Whenever Deb and I are out and about these days, whether we’re walking around public places or driving the roads and highways, we practice what’s commonly called “situational awareness.” We’ve been operating that way for years — it’s both a duty and a survival skill, honed while navigating the suburban and urban madness of central Ohio. It served us well as we traveled ’round the country, too.
Many of you do the same.
I won’t offer a primer here on how to develop, refine and practice your own situational awareness. That’s up to you, your allies and the professionals with whom you train.
What I will tell you is that Life in Ozarkansas presents a challenge. In population centers like Harrison and Mountain Home, normalcy and general peace are seductive. Out in the countryside, and in small towns like Yellville and Flippin, it’s even harder to resist complacency.
But we do. Complacency kills.
I thought about all that while sitting at the picnic table early this morning. And it occurred to me that almost a year of immersion in the wildness of The Mountain has sharpened my senses in an entirely different way.
It’s the kind of awareness that allowed me to peer into the brush along our road back in March (pictured) and see two whitetails. Yesterday, it helped me spy four leaf-shaped silhouettes amid the tall grass in the shade of an oak — a pair of fawns, parked there by their mama while she was off feeding.
My father called it “hunter’s eye.” Being able to see what most folks don’t is a skill, a matter of discerning differences in color and contrast, along with the knack to pick up movement that stands out from the natural, expected pattern of things.
Another example — a week ago yesterday, while surveying tornado damage in the vicinity, we stopped on the subdivision road to look at a mature hickory that had come down in a neighbor’s pasture. (That’s it in today’s header image.) Deb pointed out something I hadn’t seen along the edge of the woods, and I snapped this quick picture:
See it? Here’s a tight crop:
That’s a wild turkey, visible for an instant before disappearing into the brush.
Only with practice does that kind of vision improve, and I exercise my eyes intentionally every day. This morning, for instance, while scanning the ledge outcrops upslope behind the picnic table, I detected movement. I took this photo at 10x magnification:
I’m sure you can pick out what drew my attention. Here’s a tight crop anyway:
Now I could take this a step further and talk about how this skill could be useful when (not if) the SHTF, but that’s probably unnecessary. You can connect those dots on your own.
It’s a good feeling, though, to be using my senses this way. It sure beats the hell outta profiling drivers on I-270 or checking beltlines for bulges.
You read a lot about whitetail deer on this blog. Squirrels, too, lately. Those critters are considered by many to be nuisance animals — they raid bird feeders, help themselves to vegetable gardens, strip bare berry bushes and destroy flower beds (among other things).
It shouldn’t surprise you that we see it differently.
The way we approach The Mountain’s resident wildlife isn’t sentimental or sappy, some sort of residue from watching Disney movies as kids. We do recognize the existence of true nuisances (field mice in the camper or cabin, for example) and true threats (coyotes and venomous snakes in the areas we live or frequent). We won’t hesitate to eliminate either.
But we do whatever we can to support the populations of deer and squirrels, along with animals like rabbits, doves and turkeys. All are potential sources of protein in a crisis scenario, and if they’re thriving now, we have a better chance of surviving then.
We don’t for a moment suppose that our 20 acres can support (never mind contain) enough wildlife to sustain us. What it can do, we believe, is contribute.
That’s what we’re after.
And the lizards? We’ll keep ’em around just for luck.
I get an e-mail every morning from The Art of Manliness — a worthwhile website, in my opinion, providing useful content. I’m a longtime subscriber. I recommend it.
This morning’s installment, however, made me chuckle (pictured). It signals how much my life has changed.
There was a time when I “dressed for success.” I cared very much about being put-together, projecting confidence, maintaining an image that served the professional life I’d chosen. I pulled it off well, too, if I do say so myself.
Those were the days. And, I’m glad to say, those days are over.
To put a cap on this today, I want to drop a marker of sorts, a placeholder for something that’s been rattling around in my head lately. It’s a subject I may write more about at some point — or maybe I won’t, but at least I need to put it out there and see if it’s coherent.
A working title would be, “The Myth of Experience.”
This came to me when I read an article about Elizabeth Taylor. (Seriously.) The piece included a chronology of her infamous dating life — married eight times, widowed once, seven divorces. She married and divorced one guy twice.
And I thought, well, she sure had a lot of experience at being married. Getting married, anyway. Not so much at staying married.
That had me considering how each of us processes experience — we do a thing, and after we’ve done it, we can say we have experience in that thing. But if experience doesn’t make us smarter or better, leave us with wisdom, or at the very least keep us from repeating mistakes, is it really worth a damn?
I also considered how we choose those who help us, accompany us, work for us. From contractors to clergy, companions to confidants, we seek out people with experience. Is that what we really want?
I mean, would you have hired Liz Taylor as a marriage counselor? She had the experience.
More than that, I’ve noticed that people who don’t learn from experience in an important thing tend to be dysfunctional in other things that matter. A business owner who’s also a constantly relapsing addict, for example, probably sucks at business — and for the same reasons, attributable to the same character flaws.
Experience, misused and misapplied, is meaningless. It’s just a line on a résumé. What we really want, both in ourselves and from others, is wisdom.
And that’s what I think about that.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath #Ungovernable
#LetsGoBrandon #FJB