OK, this is how it goes.
First there is this ape. He walks out of the forest, gets into some basic grooming and the result, eventually, is you. You’re the slickest life-form to wear a loincloth and you can turn your hand to anything. With your super-sized brain and those freaky opposable thumbs you know what you want, and you know how to get it.
You clock up seven or eight millennia of breakneck progress, plus a few more when (frankly) you’re just coasting. You rise above every challenge you face with boundless ingenuity. You get better and better at everything, and as a result you have less and less to do. Sod this hunting business, let’s start a farm. Fed up with building shelters? Let’s get into property development. These buttons are a bit fiddly, what about a zip?
And suddenly, you’ve cracked it. Survival is in the bag; shrink-wrapped, bar-coded and scanned. Bleep! Do you need any help packing today, sir?
Now, just hold it there a second. This bit’s important. Don’t worry, you’ve got a moment while you swipe your card.
Think back a few thousand years. You’ve just tracked your first antelope and you’re standing there, spear cocked, all ready to turn it into lunch. Imagine how that felt. Now look at yourself. Instead of a blood-splattered spear and a steaming great antelope you’ve got a PIN number and a carrier bag of groceries. Different isn’t it?
What you may have just experienced as you compressed ten thousand years of human experience into one supermarket second is the niggle. It’s that little larva of doubt worming in somewhere round the back. Welcome to the modern world; this is what it’s like, I’m afraid. In theory things are great, all urges are satisfied and all needs are met. But there’s something missing: excitement. Oh, that reminds me – don’t forget to buy yourself a scratchcard.
HARDWIRED AS CAVEMEN
When our brains were hardwired the job description was just one word: survive. Back then, life was in the balance every day. Sundays and bank holidays included.
But times changed and so did the priorities. We used to have to know when to hunt and when to run away, but now we just need to know which day to put the bins out. We’re programmed for cut and thrust, a 24-7 existence that’s contested tooth and claw, not a 9-5 working day with occasional tea and biscuits.
Of course, all this lying around not doing much is great, in theory. The problem is ‘the niggle’. This is worth going into, because if nothing else it explains why you get such a kick out of lighting the barbecue.
Our primal urges, you’d think, cover a pretty straightforward shopping list: hunger, shelter, warmth…done. But there’s one more evolution has armed us with. It’s the urge to feel the thrill that come with satisfying all the other urges. That rush of bringing home the bacon is a reward in itself. In the 1960s, psychologists would have called that a bio-feedback loop. To you and me it’s a vicious circle and, because of it, we’re completely snookered.
Our DNA tells us to look for the kicks we got from all the big bad dangerous stuff that we just don’t have to do any more. And now, like a dog chasing rabbits in its sleep, we can’t stop. As you stand at the barbecue and smell the fat fizzing on the charcoal you’re acting out your favourite flashback. Man make fire! Cook, eat…yum! And you can’t switch this stuff off. It took a few million years to develop this baby. Get used to it, it’s yours to keep.
If your life is spent going undercover behind enemy lines or hunting grizzlies from a log cabin beside the Yukon this may not apply. Life may be exciting enough. But for the rest of us there’s the niggle. No wonder we get a bit ratty from time to time.
THE KEYS TO THE FERRARI
THE BEAR NECESSITIES
Over the centuries we’ve got very good at keeping our caveman brain quiet by throwing it a bone now and then. It’s what the entertainment industry has been doing for centuries. Movies are fantasy workouts for the primal self. They fall into two camps.
First there’s the Back to Eden fantasy, the one where the caveman gets to go home and lead a simple life, just as Nature intended…It’s Treasure Island or Robinson Crusoe, The Waltons, Survivor and Lost. This is powerful stuff. Has anyone ever watched The Jungle Book and actually wanted our man-cub hero Mowgli to go back and live in the man village?
The other kind of caveman fantasy is where the savage inside us gatecrashes the modern world. It’s why Basic Instinct was the best ever title for a movie, and why Shoot’em up games take over the male mind. It’s all chewing gum for our instinctive self, which explains that odd sense of calm that comes over you on walking out of a slasher movie. Chase scenes do the same job too; deep down we recognise how it feels to be the prey, whether playing chase in the playground or being hunted down by a robotic Terminator for the tenth time on DVD. It gives us the chance to rehearse it all again. And inside we squeal with pleasure.
Now we come to the fun part. It’s like discovering a Ferrari sitting in your garage. Or if you’re not that into cars, it’s where you find out you have a secret talent for wiggling your ears…whichever you prefer.
Your instinctive self is a highly tuned and finely calibrated piece of evolutionary engineering, but for most of the week you just leave it in the garage. We’re compelled to keep this powerful machine a secret from the civilised world. The urge comes over us in two ways:
1 We think if we give in to instinct we’ll start turning up at meetings with wild staring eyes and custard stains down our front. So we just don’t talk about it, we pretend it’s not there. It’s the woolly mammoth in the room.
2 We treat instinct like a hyperactive dog. It can be kept locked inside as long as you give it a run at evenings and weekends, whether it’s a fight club, manoeuvres with the Territorial Army, or working through the complete airport novels of the Bravo Two Zero veterans.
But of all the occasional outings for our instinct, one type stands out head and shoulders above the rest, loud and proud in khaki shorts, hiking boots and obligatory fleece. Yes, it’s time to throw out the deodorant and head for the woods to learn about survival skills. Under the watchful gaze of men with long knives and a faraway look in their eye you get to skin rabbits and distil your pee into drinking water.
For millions of men this stuff is an outlet for pent-up frustrations; it’s a secret ventilation shaft from the soul through which the inner caveman gets to emerge into the outside world. And of course, it’s an insurance against the collapse of global civilisation, when the ability to track hedgehogs and signal in semaphore would be quite handy.
But what if the closest you come to a desert in your day-to-day life is a square mile with no cash machine, and the highest summit you’ve seen today is the top of the multi-storey? Why escape to a fantasy wilderness to get our primal rocks off? Why not use all our innate brilliance to generate some red-blooded adventures right here, in the 9-5, where it matters most?
It’s time for bushcraft to come out of the woods. It’s just as much fun, far more relevant, and there’s no vague whiff of urine.
Man loves to make a good fire. But why persist with sticks and fire lighters when you can use a car battery and a Brillo Pad, with far more impressive results?
Navigation used to be about reading the stars and finding the campsite. For the urban bushman it’s about direction finding by Sky dish, and finding where on earth you parked the car.
And here’s the best bit. Urban bushcraft doesn’t mean turning your back on the comfort of central heating, wireless broadband and a fridge full of cold drinks.
There’s