For the upland hunter, the promise of a new season sits like a mountain on the horizon that never gets closer on the long highways of life, until the moment comes each year when the season opens. A cool breeze suddenly turns the trees a crisp yellow, while the long heated days of summer begin to fade. The smell of leather and powder perfume the air and the flashes of brilliance in a young pup begin to shine. New adventures become traditions, dogs seal their place in our hearts and ancient instructs are driven by shrinking light and the steady descent of reds and golds from the mountain tops, or at least so says my Orvis catalog.
While we are on the topic of great quotes, a perennial favorite of times is, “You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.” —Bruce Lee. This is always great advice for those who live life in the outdoors. You don’t have to be a granola to live the life. Yes, the word “granola” is still used as a slang term to describe someone who is environmentally aware, has liberal political views, and uses natural products and health foods. For example, someone who loves the outdoors, is free-spirited, and buys all-natural products might be described as a “granola girl.”
So while you don’t have to be a granola, living the #UplandLife you do have to learn to be adaptable, be like water. Seasons come and go, dogs get old, weather is unpredictable in the Rocky Mountains, grouse feast or famine, you have to learn to adapt, to overcome, to be resilient, to be anti-fragile. Nothing is more true for the blue grouse hippie.
You can overland, teardrop trailer it, or motel it. You can park an Airstream for your base camp or just sleep in a bivouac with your bird dog huddling next to you. It doesn’t matter if you are a millionaire or a blue grouse hippie looking for your next unemployment benefit check, you must be adaptable to succeed in The Upland Way of Life.
Car camping sucks by the way. And you can’t haul an Airstream or even a small teardrop on most of our two track grouse roads here in the Rockies. So, a sleazy motel makes for a better night’s rest, a place for the dogs to sleep on the bed, and an overall better experience 9 times out of 10. Plus you save a lot of time and money on capital, insurance, maintenance and cleaning. However, it requires garage organization to make it easy to load your rig, as opposed to having a ready to escape trailer already packed.
So if you are a dirtbag, a granola, a ramblin’ man, a dharma bum, a blue grouse hippie, or a combination of all of those like we are, what are you going to do to take your adventures on the road? Get packing and get outside. Becomes a nomad or a wanderlust.
I recently read a great article over at https://aeon.co/essays/wanderlust-runs-in-american-veins-from-comanche-to-retiree subtitled as, “Wanderlust Runs in Americans’ Veins.”
Nomads, according to Webster, are ‘Any of a people who have no permanent home, but moving about constantly, as in search of pasture.’ Richard Grant writes, “Webster’s looser approach calls up a long parade of American wanderers, beginning with the bison-hunting tribes on the Great Plains, and the footloose frontiersmen who opened up the continent to what they were escaping: settlement and civilisation. In the same restless male tradition came the cowboys of the open range, transient loggers and prospectors, railroad hobos, bikers, drifters, Jack London, Jack Kerouac and a multitude of unclassifiable nobodies who shared the same aversion to settling down, who started to itch when they stared at the same set of walls for too long.” He goes on to note travelling preachers and rodeo cowboys as further sets of the ramblin’ man,
‘The life of white men is slavery,’ said Sitting Bull, the Lakota Sioux chief. ‘They are prisoners in towns or farms. The life my people want is a life of freedom. I have seen nothing that a white man has, houses or railways or clothing or food, that is as good as the right to move in the open country, and live in our fashion.’ ‘I was born upon the prairie where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun,’ said the Comanche chief Ten Bears. ‘I was born where there were no enclosures and where everything took a free breath… I want to die there and not within walls.’
‘Why do you ask us to leave the rivers, and the sun, and the wind, and to live in houses?’ asked the aged Comanche chief Ten Bears. ‘We wish only to wander on the prairie until we die.’
Even among permanent RVer’s, a creed of nomadic freedom persists here, lurking like a low-grade fever in the shadows of the American dream.
A truck driver once explained it to me like this: ‘Burn down the house and saddle up the horse. Get out of here and keep going.’
I went to amazon and purchased all of Richard Grant’s books, as he seems like a lost brother on the nomadic trail.
You have to understand that being around ramblin’ man cowboys, they tend to not give out much information unless you ask or screw up so a certain amount of your learning is by trial and error. Cowboys can be pretty blunt and harsh sometimes mainly because so much of what is done on a ranch is either hazardous to you or others, or the stock. A life filled with wanderlust is much the same for you to figure out by trial and error.
___________________________________
A partial list of truly nomadic peoples still remaining
The Bushmen of Southern Africa aka the San(Botswana, Angola, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia)
The Nukak Maku of Columbia
The Gabra of Kenya and Ethiopia(camel nomads)
The Moken of the Surin Island in Thailand(Gypsies of the Sea). These are my favorite nomadic peoples
The Amazigh (The Berbers) of North Africa ie: Morocco, Libya
The Kuchi nomads of Southern and Eastern Afghanistan
The Laplanders aka Sami peoples of Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Russia(The reindeer nomads)
The Qashqai of Iran
The Pokot of Kenya Hill and Plains Pokot(another of my favorite tribes known for their beautiful beadwork and incredible generosity)
The Tuareg Society nomadic pastoralists of the Saharan Desert and Mali
Nomadic Bedouins of Israel, Saudi Arabia,Libya, and Egypt
