Mike Rowe
is narrating the Discovery Channel show “Human Planet”. I’m watching the “Arctic” segment.
It isn’t any secret to me how the Inuit or Sami or Inupiat or Yupik live. I have spent a little time north, a very little time far north, but mostly I have been fascinated by the culture for a very long time.
Living that close to the bone means living at the most basic level- In order for you to live, something else must die. As a hunter, I respect this, and understand it. I also know that it is a very critical part of our ancestry, and the further we get away from it, the worse our lives seem to be. The woman who thinks that steak she just bought grew on that little styrofoam tray is the culmination of years of the sanitization of our lives by people who want everything to be neat and clean and ordered. But life is not neat and clean and ordered- even the laws we create, that seek to impose order on our lives, as often as not cause more trouble than they’re worth. While I firmly believe in the rule of Law, as opposed to the rule of kings, or men, I most strongly believe in the rule of very little damned law.
The Law the northern peoples live by is simpler- and to my way of thinking, better. Kill that your family may eat. Love your family and your dogs (or reindeer). Your dogs and your skills are your children’s birthright. Don’t kill more than you can eat.
This kind of life is hard. I mean, I despise snow, and cold weather. But they have never known anything else.
Modern northern people have become accustomed to junk foods. Where the “Human Planet” people found the people to film, who knows. I’m glad they did. I hope it wasn’t too hard, because it means there are people still keeping that way of life alive.
The information is sketchy and tainted with “modernized” northern people, but it seems that the diet devoid of vegetables and nuts and fruits, consisting solely of fish and fat, is, for those peoples, extremely healthy. Some of those old groups have managed to add electricity and television and frame houses and modern plumbing- and still not become “modern”, still live the old ways.
I like this show, about the Arctic, my fascination fulfilled by the images and the narrative. I like watching hunters hunt, and the blood of the butchering of the animals makes them, in small ways, my brothers in blood. At the same time, I fear that some of the people who will see this are the wrackers, the people who will see the landscape and park themself in it, cut trees for better sattelite reception, adapt the environment to them, instead of adapting themselves to the environment. They “Civilize” the wilderness, to the detriment of everyone. I can see a damned crusade of these morons trying to stop the seal.shark, and whale killing, heedless of the fact that it has gone on for centuries before they came along to have their sensibilities offended.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could take those people who live that close to the bone and transport them to the city, and make the city “Less” civilized”? Get people who live in highrises used to seeing hunters taking down and eating deer in city parks. smell the ripe aroma of meat being jerked. How comical would it be to see people aghast at people wearing clothes not from Kohls trapping and eating rats?
I’m all about flush toilets. I’m also all about using technology to make life better. I like sleeping in a warm bed, and i prefer to live where I can do so every night. But I like seeing prey and predator close to my home, and I wish I was more integrated to the natural environment, and less to the artificial one.
I watched some show with Anthony Bourdain where he dined at an Inuit home where they simply butchered a raw seal on a tarp in the kitchen and ate it raw as they cut it apart.
A part of me was grossed out by that, but the majority of me really wanted to know how it tasted.
I don’t get out into the wild hardly at all due to my work schedule, to my own detriment.
But my inner carnivore isn’t very far from the surface…
Just got back from Christmas in Denver. Even though I love my son and his precious little family, I told them I wouldn’t be back again in the winter. I felt strangely free as soon as the door of the plane was secured, even though I was squished up against the window by a couple of oversized ladies. By the time the 5.5 hour trip was over, I was excited about being back on the ground in Alaska, and the cramped plane was forgotten as soon as my feet touched the jetway. Home sweet home!
Well said, and those that think they will ‘tame’ the wilderness are sadly mistaken, and usually very dead shortly thereafter…
They do live in downtown Anchorage, in the very shadow of the skyscrapers. But they don’t hunt; they panhandle, because they discovered Anchorage has a climate so mild it’s easy to live outdoors year round, and it’s easier to panhandle and drink than hunt.
And the people wearing clothes from Kohls and Nordstroms hand them money and look away uneasily, demanding “someone else” deal with “the homeless problem.”
On the bright side, in the summer, you’ll see all sorts of folks, including a few in suits and waders on their lunch break, lining the streams catching the salmon run. And cries of the bleeding hearts be damned, the bowhunters do get an urban hunt in to cull the moose now and then. I’d like to see more of the latter, as the moose are a pest and a serious traffic hazard. As for the ripe aroma of meat – yeah, that smell means only one thing to me: time to volunteer to be in the kitchen making dinner, so I can avoid freezing my fingers off while butchering the moose/caribou aging in the garage.I’m clumsy when cold, and already hacked my hands up too much.
“I’m clumsy when cold, and already hacked my hands up too much. ”
Wish I didn’t know what you mean.
I thought I was the only one who saw the dietary paradox. We’re taught the four food groups (in the 1990’s it was a food pyramid, now it’s a food rhombus or whatever the heck they came up with in the FDA to keep their jobs) with fruits and veggies as the main course with meats, then sweets, as side bits, and how if we ate seal blubber and uncooked meat all day with nothing “vitamin rich” to supplement it with, we’d be a sphere, our hair teeth and nails will fall out, and we’d have a coronary by the time we were 17.
Then I see the Inuit on the North Pole and the Masai on the African equator (don’t they only consume milk and meats?) who live a rather pure carnivore existence, and Europeans with much grain and cow milk in their diets unlike the rest of the lactose intolerant world, then other peoples who are almost vegetarian, with meat as a holiday meal if available, and yet all these peoples made it through for generations.
Just observing; no conclusions, only wondering at the adaptivity of the human body.