Dedicated to my grandchildren.

I had had it with the rat race! I decided to slow down and really see what was real.
Part of the knowledge needed to go into space was really knowing what was necessary.
I was running a parallel of living in the woods with pioneering a new planet in my mind.

I landed at an old abandoned boy scout camp on a beaver pond.
The location was in the rain forest of the Olympic penninsula.
My intended destination was Mons Olympus on Mars, So it fit.
Olympus the ancient realm of the Gods. Some meditations on that concept:
Gods by definition: Any ethnic god is too small a concept to be a GOD

Just before I left for the woods, I was watching a soap opera and the news on television.
When I came out of the woods a year later and turned on the television,
the soap opera and the news continued their sentence. Hmmmmm. I hadn't missed a thing.
The Muslums, Jews and Christians were still arguing about whose god could whip the others,
like 3 little kids in a back alley fighting over whose dad could lick the others dad.
When they all had the same dad.

The first problem was firewood. I didn't have an ax.
Alder trees come up after the douglas firs have been cut, then grow untill the douglas firs outgrow them and cut off their light.
Then they die, but stay standing. At that age, they are about 6" in diameter.
Now here is the funny part. After they die, the bark splits horizontally about every foot and the bottom edge curls out.
The effect of this is that even in the rain forest, no matter how hard its been raining.
The alder trees are dry, the bark is like little roofs keeping the drips away from the wood.
It gets stranger. If you stiff arm one of these trees it will fall and break into 6 foot lengths, just perfect to carry back to camp.
Then tap the lengths over the edge of a rock and they break into perfect 1 foot firewood lengths.

Kindling, looking around at some standing dry elderberry stems with wisps of grey lichen growing on them, they already looked like they were starting to smolder.
With a 6" parabolic mirror from a kids makeup case.
I focused the suns rays on the lichen and in a few minutes had a fire started.
I found a better way later. Collecting oak balls on my daily collecting trips,
I punched a hole in them and poured leftover grease from breakfast in each one.
Also I had found an old broken off douglas fir stump that had, by bacterial action, been oxidized.
Its appearance was a dark red (like coals in a fire) charcoal.
From the center of the stump was a wavy yellow spire an inch in diameter like a flame from the coals.
Pitch. Sprinkling a little pitch in each oak ball I completed my "fire starter balls".
I could take one of these and lay it on the cold ashes from yesterdays fire, then go about my business of preparing breakfast.
When I turned around their was a nice little fire going.
The fire balls caught from the residual heat and coals in the ashes.
After breakfast, I could build up a little heap of the red charcoal around a dutch oven
and it would burn very slow, just right for long cooking beans or stew.
One other odd fact, If you left the skillet on the dead fire overnight, the ashes sifting down from the breeze would coat it, combined with the grease residue, when you woke up and got ready to do dishes.
The soap was already in the pan!! Grease + Lye (ashes) + water =soap
Firewood collected, breakfast, dishes done, dinner on. Time factor less than 1 hour.
I found after I got organized I could easily do all my [have too's] in 3 hrs/day, including acquireing my food.
Why can't we do that good in civilization? Something is wrong with the system.

Conclusion: You shouldn't have to work 8 hrs a day just to survive.
Bottom line: 3 hrs/day should take care of your survival needs.
The hardest thing to do was quit seeing "$" signs.
Everything I looked at automatically translated as "how many $'s" I could get from it.
Or how much would "what I need" cost.
What I needed was right in front of me!