Primitive Futurism in the 1990s: Between the Hemispheres! By Scott Temple ! www.quickbloom.com!

Sixteen years after I lived at Turtle Island Preserve, I returned to interview Eustace Conway, the owner. Much has changed in my life since my departure for graduate school in 1999, but my fundamental outlook on life has stayed the same. What I realize is there is no simple way to live. Each day I must make hard decisions on what I should buy and what tools I should employ for a certain task. Most of this wisdom I learned from Eustace through doing. Much of it from stumbling through life, avoiding pain.!

! ! !

What is most important in my life is having a conscious and making the right decision. It is, of course, easy to live with modern stuff, however it is much harder to make a choice about what stuff is essential to live with.! From 1995 to 1999 (my time at Turtle Island Preserves), my then-girlfriend Diyakaya and I were both new undergraduate students in the English program at Appalachian State University. We ashed between a tipi lifestyle on an eighteenth-century farm with primitive technology to the 1995 social terrain of a university promising the technology of the future.!

I had been a reghter, then a campaign director for the Florida Public Research Group, then a National Wildlife Federation Teen Adventure leader, and nally an explorer of wild places around America and Canada before I decided to attend Appalachian State University at the age of 25. Eustace Conways Turtle Island Preserve was just the next adventure. ! This new adventure would bring a 16 foot tipi into my life. I lived out of that tipi for four years. The route into the Preserve took us through a washboard dirt road with 10 percent switchback grades. My two wheel drive, green Nissan pickup would clank along, kicking up a smoke screen of dust and rocks. The summer roadside plants were always coated with a grey dead until a heavy rain. Turtle Island Preserve was a good 40 minutes from the University and a 1000 foot drop in elevation. Therefore each winter, we moved our tipi (since mobile) to a higher elevation (above 3,500 feet) but closer to the University. Often in the morning, we broke through the icicles in the tipi doorway to free ourselves into the crisp mountain air for another day of lectures.!

! !

I moved in between two worlds: the world of the University and the world of rewood and open ame cooking. We smelled mostly like burnt wood, a little like river water, and somewhat like homemade soap we bought from the old time mountain folk. We either sat on a log at the tipi or at a desk at the university. My British Literature Professor thought it was romantic that I read King Author by relight. On campus, we learned mostly social skills and deadlines. Clocks were highly important. Life in the sticks was different. We learned how to think like water when it rained by digging ditches and working with the natural curves of the ground. We learned to think like sun during the hot days when no wind blessed our skin. We sought the cool creeks to cleanse our bodies from the grime of the town. We learned to think like nontraditional students: we could not relate to the idea of late night parties, a quick pizza delivery, a heated apartment, or a coffee maker in the morning.!

We learned to communicate with friends and faculty by leaving mid 1990 Tweets, little sticky post-its on the message boards and ofce doors. Friends and faculty left their replies. Sometimes I would go a month exchanging one-sentence sticky notes day after day to friends I never physically saw. We did not know a cell phone. Some people had pagers, but that seemed strange to me. I was just introduced to electronic mail, but this was reserved for ofcial business from the administration and rarely checked. Professors never expected students to look at electronic mail. I typed my essays at the computer lab, and an electronic typewriter was still an option. I still received the most important information at the student post ofce. I never received a bill for rent or utility! !

Sometimes when we arrived at our tipi trail head late at night, when the moon was not illuminated by the sun, the darkness seemed forever deep. This wall of darkness was so dense it seemed solid, as if everything pressed against my face. It never seemed to fail that during the darkest nights we would discover we had left behind our ashlights. After all, when we left in the morning, the sun was up. Almost all our tipi site locations were at least a quarter mile to a half mile into the woods (usually up) a trial from where we parked the truck. It amazed me how familiar I knew our trial to our tipi. The only way I can explain it to a house dweller is instinctively knowing your way through your dark house at night from your bedroom to your kitchen. Unless your children left toys to trip over, the route to the faucet for a drink of water was successful. Instead of negotiating a couch or a table or a toy, I knew the texture and shape of roots and stones. I felt the difference between the soft forest and the hard packed trail. Some instinctive sense told me the trail meandered around a large Poplar. The prick of a thorn bush let me know I was half way home. The exposed roots meant I had arrived at the clearing for the tipi. And still, on the darkest nights, when the milky way

extended in a gauzy haze over head, I still could not see my tipi until I stood next to it. I still have not found nights as dark as that. I would be lying if I said I never got lost or upset with myself for forgetting something as simple as a ashlight. Ive been lost in a briar patch in the deep dark of night and had to rip on through until I found relief on the trail again. But most of the time I found my way one step at a time to the door of my tipi to light the oil lamp inside.!

During the day time, the trail always had a story to tell me. I knew if somebody had walked on the trail that day. Most people do not lift their feet as they walk. They tended to kick rocks loose from the trail. I had my favorite rocks and roots and would be quick to notice something as simple as a stone freshly loosened from the packed dirt. I knew Diyakayas shoe prints and mine as well. So I could pick out a strangers print with ease, especially another species such as deer, possum, squirrel, coyote, fox, and an occasional bear.!

! I knew the land I lived on.! !

Eustace, our mentor, taught us the ways of cutting down selected trees, clearing land for pasture, splitting rails for fencing, shaving shingles from pine for roong, plowing the winter beds by horse, burning out logs for water basins, or wood blocks for bowls. My thoughts were on natures time. He reminded us that language has its roots through analogy with our surroundings. I still remember where the folklore saying the shit hits the fan originated. This is when the horse manurer in a atbed horse-drawn trailer is pulled off the back end where it hits a rotating spreader fan. The fan spreads the manurer all over the elds. The last time I saw Eustace do this was at dusk. Eustace sat on his horse-drawn wagon. The sunset burned orange through the trees. And shit was ying everywhere.!

! This is how we lived for four years.! !

Then something wild grew in Diyakaya. She lost her ability to see the blackboard and the professors notes. She moved closer to the front row. She became nauseous when doing hard work. She had always been a tough woman, having completed a tour of duty in Desert Storm Kuwait, hiding out during bombings in bunkers, carrying her weight during a 20 mile hike, or handling a chainsaw when needed. So the idea of her getting sick during hard work was not an excuse. After ten minutes of exertion, she would begin to vomit.!

! !

An eye doctor sent her for a brain scan. Inside her right ventricular cavity was a grapefruit size tumor. A wild weed. ! Those two worlds--between the tipi world and the University world--unzipped. We had fallen full time into the depth of something more wild. We found ourselves in the bowels

of hospitals without many windows, smooth stainless steal walls without bark, and articial lights instead of stars. She had brain surgery. The brain surgeon hiked tools between the left and right hemisphere of her brain, scrapped the wild weed from what the surgeon called valuable real estate, blessed her with a great outcome, and sent her on her way.!

The practice of living wild presents itself in many ways. Each day I continue to make conscious decisions, drawing off all my life lessons and the knowledge. Even in the 21st century frontier, I walk in conscious directions thanks to Eustace.!