Environmentalism – Page 9

The Real World? Wilderness Punk vs Tarmac

I go from getting up in the woods and riding through five miles of forest, to having my Avatars powering through the web to support some of my Sharestorm people. But free food and Dr. Ps at AK Café makes it all so easy. One of my fav places to Jack-in for sure.

AK Rain

After hitting the storage unit and Jeremy’s, I set off for a huge ride to see if I can get a job at the Arboretum, which would include free housing, utilities, and wifi. Odds might be against me, but I would be perfect for the job. However it does have me riding form 3 miles far east to 4 miles past town to the far west. I’ll be putting in about 30 miles on the mountain bike today.

After spending 7 out of the last 9 nights in the forest, riding alongside the never-ending stream of loud vehicles harshes my senses. The constant hum of fossil fuels chokes a man after so much pure perfection. The overwhelming percentage of motorists in ratio to bikers or pedestrians is appalling to me. My heavy backpack is like the weight of human necessity and I feel it pulling me into the steaming tarmac. The miles rip by as I weave through the garbage trucks and pumped pickups.

Light head

Four miles into the western forest, I meet with the man who could be my new boss, but I doubt it will be that easy. He speaks of the frailties of the former employees and the ‘tough’ requirements for living so far out into the woods. I want to laugh, and may have put him off in my disregard for such minor non-issues. Living within such beauty even in such a small place would be a luxury beyond what I feel I could deserve. If only such physical and emotion issues of his former employees were my worst obstacles.

Later, I make it to Down Town Flag. I see some down and out guys and stop because I know one of them. They are homeless and panhandling. Part of me wonders how far off I’m really removed from them. After a shared minute, I feel a certain unease, like the universe is watching and I’m at some cosmic tipping point. I excuse myself and move on.

What does it say about which side I’m tipping over?

One cup of tea later and I’ve set up no less than 4 meetings for tomorrow afternoon. A piece of Migo pie, right. I must be back in e-land. The most exciting of which is an Australian I will be meeting with who’s skateboarding across the old Route 66. I’ll be trading PR for beer, yep, that’s how I roll it. I might even be trading PR for some Re… I do important things.

Next Morning:

In town, showered and I’m told a client I’ve been chasing for about four months wants to see me. I meet with her and her husband.

Her: “Getting this super inflated bid for internet service triggered me to want to contact you again.”

Me: “Let’s just make this happen. I can start today.”

Him: “Okay here’s a check and one of each of the products we sell.”

I had left my backpack back at Jeremy’s and I’ll just say that was a tricky bike ride home.

Four more meetings before sunset. Punk > Wilderness, but ale is also > Sunburns.

Thanks for listening and turn back in to see how my manic meetings of doom go. Will I meet with these folks before I have too many beers or will having too many beers help me take it home?

Grab some of my Skin-Punk fiction here

Wilderness Punk: Back to Camp I and some Fun

I found myself out of the cyber loop for a while out there in the Lilly Ponds. Friday night I spend alone. I wrote, hiked, looked at frogs, you know, the normal things. I did take a long mountain ride down the Sycamore trail. First time for that one and in the drizzling rain, it was well…awesome.

Biking It

Later circumstances forced me to defend my camp while alone. My habit of talking out loud alerted the sheep herding dogs to my presence. These half feral monster sized beasts barked and growled as they attempted to surround me like a pack of wolves. Some shouting of my own and moving at them with my war club clenched in hand sent them packing, but only after a minute standoff, which I guess this Boneman won.

Lilly Fields Forever

Wooks did make it and lucky for me (even if he did beat me 3 games to 2 in horseshoes) he did, for that would have been a long ride of twenty miles into town after I would have been forced to stash some gear. Instead, I put my cooler etc, into the storage unit and plunged back into normal, well at least as normal as my life gets, humanity. An attempt at jacking up my gear and getting work done, became a fun bit of the social at east side Historic. I learn some useful factoids, and even double gear up while I eat three bags of croutons.

Next day, no tour, no money, some low spirits. I set myself to hitting the Cyberpunk world and then do a few tasks to take advantage of this thing we call civilization, while also prepping for a quick turnaround to camp I. Along the way I find a giant unopened bag of trail mix. Accorded to some paths of mysticism such an event would mean the Gods favor my current quest. So since it was a double mystic Day of Yig, I’ll send the All-Father serpent my thanks.

More power-cyber slamming for the touring company and I’m ready to bum a ride out to Camp I. Jeremy hikes up to see it with our touring mutt mascot. I forgot the ice, but what would life be like if everything went smoothly.

I finished my fifth Chronicles of Jack Primus book out in the woods. See, I’m doing some writing out here. New Primus E-Book here I come.

Camp I Day II

An unused road leads down to some powerlines. I discovered that if I’m willing to walk down these powerlines about half a mile, my cell reception rocks. Not all-important to me, but good to scout out resources. No water, no random supplies other than a giant spike and two nails.

Managing to slam some writing and prepping for some of my cyber-business, which actually does pay a few bucks and you know what, I think it’s about beer:30. Which is good since my water is running low, due to the lack of my frozen bottles of ice.

3PM

Jeremy arrives with two bottles of chilled water and tells me a hurricane has been tearing up through Mexico and is ranging through Arizona. We both looked at the dark arrowhead of clouds moving east to cover the land in shadow.

Clouds

“I’m here with the van if you want to pull out.”

“No, I’ll ride it out. I’m ready.”

“How about any gear?”

“Nope, I think I’m ready for whatever might be thrown at me. Bring it on. I’m going to ride it out.”

And…Yeah…It was a big no show. Not so much as a drop. So I went mountain bike riding until the trail disappeared.

Where did the roadd go

Great day though, Clouds came in and gave me some shade.

Smile

When I woke up today, I really, really wished I didn’t have to leave. Maybe this whole WildernessPunk thing is dangerous for me. I may never want to come back.

Morning

Thanks for listening and return to see how the Punk side goes this week.

Grab some of my Skin-Punk fiction here

Bike Camp I

Wilderness Punk Camp II, Pictures of Lillies

After my blast into town to take care of the human and cyber side of my current existence, a little luck finds me and I have a lovely mother and her two children take me out to one of my three favorite spots in Arizona, the Lilly Ponds. They are a secret place that even people living in the region for decades have never heard of and I’m going to stop talking about it because I want it to stay that way.

Lilly Pond Love

Due the turmoil I suffered this spring and the fallout from my tribulations, I have not met many of my usual warm weather goals, such as making it out to the Lilies once a month from May to September. Being here is as close to paradise as most people get.

Experiencing this heaven on earth with kids and an adult who has never been here, increases the pleasure. I even went swimming with the frogs.

Lilly Silly

I take a great level is satisfaction when I see so many frogs floating and swimming around me, for their emergence from near extinction is owed to me spearheading the effort, with the aid of my friends, to attempt to hunt out the crawdads which is an invasive species this side of The Rockies.

Kenny the Crawdad

I remember standing at the cliff that overlooks the ponds with Geff in 2007 and we could barely hold a conversation due to the frogs being so loud. A year later they had nearly perished due to the three ponds becoming overrun with crawdads. We worried over whether even a breeding population of frogs remained.

Save the frogs

So my allies and I took it upon ourselves to save this one place. We researched both written word and tried our own techniques to remove every crawdad we could from the three ponds. Between 12-20 days a year with focused on fishing them out. We used traps, nets, and my personal favorite, meat on a string, to eradicate this invasive species.

Frog

Crawdads first eat all the animals and their eggs. Then they devour all the plants so nothing can recycle the CO2. Eventually a once clear pond full of life becomes a murky mess where only crawdads remain eating each other in the cannibalistic darkness.

For the first four years, we would come and see dozens sunning themselves on the rocks. If we were lucky we might see one frog all summer. It really did seem close to hopeless. Instead of giving up, we tried harder. I would even pull the old Tom Sawyer trick and convince wandering families how fun it was and sometimes we’d get up to fifteen people working a pond at once.

Frog too

Around 2013 is seems like we were making more headway. There were frogs, not all of them had been killed. In 2015 we broke them and the frogs returned. Today they fill the ponds and you can see ten in one area.

It really is a beautiful thing.

Frogs

After helping the kids learn how to catch a few crawdads while we were down there, we headed back to base with our haul. Right after reaching the fire pit, a bald eagle flew through our camp. Later one of the kids found a rare tree frog. Seems like we might be doing something right and perhaps nature provides us with its own rewards.

Thanks for listening and turn back in to see how things go with campsite 2.

Grab some of my Skin-Punk fiction here

Those Damn Crawdads

Wilderness Punk, First Challenge

Something happened yesterday, which became very intense. I was tested. If I had failed, this experiment would be over before it started.

I heard something moving over the hills toward me. I’ve clocked hundreds of days of camping, but I had never heard anything like this. I could sense something traveling my way. A wall of water approached my site. This wasn’t a few sprinkles that grew into something more. No, instead this was a visual, moving storm. One moment it was dark, the next I was in torrents of blasting rain.

Storm

My first thought was all my tech, and well, everything else. My meager possessions went into my half destroyed tent. I quickly realized that my old tarp was also all but useless in a storm of this power. As I did my best to secure my backpacks and wrapped them in my blankets I become soaked to the bone. I wouldn’t have been wetter if I had jumped into a lake. With a yelp, I remembered my cell and dashed it out of my soggy shirt pocket and into the inner pouch of a back pack.

But things weren’t good.

pre-roof

I accepted that I was completely drenched and didn’t let that bother me as I struggled to figure out a way to protect my things. I had found a huge tile earlier, which went on the tent first, but it gave me an idea.

Water became six inches deep over the surface of the entire forest. I sloshed through the pools and streams looking for strong long branches. I got these up and built a grind work over my tent. Next I made overlapping shingles out of giant pieces of ponderosa bark. It took a few hours and of course once I was done it stopped raining, but I had gained myself an additional level of protection.

Shacking in

It rained a little that night and I didn’t have any issues inside the tent.

Hopefully it will help keep the place as dry and secure as possible, for Wednesday is townie day. I have work, need to see contacts, get some networking done, a class to attend, and some more work to take care of before I head out for a longer trip to one of my favorite places in Arizona, a place where I will be able to jump into my own private pond paradise.

Bone at Lilly

Thanks for listening and turn back in to see how things go with campsite 2.

Grab some of my Skin-Punk fiction here

wet

Wilderness Punk, Setbacks

Waking up with the sun, I listen to the birds and hope they help drone out the plane passing overhead. I know I need to reach further into the wilds, but with just a bike for transportation, I’d leave the Punk/Cyber out of my Wilderness equation.

Since yesterday I expounded on my resources, I thought today I would give a quick overview of my current weaknesses. I won’t go into the lack of some wish list and I’ve already covered my damaged bike and almost non-tent.

Tangled tree

The most obvious are my recent injuries. In the month of July I suffered a few mishaps. After an invite to a get together where I knew almost no one, I experienced a wreck on the way home which left me with three broken ribs on my right side and a hairline fracture in my left wrist. No big deal really, just gives me some aches and makes some things a little harder.

I broke my largest toenail far back under the skin during an angry powerwalk home, back when I had a home. This was a worry for a few weeks. It bled everyday as the nail worked itself out from under the skin. I went on some ten miles hikes and strangely the last one worked it off and on the last full day I got to spend at my last place… it came free. I felt like an odd level of rebirth when that happened right before I headed out into the forest.

Right now I have no real job or at least I’m not working for someone else. Currently trying to start and keep going a few of my own businesses, those chiefly being, writing, training, marketing, and touring. I’m in the process of trying to get this touring company off the ground which will be a rocking dream job, but for now I’m just surviving on mostly money I make online, which could make living in the woods more difficult, thus the whole Wilderness Punk goal.

Back II

I only mention jobs and such because, yeah, like most folks in the USA I have people I owe and other obligations. Upside, not dumping money on rent and utilities, car payments, or gas.

Footwear is a minor concern. My sandals are going strong, but nights will be getting colder soon. My new sneakers paid the price for my one night of bliss and need to be repaired. My two pairs of boots have still not made it into the storage unit. I sure hope they don’t become a write off.

Where I am no fires are allowed and I’ll be surviving around that, but I also need to get more serious camping supplies. The horror is, I have everything I need, back at my former house, but I’m not able to gather it. Still, new things would be fine as well, but it comes back to the money thing mentioned above.

Will some tours come in? Will Alex Bone make it to the wifi coffee shop? Can he charge his computer in time? Tune in ah…probably tomorrow unless I get a flat tire or something. Peacing Out

Thanks for listening as I face my first real trail next.

Grab some of my Skin-Punk fiction here

arizonafog

Wilderness Punk, Camp 1, Day 2

Out in the forests ten miles east of Flagstaff, a place where pine and oak have juniper for a neighbor. Ravens and hawks battle the still air to fly over the hills and washes cutting through the green. I sit alone in the camping chair I found discarded—just today. I’ve repaired it to a relative working order and it affords me a simple luxury I hadn’t anticipated and also brings me to the subject matter of this post.

Backside Camp

Being only one day in and still having some ice for my beer, I’m not feeling to hard pressed, so in the absence of any stressors or obstacles, I thought it would be a good time to outline the list of that I have going for me as I strive to live my Wilderness Punk lifestyle.

To keep with the punk/cyber side of things, I possess a laptop and a smart phone. Both are pretty fly and puts me a few levels above many folks who struggle out in the woods, however my charger doesn’t seem to have a place to plug into this tree. This will give me limited time to accomplish my writing and I obviously can’t post anything from here or get on the web in any way. My phone can did small things, but it has no bars most of the time. I can send a text by taking a small hike and climbing on top of a giant fallen pine, but other things need doing.

Cell Survice

Yes, some people have tech which can stream from the wilderness and even solar panels to charge their devices. Yeah, I guess I’m more Wilderness than Punk right now. Perhaps I will evolve, but currently de-evolving seems a bit more accurate.

I have a couple of sleeping bags, a couple of backpacks full of random gear like clipboards and pens. A few daggers, papers, and items to help me blend back into civilization are also housed there. My tent for reasons I might delve into later, is a farce. Holes with no poles makes, it a tent in name only. Also I have a tiny cooler, which holds maybe three cans with some ice. Yeah, I need to gear up.

Trail

Others things I have going for me are half a storage unit, which is currently about 2/3 packed and I just got a PO Box, which is awesome, but also expensive.

Then my last real luxury is my ripping ‘Giant’ mountain bike. Just got a free tune up and was running like Hermes pushed me from behind until some foul human drove into where it was parked up on the curb. A few operations and money spent and it is back to running well, although the back tire was damaged and might leave me working harder on the long rides. More things to fix, but right now I just need hold on to what I got and give myself a whole day of peace in the wilds before reality strikes and I take the long ride back into the humanity. Flagstaff my mountain island surrounded by the Arizona deserts baking in the summer sun will be calling me soon enough.

Chaos Face

Thanks for listening and I’ll take a peek at challenges next.

Grab some of my Skin-Punk fiction here

Coolness Cliffs

Wilderness Punk, Day 1

8/1/16

After three full days of packing, moving, cleaning, and a few spikes of harsh doses of unneeded drama, I and my two compadres have escaped from the Canyon Apartments, with our property and lives. Some of my dignity may have remained behind, along with my modern standard of living.

Water in wash

How will I look back upon this strange summer of torment and freedom? Will I lay curses at my feet, or feel forever thankful that I allowed myself the life of a writer, even if a mostly unsuccessful one.

As I finish loading up and locking down the life I once knew, I leave most of what makes a modern American behind in my storage unit. Some people might consider me about to live off the grid, but this will not be the case, for although my body, that force of existence that must be at all times present somewhere, will be a traveling through a chaos of locations and styles of adaptation, I fully intent to stay on the grind at least in cyber form.

talon

This brings up the next topic, Cyber Punk. The meshing of cyber space and man’s understanding. The blurring of lines where you end and an internet reality begins. How real is your cyber presence and what skills and powers does it possess? More recently Steampunk is gaining in popularity, the idea of a fantastic creativity manifesting during a more romantic time, such as the Wild West or Gaslight London. Splatter punk and Zombie Punk have also been batted around. Splatter Punk, are the hardcore horror fanatics, while Zombie Punk is the concept of living through the terror of a zombie apocalypse and discovering methods to survive and often thrive through such adversary.

The idea of punk could be summarized as taking control of something once denied you. Punk Rock took and made their own music, style, and morality. Cyber Punks take what they have the power to control on the internet. Steampunk is only limited by their creativity.

Perhaps what I propose has been accomplished and is currently being done, but instead of distracting from my little experiment, more people on board could be making it more valid. What if we could add a new type of ‘punk’ to our lexicon? Perhaps one more grounded in reality, but in most ways swimming against the current tide of our mainstream in the US.

Morning Walk

What I speak of is Wilderness Punk. This is the concept one could embrace nature, enter it, live off the land or at least with it, but somehow maintain a cyber presence, a writing presence, and perhaps thrive while doing so.

For me it will be starting today, August 1^st 2016. I set off to be a man between two worlds. One foot in the wilds of Northern Arizona with the other foot firmly connected with the entangled web, with all its advantages and curses. Will my writing slow or explode, will my various projects and marketing efforts thrive or will the trials and challenges of an outdoor environment slow my other e-efforts? I guess we will be finding out together.

Cliffs of lava

Thanks for listening and a little more on my back story next.

Grab some of my Skin-Punk fiction here

Ladder II