Quote (eLeMeNt477 @ Aug 16 2016 12:25pm)
i just read Hatchet
Looked it up on wiki, looks like a good read. when I was a kid I read My Side of the Mountain, which got me interested in self sufficiency. My parents are hippies from the 60's my dad is a Vietnam vet who did 3 tours as a marine then they wouldn't let him do a fourth so he didn't re enlist, so when he got out, he enlisted in the army and went back. He saw how the country was torn apart by war and decided that we needed to be able to fend for ourselves in case anything like that ever happened here at home. In 1981 he bought 84 acres and we built a house in west Michigan. My dad taught me how to live off the land and what plants were edible and what plants were not and what uses every plant he knew did. We spent many weekends camping and hunting and fishing. We would take canoe trips with just the basics and stay on the bank and build a shelter and eat what we caught and gathered, my dad taught me how to make snares and dead fall traps and different types of primitive hunting/fishing techniques, and my Mom would come pick us up at the end of the weekend 60-80 miles down stream or she would take us and drop us off 3 days upstream and we would float home. My Dad and my sister and mom would go on month vacation in the summer, camping all the way, we went all the way to California from Michigan and back and camped all the way. That's just some of the type of the things I have done to gain real world knowledge of being able to stay alive with not much to work with. By the time I was sixteen I had spent three+ years camping and learning to live off the land with my Dad. My parents got divorced and I hated my new step mom so we had a falling out. My Dad gave me a choice to stay and abide by the rules or leave, so I chose to leave. They wouldn't let me take my car since they had ownership of it, so I left with my clothes and gear I had and took 3 trips to the end of the driveway and piled it up across the road. I walked to my friends and he came with his pick up and took me to a remote lake. This was December and I camped and survived until late February when I got a job and a place to live. I have since done many survival solo and team weekends to keep my skills fresh. My main occupation now is I own a residential siding company, but every spring/summer/fall I do guided hunting and fishing trips and usually one to three times a year I do a paid survival weekend where I teach people the skills I know to keep them alive in case they ever need it. I could go into more detail but this has already become a giant wall of text as it is.