The Feral Future
January 1st, 1970 by
By Jennifer Lynne Carter
I’m 30 minutes west of Hollywood and about a million miles away. The cultivated landscapes of expensive Topanga estates sprawl across the hilly wildness. Small structures of local wood and rows of windows offer the off-the-grid counterpoint that gives this area its reputation as a hardcore hippy enclave. 
I’ve come here to meet with the rewilders who responded to my online invitation. In the wake of the international economic implosion and ensuing network coverage of associated scandals, I asked, “Is this the end of the world as we know it?” The rewilders answered.
I’m done before I begin. After my boyfriend’s computerized hybrid dies on the highway in Friday night traffic, I have to hitch a ride from a friend in his 25-year-old Chevy. Also, weight training twice a week doesn’t prepare me for the steep hike to Drury Brennan’s residence. Halfway up, he carries my backpack and a bottle of Malbec to his ascetic homestead: wooden deck, weighted tarp for a roof, Airstream trailer and odd shack for an office/guest bedroom. There’s no toilet per se, but Drury has a shovel and a good arm. It’s here that Drury and I meet Bill Maxwell, Peter Bauer (a.k.a. Urban Scout), Rob Gill, Erin Crowell, and Hannah Cranford. Bauer, a beacon among rewilders for walking the talk and author of his self-published Rewild or Die, has flown in from Portland, where he lives as much as possible as a hunter-gatherer. The others are local, but they are all united in their efforts to undo their own domestication, to reintroduce themselves into the wild.
If you do a Google search, you’ll see that “rewilding” renders a list of links about the process of reintroducing captive animals to what would have been a natural habitat had civilization not intervened. Though safari animals does not equal eccentric hipsters, Scout tells me, “We’re nature too.” Some general principles are shared by both kinds of rewilders: civilization creates abusive hierarchies; it interferes with a natural way of living, and living as naturally as possible is the only sustainable way. Both efforts can be defined as the rehabilitation of captive animals that helps them to regain survival instincts before being reintroduced back into the wild. For the eccentric hipster species, this involves a relationship with the land that is more than agricultural, learning and using technologies that civilization considers obsolete, sharing skills within one’s community, and transitioning to sustainable ways of living before the entirety of civilized living becomes the source of a sad new gallows humor. None of these are the beginning and the end of rewilding, and neither are any of its moments in isolation. Rewilding isn’t the absence of indoor plumbing. It isn’t the absence of indoor living, even. It’s not our collective desire to hunt an animal and eat its bloody guts, the photo op we all wanted. And it definitely isn’t our over-consumption of whiskey. We don’t let that stop us.
It’s 10 p.m. before Bill and Rob find their way to our tree-ensconced revelry. Bill explains that he was at Chuck E. Cheese, celebrating his daughter’s 7th birthday. “I love it,” he chuckles, settling into an Adirondack chair, “They’ve turned ‘I Think I’m Turning Japanese’ into the Chuck E. Cheese theme song. They introduce the band to the tune of ‘When the Saints Come Marching In,’ and I’m watching my kid chant ‘You say “birthday!,” I say “Chuck E. Cheese!”’” Bill demonstrates the call and response, and we kind of can’t believe it. “Why did you take her there?,” I ask. Not that I don’t know that it’s every 7-year-old’s soft-focus birthday fantasy. Bill explains that he and his family can’t sustain themselves entirely outside of civilization. He has a PS3, a gift from a friend. Scout watches Law and Order. I brought a 12-pack of bottled water. “You can’t beat yourself up over it,” Bill says.
Agreement about the inelegance of modern technologies and the appeal of pizza parties segues to talking about exactly how civilization makes us captive animals. “Jobs” is an obvious answer: working 10 hours a day, five days a week; answering to a supervisor who answers to someone else, shifting wealth around. Hierarchy dictates that someone has to be there at the bottom to serve coffee. Bill shakes his head; “This isn’t a way of life, it’s a way of death.” At the same time, rewilders don’t believe in leaving it all behind, breaking away from civilization without everything necessary for survival. They’re not interested in “primitive” anything, either. As I sit in a sleeping bag, dressed in as many layers as I can find as the cold sets in, Bill explains that this is how pre-modern technologies developed. My man wouldn’t have let me shiver, because I would have complained anyway until he’d developed a stove. It occurs to me that rewilding isn’t an elaborate effort to find new and different ways of being uncomfortable and unprepared.
A bag of Tostitos gets passed around. There’s talk of cooking food over a fire, but it’s only talk. We’re all talk tonight.
The morning finds me, well, uncomfortable. I had found my way to the guest bed after the campfire died. I reek of campfire. I listen to the quiet until I’m confident that everyone else has gone off - to a local breakfast place, I later learn – and strongly consider finding the shovel. I lay still until the urge to shit subsides. When everyone returns, it’s clear that being hung-over has blunted us. We’re quieter. Maybe we’ve done all of our talking.
Bill invites Sarah Schreiber of the Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere (AWARE) to join us for a while. She comes along just as everyone’s telling me what they would put into a time capsule. Scout says “a laptop with the game Civilization.” Bill says “a note. ‘We were here. We’re sorry.’” Rob suggests seeds. “I don’t feel the need to put anything in a time capsule,” Sarah chimes in. “I don’t need to be remembered by the Tootsie Roll wrapper I leave. They’ll be living in what we leave.” Well, so what are we leaving? Will we find sustainable alternatives when aquifers that support agriculture here are turned off? Will the day come when one can walk in L.A. and not be “only a nobody,” as the Missing Persons dictate in one of L.A.’s radio anthems?
Conversation subsides again as soon as Sarah leaves. Rob, who’s quiet anyway, leads Drury, Scout and I on an excursion to forage for feral food, identifying whatever edible flora we come across. It’s one-stop shopping – in Drury’s yard alone, there’s mescaline, prickly pears, a fungus that can be used as a dye. In the vicinity, we eat peppery pink berries, smell the gingery roots of wild carrot and learn to distinguish it from extremely deadly water hemlock, and uproot a tobacco plant with ambitions of drying it. I fill a grocery bag with greens.
In an effort to acquaint ourselves with neighbors, we trek down to a wooden two-story house on the hillside. Cliff, the architect of the small wooden dwellings, has invited us over. Also Drury’s idiosyncratic landlord, Cliff was concerned about all of the foot traffic past his place lately. After some explanation, Cliff said that he was interested in meeting the rewilders. We sit on his porch, some of us under blankets, some of us braving the chill, and talk about how the things we consume have become increasingly unsustainable: cars like my boyfriend’s that can’t be repaired with a set of tools and a trip to the junkyard, septic systems operated by computers, all of the plastic packaging and Styrofoam detritus that will have to be hauled off after we leave. 
Before we're ready to return to camp, hunger wins out. Scout and Hannah ditch the bag of produce for the fluorescent-lit offerings of a not-so-nearby grocery store. They return with packages of ground beef, a bottle of ketchup and a bottle of mustard, and enriched white hamburger buns. No one’s complaining as the bag of greens wilts on the deck. Baby steps.
