Wilderness skills

A few days ago I wrote about how we must be the only people in north America who still wash dishes by hand. Here’s another primitive skill to toss into the mix—using a clothesline. Actually, we have a clothes dryer and we use it almost all the time, but king-size sheets just tend to roll up in a ball and sweat while the dryer spins, wasting a lot of gas and electricity since the drying time is like forever. Besides, sheets dried in the sunshine and gentle breezes come out so much nicer.

Bonus: This part of the clothesline Hilary is using was strung between oak trees by Luke, who used several pieces of polyurethane baling twine from one of the grass hay bales we buy every year. Even though the line is blue, it makes us feel green to multitask.

In 1987 I volunteered to help the US Forest Service replace a footbridge on Paiute Creek in the John Muir Wilderness. Our mandate was to do the entire job using hand tools. The bridge steel and wood was hauled in by mule after we carried it across Florence Lake on the Sierra Queen, our steel-hulled ferry boat. I drove the boat, and it was an experience I’ll never forget. Each load weighed way over 11,000 pounds (about 5,000 kg) counting bridge parts, crew of seven men, and food. We didn’t have a lot of freeboard, but it was a calm day. The landing was the most interesting part of the trip since our momentum was enormous for a 29-foot boat. About three minutes before reaching shore, I had already put the engines in reverse to bleed off our speed. On both trips, the boat just tapped the shore, almost completely stopped. And we did it without the aid of tug boats! When we completed the bridge, it won the 1987 Wilderness Primitive Skills Award from the Forest Service. As I tell people now, I took on the job for the T-shirt. (We also got bronze belt buckles with mules and stuff on them, and a plaque with my name misspelled.)

The opposite shore of Paiute Creek is on National Park Service land. The Park guys aren’t restricted to using hand tools. While we would be cutting trees with a misery whip (very long hand saw), they would be obscured by the smoke from their chainsaws. While we used mules to haul in bridge parts, they use a helicopter whenever they can afford it. We pounded deep holes in solid granite to anchor our construction highlines using star drills and sledge hammers. They use gas-powered drills.

But they don’t get nifty belt buckles, T-shirts, or mispeled plaqs.