The Fabulous Forager

Recently, Jason and I were wandering through REI looking for a birthday gift for Mike when we stumbled upon a book called Let’s Get Primitive: The Urban Girl’s Guide to Camping by Heather Menicucci. It looked to be a clever, irreverent guide to back-country camping designed for women not so used to the outdoors. I thought it might be perfect for me (my camping excursions have up until now remained solidly in the front-country, and I have yet to go camping without some sort of Port-A-Potty somewhere nearby), but I was suspicious. Mainly because some months ago, Jason and I got really excited about this other book that promised to be a clever, irreverent guide to Dungeons & Dragons designed for women not so used to role-playing, but ended up being a condescending parade of stereotypes. With that in my recent memory, I flipped through Let’s Get Primitive suspiciously, looking for any reference to cosmos, Manolos, or mani-pedis. I couldn’t find any and liked what I did see, so I bought it. And I’m glad I did.

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to makeup ads in the past few years (and if you haven’t, shame on you! Bad consumer! Bad!), you’ve probably noticed that “all-natural” mineral makeup has been growing in popularity these last few years. It’s gotten so popular that major brands are producing cheaper knock-offs that contain many of the skin irritants and carcinogens that people generally buy mineral makeup to avoid.

What I’ve been wondering ever since I first heard of mineral makeup is, could I make my own from scratch? It is certainly possible to make it from home using purchased ingredients. But could you gather the basic ingredients from the wild and make it completely from scratch? That’s a bit trickier. 

Spring is in the air, and we’re ready to get back outside, but sunshine ain’t what it used to be. Primitive living involves spending a lot of time outdoors, but people nowadays have much more to worry about vis-a-vis the sun than our hunter-gatherer ancestors, especially those of us with skin the color of unbaked cookie dough. “Since the 1930s, the global incidence of skin cancer has been increasing by 4.2 percent a year. Back then, the risk of developing malignant melanoma was one in 1,500. [By 1996, it was] one in 128.” (E Magazine)

It’s a well-known truism that people (usually teens or young adults) going out of their way to dress differently all end up looking the same. People commonly point that out to mock punks, or Goths, or emo kids, or whatever the new “sub-culture” fashion is, but that completely misses the point. These people generally aren’t dressing differently to differentiate themselves as individuals from the greater culture; they’re dressing differently to mark themselves as a member of a larger group that differentiates itself from the greater culture. This serves several purposes: for people who support the status quo, it’s instant, silent, unmistakable cultural shorthand for, “I don’t share your values.” For people who don’t support the status quo, it’s instant, silent, unmistakable cultural shorthand for, “We’re members of the same tribe.”

I can never get into live albums. Or remixes, for that matter, or any alternate version of a song that I know. The few exceptions to this rule tend to be songs I heard first and/or exclusively as live versions (Nirvana’s “About a Girl,” for example) or songs unique to that live performance. But in every other case, multiple versions of the same song generally just irk me. At the very least, there’s always that one line that the singer changes a little, or that bass that doesn’t come in at the right moment, that pops out at me and sounds horribly, resoundingly wrong. As you can imagine, for this reason the recent tidal wave of “Hallelujah” covers has driven me completely insane.

A common concern among women who stumble upon primitivism (usually through their boyfriends or husbands) is that living primitively is necessarily anti-feminist, since there is no way for a woman to control when or if she gets pregnant without the help of latex condoms, pills, and so forth. But looking at the grand sweep of human history, this is patently untrue. All primitive peoples practice some form–usually multiple forms–of birth control. In a nomadic society, it’s essential to keep the population low because you can’t have more babies than you can carry from one camp to the next. (And when you practice attachment parenting and late weaning, that reduces the number of babies even lower than a number we Westerners might imagine.)

At Raccoon Creek State Park’s PATH WAYS’s herbal medicines workshop, the instructors provide a recipe for natural, poison-free insect repellent. When Jason and I first attended the workshop back in 2006, we came back with two 4oz bottles of this “bug juice”: a combination of simple extra virgin olive oil and essential plant oils. Since then, we’ve used it on every hike and camping trip, and noticed a big difference in how many bugs bother us. We’ve also noticed that the people around us using bug sprays with DEET and other poisons generally end up getting devoured like they’re walking mosquito buffets while we remain untouched.

Decorations weren’t–and still aren’t–just for fashion: they carried cultural and personal meanings. I probably should have included this in my last post about Native American dresses, but here’s a fascinating article (from NativeTech, natch) about beads. Native Americans in my bioregion made them out of bone, ceramic, metal, shell, and stone. Beads, of course, are far from the only method of decorating clothing: there’s also quill embroidery.In other news, I <3 NativeTech.

The National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., is currently running an exhibit on native dresses called Identity by Design. They’ll be running it until August 3, 2008–one reason why Jason and I are looking for some excuse to go to D.C. before then. But even if you can’t get to the exhibit itself, check out the website for a wealth of information on native dressmaking. And naturally, you’re going to need something to go with all those dresses: check out this interesting article on NativeTech for information on how the Seminoles accessorized.

Are you getting a good, solid eight hours of sleep every night? Sleeping soundly from the time you lay down to the time you get up to go to work? Well, stop doing that: it’s bad for you and unnatural. Yes, you heard me correctly!

There are so many aspects of our daily lives that we take for granted as being normal that have turned out to be totally maladaptive and, in the grand scheme of human history, brand-new: having hierarchy, eating cereal grains, wearing shoes… now it seems we can’t even get sleeping right.