RabbitStick

For a long time I had been meaning to attend a primitive skills gathering, but the distance to travel and the price always prevented me from doing so. But, after participating in the Stone Age project with Lynx, I happened to get a good deal this year so I decided to make the trip to Idaho and check out RabbitStick. I have to admit that I was not very impressed. I guess that for people with little experience in the skills it's a great place to get your toes wet and meet a lot of like-minded people, especially if you feel alienated in your own community.

For me, however, I thought that there were too many very basic classes with no real practical purpose, especially for a gathering that has been running for 22 years. Actually, Alice, one of the elders challenged the group to teach more advanced classes in the future. I'm not sure her challenge was very well received. I was also very surprised that not many people were into really applying their skills to their daily lives; mainly people approach the skills as a hobby, which I'm not really into. Only a handful of people I talked to were into the daily, practical aspect of skills, and that's what partly motivated me to start the Sustainable Living Project.

On top of everything else, the food, though it tasted fine, was terrible: the cheapest of eggs and white bread. I came back all puffy and couldn't stop from eating. So all in all I was pretty disappointed and probably won't do that again, especially because it ate up a whole week of my life back at home, where I have some real things to take care of.