For most of human history, the world around us has changed very, very slowly.

It’s a bit hard to define exactly when humans first appeared on this planet, because there is no exact date; rather, it was a gradual evolution over many millions of years. But, for the sake of this discussion, let’s call it 200,000 years of human history, which is about how long anatomically modern humans have walked this Earth.

For most of that history, our ancestors existed mainly as nomadic hunters and gatherers, walking in small family bands (or societies) through small territories in which they collected their food. Communities were oriented around “place” – they didn’t have any travel options anyway, right? – and their knowledge of that place: seasonal changes, plant growth, wildlife movements, was key to their success in finding food… and, so, to survival.

By around 10,000 years ago, following the end of the last Ice Age, many of these societies around the world were making the transition to agriculture. Now they were even more bonded to their place, and their knowledge of natural cycles such as seasons, weather and growing cycles were even more critical to their survival.

Connection to place was not simply an airy-fairy spiritual thing – even though rituals and spiritualities did, in many cultures, develop to symbolize this connection (e.g. the Thunderbird on the Mountain, or the Pachamama). Connection to place was a practical key to survival. And caring for that place – ensuring that wild animals were not hunted to extinction, and that soil remained fertile for subsequent years and subsequent generations -  was a logical key to survival.

Up until only a few hundred years ago, most people on Earth never ventured far from their birthplace. It’s only just over 500 years ago that Columbus embarked on his voyages of “discovery”. By the 1700s and 1800s more of a mass movement of humanity started to occur, as Europeans set out on journeys of colonization. But even these were mostly one-of trips: people emigrated (mainly from Europe; also some from Asia and – not by their own choice – some from Africa) to new lands where they made their new homes and developed their new connections, learning what to hunt and how to cultivate crops.

But what’s happened now? In the last century (or less!) we have arrived to this state where nearly everyone in our western society is mobile. Most of us no longer live where we grew up – or our children no longer live near us. Many of us have moved several times in our lives already. And, more significantly, we know that we have the option of moving again. Our lives and our communities are no longer centred upon a place.

Caring for place used to be critical to our survival. It was in our face every day, our place. If we didn’t care for it, the consequences would be felt quickly enough: no animals to hunt, or crop failures.

Our increased mobility, this last century (which, if you take 200,000 years as the length of time humans have walked the Earth, means only 0.05% of our history) has affected our connection to place. In fact, I would argue that it has pretty much destroyed it.

And once we lose that connection: our knowledge of natural cycles and any awareness of our impact on our place, it suddenly becomes much easier for us to damage our place. We no longer understand the consequences of our actions.

What do you think?
Do you have a place you feel connected to?
Do you still live there?

OK, yes, it is the peak of summer, but this is Patagonia. Unfortunately, you can’t tell in the picture how windy it is! Not only is it high-latitude (53-54 degrees where I was, in and south of Punta Arenas – roughly equivalent to the latitude of Haida Gwaii/Queen Charlotte Islands). But in addition, the plate tectonic accident that has placed Antarctica symmetrically over the south pole (for now, anyway) means that, unlike in the northern hemisphere, the winds that swirl around the globe in the latitudes 50s, 60s and 70s are unimpeded by any continental mass here in the south.

The south tip of South America is the first point of land that juts down and intercepts these winds (check it out on a globe – South America’s southern tip is something like 1000 km further south than either Australia or South Africa. Sorry I don’t have a globe on hand to verify my figures, but something like that). That’s why southern Patagonia is so windy, and why the ocean currents are so treacherous.

So, I have been offline for a while. Over the next two weeks I’ll catch y’all up on the interesting places I have been to. I am officially down here to report on an adventure race, Xtremo6000, which is part of the Adventure Racing World Series and which will take place later this week in northern Argentina.

But I decided to take advantage of being flown this close to Patagonia by grasping the opportunity and heading down to visit my dear friends in Chilean Patagonia. I met the Cáceres Murrie family back in 2004 – they run a wilderness lodge at Cabo San Isidro lighthouse, the southernmost inhabited point of the American continent, on the edge of Magellan Strait. The Patagonia Expedition Race finished there a few years back – I was reporting on that race and, while waiting for the teams to come in, we all became friends. In particular, Benjamín and I really hit it off (he was 14 at the time), with our common interests in learning about gathering wild foods and trying to figure out how to make serviceable objects from found items, e.g. making urchin-catching spears (erizeros in Spanish – we don’t have a word for them in English) and weaving baskets out of the native reed junquillo.

Benjamín is now 20, and going into his third year in marine biology. (He’s also an amazing swimmer… more about than in an upcoming post). My visit coincided with his summer break, so we headed out to the lighthouse (or faro) with plans to hike to Cabo Froward: the southermost point on the American continent. Benjamín had some guiding obligations first (tourists who had come to hike and kayak from the faro) so I hung out with him, enjoying the hiking and kayaking and doing some photography.

By the time he had finished up his guiding obligations, Benja had a friend arriving back home in Punta Arenas (another champion swimmer, more about her coming up too). So we did our 4-day hike to Froward in just two days (i.e. 60 km of rough terrain: irregular coastal rock shelves, wet and spongy peat bog, and steep slippery rainforest trails in less than 36 hours!… carrying 4 days of food with us). There were 4 river crossings along the way – and we hit 3 of the 4 at high tide, forcing me to swim (Benja is used to cold water; I am not!). Out backpacks were stuffed into big garbage bags – as heavy as they seem, they still float!. We lucked out with the two sunniest days of my whole visit for the trek, and by the next morning we were back in Punta Arenas. (More on that coming up too… especially the dolphins leaping joyously at the bow of the zodiac).

So I’ll be posting more about the whole trip over the coming weeks – photos and words both. But the summary is…. a few days in Buenos Aires, overcoming the jetlag while taking in the tango scene, then 2nd a half weeks in the far south of the continent, then this coming week at Xtremo6000 adventure race (daily “live” reports coming on SleepMonsters, if you are interested).

It was a sad goodbye to everyone this morning… I’ve shared so many laughs these last few weeks, both with Benja out at the faro, and with the whole family, Pato and Ángela and their sons and all of their many friends. It’s tough when you have such good friends who live so far away… and you just never know if or when you will ever see them again.

OK, please check back over the coming weeks… for more about the faro, about our hike, about some amazing swimmers, about Andean condors, about Buenos Aires tango, about adventure racing…. lots coming.

Well, I know that’s not true everywhere, but it sure is true out here on the west coast.

I went out for a little kayak paddle on a golden evening last week.  As I glided over the kelp beds, I could see that that some of the fronds at the tips of the Giant Kelp (Macrocystis spp.) were still lovely and clean.  Usually, around this time of the year, the “leaves” start to fall apart, and are overgrown with all sorts of stuff (I am not sure exactly what, but some sort of fuzzy marine growth that makes them pretty unsuitable for harvest).

I plucked a couple of fronds, and folded them up under the bungies on my deck.  It was late in the day when I got back home, so I just hung them in my carport for the night. I knew that they would never dry there – but putting them down anywhere tends to get them sandy, or dusty.

The next day was, as I had hoped, lovely and sunny.  I laid the strands out in the sun on my back deck, and they dried almost immediately.  The kelps transforming before my eyes, from the rich kelpy brown to deep green, as each piece dried – the colour working its way inward from the edges.

Within fifteen minutes, they were done.  I packaged them up in ziplock bags, and there is my kelp for the winter.  I can eat the pieces as they are, as a snack (they come out much like the square pieces of nori you buy to make sushi rolls), or crumble them up to use like a seasoning, on rice dishes or in stir-fries – or, my favourite, to crumble into tuna “poké”, that lovely Hawai’ian dish made of cubes of raw tuna stirred up with green onions, chopped chillis, seaweed, and a dash of sesame oil.

People here buy this stuff at the grocery store – packaged in plastic, and transported from who-knows-where…  yet it’s here, right on our doorstep, and free!

PS – I’ve tried in the past to use another kelp species, Bull Kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana).  This is a species that is harvested in order to extract “alginate”, which is used as a thickener in products like ice cream.  I once tried cutting up the fleshy bull kelp tubes, and using them in a veggie stirfry.  This was a good lesson in what not to do with kelp.  Stir-frying the bull kelp slices made all of the alginate come out and glue all of my veggies together; my stir-fry turned into a big mucus-ball.

Apparently, bull kelp makes great pickles.

It’s set me thinking…  because I don’t have a workout regimen.  OK, last year I was training quite hard for a triathlon – swimming and kayaking, and doing a bit of weights too, as well as my running and biking.  But that triathlon was last August – a full year ago – and I have barely done any training at all since then.  And especially not arm training.  I’ve been in my kayak only two or three times this year, and I’ve hardly been in a pool since January either.

So I’ve been reflecting upon this.  I haven’t been “working out”, yet my body is stiff and sore from exercise.  And I realize that it is my chosen lifestyle.  I try to live as low-impact on the world as I can, at least in most areas of my life, and this means that I must keep active.

I don’t own a car – I bike as much as I possibly can.  I brought my bike to Vancouver for my writing course at UBC – and, even though I had use of my friend’s van, I rode my bike up that big hill every day.  (Hills are great armwork on a bike!)

I also put a lot of effort into growing and gathering my food – July is one of the prime months for that, and that is why my muscles are so sore now.  I’ve dug and planted two veggie gardens in the last month, I was clamming for four days in late July (the last low clamming tides of this summer) and I also scored five freshly caught local sockeye salmon, which I butchered and canned.  All that digging – for clams, and in the garden – has been great for the arms and legs and back, and I can even feel it in my core muscles.

I am fit mainly because I am active.  Yes, I do “work out” or “train” when I have the time – but I am active for several hours of every day.  Every day.  I refuse to “buy in” and just drive around when I can bike, and to purchase all of my food when I can actually get much of it myself.  I value the slower pace of biking – not stressing and rushing around.  I value the freshness and healthiness of my locally grown and gathered food.  I value the calming and meditative hours of work that collecting or growing my food entails.  I value having the kind of fitness that is not gained by three or four hard training sessions a week (aerobics or running or spinning or whatever), but the kind of fitness (and associated calorie-burn) that comes with a high level of “background” physical activity.

It strikes me that this, really, is how all of our ancestors have always lived.  It is only in the last half-century or so that most of us spend much of our day seated, in cars or at desks.  People used to walk or ride bikes a lot, to get anywhere at all – they did not expect to zip across town in some matter of minutes.  It is also only in the last half century that people get most of their food from the supermarket (that they drove to).  No wonder there is such an obesity epidemic in North America.  It is not just the poor-quality processed food many people live on, it is also that they have no background calorie burn.

Most people categorize what is “normal” by looking around them and observing what other people are doing.  So you might look at my life choices and say that I am not “normal” – because I am not behaving like most North Americans today.  But my formal scientific training is as a geologist, and we geologists are trained to understand time.  Humans have been on this planet for over one million years now – up until the last century (i.e. for the first 99.99% of human history), moving around under our own steam all day long in order to collect our food was “normal”.

The way we “Westerners” are living now is what is abnormal.

And I remember that, too, from a few years ago when I was staying in West Van in June and July: all of the ripe berries hanging on the paths behind Park Royal.  So, of course I was gorging on them  – and the people who walk by there every day were looking at me like I’m a weirdo, even asking me if I was sure they weren’t poisonous.

So, early on in the writing workshop our group critiqued a piece that I had written that included references to salmonberries.  About half of my class was not from BC, so did not know what a salmonberry was.  So the next morning, I stopped on my bike to pick a little bowl-full, to share with them.  Once I slowed down to pick, I saw just how many other wild berries were right there, too – ignored by the city-dwellers.

I was picking the salmonberries for my colleagues because of my little literary reference – but, right then and there, I committed to bringing in five different types of local wild berries for my class, over five days: as a statement about wild foods, about eating local, about not wasting what is right there in front of you.

It was early July; I could see that the thimbleberries would be ripe by the end of the course, in another week, and I even found a little patch of south-facing salal bushes, a little micro-climate where they were ripening early (you don’t usually see them til well into August).
Over the week we ate salmonberries, then red huckleberries, then some deliciously juicy black trailing raspberries, and finally the thimbleberries and salal berries.  (As an aside, I also scored some wild plums – deliciously sweet even though they are only the size of blueberries, as well as blackberries, which grow wild now but are not native here).

So, folks, the lesson is to look around you; pay attention to the wild foods.  You won’t find them from your cars – you need to move more slowly, on foot or on your bike, and get to know the area where you live: where to find things, and when.  Looking for those microclimates is the key to extending the berry season – sheltered sunny spots for the early crop, and cooler shaded areas for the late crop (even now, there are still a few salmonberries hanging around).  Wild berries are naturally organic, they are well within the 100 mile diet and, best of all, they are free!