Boonekins and Crocketteers

I haven’t posted anything in the past few days because I have been enthralled in an all weekend long “Wilderness First Aid” class. The class didn’t end up being what I had imagined it would be about when I signed up for it. With the word “Wilderness” headlining the title I had hoped it would be about learning how to use things you would find in the wilderness to help manage first aid emergencies when caught out in the forest. You know something like this… ok “Daniel Boonkins”, today we are going to learn how to carefully strip thin pieces of bark off a Tan Oak tree and weave it together and by adding two sturdy Live Oak poles make a stretcher to carry our injured patient out of the “wilderness”. Or better yet… “Crocketteers” today we are going to hunt for the elusive Myrtlewood tree and after milking the sap from within the trees cambium layer we are going to combine it with crushed moss that we had before hand gathered from the north facing side of a Douglas Fire tree. After making our powerful pulpous we will learn to apply it to a serious wound to help draw away the poisons and provide pain relief while we are carrying our patient out of the “wilderness” on our cleverly built stretcher.

What did I learn in our 24 hour long class was… dramatic pause… if you are hurt in the “Wilderness” it will take emergency personnel longer to reach you and even longer to extract you to an emergency facility, then if you were injured on 6th Street in downtown Grants Pass. Hummm... I sort of knew that before hand. Actually the class ended up being a great general first aid refresher course for me and the hours I participated will apply towards the continuing education hours I need each year to keep my E.M.T. certification current.

I did end up learning a few clever tricks from a Boy Scout leader that was taking the course with us. I have had training in so many different fields through the years, sometimes if you can come away from a class with just one or two new ideas that you can throw in your MacGyver tool chest it makes all the class hours worth it. I do hope that I will be able to find a class where I will be able to learn more about true wilderness first aid in the future though.

Nobody practices “medicine” like in the old days. Knowledge of Grandma Gray’s fantastic remedies or Harry Smiths concoctions at the ranch are no longer passed down to the younger generations. That old style way of caring for sick people served a duel purpose. If you were able to live through the cure you could use it again on the next victim. If the cure did kill you it helped cleanse the family genes of the weak individuals. When I was little, still living at Grandma Mary’s, I used to get ear infections fairly often. I can still remember being sat on by the brood of concerned family members, to hold me down, while grandma poured some hot gruel into my infected ear. Within a few days the burns would heal in my inner ear canal and the ear pain would have disappeared, completely. I couldn’t hear out of that ear anymore, but the pain was at least gone.

One summer when I was still in high school I got to work on the trail crew that maintained the trails within the Siskiyou National Forest. Our crew boss was an old guy that looked like he had just stepped off the pages of an old miner forty-niner book cover. Wooly white hair, big dangly beard, shoulders hunched over a bit, he even limped on one leg slightly when he walked along the mountainous trails. Harold would yell at us “kids” to get up in the mornings when we were out camping the nights along the trails. He would have already been up stumbling around in the morning darkness for what would seem like hours before we would finally drag ourselves from our warm sleeping bags. Groggily we would eat something, pack our gear up into our packs and then zooming down the trail, us "kids" would go. Our young gang would be kicking rocks off the trail as fast as we could go, cutting branches leaning into the pathway and occasionally digging a water bar into the trail tread with our Pulaski, to help prevent soil erosion. Harold would sometimes be a half mile behind us trudging down our freshly made trail bed. We would all be yelling back at him, “Come-on old man, is that the best you can do?” “If you were moving any slower you’d be going backwards” we would taunt him. As the day progressed the sun would always get hotter, we kids would always get tired. Stopping to rest against our heavy packs, with our tongues hanging out, in the shade of some old tree along our route.  Harold would eventually come limping along. Passing by us he would inform us that he would be waiting for us at the next campsite. “I told you. You should have paced yourself,” he would announce, once he had gotten far enough ahead on the trail that we couldn’t throw a rock at him.

Every time towards the end of a ten day stint out on a trail maintenance job our “kid” backpacks would be running low on the good food, like Taylor’s beef jerky, fruit roll ups and granola bars. We’d come dragging ourselves into the campsite Harold had chosen that afternoon not knowing really what we were going to eat for dinner. Harold would ask what we had left for food in our packs and we would throw the miserable contents out on a stump or log. Harold would rummage through the pile of crumpled cans and torn open Rice-a-roni bags as we would fall over from exhaustion. An hour or so later Harold would yell to us, “Kids, come and get it while it’s hot”. To this day I have no idea how he made some of the meals out of the crap that we piled on the log, but they were always tasty. Harold turned out to be far more then a trail boss that summer to us kids. He really ended up being more like a mentor. In his simple way he taught us how to use things found in the forest. He taught us how to identify things that were good to eat, where to find them and the other things that would make us sick. He drilled us on what the trees and plants names were till we remembered their names. I still remember many of their names to this day. I now wish I had listened closer to Harold Teague’s off the cuff lessons. Simply put, he was a man of great “wilderness” wisdom and I wish he could have been there to throw his tidbits into the room while the class was being taught this weekend