Walden 2.01

At present, I have acquired few of the supplies that I shall be taking into the forest. I have secured permission to live on several acres of land. I have no assets to speak of, but enjoy (for a while longer) a very modest income.

I was offered use of a tent, but refused because of the shelter’s weight (this was when my plan involved moving through a National Forest). I am hopeful that this charity will be extended again, for if it is, I shall have satisfied the need for shelter. I will have to purchase a tarp, and much cordage. This should not cost more than twenty-five dollars.

I have acquired a very good knife called a Mora, after the Swedish town in which the style originated. The blade is good thick steel, the tang is three-quarters of the grip. I do not own a hone or multi-tool, and will have to purchase these things. I hope to get them for less than thirty dollars, and that should get me a multi-tool good for five or more years.

I have purchased a marvelous water filter, called a Lifestraw. It has no moving parts and weighs only two ounces, and filters out particulates and contaminates that are larger than 0.2 microns: good for 1k liters (a year for an active average-sized adult male). The land on which I will stay has running water within its rights, and so I shall have no worry of thirst. For my fires, I will use a flint and steel- cheap, yet to be bought.

For sleeping arrangements, I will have a sleeping bag with a mat beneath it ( I hope to claim ownership of the sleeping bag I used in my youth, red, with the name PARKER written at one end to contrast it with PATRICK’s sleeping bag). Because my camp is semi-permanent, I may bring a pillow in place of bundled clothes.

For the disposal of waste, a trench tool and a certain amount of lye will suffice to ward off noxious vermin and disease. The spade I will purchase, the lye I can acquire without cash via an acquaintance.

These scarce debits considered, I come to sustenance, which is the primary concern of every life. Though in later years I may become a hermit in earnest, that life is not my current goal. There is a lake not far from where I will sleep, where I may get fish: if I choose this course, the rod and reel and tackle and necessary governmental licenses will cost perhaps seventy-five dollars. I do not think that I will plant much food (it is too late for potatoes) but still I may hoe a dozen rows to harvest cabbage and spinach and the other fruits of the cold months.

So how shall I eat? In short, my diet will be very simple. For my meals: rice and beans, or peanut butter, or bulk sugar, or vitamin-enriched protein powder. To supplement this, tablets containing ascorbic acid. If I can live on two dollars of food a day, with a ration of salt, then by mathematics I can live for a year on less than Eight Hundred Dollars- and what do the poor pay for their walls?

I will place my food stores in airtight plastic containers, and bury them in the ground.

As for books, will be sad to exile myself from the Library. With me I will take, at least, the Metamorphoses of Ovid (trans. Melville), The Aeneid of Virgil (t. Mandelbaum), the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer (t. Lattimore), The Divine Comedy (t. Longfellow), The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Notes From Underground, The Moon is Down, and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972. Small a library as it is, I will have to water-proof it.

Essential things are small and attainable. This more than any other thing I seek to demonstrate to myself. I know a number of nurses, doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors, pharmacists, teachers- their compensation staggers me. Can a man really be fed for three months upon one day of their salary?

I want to live, and I can afford to live. I reach this economic moment by luck, favoritism, and kindness. It may be that I already have the answers to my questions, but I will need to hear the echo in order to believe.