I am of the opinion that they ever will be, our greatest teachers. The important thing is to simply begin and keep adding experience to that initial beginning.

Whittling Sticks

I remember my first pocket knife.

It was an old Barlow hand-me-down. I have no idea where it came from or how my dad came to be in possession of it. He wasn’t much on carrying knives of any kind. I never saw him whittling anything other than sharpening a toothpick and he usually did that with whatever kitchen knife was handiest.

I was seven or eight when the old hand-me-down two blade was given to me to tote around in my pocket. It was about as dull as a butter knife. I’m not sure if it was dull to begin with or if my dad dulled it on purpose before he gave it to me. Knowing my dad he probably applied a brick to the edges before he put it in my hand.

One thing for sure … I was plenty proud of that old folding tool.

Wasn’t long before I found the whetstone … the one in the kitchen drawer that kept the kitchen knives sharp … and worked a bit of an edge on the blades of the old Barlow. It wasn’t as good a sharpening job as I do now but it was enough of an edge that I drew my own blood a few times. 

That’s part of the learning curve with knives. Both the sharpening and the cutting yourself.  It’s one of those paying your dues things.

Once you slice yourself  … feel the sting, see the red flowing, and have to deal with sore fingers a few times  … you learn to be careful.

That was a good long time ago.

That was back when a lot of kids carried their pocket knives everywhere they went. Even to school. Imagine. Kids sitting in the shade during recess peeling sticks and whittling with their pocket knives. No one got alarmed. No one raised a fuss about it. The police weren’t called. Kid’s weren’t expelled or carted off to the juvenile detention center for bringing a weapon to school. Parents weren’t labelled as negligent or derelict because their child brought a pocket knife to school.

It was normal back then for boys to carry pocket knives. At least around here.

And here is the kicker.

I do not recall a single knife fight at any point in my progress through the public school system. Not even during that tumultuous period known as De-Segregation. A few good fist fights. Very few of them racially motivated. Most of the fist fights had to do with hormonal bravado. Guys fighting over girls. But not a single knife fight.

Cutting tools are extremely important items in the world of woodcraft. Their edges provide us with some needed advantages when it comes to crafting other items that are necessary for self-reliance. Their edges give us an edge. Possessing appropriate cutting tools, caring for our cutting tool possessions to insure their efficiency and longevity, and knowing how to effectively and safely use cutting tools for their intended purposes are necessarily integral elements of our woodcraft school program.

In the forward to his book … The Book of Camping and Woodcraft … Horace Kephart wrote that “Real woodcraft consists in knowing how to get along without the appliances of civilization rather than adapting them to wildwood life.  ..… Woodcraft may be defined as the art of getting along well in the wilderness by utilizing nature’s storehouse.”

Whittling sticks to turn them into something other than sticks is at the very heart of woodcraft … the ability to manipulate a few simple hand tools and utilize available natural resources to secure our well-being in a self-reliant manner … whether it’s building a shelter that will protect against the wiles of winter, handles for tools, furnishings for home and camp, or improvising devises that assist in procuring meat to sustain physical life … and do it all in an efficient manner that limits the possibility of embedding an axe in our shin or laying ourselves open with our own knife.

Times were, and those times were not so long ago in the big scheme of time, that these (and quite a few other skills) were common skills developed at a young age and practiced throughout life.  Unless you were a city person accustomed to city ways.

It may raise some hackles to say it but it is something that needs to be said.

Accept it or not. Like it or not.

But the truth of the matter is that, with few rare exceptions, we have all, in varying degrees, become city people. Some lesser so than others. Some more so than others. Some are simply outright city people whether they live in the city or out on the farm. The progress of life in these modern times is the culprit that has thrown a harness on us and made us city people … made us all even more dependent upon the outfitter and the mercantile.

City people … dependent upon our appliances and conveniences … regardless of whether we are urban, suburban, or rural … is what we will remain without personal concerted efforts to reclaim, relearn, and put into practice the craft that the old timers called woodcraft.

I’m passionate about this … about woodcraft and self-reliant living … about practicing what I know … about continuing to learn new things in the school of the woods where there is no graduation day …  about achieving greater degrees of self-reliance through knowledge, skills, and resources … about teaching woodcraft skills and hopefully seeing others transition from hobby woodcrafters to woodcraftsmen as a lifestyle.

Ma Nature and all that she is, when that transition is made, begins to take on a lot of significance that is otherwise missed by city people and by woodcraft hobbyists. Somewhere in making that transition we begin to see ourselves as one small part of nature dependent up it as the greater part. We begin to see nature as an ally to be cared for and safeguarded. Our lives, and the way we go about life, go through a serious adjustment.

People are getting into the craft for a number of reasons. One of the reasons definitely has to do with the survival aspect. There is not a thing wrong with that aspect. I admit that it is one of my reasons.

But there is a something else. There is a lot more to it. At least for me.

That something else for me is that a time came in my consciousness where I realized that the process of citification had overtaken me. Me? One that grew up in the woods and fields? One that hunted cottonmouth moccasins in these swamps and bottoms as a summer sport when I was in grade school? One that knew more about life in the woods and fields before I was 12 than the majority of 50 year old men in today’s society?

I fell victim to citification.

It’s hard to imagine it looking at me today but there was a long length of time … back there a ways … when my normal daily attire was suit, tie, and wing tips. Those years of citification robbed me and instilled a lot of fear in me. Back when I first started reclaiming myself I had become, despite my formative years in the woods and fields, afraid to venture off the beaten path. Dirt roads and out of the way places no longer called to me. The woods had become a foreign stranger to me.

I simply had to return to myself and get back what I had lost.

Now?

I’ve crossed a line in my own mind and heart. A line that I cannot cross back over. A line that I will not cross back over no matter the pressures brought to bear against me to return to the city ways that holds modern society captive in its strangling grasp.

So we whittled some sticks Saturday morning and turned them into Figure 4 snare triggers … 3 sticks … 4 notches as the contact points … 3 pointed ends … touchy things that appear to the novice as complicated contraptions but are really simple devices that do an effective job where a baited snare-set is concerned.

The finished products were a little rough for first attempts. I took time with each one to do a little touching up on the notches and points, explaining the necessity to make clean joints that will hold when pressure is applied to the trigger stick part of the sensitive device, then field tested the finished products with each student. 5 out of 6, after a little tuning, performed effectively.

Whittling, like all the other skills in woodcraft, is something that takes practice.

No skill is developed without practice. The more we practice the more efficient we become. I think whittling is a terribly underrated and neglected skill. There is a lot more to blade proficiency than carving feather sticks, billeting kindling, and cutting lengths of cordage.

Whittling involves developing dexterity. It involves developing muscles in our hands and fingers. It involves eye-hand coordination. It involves learning to manipulate and control a sharp blade without slicing a finger open and bleeding all over our work. It involves imagination and creativity. It involves being able to visualize and see a finished product in some sticks and bring the finished product to life. Whittling doles out patience and perseverance in small doses.

And another thing.

Whittling introduces us to and helps us understand the different qualities and characteristics of different woods … from the soft woods to the hard woods … something that can assist us in a big way when we are harvesting sticks to be used for varying woodcraft purposes.

We have a lot more whittling to do.

Little sticks. Larger sticks. Logs.

With tools appropriate for the jobs at hand.