by Ben Hewitt
As we soon learned, six years prior, when he was thirty, Nate had up and quit pretty much everything he was doing in order to devote himself to acquiring wilderness skills and building meaningful relationships with the natural world. “I realized I didn’t know anything that really mattered,” is how he explained it, and I immediately understood what he meant. Like many people, I am often struck by the fact that the modern world is full of affected knowledge and information that, when you get right down to it, is only relevant to the extent we grant it relevance. We have become very good at procuring and prioritizing things that are not fundamentally all that important—cars and computers and cell phones come to mind—even as we have become less good at providing for ourselves the things that are downright essential: Food. Shelter. Water. Warmth.
For the past half-dozen years, Nate had been living in tents, cabins, yurts, and snow caves, while immersing himself in a self-directed course of study for all the things you don’t learn in school. He had made snowshoes, a toboggan, and numerous articles of clothing, generally from the coats and skins of wild animals he had trapped or shot. He was in the process of building a birchbark canoe, and played a mean fiddle. He did not spend much money, and seemed quite content to not know where he’d be living come winter. It wouldn’t be in the Nate Crate, that much was clear from the way the wind whistled through the gaping cracks between the siding boards.
One night shortly after he arrived, a massive thunderstorm blew in. The sky went all dusky, and lightning started splashing everywhere, and the wind got furious and gnashing. Penny and I stood on the threshold of the French doors that open from our kitchen onto a small stone patio, watching the storm move across the sky. We could just hear Nate’s fiddle riding above the clamor of it all; he was down in his little cabin, sitting in the gathering dark, playing to the storm. Penny and I stood there even as the rain began pelting down so hard it actually hurt, watching the trees writhe in the wind and listening to the music carrying up from Nate’s fiddle, and I realized that what inspired me about Nate was not so much the specific skills he had learned but the simple fact that he had taken his life into his own hands. It takes courage to do such a thing, to conduct oneself in accordance with beliefs that do not enjoy widespread support, and his presence became a living reminder that we are often freer than we might otherwise believe.
The boys, of course, were ecstatic to have Nate around, as it meant they had a live-in teacher for all the things they dreamed of knowing. Shortly after arriving at our place, Nate began helping Fin and Rye construct a pair of shaving horses, starting with a length of birch they split with wedges. He loaned the boys each a drawknife, and for a week or so, their spare moments were consumed by carving and shaping. He took the boys turkey hunting. They went fishing. They disappeared into the woods to follow animal trails visible only to the trained eye.
In this manner, the story of Fin and Rye’s trapping and hunting is not merely the story of their trapping and hunting. Indeed, it is the story of many of the aspects crucial to how they learn and develop. It is the story of mentors, of people like Nate, who have taken an interest in our sons and whose generosity with their time and knowledge cannot be overstated. The role of mentors in our culture seems to have been reduced to programs intended for youth “in need,” those unfortunate children whose parents are not fully able to embody healthy, stable role modeling. But of course all children are in need to a certain extent. As present, attentive, and well meaning as Penny and I are, Fin and Rye were in need of someone to guide them through the skills and ethics of trapping. They needed someone to validate their interests and instincts, someone whose words carried the authority of experience and respect. Because let’s face it: children don’t always consider their parents to be fonts of wisdom, and it was not long before the phrase “Nate says” became a common refrain in our home.
Mentors are disappearing across the landscape of contemporary childhood learning and development. And how could it be otherwise? Because how many adults even have time to mentor anymore? Furthermore, after school and after-school activities, and after homework, television, and texting, how many children even have time to be mentored?
But my sons’ foray into hunting and trapping is about more than mentoring, because it has reminded me once again that when they are granted the freedom to follow their passion, they learn quickly. I almost wrote “effortlessly,” but that’s not true. Their learning isn’t effortless; it merely appears that way, because they do not struggle against it. Penny and I watched in amazement as they studied for hours at a time in order to pass the safety-certification courses necessary to earn their hunting and trapping licenses. For weeks on end, they bent over the state-supplied workbooks, writing their answers in the careful, blocky penmanship common to youth. “Look at them,” said Penny one day, as they sat across the table from one another, immersed in their respective workbooks. “They’re learning how to memorize useless information in order to pass a test, just like in school!”
Indeed, much of the information in the books was fairly useless, at least for two boys who already knew they should dress in layers on cold days and never look down the barrel of a loaded gun. But of course their immersion into hunting and trapping, facilitated by Nate, has also taught them many things that are of tremendous and enduring value.
Not long after they passed their respective tests and were granted their licenses, Penny and I brainstormed a list of all the subjects their interest in trapping had exposed them to. It was merely out of curiosity, because by this point in their unschooled education, we were confident our sons were learning everything they truly needed to know. We felt no need to categorize their learning into respective subjects, in part because we had long ago come to understand that such categorization was an affectation. Still, it was fascinating to see how Fin and Rye’s self-directed learning could be understood and explained in the common terminology of modern education, as well as the so-called “soft skills” of human socialization and self-regulation.
Here’s the list we came up with:
Money Management—saving for supplies, evaluating purchases and the value of these purchases
Math—primarily in the context of money management, but also in consideration of the land’s capacity to support a given number of animals
Time Management—how to structure their days to accommodate running the trapline and other commitments, such as chores
Biology and Earth Sciences—study of the habitats and habits of their quarry, how weather and climate impacts wildlife, reproductive cycles, and so on
Anatomy—identification of internal organs and other aspects of physical anatomy via skinning, dressing, butchering
Physical Education—as evidenced by their endless forays over hill and dale, shouldering thirty-pound packs
Ethics—the importance of using all parts of animals, giving thanks, not trapping more than they can actually use/consume, utilizing traps designed to minimize pain
Teamwork—negotiating whose traps would be set where, how to best lay out trapline to meet expectations of time management, interdependence/cooperation
Geography—consulting both tax and topographic maps to determine who owns the land they wish to hunt and trap, and also to determine how best to design their trapline
Reading and Writing—the completion of their hunting and trapping workbooks, the actual tests, and the numerous letters to landowners seeking permission to trap on their land, which provided ample opportunity to hone their reading and writing, including spelling, penmanship, sentence and paragraph formation, and their general ability to communicate effectively via the written word
Human Relations—knocking on doors during the quest to secure hunting and trapping permission and remaining positive and friendly even in the face of frequent refusals
This list could continue, I suspect. But the truth is, while I recognize the value of these subjects and whatever ones could be added, there is something about defining and isolatin
g them that profoundly misses the point. Because in doing so, each subject becomes segregated from the others in a way that exists only in the vacuum of structured learning. Such segregation is not the way of the natural world, where all of these aspects form an ecosystem of knowledge and experience that cannot be defined by the commonplace vernacular of standardized learning. This is precisely why so much of the learning that happens in schools feels irrelevant beyond the classroom.
Still, I cannot deny gleaning a certain satisfaction and perhaps even comfort from this list, if only because already it has helped me explain my children’s education in a manner that is broadly understood. Yes, I do believe it is flawed to think of learning in such overly simplistic terms, but that is nonetheless how most people have come to think of it, and there is not always time to engage in a more meaningful discussion. In a sense, the list that Penny and I came up with provides a convenient bridge between our sons’ atypical education and the prevailing educational orthodoxy, flawed as it might be.
Finally, while Penny and I are fortunate that our parents and extended family generally support our choices around education, not all parents who walk an atypical path are so lucky. Therefore, I humbly offer this thought experiment in the hope that it might help these parents demonstrate their children’s learning in the context of convention.
Nate eventually moved from the Nate Crate, chased by the cold winds of autumn into the insulated protection of a yurt he’d constructed from scratch. A few weeks later, he sent a letter to the boys. It was a long letter, four pages in all, single spaced and written in his careful hand. Reading it to the boys, I realized how incredibly blessed we are. To have Nate in our lives, yes, but also to have structured our lives in such a manner that our lives could accommodate Nate in the first place. To have been able to allow our sons the freedom to learn from him, to spend long hours sitting in the Crate or just outside it, bent over some task or another, or to pass the day walking the woods with him, or in a canoe, making their way down a sinuous river. To have allowed ourselves the freedom to unlearn so much of what we thought we knew, not only about hunting and trapping but also about what learning can be, and who should teach us.
Is a beaver just another piece of skin to be stripped and sold, or is he an animal with his own life and part in creation, an orange-toothed fat-bellied dark-haired night swimmer who knows worlds we can’t imagine, experiences life in ways we’ll never know, and deserves his place on Earth as much as anyone or anything?
You two will have to find your own way in this. How to make your living in such a way that it fits with your beliefs. The more you know, the more options you have, and the more freedom you have to live outside convention, if this is what you choose . . . the easiest thing to do is what everyone else is doing.
Our first task is to treat each other well, for when we learn to always offer respect, kindness, and generosity to those around us, it spreads outward into our relationship with the rest of the world, and the Earth opens up to us in ways we never imagined.
What has Nate taught Fin and Rye? Geography, anatomy, biology, yes. Some history, ethics, a bit of science, absolutely. How to pound a length of brown ash into splits for weaving into baskets. How to scrape and stretch a freshly slaughtered steerhide so it will dry properly, and then how to make it into sandals. Much like the list of subjects Penny and I came up with, this one could go on. And on.
But I’m pretty sure the boys are learning something more from their friend, too. It defies ready explanation, perhaps because it does not fit within the catalog of segregated subjects that defines most institutional learning. There is no class in this lesson, and there is no way to grade one’s progress. The learning required will never be finished. Yet it’s probably the most important thing my sons will ever learn.
It is an understanding of their place in the grand scheme of this big and imperfect world. It is their recognition of the need to ask questions of themselves and of others, and the knowledge that the answers they get should not always be taken at face value. They are learning to consider how everything they do affects everything else, and they are learning that there are worlds where orange-toothed fat-bellied dark-haired night swimmers move in shadows beneath the water.
Will Fin and Rye ever fully know these worlds? No. But they’re learning something else, too: sometimes it’s OK to not know.
THE FREEDOM TO LEARN
It was twelve-below this morning, an even dozen degrees to the underside of zero, and I couldn’t quite get the image of a full carton of eggs out of my mind, each egg a frigid digit, freezing my appendages, one at a time. Ridiculous, I know, but there you have it. In any case, it was the coldest it’d been in a good long while, although apparently not cold enough to keep Penny from opening the bedroom window before we turned in for the night. I’m generally grateful to be married to a woman who insists on sleeping beneath an open window 365 nights per year, but I can’t quite stop thinking about all those waves of hard-earned heat radiating off the woodstove, only to funnel out that two-inch gap and into the frigid expanse. But damned if I don’t know when to pick a battle and when to simply burrow deeper into the covers.
During the summer and fall Penny milks, but in winter, when it comes to feel like something that approaches a chore, we split milking duties, alternating days. Today was mine. I waited until seven forty or so, knowing that at about seven forty-five, the first slanting rays of sun would pop over the small rise to the immediate east of the barn’s opening, basking the milking stanchion in their honeyed glow. Cold or no, there is nothing better than milking in the morning’s first sun. The warming rays release the soft smells of hay and cow, and when my fingers start stinging from the cold, I ball them up, tuck them into my jacket pockets, and turn my face into the sun as it rises another inch over the horizon.
As I milked, I could hear the boys down in the woods, already deep into some game of imagination or another, and I had to grin. Twelve below zero and my children were playing in the woods. It occurred to me, and not for the first time, that they have much to teach me. And how much they have already taught me. How to harvest stinging wood nettles without getting stung. (“You need to pick them like this, Papa,” Rye says, and I bend low so he can demonstrate.) Where the fiddlehead ferns grow. How to build a water-tight shelter of sticks and leaves, and a fire with flint and steel. The difference between thinking cold and feeling cold. That fox pee smells like skunk. (“Sniff,” says Fin, crouched over a yellow divot in the snow, and so I drop to my knees to smell fox piss with my son. He’s right, of course. It smells just like skunk.)
They have taught me nature is full of more small wonders than I will ever know, and even that not knowing is OK, too.
They have taught me patience. So, so much patience.
How many of these things would I have learned if Penny and I had sent them out of our lives for eight or more hours each day? How many would I have learned if I’d sent myself out of their lives for eight or more hours each day, if we had not chosen to commit ourselves to this piece of land, to this way of life? We do not allow our children to learn at home simply so we can learn from them. Such a thing would be selfish. But in allowing them the freedom to learn as they grow, an unanticipated and beautiful thing has happened: We have allowed ourselves the same freedom.
11
How It Ends
I WISH I COULD TELL YOU how all of this ends. I wish I could report that Fin and Rye have grown into young men who are finding their way in a world that is evolving toward the most beautiful expression of what the world can be. I wish I could say with certainty that my children have made their place in this community, or in another community; that they have fallen in love, or have not; that they have had children, or have not. I wish I could tell you that my sons’ atypical education has impacted them in ways that are only positive, that they have never been denied an opportunity because of their unconventional childhood. It would be meaningful for me to offer evidence that their relationship to th
e natural world has continued into adulthood and has somehow informed their lives for the better.
Furthermore, I would like to write that Penny and I have aged with grace, right here on this same small piece of ground, sheltered by the same slanting roof under which Fin and Rye took their first breaths. If I could, I would say that we have never regretted any of our choices—those made both for ourselves and on behalf of the boys—and that our faith in what it means to be whole and happy has never been broken. I have this image in my head—dangerous, I know—of the two of us, slower, less steady, stooped, our bodies inevitably giving way to gravity’s demands, still going about our days much the same as we do now. In the morning start the fire, feed the cows, and slop the pigs; then breakfast and work. In the afternoon, a project, wood to be split, or something to be repaired or built, friends visiting or visited. Chores again and dinner. Reading. Bed. Sleep.
I want to write that some of those who have been most meaningful to us have moved on—our parents, Melvin, Martha—and that their departure has made room for others to move into our lives. It would be nice to say that although we still do not have much money, we never want for more; that most of our needs remain simple, and that all of our needs, those simple and those complex, are met. I want to tell you that on clear, moonlit nights in winter we still ski what was once Melvin’s hayfield, and I still watch the moon climb into the sky. I still feel impermanence and connectivity. I still feel wonder. I still feel held.
If I could write the end of this book from that unknown place in the future, I would hope that the clarity of my beliefs regarding what is possible remains unclouded. I would hope that I could look back over my life and see that I had acted on those beliefs, even as the story of our time suggested I was foolish for having done so. I would hope that I hadn’t succumbed to cynicism, but instead had remained earnest, honest, grateful, and perhaps even naive in my dealings and interpretations of the world around me. I would hope that this would no longer feel like something to strive for, but rather something I had long ago attained.