The Late Afternoon Walk

We take walks in the late afternoon, my five blue heelers and I. Well, sometimes it’s only three of my heelers since two of them are 16 years old and don’t always feel like walking long distances. It’s a quiet time, a time for contemplation and solitude.  In fact, woods roaming is perhaps the one activity I look forward to all day long. A day without being in the woods is more than merely a day lost: It is a day without meaning. For the late afternoon walk allows me time to do a hundred different things all at once, as if every second compresses every feature of who I am into a single reality. Yes, two to four miles of walking at least five times a week is good exercise. And yes, it gives me a chance to occasionally use some of my bushcraft skills. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m not going out to impress myself with my abilities to make bow-drills or feather sticks or fashion a primitive campsite. Instead, I am walking in order to be.  Yes, it’s that simple. I am who I am when I am in the woods.  A man of modest pleasures perhaps, but in my life the sight of a great-horned owl sitting atop a mesquite near sunset, or listening to the silence while watching clouds following their own trails across the skies is enough to bring happiness.  I do not seek the approval of others by living my life through their eyes. For me it is only the woods. And when I am gone perhaps someone will say about my life, “He loved the woods.” That will suffice. For in those four words the facts of my life, whether good or bad, will have been distilled into one simple fact.

“He loved the woods.”

South Texas Wildflowers

Spring is officially several weeks away.  But in South Texas things don’t often follow the rules.  Here, the spring wildflowers have emerged and the days are warming fast.  Over the next few weeks the color combinations will change and predominantly yellow and white landscapes will turn blue, red, orange, lavender and other assorted shades.  Meadows and clearings will take on a kaleidoscope of evolving hues.  And, for a few weeks at least, the temperature will be tolerable, perhaps even pleasant.

Last summer I resolved not to spend anymore summers in the region.  With rising temperatures seen yearly for the last decade, (over twenty years, in fact) and with predictions of increasing droughts, blazing summers, chaotic winters and all the other ills associated with what every reputable scientist around the world has said are indicators of growing climatic pandemonium, I’ve decided to spend my summers in cooler climes.

Last year there were few wildflowers.  A seemingly interminable drought reduced the foliage to nothing more than withered stems.  Monstrous fires, some stretching across tens of thousands of acres, ravaged the landscape and turned the skies a murky brown.  In some areas you could drive for miles and never leave the smell of smoke.  Only the mesquite, brasil, granjeno, chaparro prieto, lotebush, junco, huisache, anacua and another couple dozen hardwoods seemed to survive.  In fact, those hardwoods (some growing no more than a few meters high while others grow tall enough to provide a meaningful and critical shade) have been the great salvation for the region.  Ironically, some people have indulged in all out attempts to eradicate the brushlands.  Their folly has been brutal for both wildlife and the land itself.  It seems that greed and narcissism play continually bigger hands in a country that embraces a predatory economic system.  In the end not only humans suffer but the land itself.

But for now in this isolated world where I live, the flowers survive as well.  Yes, there are those who would destroy even the flowers if given the chance.  Their minds are as far from mine as Earth from Pluto. 

For those of you who take pleasure in bushcraft or woodcraft, I hope you always keep in mind that without nature your enjoyment is impossible.  Every real woodcrafter is at heart…..Let me see, what is that phrase?  Oh yes, a “tree hugger.”  And damn proud of it too!

Enjoy the flowers, my friends.

Rawhide that Tomahawk

Some people complain about tomahawk heads working loose. So here’s a quick tip on securing a tomahawk head onto the handle. Wrap a piece of wet rawhide around the base of the tomahawk head and then allow it to dry. Make sure you wrap it tightly. I secure the wrap by looping each subsequent wrap under the loop that preceded it and then using my Swiss Army Knife screwdriver to push the remaining strand under the wrap. I usually get my rawhide from dog chews purchased at the grocery store and then cut the chew into strands from 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick. You’d best cut it to the quarter inch mark for the wrap that should be at least 30 inches long. Once the rawhide has thoroughly dried it will be hard and will have shrunk considerably thus creating a strong hold that should keep the tomahawk head in place. Of course, the main thing is to make sure your tomahawk handle is properly contoured to form a proper fit. I've seen tomahawk handles that were much too loose and that is frustrating because the heads keep sliding down. So give the rawhide wrap a try. You can keep a small roll of rawhide in your possibles bag and use it for other things as well like wrapping your crooked knife blade to a handle. And one more note: Keep a tube of bees wax lip balm in your bag. Besides using it to keep your lips from becoming chapped, you can also use it to coat the rawhide to keep it waterproof. You can use it to coat the ends of a bow stave to prevent checking. The list goes on and on. 

   

A small axe, a piece of wood, and a quiet night

About a week ago my cousin Dora Ines and her partner Del decided to visit. Dora and Del have a place across the road from us and as I’ve mentioned in previous posts we live in an isolated spot far from what some choose to call civilization. I was in my little shop working a rasp across a piece of mesquite when the two showed up. Dora is an accomplished artist who makes her own jewelry and weaves intricate cloth used in various religious sacraments. By the way, she just finished making a new studio and in a couple of weeks I hope to show you pictures of her work. An artist colony of sorts we have here with Dora Ines making her jewelry and luxurious cloth and I engaged in my writing as well as making knives, selfbows and a few other things. Dora’s father and my mother were brother and sister and she and I grew up together in the ranch country.

When Del saw me using the rasp he said, “Why don’t you just use an electric lathe and a belt sander?” I was about to answer but Dora came to my defense: “Because then it wouldn’t be quiet,” she said.

And I realized more than ever how much Dora and I have in common. We grew up loving the woods and holding nature’s quiet dear to our hearts. We revel at the site of a bird perched on a branch, or the sounds of an owl in the night. We’ll sit and listen to the yaps and yodels of coyotes and lament the fact that in some parts of Texas people live in fear of the little dogs and you can wait for days, weeks and months and never hear their serenades. Dora and I have camped in the brushlands of South Texas and Mexico and now that those who were dear to us are gone we have each other to help revisit those times. For in our youth the brushlands sprawled as far as the eye could see and never did we imagine that humans, in their rapacious quests and greed, would annihilate most of it. Perhaps that is why we both live in this isolated place. Woe to anyone who might come along and want to destroy any part of it. For in the autumn of our years we have little patience with those who see the world as something bestowed strictly for their personal consumption and enrichment.    

So as I often do I spent several hours sitting under the roof of my shed with a small axe and a piece of mesquite in my hands. The quiet seemed to exude from the ground as well as from endless stars held still in the night. Interrupted only by the occasional hoots of a couple of great-horned owls, the shriek of a barn owl, and the falsetto wailings of coyotes both near and far and, of course, the rhythmic taps from my little axe as a knife handle began to take shape.  Yes, I do own a belt sander but I detest the contraption. Clouds of sawdust or metal flakes pollute the air and the wailing—an incongruent scream in the night—destroys the placidity of my surroundings. Belt sanders, angle grinders, and power this and power that were made for factories and cities and for lovers of tractors and bulldozers and perhaps heavy metal music. But not here. Not in this place where for a few moments I stopped and listened to geese migrating south overhead. Other night birds came to visit. A pauraque and a screech owl and even the crackling grunts of a family of raccoons skirting the edge of the woods on their way to where I dumped scraps just for them. 

Whether you call it dasein, or flow, or simply to be lost in the moment, the act of taking something as simple as a sharp axe, a piece of wood and coupling it with a dark and quiet night and you have the makings for the immersion of self into the universe.  You’ll never hear it with a belt sander or a spinning lathe, or when a tractor grunts nearby. You can only hear it when there are few sounds to stand in the way.

Was it one hour or two? I’m not really sure, nor do I care. I was alive and life was good. Yesterday, I had to drive into the city 65 miles away. Too much noise, too many people, crazy drivers, bad smells, sirens, congestion….

Dora Ines goes to town only once a month, but I think she would be fine if she never had to go to the city. I’ve trimmed my visits down to twice a month, and even that is too much. We’ve talked to people who say they won’t come out here because “it’s just too quiet.” Others can’t stand the isolation. Some people around here will look for any excuse to drive into town. We see through their ruse and to each his own. I have been asked to make a selfbow and some arrows for a museum as well as some other woodcraft articles. I’ll be busy in my little workshop. Listening to the night sounds of coyotes and birds and the breeze skittering along the treetops. And yes, hearing as well the musical sound of a rasp working wood as well as the hypnotic taps of my little axe.

The Woods Roamer Survival Knife

Choosing a wilderness survival knife is a subjective decision. Hopefully that decision is based on a careful weighing of criteria that remains constant regardless of terrain. First, the knife must be robust. Second, it should be well made—capable of holding a sharp edge but at the same time able to maintain that edge given rough treatment. Third, the knife must not be obtrusive; in other words, it should be neither unwieldy nor ponderous. At the same time the knife must not be so flimsy or insubstantial that it fails in the most common task a survival knife is called upon to perform which is chopping.

Lest our choice becomes burdened by an overabundance of subjectivity then remember that the survival knife should not be so specialized as to fail in the most important of all needs—universality. Said another way, the need to chop does not necessarily call for an axe nor does the luxury of making a wooden spoon dictate the need to carry only a crooked knife. In other words, the ideal survival knife must be a jack-of-all-trades. Specialized cutting tools will outperform the survival knife at specific tasks, but no knife can do all the things the ideal survival knife can do given multiple tasks.

Enter the Woods Roamer Survival Knife. Yes, I make these knives and I am partial. But long past 60 years of age and with over fifty of those years spent working in the woods or actually living in the woods I think I can accurately assess what performs best and what falls short. What you see pictured below is the third model in an evolutionary process that began about two years ago. I called the first model “the custom bush tool.” The second model was called “the survival parang” because of the design's similarities to the short machetes seen in parts of Malaysia. But when a host of emails referred to the knife as “the woods roamer knife” I decided that moniker was appropriate.

The knife’s dimensions are as follows:

Blade length: 10 inches

Cutting edge length: 8 ½ inches

Blade thickness: ¼ inch

Handle length: 6 inches

Overall length: 16 inches

  

The lazy S design incorporated into the knife’s shape vastly improves the knife’s chopping ability—especially when compared to a straight handled knife like the K-Bar or other large knives. This knife chops with the ease of a small axe but can slice and cut like a bushcraft knife. The blade’s rearward section near the handle is rounded to allow the knife to be easily choked and thus used for woodcarving tasks. The tang is substantial (much more so than the flimsy stick tangs seen on Malaysian parangs) but yet it does not disturb the knife’s overall balance like a full-tang large knife often does.

My two Woods Roamer knives: The top knife has a 10 inch blade and the bottom knife has an 8 ¼ inch blade. These are working knives, hand forged from 14 inch industrial files and intended for serious bushcraft and survival.

Many people have asked me to make them a knife so I’ve decided to build a batch and sell them on a first-come-first-served basis. As I complete a knife I will post the pictures of that knife and if you want it I’ll sell it to you. In other words, I won’t take orders for knives. I’ll build Woods Roamer Survival Knives as time permits and I should be able to produce a couple per month.

Here’s a video I posted on YouTube showing “The Woods Roamer Survival Knife.”

   

Using a Machete with a Gancho "hook"

First I’d like to thank my readers for their patience during this interlude, and especially those of you who were kind enough to send me emails asking why I had stopped posting. As you might have gathered, we live in a remote area in deep South Texas.  The ranch is nearly four miles from the nearest town—a hamlet actually of less than 300 people.  We pass through a number of locked gates before we get to our place and the isolation would be perhaps too much for some folks. We have no television nor do we want one. The Internet is our only connection to the outside world but over the past two months our link was slow to nonexistent. As of yesterday things improved and now I can get back to posting.

Despite the oppressive heat of the last four months we’re still putting in ten or twelve hour days working on various projects.  I wanted you to see how the ranch-hands use their machetes along with a gancho or hook to trim the underbrush and manipulate thorny plants and spine­-ridden cacti.  I’ve spent my life trying to save the South Texas Brushlands from indiscriminate clearing and I assure you that any manipulation of the monte comes with a degree of trepidation.

The video below was taken in the early stages of creating a cabin site. We left all the trees and larger woody plants intact and only removed the underbrush where rattlesnakes and other nefarious creatures might lay waiting. The cabin is now almost completed and I might add that the “birding” surrounding the place is spectacular. We’ve included water sources and the area is thickly foliaged. Deep South Texas is famous for outstanding bird watching and the area around the new cabin does not lessen those expectations.

South Texas is machete country and no one travels in these parts without one of the long blades. They’re used for everything from clearing underbrush to whacking rattlesnakes to cutting saplings for walking sticks and other projects to slicing one’s way through a stand of prickly pear cactus. I’ve made entire selfbows and primitive arrows with nothing more than a machete.

Here’s the video on using a machete in unison with a gancho to perform work.

Bushcraft and Nature

Although I do not know my readers personally, I assume you are here because you feel a certain kinship with the things I write about. Viewing the statistics generated from this blog I know that many of you want to learn about knives and machetes and other types of cutting tools associated with bushcraft. Some of you also want to know about native plants and how they have been used over the centuries to provide both food and medicinal care. Still others are concerned about the natural world and its future. An eclectic readership and yet at the same time sharing a bond ensconced in the idea of the importance of wilderness, the need to preserve it, and a deep interest in learning how to live with nature and not off nature.

We are most certainly brothers and sisters in that regard. I bet that for most of you the ideal moment is spent in a forest or woods or maybe on a mountain top or perhaps by a campfire in the desert night watching the endless stars overhead. I imagine, as well, that you draw strength from nature; it is there that you regenerate yourself.  In fact, for all your love of bushcraft knives, axes and machetes and other assorted topics, what really drives you is a profound need to arrive at some sort of equilibrium with what exists apart from the world humans have created. You seek the solitude and beauty of those things that sustained our ancestors. For no matter what your religion is or politics or where you live in the world you and I and all the others who come to this blog are one and the same: We love nature.  The wilderness is the very breath of our lives.

Perhaps some of you venture into the wilds carrying field manuals on birds or plants or reptiles. After all, it’s not all about making a fire with sticks or building a lean-to or fashioning a pot holder.  I’ve seen enough YouTube videos to know that a significant number of bushcraft devotees encourage others to never destroy nature just so they can “have fun” or “practice their skills.” The ideal is to enter and leave like a ghost without trace or remnant or artifact left behind.  That, my friends, is a master woodsman.

I look forward to hearing from you.

thewoodsroamer@gmail.com