Never Alone, page 6
“Oh my goodness honey, I totally hear you. I’ve had all those same prejudices about money myself. And you know what, all it’s ever done is kept me down and struggling financially. I mean, of course, right? Because that’s what happens when you don’t believe you’re worthy of having something.”
Her words were like a gong going off in my head.
I had almost always lived under the poverty line. I’m well educated and very capable, so could have pursued a well-paying career. But I’d always valued my freedom and wilderness time too much to be shackled to a regular, nine-to-five job. I’d also always had a healthy criticism of capitalism and its ugly history. I knew it wasn’t entirely logical, but I’d never shaken an insidious inner conviction that money was somehow evil.
“I’ve actually decided to do something about it,” Kristi said. “I joined a group focused on learning to shift long-held habits of rejecting abundance.”
Oh my goodness, there are actually groups about this subject?
Kristi and I had so much in common in our passions, our life histories, and our way of approaching the world. Knowing that she had struggled with these questions too helped me see the deeper truths behind them—ones that had taken me decades of personal work and no small measure of counseling to unveil.
“Oh my god, Kristi, you don’t know how important this is for me to hear right now.”
I took a deep breath and steadied my shaky fingers on the wheel.
“You know what,” I said. “You’re totally right. If I’m really honest with myself, my whole history with scarcity isn’t really about money; it’s about not believing I’m worthy of having what I need—money, acceptance, love, all of it.”
I was forty-two and just seeing it—and it took someone else’s words to show me. Someone who believes they deserve happiness doesn’t stay in relationships that actively do them harm. Someone who believes in their worth doesn’t bend over backward to please others, nor put their own well-being on the back burner to make room for another’s.
I hadn’t fully grasped the degree to which I had done this all my life until I made a choice bad enough that I was forced to see it. In my late twenties, a year after my first divorce, I moved across the country to an unfinished cabin without electricity or running water, 1,500 miles from my friends and family, with an increasingly abusive partner. When I extracted myself from the situation, I spent a winter unraveling the mystery of how I’d let myself enter that situation, and then I found myself a very good therapist.
Now here it was again—more subtle but rooted in the same deep pattern. Sure, capitalism is destructive to people and the planet. Does it then follow that everything to do with earning money is always wrong and causes harm? Does having financial stress, and skimping on good food and self-care, make me a better person and more able to do good in the world? No, it handicaps me.
I wanted to do Alone for the experience. I also wanted to do it well, even win it. It felt important to me to represent a whole different approach to wilderness survival, because the images we usually see are of big strong men, most often with military training, with knives the size of their forearms strapped to their thighs and a pack full of fancy tactical gadgets. The implication, whether subtle or explicit, is that they are out to kick nature’s butt. I wanted to show the world that living in the wild doesn’t have to be about battling it. For me, it’s all about knowing that I’m part of nature and am humbly willing to learn about and participate in it.
While winning Alone had never felt important to me personally, I also knew that Western society pays a lot of attention to such things. I believed someone like me winning would be good for the world. If I continued to subconsciously believe that money was wrong and that I didn’t deserve abundance, though, I would be conflicted in my desire to be the last one in the wilderness on Alone.
“Kristi, I’m totally with you,” I told her. “Starting now, I’m going to redefine my relationship to wealth and abundance as well.”
For the first time in who knows how long, I began actually imagining what it would look like to not be operating under money scarcity.
As luck would have it, there was a lunar eclipse happening that night, and I was getting together with some friends to honor it. If the rocks and the universe had conspired to send me on my Alone journey, perhaps the moon and the universe could get together now to help me manifest this new prayer, a Woniya willing to usher abundance of all kinds into her life with open arms.
13
The Creative Cyclone
After the eclipse get-together, I felt different. More dropped-in, more present and focused. I called Quinn and told her, “Heck yes, I’m in.”
Now, for the first time since all this began, I was thinking seriously about what I needed to do, not just to get there, but to win it.
The location was as motivating as it was intimidating. In one of the most extreme environments on earth, I would need all the gear I’d been planning on, but beefed up to arctic proportions. Back home I pulled bins of furs and deer hides down from the shelves to tan, crates of wool to spin more yarn for the sweater already underway, and dye for the yarn of the one not yet begun.
Looking around at the piles of raw materials and not one finished garment, I wondered again if I was being crazy. This was arctic winter we were talking about. Should I give in and buy commercial clothing?
I tried to picture myself up there, working to survive in a harsh landscape while wearing modern garments I had no relationship with. Viewed by millions of people while representing synthetic clothing, instead of the work I’ve devoted my life to. Entering the Arctic looking like an invader wearing plastic clothes rather than part of it in wool and leather. I reminded myself that though I’d love to win, my priority was still demonstrating a beautiful, balanced, connected approach to survival rather than an extractive, dominating, modern one.
There was my answer, and for the final time, I threw compromise out the window.
For those four days back home, I was a creative cyclone. While deer hides and rabbit furs hydrated in buckets, I set up a folding table in the yard and dumped boxes of the white yarn my mom had helped me prepare onto it. Hand-painted yarns are an art; you can’t just dump them in a pot and let them boil, as you would for simple, hand-dyed yarn. I mixed up dye powders with water and vinegar. I squirted squeeze bottles of every variant of flame orange and crimson red until each skein was saturated with brilliant color, then carefully steamed them to set the dye. I was making great progress until midday, when my housemate’s four-year-old daughter, Emma, came out to help. It was a slower, but very sweet, household affair. By dusk, most of the yarn was dyed. So was the table, Emma’s stool, the door handle, a good portion of the countertop, and god knows what else. By the time I fell exhausted into bed at midnight, having steamed nearly sixty skeins of freshly dyed yarn in small batches for hours, I no longer cared what else in the house was pink.
I tanned three deer hides, the bobcat, and a handful of rabbit furs in the days I had left, then packed it all back into the car for another caregiver stint.
14
The World’s Biggest Sweater
The routine at Mom’s was similar to the earlier visit, but in fast-forward. I threw myself back into the archery practice, strength and stability exercises, and weight gain regimen—but now not just with all the craft projects still to do, but arctic upgrades to add on.
Body fat was still coming on, but slowly. Finally, I had to shift from just more meals with larger portions to more serious measures—a lot more sweets and beer.
For a little while the routine worked, but before long my body rebelled. If I ate more than a small bowl of ice cream in one sitting, it would go right through me, taking whatever healthy food was in my bowels along with it. Making my way through an ipa had never felt like a chore before, but it got to where I didn’t even want to look at one. My body was used to such a healthy lifestyle that forcing the issue was clearly counterproductive. While it meant less weight than I had hoped to put on, eventually I came to see this as a good thing rather than a handicap. A body so attached to healthy habits that it won’t allow anything less? Yeah, I could live with that. It wouldn’t be the last time on my Alone journey that I would surrender to my body’s innate wisdom rather than forcing the issue. It was a habit that would serve me well in the months to come.
I didn’t have much time left to dial in my ten items. I researched everything I could about Great Slave Lake—the terrain, the temperatures, the wildlife, and the plants. Learning it was a world class fishing destination, I added fishing gear to my “no questions about it” list.
That gave me:
Sleeping bag (waterproofed down and rated to minus forty degrees)
Cook pot (stainless steel with a locking lid that could also be used as a frying pan)
Ferrocerium rod and striker for fire making (six-by-half-inch rod with a carbide striker I could use to sharpen other tools)
Fishing gear (only barbless hooks and monofilament line allowed, but I put together a good assortment of both)
I could take six more items. I considered a food ration critical, and pemmican—a mixture of powdered dried meat and berries mixed with rendered fat—was the only one that had enough fat content to be worthwhile. Fat could be critical out there not just for its calories, but to keep my system functioning if all I was bringing in was lean meat and plant foods. At two pounds maximum it wouldn’t be much, but it would help my body transition into reduced calories more gradually and give me a calorie and morale cushion I might need.
Five more items.
I knew it was a big gamble, but I didn’t want to be out there without my bow. My long-term strategy depended on big game. No one had gotten any in the history of the show, and I certainly wasn’t the most experienced hunter, but if I managed it, the win would be in my pocket. Plus, the security of knowing I could protect myself from hungry predators was no small thing. I added the bow and arrows to my “for sure” list.
Four more items.
I went back and forth about whether I needed both a fixed-blade knife and the folding knife on the Leatherman. I didn’t trust that the locking mechanism on the Leatherman would hold up to the kind of abuse that I would be giving it out there, and without a knife, I would be in trouble. I decided to take a standard knife. That meant the Leatherman wasn’t strictly necessary, but as one of my most essential tools, a backup blade wasn’t a bad idea. It would provide that, plus the pliers could be critical for fishhook emergencies, the wire cutters would be very helpful for the snare wire I might bring, and a lot of its other tools could have important uses. My friend Rich was working on building me a modified Leatherman with a custom set of tools—some of his design and some of mine. It could be a game-changer. That was it, both the knife and Leatherman had to come.
Eight items accounted for and just two more to choose.
Did I need both a saw and an axe? I felt I did, but while axes are important for many crafting and woodworking projects, saws are more efficient for felling trees and better for many building tasks. They’re also harder to accidentally sink into one’s shin if working while woozy with hunger—an important consideration. At least one participant has been sent home by an axe accident. Trees that far north were reported to be only wrist thick or less—not the kind of wood that needs splitting. An axe would be important once the lake froze over, but who knew when that would happen and whether I would still be out there? Taking an axe would mean leaving behind something else that might be key to being able to stay that long in the first place. It was quite a conundrum.
I moved the axe to the “maybe” list and kept the saw in the “for sure” category.
One item left.
It was down to parachute cord (a.k.a. paracord) versus snare wire. Paracord would be important for shelter building, net making, and a hundred other uses, but snaring is passive hunting, not calorie-burning hunting. If I didn’t manage to bring in a moose, a steady supply of small game could see me through the winter.
Was there a way I could work around taking paracord? There are a lot of plant fibers that make good cordage, but I was too unfamiliar with the plant communities up north to count on them for my cordage needs. I didn’t want to be up there without snare wire, though, and cordage material was a lot easier to come by in the wild than metal.
And then I had it. My first sweater was so warm and thick, the second one wasn’t strictly necessary. Instead of using little bits of yarn from it here and there as needed, I could just use the whole sweater as cordage and be able to take the snare wire.
I wasn’t allowed to knit it out of parachute cord, but yarn is string too, and if I unraveled the sweater I would have ten times more cordage than the eighty meters of paracord I could bring as a gear item. In fact, if I was strategic with my pattern, it could contain enough yarn to reknit into other garments too. I had already planned for the sweater to be very thick and extra-long. How could I improve on it to give me even more material to work with? Holy crap. What if it was both ribbed and double knit?
Ribbing draws in a knit garment, so even large sweaters wear as if they are smaller and more fitted. Double knitting is a technique that adds an additional layer to a garment, so it makes any knit item twice as thick. A double-knit, ribbed sweater of extra-large proportions was ambitious, but if it could be knit, I was confident I could knit it. I ordered several more boxes of yarn and dove in.
Whenever I wasn’t out shooting my bow, feeding my face, or working on something else, I was knitting away at what I came to call—sometimes affectionately, sometimes in exasperation—“the world’s biggest sweater.”
I’m a fast knitter, but the monstrous sweater took an absurd amount of time. My fingers flew while I sweated under my piles of yarn, but I consoled myself with visions of all the things I could do with it up there. The sweater I had planned would be big enough for a giant. Even after using all I needed for cordage, I would still have a whole mobile yarn store on my hands. I could easily knit one or two smaller sweaters, leg warmers, mittens—whatever I needed.
But that wasn’t all. Arctic winters are extraordinarily long and dark. Instead of countless hours twiddling my thumbs and counting the days, I could be tucked up next to a cozy fire, a pair of hand carved knitting needles and balls of yarn in my hands, letting my creative juices flow. The sweater wouldn’t just be a great resource; it would also be a winter’s worth of entertainment.
15
A Grain of Salt
My mother became increasingly independent as my sweaters grew inch by painstaking inch. It was hard to imagine leaving her on her own, but we both knew I couldn’t stay much longer without seriously jeopardizing my plans. We got the thumbs up from the doctor that her healing was progressing nicely and that she could be left on her own overnight. Between my aunt, Mom’s friends and neighbors, and the visiting nurses, she was in good hands. And so, at the start of August, with roughly four weeks left before I boarded a plane north, I packed up my projects and headed back home. I arrived there with hundreds of decisions upon which my life could depend sitting heavily on my shoulders.
I had thought July was intense, with my catastrophic—and thankfully wrong—diagnosis, and my mother’s accident. That had just been the warm-up. By the middle of August I was doing Google searches to see if it was possible for stress to stop one’s heart. The near impossible task of carrying on with my gear-making mission committed me to a month of utter insanity. Not the best preface to a challenging survival feat in an extreme environment, but I had made my choice and was going to carry on until I managed it, or until my head exploded. I like to think it was foreshadowing—a lower profile survival experiment before the actual survival experiment. If I could survive that August, I could survive anything.
There were more hides to tan, winter worthy boots to create from scratch, a three-layer fur parka to make, and buckskin pants and insulated buckskin/wool overalls to sew. And those were just the big projects. There were also a fur hat, mittens, wool scarf and two wool buffs, and the rest of my ten items to procure and modify.
I set up a crafting station in the yard, took over the spare room with my sewing machine and worktable, and moved my heavy, foot-treadled, 1915 leather sewing machine into the middle of the backroom.
Any time I wasn’t feverishly working on something else, I worked on the world’s biggest sweater. I knit as I did online gear research, knit as I designed my other clothing, knit as I was brushing my teeth…Okay, that last one isn’t actually true, but you get the picture.
Going to the gym to work out with my trainer was the highlight of my week. No decision-making and no screwing up and having to redo seams—just me and the blonde masochist holding the stopwatch.
Dietary advice was part of her service, but she clearly didn’t know what to do with me.
“Did you eat breakfast before coming in?” she’d ask.
“Kind of,” I’d say. “I had a smoothie made of whole milk, nut butter, three kinds of seeds, coconut oil, bone broth protein, collagen, maca powder, and fruit.”
Her eyes would bug out in horror.
“It’s okay,” I’d say. “I’ll have a second breakfast when I get home.”
One morning I came in excited. “It’s working!” I told her. “I managed to put on another three pounds last week.”
“For god’s sake keep your voice down!” she said, looking around to make sure no one had heard me. “This is a gym! Are you trying to get yourself beat up?”
Still, those sessions gave me my greatest sense of success all summer. No longer holding back to protect my “fragile organs,” I was getting stronger every week. I was confident that pulling my bow would be no issue, even with muscle loss.
