Long Term Primitive Survival, As A Group
Maybe it happened when I watched Rambo as a kid. Maybe it was Damnation Alley. It could have even been good old Mad Max. I’m not really sure, but somewhere along the way, I got very interested in the whole idea of survival. I was even more encouraged when my uncle Bobby gave me a survival knife for Christmas one year. I couldn’t have been more than 7 or 8.
Strangely enough, I didn’t start going on real backpacking trips until recently in life. While I’ve done a bit of camping, I never went so far as to carry everything I would need for several days attached one way or another to my own body. The experience was everything I had hoped it would be.
While I have yet to do it, I have thought a lot about going it entirely alone. All of my backpacking adventures have included at least a couple of other people. The idea of going solo seems like an engaging, and perhaps risky challenge. I’ve thought about this a lot. I’ve even wondered what it would be like for extended amounts of time.
However, it wasn’t until just a few days ago that I thought about another paradigm altogether. In the vein of conversations about building intentional communities, I thought about a pro-longed “survival” type experience with a relatively large group of people. Said another way, imagine two dozen or more people backpacking around the world as a cooperative group.
I’m sure it would be much like a Burning Man camp, only for a much longer period of time – as much as a couple of years. Like BM, you would have a whole range of challenges from practical logistical problems to social drama. I wonder if it would be as rewarding? I also wonder if I’m the only person who thinks this is a fun idea?