Lynx Vilden has lived off the grid for most of her life. She now camps out in the woods of Washington state. Vilden has a cabin, but prefers to sleep in a dugout away from any kind of civilization, where she holds camps to teach other people how to survive on only what they can find around them. Writer Katherine Rowland drove out to see what that's like.
It’s getting late, so Lynx and I abandon the cozy cabin for the lodge in the forest. “I like to sleep touching the earth,” she says, speaking in the drawn-out syllables of the Queen’s English. Through the thin light of my headlamp, I try to chase her sure-footed steps down an invisible trail through conifers and broad-leaved trees. I worry that I’ve lost Lynx to the night. But then I catch sight of an earthen dome rising five or six feet from the needled floor. I cast my light around, and see a tiny wooden door leading into the shelter, and crouch to enter a warm womb carved from the soil. Inside, Lynx coaxes embers to a roar before we settle into our matching hide and pine-bough beds.
The appeal of the “Stone Age thing,” Lynx explains as we sprawl before the fire, is that all you have are the materials available in the immediate environment. “It liberates something in the mind when you realize you’re not constrained by having to go buy some kind of tool that’s going to make your life easier.” This direct dependence on the elements cultivates “a depth of connection with all the nuances of nature around us,” she says. “You might see a shriveled-up stalk of grass. What I know is that, below the earth, there’s an edible root that tastes nutty. You just keep on learning.” Living wild, she elaborates, is an act of bearing witness, one that frequently requires relearning how to see and hear. Our senses have been numbed by the unrelenting light and noise of urban life. It deadens us, she says. “If we get so tame, so domesticated, we lose something that is very human.”
Read about Lynx Vilden and her philosophy at Outside Online. -via Digg