111: Adventures in the Simple Life
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He used to screw up in the suburbs in North Carolina. He watched TV, 8 candy, rode a bike, not pretty much like any suburban kid. Until, at the age of 17, he moved out in the woods and never came back. I had moved out into the forest, I was 17 years old, and I just decided that I would try an alternative style of living. And really with that, I didn't think it all through in a major complex way. I just decided I would like to try living outside. And so I moved out and started camping in a teepee, hunting and gathering food and making my own tools and clothes. Hey, I may just be sure people understand, and when you're living outside, you were there year-round. Yeah, totally moved out, in fact, now I've lived outside for 20 years now. From the time he used to move outside, he was interested in the past, and all the things that people knew about how to live with nature, back when they had no choice about living with nature. For years he lived in the woods, slept in a teepee, hunted his own food with bow and arrow, made his own clothes out of deer skin, his own utensils and tools. And then he started to evolve. From a life as a hunter-gatherer to basic agriculture, he went to plant and harvest, cultivated a patch of land, started raising animals, taught himself how to work with horses and mules. In other words, heat personally went through the major evolutionary stages that took the human species about 10,000 years during the late Senna Zoech. Around the same time that he moved out into the forest, he had another idea to ride a horse across America. And I decided to do it when I was sitting around a camp bar, and I heard about a couple that was living with their horses in the national forest, and it just sort of struck me. It's like a thunderbolt. It's like it came into my mind, and I said, "It's like I didn't even know what was coming out of my mouth." And he said, "I'm going to ride a horse across America someday." And then he asked me if I wanted to go. He used to as a younger brother, Judson. And my first reaction was, "Well, no, not really, but why?" It just seemed like a big undertaking, and I was happy in my little life. But then I asked myself, "Well, what reason do you not have to go? Why shouldn't you go, you know? Why not?" And one of my biggest inspirations for going was to spend time with him. And you know, 17 years after he first decided to ride across America, he used to finally set out on the trail with his brother. The ride was partly an experiment in time travel. What happens when you try to live, how people lived over a century ago? It was partly a lark, an adventure, men and horses battling the elements, testing themselves, launched toward a goal they had no idea if they could reach. You know, but I should tell you that for use this, the main idea behind this trip was not nearly so grand as all that. For use this, a big part of it was simply about horses. Uses been working with horses for a while when he set out on the trail, but he knew there
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