Wild-Type Humans

Beyond "Touching Grass", Part 3

My recent excursion from my mountaintop hideaway into one of America’s most famously friendly cities showed me a few things about the post-Covidian American life that remain hidden most of the time, for most people. This is the third installment in my series of meditations on what I discovered. It can be read as a standalone, but you can also read it as the capstone to the series, the first installment of which can be found here, and the second installment here.

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Modern American cities are not, as certain regiments of culture warriors like to say, “open-air prisons.”

Prisons aren’t exactly great spaces, but those who are so inclined tend to find that the deprivation of accustomed pleasures and luxuries in prison tends to concentrate the mind. Some of the world’s most pivotal books have been written by incarcerated men looking to pass the time.

Modern American cities are not prisons. They are something far less congenial to human flourishing:

Poorly-designed zoos.

An animal in a well-designed zoo can learn to love its keepers and captors, can even flourish in a limited way within those confines. An animal in a poorly-designed zoo, on the other hand, goes crazy—you may have noticed.

Fun fact: Every state has these kinds of crimes. Florida just has a law requiring they be made public.

If you live in one of these places, what I’m saying may seem flat-out bonkers, so in this final installment I’m going to share with you what I’ve seen happen to sub/urbanites who come to the country and stay long enough that they make the transition. It reveals a lot about what makes humans tick. So without the normal hippie woo-woo bullshit that often coats this, I hope to hand you a new basket of tricks that you can use to turn your life-in-the-zoo into something much healthier and more life-enhancing.

That “transition,” though, is key to the operation.

The Prison Walls

In the prison drama The Shawshank Redemption, after being released from a multi-decadal sentence, an elderly character hangs himself. In explaining to the other inmates why this would happen, a veteran resident of the prison yard explains that his deceased friend had become “institutionalized”:

“These walls are funny. First you hate ‘em. Then you get used to ‘em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them.”

In every life, there are obstacles—structural and internal—that are hard to change. Often times it’s simply easier to incorporate those obstacles into one’s understanding of oneself and the world. Like an old bullet left lodged in an organ, these obstacles might be so painful to remove it that it’s not worth the bother.

When this happens, those obstacles that are external get internalized—and, once internalized, they start to throw shade over everything. If the obstacle is a particularly insidious one, it will begin to behave like that bullet, which eventually leaches lead into the rest of the body, slowly poisoning it until it becomes feeble.

And, when it comes to the walls of the post-war urban/suburban prison, the effects are poisonous indeed.

The Transition

As I detailed in my post about introducing people to the wildlands, one of the typical responses of visitors to my mountain hideaway is shock at the quiet.

It’s not just the quiet they’re reacting to, of course. That’s merely the part they notice.

It’s the rawness.

If you want running water, you have to fill the gravity tank from the rain barrel (at least every so-often). If you want something to eat, you gotta cook it in the outdoor kitchen (the indoor kitchen is tiny and we only use it in the winter).

If you want to hike on a trail that hasn’t been used in a while, you gotta take a machete—and you’d better get a friend to check you for ticks when you get back.

There are no paved trails or roads, for several miles in any direction. There are cliffs you can walk right off of if you’re not careful, and rocks to trip over, and sticks and fallen logs. There are bears and cougars and coyotes and wolves in the woods, and you might happen upon them.

You’re up with the sun, and the rooster and dogs will make sure of it.

There are no clocks to structure your day (unless you’re carrying one with you).

There’s not a lot of spare electricity.

Almost everything you’re used to using to mark and structure your life just isn’t available up here.

This isn’t quite as rough-n-rural as you can get, but you can see there from here.

This is the kind of thing that’s fun for a day or two for most people, and then gets very unnerving. The cage door is open, the cage bars are gone, and there’s a big world out there, and that’s hard to handle.

But something happens to those who stick through more than a few days, and it’s a glorious thing to behold.

It starts, reliably, on the fourth or fifth day when the newbie emerges bleary-eyed from their tent or trailer, pick up the coffee that’s waiting for them, and join the residents arrayed in folding chairs around a large stump. We drink our coffee, we talk about the coming day and the projects that are underway. If the conversation has legs, we sit there for far too long and invariably someone decides to go make breakfast (which involves a trip to the hen house, then a stint in the outdoor kitchen). If it doesn’t, we get up and take the dogs for a hike, between a half-mile and a mile-and-a-half, depending on the demands of the coming day.

By the time the guests are back from the hike, they’ve got a sparkle in their eye and they start turning their hand to one of the projects on offer—foraging, building sheds, removing surplus fuel from the forest to attenuate the danger of wildfires, feeding the critters, digging post-holes, running the saw mill—or they settle down with projects they’ve brought for themselves (knitting, reading, etc.), or they might decide to turn their hand to learning a new craft that we have the tools for here (leatherworking, blacksmithing, woodworking, etc.), so they can take home a souvenir.

There are breaks throughout the day for more hiking and exploring, and the day ends with dinner and more socializing, and stargazing if the weather permits, and then bed, and sleep—the kind of sleep you rarely get in the city, because you’re rarely actually pleasantly tired all over unless you work a blue collar job.

Everywhere they look, they see things made by human hands using handicraft methods. They also see things built by animals: eagle’s nests, rabbit warrens, groundhog tunnels that have collapsed in the spring rains, woodpecker holes, and bear bedding areas. They’re surrounded by beauty with a kind of complexity that you don’t often get in a city (unless you’re in an old city, or in a Gothic cathedral) nested levels of self-similarity characterizes everything around you.

Most of what they eat is produced on local land. Some of it they’ve harvested (or slaughtered) with their own hand. All of it is more nutritious (by which I mean, less refined and more well-balanced) than what they’re used to at home.

If it’s a hot summer, they go on a short drive and jump in a lake.

When they go to town, they get into conversations with the locals, and these conversations sometimes eat up an entire afternoon.

Without even noticing it, they go native.

Post-Transition

Once this transition period passes (this requires a week or so, and a determination to just go with the flow), the really weird stuff starts to show itself.

Gunfire stops being a source of anxiety. In the city, “gunfire” means “crime.” In the country, “gunfire” means “someone is practicing on their range” or “someone just bagged a coyote/deer/bear/rabbit and is going to eat well tonight.”¹

The sound of a car engine also has the opposite valence from the city. If you hear a car you’re not expecting, it means someone is about to make an unscheduled visit. Your neighbor might have an emergency they need help with. Someone might be lost. A hunter might have ignored the “no hunting” signs. A burglar might be scoping for likely targets.

Meanwhile, the guest begins to notice that the constant minor aches and pains they experienced in the city, along with the majority of the migraines and tension headaches, have either disappeared or greatly reduced in severity. They do, however, have a lot of exciting new aches and pains that feel very different. This is because the old aches and pains and headaches were at least partly the effect of generalized inflammation—something that city life is very good at producing (for a variety of reasons), and the new ones are the result of muscle use, bruising, and fatigue. The former sort of ache is only slightly helped by rest and sleep (the best cure for it is actually intense exercise), while the latter is handily cured by it.

Digestive issues also have a way of diminishing or disappearing. The move from highly processed, packaged foods and pre-prepared mixes to a diet cooked with traditional ingredients (rice, flour, yeast, meat, fish, vegetables, herbs, spices, salt, fruit, molasses, honey, table sugar, and soda) and including fermented foods provides a more complete nutritional profile than you get in a typical urban or suburban diet (including stuff you can’t easily get in multivitamins). As their bodies make this transition, they also develop an intolerance for processed foods.²

I’m sure the fresh air helps—asthma sufferers certainly show a startling improvement out here after a few days of hiking (as long as it’s not wildfire season—then the air gets positively toxic).

But in addition to the fresh air, there’s also the disease load. Up here, no matter how often you shower, you’re dirty all the time. Your immune system is always practicing on all the different bacteria and parasites and viruses you come into contact with every day, so you get sick less often—and when you do get sick, it’s usually less severe. And conditions like asthma are autoimmune related—when the immune system actually has disease vectors nibbling at the body, it’s less prone to the kind of hyperactivity that brings on asthma attacks.³

And don’t underestimate the hidden benefits of hiking in the forest! The sorts of patterns you find in nature stimulate deep parts of the human neurology in ways that are difficult to replicate artificially, and you don’t just see these patterns. They show up in smells, in textures, in sounds, and in the terrain itself—walking over uneven ground is one of the prescribed therapies for people recovering from brain surgery and/or who are battling dementia. Like all other things in nature, the human nervous system is a “use it or lose it” affair, and a nontrivial portion of the epidemic of dementia is inarguably down to the lack of natural complexity in our artificial worlds, which leads to flacidness in the neural structures that the higher brain depends on for things like coordination and recall.

But, most of all, it is the regularity of sleep that seems to do the most good. Our bodies use light to regulate all manner of hormone levels that influence wakefulness, mood, blood pressure, emotional stability, digestion, and the like. Regular sleep that syncs you up with the light of morning stabilizes your entire physiology and, if you keep at it long enough, your entire mentality. It doesn’t change your personality, but it does reduce the overburden of emotional white noise that people carry around.

Recalibration

After the transition, a few strange things happen to your worldview.

The first affects the urgency of life. Whether it’s the demands of a job, or a sale, or a community event, or the school schedules of your kids, or your church, or the trash day schedule, or the street sweeping schedule, in the city you often wind up running harried from one thing to another, keeping a bunch of plates spinning in order to maintain your life, but rarely feeling like you’ve notched some good solid accomplishments onto your counting stick.⁴

Out here, there’s more to do. A LOT more to do. But it’s rarely urgent. You’ve always got something on your plate, but you’re almost never in a rush.

And this in spite of the fact that, unlike most of the stuff that keeps you up at night in the city, some of it is actually, no-kidding, a matter of life and death:

• If you don’t get enough firewood split and stacked by the correct date, you risk freezing to death.

• If you don’t manage your fuel and water stockpiles carefully, and maintain your equipment properly, you could wind up without water to drink or without the ability to get to town or clear a fallen tree from across the road, right when there’s a medical emergency.

• If you don’t keep your garbage policed, the bear could come into camp, and if it’s spooked the wrong way, it could kill you.

• If you forget your phone or your walkie talkie, and you fall off a cliff or out of a tree and break your leg, you could die before anyone finds you.

• You could slip on a patch of ice hidden under the snow, hit your head on a rock, and bleed into your brain.

Farms and ranches and little mountain hideaways are full of dangers, from our tools and machines to the critters that surround us to the weather itself—and that’s to say nothing if some rando gets hopped up on meth and decides to ride off into the wilderness looking for women to conquer or houses to burgle.⁵

When you live out here, those dangers are, like it or not, your responsibility, because of the one law of rural living that is higher than any other laws.

No One is Coming to Save You

Back there in the hustle-bustle of the city, you have the fire department, the ambulance, and the police on speed dial. They’re supported by your tax dollars, and they’re (theoretically) there to protect you and save your ass.

I live on a road where the ambulance can’t even drive because of ground clearance issues,⁶ in a part of the country where wildfires abound and all the fire departments are staffed exclusively by volunteers, in a wild region where a handful of cops police thousands of square miles.

Out here, you’re on your own.

But here’s the crazy part:

That’s a feature, not a bug.

Because out here, we know our neighbors.

Out here, we all get first-aid training and keep the supplies at hand.

We tell each other where we’re going to hike, so if we go missing, people know where to look.

We keep dogs to establish perimeters against the large predators, and to go for help when we’re in trouble.

We own the forests that we hope don’t burn down, so we’re very careful with how we manage fire, and logging, and brush.

We know how to survive a forest fire, escape a bear, appease a wolf, and scare off a mountain lion.

We know how to keep a road clear in winter even if we only have a shovel to work with, how to pull a car or truck out of a ditch, how to drive on the ice, and how to stay cool in a heat wave when there’s no air conditioning.

We know how to acclimatize fast as the temps drop in the fall, and how to make the most of every day of spring.

We know how to fell a tree that’s threatening a building, or clear one that’s blocking a road.

And, if you came out here, you’d learn most of this stuff in the first year.

The prospect of living such a tenuous existence is something we city slickers (I spent my first 36 years in the city, without interruption) flinch at. We’ve been propagandized against it, we’ve got our creature comforts that we think are bare necessities, and the prospect of doing things another way is…weird. And frightening.

But humans are remarkable creatures. The first time you’re faced with the reality that nobody is coming to save you (in my case it was because there was a giant earthquake and all the communications in the city were down), you stand up, square off your shoulders, and figure out how to save yourself—but that only happens after you accept that you’re in that situation.

You know those characters in films and on television that sniff in disapproval at an unfortunate turn of events and refuse to dignify fate by rising to the occasion? Or the ones that freak out, go nuts, shriek and cry in terror, or run away as fast as they can?

They exist in real life too.

Those are emotive defenses against the stark reality of the situation. But even people who react that way have their breaking point. And once reality batters through their defenses, they, too, rise to the occasion.

Out here, nobody is coming to save you, and that is entirely a good thing.

Because back where you live, in those vast sprawling suburbs and those old city cores, the reality is that if shit really goes south, nobody is coming to save you either…you just don’t know it, even though you’ve seen it over and over during the past few years.

Direct vs. Indirect

If I were to sum up, in a single paragraph, the difference between life in a natural setting (meaning, an older city, a small town, or a rural area)⁷ and life in an artificial setting (any post-WW2 development), it would be this:

In a natural environment, relationships are direct. In an artificial environment, relationships are triangular.

For example, in a natural real estate market, the price you could get for your house would be decided by the housing demand in the area and how your house stacked up, qualitatively and location-wise, against the available supply.

But, despite what you might have learned in economics 101, that’s not what determines the price of your house in today’s artificial marketplace. Instead, your home’s price is determined by the price of money, the financial incentives in the bond market, at least a half-dozen factors in your local political climate, and that’s just a start. Instead of the sale of your home being a transaction between a buyer and seller, it’s a transaction that involves a half dozen other parties—including a real estate agent—and that’s conditioned by other factors which you cannot influence, but which other market actors can.

It is therefore an indirect transaction. This is similar to the indirect relationship you have with Facebook—you’re the consumer of their service, but you’re not their customer.

Just about everything in today’s urban, suburban, and internet world is highly-mediated in this fashion. You are insulated on every side from all the signals of life that might tell you how to orient yourself, how to conduct yourself, and how to win. The rules are inscrutable…and that’s the point. That inscrutability is what the bars of the zoo are made of.

When you’re in a more natural environment, relationships are direct. This starts with the literal soil, but the principle of each of these relationships is the same: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. You don’t deal with your neighbors via an HOA or a legal apparatus (unless they leave you no choice but to bring in outside parties), you wangle and bargain and compromise to solve disputes, and those disputes are solved in the context of them bringing you baked goods, you bringing them eggs, them helping you move a stuck vehicle, you helping them repair their roof. It doesn’t matter if you’re best friends or as different as the sun and moon, you’re still living next to one another, and sometimes they’re the only people you can call on if you’re in trouble (and vice versa). And that principle extends outwards to the entire local community.

In artificial environments, you’re funneled down chutes by systems that don’t care whether you’re there or not (streets, customer service frameworks, paperwork mazes, etc.). If you put a foot wrong, or the system makes an error, you won’t find out about it until much later—at which point you have another mess and maze on your hands. In natural environments, your passage leaves a mark that you can see, and your interactions matter to the quality of your life (as well as the lives of those around you. What you do in a natural environment matters, because it leaves a mark…

…but it doesn’t matter all that much, because the environment itself is self-healing, as are you, so the fault tolerance for almost everything is higher. And the feedback is direct enough that faults and failures lead to quick learning.

In an artificial environment, a fuck-up (or misfortune) can mean weeks, months, or years of misery as you get caught in the teeth of the bureaucracy. In a natural environment, a fuck-up or misfortune can cost you a bruise, an arm, a leg, your life, or bruised feelings, but it won’t ruin your life forevermore—and most of the bad things that can happen are things you can heal from. Your body has systems for that. Your community has customs for that.

In an artificial environment, you work forty hours a week and often the only result you see are points which are kept on a ledger sheet on a computer far away from you (your paycheck), which has been garnished by a government to do things you don’t get a say in (a “vote” for a candidate is not an actual “say” in policy), so that you can pay for a domicile where you don’t spend much time, and for a family whose members are all in similar institutional settings for the bulk of their waking hours, and for the food that you all eat which keeps you alive well enough to continue attending to these institutional obligations that are—by dint of the heavy regulatory overburden—devoid of genuine human relationships.

In a natural environment, you provide a service or a product to people whose faces you know. You can see the results of your labors quickly (and usually immediately). There is no bullshit about “delayed gratification” in this world. If you’ve got a complicated build project, and you go cut down a tree and shape it and fit it into place on the building, you may not have finished the project, but you can still see what you’ve done. In a natural environment, every action has an immediate result, which is how you keep yourself oriented when you’re undertaking multi-decadal projects (like starting a family, or building a house, or bootstrapping a business, or erecting a cathedral).

Instant gratification is not a bug in the human system, it’s a feature, and it’s not incompatible with a long time horizon. Every grand thing any human ever did was done by using this feature in creative ways, because “instant gratification” is simply another term for “feedback.”

When the environment gives you feedback, you don’t need rules. The nature of the world you’re in provides all the rules necessary to do things well.

When you’re insulated from feedback by distance, by technology, by regulation, by drink or other drugs, or by rationalizations, rules are the solution. Sometimes, rules are necessary, but every new rule is an opportunity for another leech to attach itself to your community and suck the humanity right out of it.

Is it any wonder why, in today’s hyper-mediated world, the rules breed faster than the humans?

When I grew up, there were still some pretty hickish areas nearby—cattle ranches and other agricultural establishments that hadn’t yet been paved over. We suburbanites would look with disdain at the cowboys and their rough manners, and tell ourselves:

“Well, that’s what happens when you live in the country. In the city, you have to behave better, because living so close to other people files off your rough edges.”

In the time I’ve been out here in the wilderness, I’ve learned that this formulation was exactly backwards.

In the city, sharp elbows are the norm. You need them to get through the press of humanity and claim what’s yours. City dwellers hide this from themselves by developing elaborate (and somewhat convincing) rationalizations for why their own fury is justified and their neighbor’s fury is unreasonable.

Out here in the country, we all know what it takes to survive. Even when we don’t like each other, we respect each other, because we readily recognize the expertise, savvy, experience, and self-possession it takes to make life work without all the luxuries of the city. And because we know what it means for someone to prefer this way of life to the artificial way. Our rough edges get covered with velvet when we interact with each other, because we each know that the other guy has got some pretty sharp blades in his belt—he has to, just to make life work out here.

Civilization Doesn’t Scale

The ultimate problem with the artificial environments I saw on my recent city trip is so basic it’s almost funny:

These environments are an attempt to make civilization scale.

But civilization doesn’t scale. In every old city, in every empire, everywhere in the world throughout history, we see the same pattern: individuals nesting inside families nesting inside communities divided up into neighborhoods clustered around commercial activity, and each of these clusters bordering each other to make up a city, with the cities themselves surrounded by agricultural land and sometimes also nested within larger political entities.

Every time the group gets too big, it calves off, because there are only so many relationships each of us can maintain well before we hit overload.

The artificial world is an attempt (and a fairly recent one) to create a one-size-fits all solution to the “problem” of localism, tribalism, and identity: Make a world where everything’s the same, everyone will be part of a single group, and you don’t have to worry about war and exploitation anymore. And, of course, a world like that needs managers to make the system run smoothly and keep the troublemakers occupied, so this kind of vision appeals to the vanity of the socially ambitious.

The trouble is…it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work for the same reason that the “scientific management” of Yellowstone Park nearly killed it:

Human society is a wild, natural domain.

Man is not a machine.

Whether you’ve noticed or not, allowing yourself to be treated like a machine is making you sicker, angrier, more depressed, and more lonely than you otherwise would be.

And the hell of it is, all you have to do to correct for that problem is to bring “nature” back into your humanity:

Cook your own food, from basic ingredients.

Make sure you spend time in the sun each day.

Talk to people directly, without a phone or computer or TV in the room.

Get a dog, and make your relationship with it a priority.⁸

Do physical things, learn a craft, make a mark.

Practice risk.

Curate and prioritize your relationships, both personal and commercial.

Manage your tasks and projects and recreations so that your life is filled with feedback and immediate gratification.

Walk over uneven ground.

Get dirty, as often as you can.

Don’t allow yourself to be part of a machine.

Don’t use your intelligence to insulate you from discomfort.

Do these things, and you can live a deeply satisfying life even in a suburban or urban hellscape.

And remember always these wise words:

“So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains, and we never even know we have the key.”
—The Eagles, Already Gone

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1. It also means “Oh good, my neighbors are still able to help defend the area if things ever got really screwy.” In an area where the ratio of cops to people is around 1:20,000 and the geography is bigger than the greater San Francisco Cay Area, this is a nontrivial concern.

2. One visitor experienced a day of debilitating cramps and diarrhea after eating ice cream that wasn’t really ice cream—so did the rest of us on site, though those of us who were long-term residents of rural-land had much milder reactions than did the newbie. A good lesson in the importance of reading labels.

3. Yes, I did just say “being too clean can kill you.” Deal with it. This has been an established reality of medicine for half a century at least, and not paying attention to it doesn’t just give you an ever-increasing prevalence of allergies and autoimmune disorders, it’s also responsible for antibiotic-resistant infections (syphilis, MRSA, strep, tuberculosis, etc.) and other fun stuff.

4. These things all exist, to one extent or another, in small towns and rural places as well, but the distances involved are much smaller and the elbow room around each activity is much greater—the net result is that you have to really work to make a life that harries you half as much as the default in the modern city.

5. This hasn’t ever happened in our neighborhood, but it’s still a danger you gotta account for.

6. I got a space where a helicopter can land, though. And there are a lot of 4WD vehicles that could get to me in a dire pinch.

7. Humans are part of nature, I therefore count as “natural” environments made for humans by other humans. Artificial environments are those made by humans to serve the needs of machines and inhuman entities (such as governments, corporations, and technological constructs).

8. Dogs are co-evolved symbiants with us. Each species unlocks things in the other that aren’t otherwise possible.