Sorry, I haven't been on in awhile.

>> What were your further out ideas?<<

My generation was prone to a lot of delusions about "living of the land", the idea that you could just walk out into the wilderness and stay, inspired by books from people like Euell Gibbons and Bradford Angier, and a sort of printed proto-web called "The Whole Earth Catalog". Things were different then, and information was a lot harder to come by than it is now.

I made some modest attempts at using wild foods, until a painful episode killed a lot of my curiosity about it. For a while something called "spirulina", a refined blue-green algae, was being promoted as "the perfect food" and it was thought that you could backpack for weeks carrying nothing else but these pills, made, essentially, of pond scum. I tried to live off them for a week, but after four days I couldn't stand the smell, and couldn't bring myself to swallow them anymore. We made tipis (that leaked) from surplus parachutes (probably, in retrospect, risking a very painful death by burning), and hiked through the woods wearing imitation "buckskin" leather-fringed jackets and drinking from leather wineskins, and thought we were somehow getting "back to nature". We learned to make atl-atls and bolos, sandals and mocassins, and I had a friend who went all winter, though the snows, barefoot.

Silly as it seems now, I don't regret any of it. I learned a lot, and I'd rather have to wade through lots of ideas, the vast majority of which don't work, than have the ideas suppressed before they can be tried.