Strayed far from the woodland
While flipping through the channels this evening, one program gave me pause. What would life be like if I couldn’t go to the cupboard and pull out what I needed for supper? What if my food preparation really was a start to finish profile, where I had to catch my food before sitting down to savour?
The program host was visiting a native cultural school in the north part of the province, where trapping animals, curing the meat over a smoky fire and preparing the hides for eventual clothing use were not part of a museum exhibit. The guest was my age, yet he could remember when virtually everything he required for sustenance was his responibility. He was assured in his techniques, based on a lifetime of practice, but the elephant in the room was that without those skills he would not be alive. As I open the refrigerator for a bit of prepared food, and adjust the thermostat because I feel a chill (from the refrigerator, probably), I’m light years away from that world.
The host made a joke about drinking water from a stream, and was warned against the action. Would any of us know where to get safe liquids, if we were left in the woods over a weekend? It’s easy to watch someone construct a “deadfall trap”; would we know where to place it in order to catch food? There are many “simple skills” that were common knowledge here in Canada only a few years ago. Now, we depend on the local supermarket. If anything ever happened to our advanced systems, we might be in for more than cultural shock.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. No knowledge is worse.
