Spring Break
Just Rocks
Derek Owens
Issue date: 5/1/09 Section: Spring 2009
just rocks
derek owens
one
I'm sitting between a German stewardess named Ritva and a Michigan masseuse named
Shanti in cow barn somewhere in rural New Jersey watching Tom Brown show us how to
track mice over bare rock. There are over a hundred of us in this barn and we have been sitting on rough wooden benches for a week now, sleeping in tents in a neighboring field and attending daily lectures and demonstrations on wilderness tracking and survival skills. In the morning we are fed oatmeal ladled out of enormous pots and in the evening, after the
last of the workshops and a dinner of vegetarian stew, people gather about the fires working on their bow drill technique or weaving cordage.
We are an eclectic bunch. There are turkey hunters from Kentucky who have come here
to hone their tracking skills. There is an excess of Germans, one of whom informs me that Tom Brown is huge in their country, and I wonder if they read him in the same romanticized way their ancestors did Karl May. Some are Tom Brown groupies who have attended this week-long workshop before (if you pay for the course once you can request to come back as a grunt for free). A lot of them are tanned, skinny boys in their teens and twenties with hair half-way to dreadlocks and who walk around perpetually barefoot. They are like a tribe of adolescent Mowglis. Several have brought didgeridoos which they play, kind of, around the campfire. Then there's the couple in the tent next to mine, fresh from a two-week wilderness survival EMT training course in California. They tell me of the impending cataclysms predicted by futurist visionary Gordon Michael Scallion, whose laminated maps of a disfigured Future America can be bought online. "There's a lot of work to be
done when the red skies come," they tell me, "and we want to be prepared. We want to help people." They seem downright cheery about the coming apocalypse, and nights they keep me up with their lovemaking. Ritva is here on vacation, and Shanti too.
derek owens
one
I'm sitting between a German stewardess named Ritva and a Michigan masseuse named
Shanti in cow barn somewhere in rural New Jersey watching Tom Brown show us how to
track mice over bare rock. There are over a hundred of us in this barn and we have been sitting on rough wooden benches for a week now, sleeping in tents in a neighboring field and attending daily lectures and demonstrations on wilderness tracking and survival skills. In the morning we are fed oatmeal ladled out of enormous pots and in the evening, after the
last of the workshops and a dinner of vegetarian stew, people gather about the fires working on their bow drill technique or weaving cordage.
We are an eclectic bunch. There are turkey hunters from Kentucky who have come here
to hone their tracking skills. There is an excess of Germans, one of whom informs me that Tom Brown is huge in their country, and I wonder if they read him in the same romanticized way their ancestors did Karl May. Some are Tom Brown groupies who have attended this week-long workshop before (if you pay for the course once you can request to come back as a grunt for free). A lot of them are tanned, skinny boys in their teens and twenties with hair half-way to dreadlocks and who walk around perpetually barefoot. They are like a tribe of adolescent Mowglis. Several have brought didgeridoos which they play, kind of, around the campfire. Then there's the couple in the tent next to mine, fresh from a two-week wilderness survival EMT training course in California. They tell me of the impending cataclysms predicted by futurist visionary Gordon Michael Scallion, whose laminated maps of a disfigured Future America can be bought online. "There's a lot of work to be
done when the red skies come," they tell me, "and we want to be prepared. We want to help people." They seem downright cheery about the coming apocalypse, and nights they keep me up with their lovemaking. Ritva is here on vacation, and Shanti too.
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posted 12/09/09 @ 5:59 PM EST
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posted 12/15/09 @ 5:10 AM EST
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