PatternSeeker86

While I was working at a northern Minnesota summer camp, my friend Jay visited by seaplane on a fishing trip with his dad and younger brother, Dave. While the seaplane was being serviced, Jay, Dave and I took a canoe out. The summer camp was between sessions. I had free time on a balmy day. We paddled a five-man canoe across Pelican Lake to a swimming point where we could jump off a cliff into the summer-warm water. It was ice-free for the last three months, so water weeds had not yet filled the lake where we swam. While we were cliff jumping, a dark storm rolled in from the northwest. A thin line of white formed on the lake north of us, oncoming. A wall of hard rain frothed the water in a distinct line.   We were wet but the hard rain was chilling. We got back in the canoe and dug in with our paddles, quickly returning to the lakeside dock at the summer camp. We pulled the canoe up onto grass, turning it over to drain the water out. We stowed life jackets and paddles in a nearby

She needed eyeglasses to drive, the patrolman wrote in his report as he referred to her driver's license. She was not wearing them as her license required when he helped her out of her car in the ditch. Her car was slightly damaged in the ditch but maybe still in driving condition. Scorch marks crossed the hood, up the driver's side windshield and across the top of the car. She was shaken but the car’s air bags did not go off from an impact. There was no reason to do more than call for a wrecker to pull the car back onto the road. “I thought it was a deer, jumping down from the hill at the side of the road,” she said, “But when I tried to avoid it, it followed me into the ditch.” The man shone a spotlight on the road where the pavement was burnt, across the car and into weeds at the side of the road. “Looks like we are lucky that whatever it was did not start a fire. Did it look like a deer?” he asked. “Not really, but it was big like a deer, but round, red and bright like

He visited chilly and windswept abandoned settlements in Canada, Alaska, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, Sweden, Finland, Russia and Siberia.  He looked for waste pits. Occasionally he found treasures that had not decayed, old films that were discarded in huge lots, buried and abandoned. He found old French films that he restored and archived. He hoped to find celluloid films lost from the Fox film archives that burned in the 1930s. There were some films lost so long ago that no one remembered the multiple-decade careers of the actors, actresses and directors and their life’s work. The film decayed or burned. In Greenland, he hit the jackpot, films from the 1930s that were shipped to secret American outposts. There was a secret American airbase built up to support the Allied war against the Axis nations. There he camped out on the ice and took several digging seasons to find anything. His excavations uncovered two complete silent films starring Clara Bow and short film starring Fatty

I walked through wilderness, not sure what I might find to eat. I found a patch of weeds on the shaded slope of a gully with a shallow meandering creek at the bottom. I dug up some tubers I knew to be palatable and nutritious. I harvested greens, too. I washed the dirt off with a small amount of water from my canteen. The water in the gully did not look healthy. By the time I got back to civilization, two weeks of hunting and gathering wild vegetation, fish, bird eggs and grasshoppers made me glad to have shed twenty pounds. I made it back, famished and looking like a hollow-eyed, bony scarecrow in need of a shave. I wrote a blog about my survival diet. It got a lot of comments from people, basically saying, “Nope” or “You must be insane.”