I MAKE FIRE… or at least, I try

In an urbanising world, can the wilderness help us remember that we are still connected to nature?

A long overdue post. A man named Shane Engelbrecht runs a wilderness survival school near Grahamstown. My editor passed his business card on to me and I gave him a call to set up a meeting – the kind of meeting for which you need hiking boots.

The Eastern Wilderness School offers a weekend basic course, where you learn how to make fire, look for food, build shelter, etc. The advanced course takes it a notch higher. You and your group are dropped off in the bush and have to demonstrate your grasp of the skills over the course of a 36-hour survival challenge. It sounds amazing. Anyone want to take the course with me??

Shane picked me up in his bakkie (a.k.a. pickup truck) and we drove south to the Thomas Baines Nature Preserve, where he teaches the basic course. As we drove, Shane talked passionately, urgently, even, on a number of topics, from what the government should be doing to protect the rights of hunter-gatherers to the problems with land-reform in post-Apartheid South Africa. One gets the sense that he is constantly chewing on these questions and is eager for the chance to talk. And he had a lot to say. A lot a lot. I had just purchased a handheld audio recorder the day before, and came back with two and a half hours of recordings. Great material to use for an article, but a real pain to transcribe!

Even though it wasn’t relevant to my article, I found a lot of the political stuff really interesting. One of the buzzwords in South Africa at the moment is transformation, meaning the transformation of the nation and the fulfillment of the goals of the struggle. A component of this is Black Economic Empowerment (“black” actually includes coloured and Indian citizens as well) through preferential hiring, skills training, and mandates for certain proportional representation in management and ownership. As with affirmative action in the United States, transformation has prompted a significant and sometimes nasty backlash among whites, which I’ve already voiced on several occasions.

I just picked up a copy of a new book called Opinion Pieces by South African Thought Leaders, edited by journalist and writer Max Du Preez, after hearing him on a radio show. So once I read a bit of it, I’ll have some more detailed thoughts for a future post that will grapple a with these issues. For now, though, back to the wilderness.

Shane studied anthropology at Rhodes, focusing on the San and Ovahimba, and even spent some time camping out by their settlements in Namibia and Botswana. He also speaks fairly fluent isiXhosa, having spent a portion of his early life living in the Transkei, back when it was still an Apartheid homeland. His parents were specialists working for the Transkeian government. “My life was much less compartmentalized than that of the average white South African,” he says.

Shane used to host Xhosa school groups, but the level of enthusiasm among the students was often disappointing. “Why are you showing us this, we’re not interested in this, we want to know how to use Excel on the computer,” Shane imagines them thinking. “We want to get our driver’s license. We don’t want to know how to navigate through the bush – we’re never going to come back here, we don’t want to come back here.”

If there is a theme to everything Shane says, it is interconnectedness. All of us are connected to each other and to the environment, and when we fail to protect what is vulnerable in nature, we put ourselves in a dangerous situation. To make people more conscientious about the environment, Shane says, give them greater exposure to it. “What’s the importance of water? After you haven’t drunk water for six hours, then you’ll know: well, I won’t pollute the water environment again. It’s absolutely essential. No water, no life.”

Shane says that people sometimes ask if he is like Bear Grylls, and his response is an emphatic “no!” “You say survival, and people think Rambo, camouflage, machete on the belt, all that. Nothing like that, nothing at all,” he says, shaking his head. “Survival for me is every day, it’s a mindset. The things you need in survival are the things you need in everyday life. You need to be able to think on your feet. You need to have self-reliance. You need leadership. All these things are what you use in a survival situation.”

Next to some squat survival huts that remain from his last course, Shane demonstrated several methods of making fire, a skill that is essential for survival. His demonstration progressed from ancient to modern, from what our ancestors once used in caves to what today’s world militaries give to their soldiers.

After the lesson, Shane let me have a go with the sticks. The idea is this: as you spin the fire drill in your hands, it rubs against the fire board, and you gradually grind out a small pile of charred wood dust. As the dust accumulates, the temperature rises, and if you can keep it up long enough you’ll end up with a little glowing ember which you can use to light your kindling – in our case, dry grass.

I leaned into it and managed to create some pretty good smoke before giving up, arms worn out and hands cruelly blistered. The ember was elusive. Shane had a good-natured laugh. “You’ll get it,” he said, and at the end of my visit left me with a set of sticks so I could try again when my hands recovered.

The UN estimates that just over half of the world’s population lives in an urban setting. For South Africa the number is above 60%. Urbanization is steadily progressing, but Shane argues that when we spend time in the fast-dwindling natural environment, when we temporarily put aside technology and consumer society, through our bodies and our basic physical needs we can reaffirm our connection to the planet. The environment is not something we can afford to lose. “If you take away this, you take away the soul of people,” Shane says.

Now, with our further ado, I MAKE FIRE… sorta.

 

I feel pretty good about this. I can reliably create the ember now, I just need to get better at handling the kindling.

Next long post (by next Friday, I promise): Reflections on crime reporting