These Skills Are Only Natural

Creating a fire by rubbing two sticks together is surprisingly challenging, which actually should not be surprising, since everybody who’s tried will tell you it’s challenging. There are so many variables before you even commence with the frictive part. Where do you get the sticks? What kind of wood do you use? Do you take the bark off or not? Do you sharpen the ends or round them? How dry do they have to be? How smooth? Which stick goes where? How do you rub them? I’ve tried just using my hands and I’ve tried with a bow and line. So far, not even a wisp of smoke. The ace in my pocket is my friend Jay, who is the executive director of the Boulder Outdoor Survival School. Jay is the inspiration for my recent fascination in ancestral outdoor skills. When I first met and interviewed him for a podcast, I learned that BOSS’s underlying mission is not teaching survival skills so much as enabling a more intimate relationship with nature. My adventures had already been moving in that direction, so the idea resonated powerfully, and since getting to know him, I’ve been on a self-directed mission to rewild myself through fundamental knowledge and the applied use of materials. I’ve collected pine pitch to make glue, oak-wasp galls to make ink, quartz shards to make a hand drill. I feel a little sheepish, as if this is nothing more than cosplay, but I’m getting pretty good at spotting pitch and galls from afar, so there’s that.

In 1854, Henry David Thoreau published Walden. It sold only two thousand copies in five years but since then has been translated and published in nearly every language on earth. You might even be able to quote some of it by heart. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life…” The fascination with Thoreau and his pursuit of a simple, wild, and natural life has not waned; indeed, it remains as popular and vital as it was two hundred years ago, if not more so. In February 2026, the New York Times reported the latest trend in cabins is building replicas of Thoreau’s ten-by-fifteen-foot Walden Pond shelter, often using unpowered hand tools. Those available on Airbnb are being rented by people all over the globe. Folks are reaching for less as the remedy for more.

The tension between how we live and how we evolved to live seems universal, and timeless. I mean, Thoreau felt it necessary to flee civilization in the 1800s—what, was he doomscrolling the town crier? Maybe this was an issue for paleo humans, too, longing for the wild even as they lived in it. Maybe homo sapiens have never been and never will be satisfied. But I suspect we are happiest and least needy when we own nothing but a small kit of necessities we can carry, when we embody the environment as home, when we have a close community of fellows. I think of three-thousand-year-old Ötzi the Iceman a lot more than I think of Thoreau. It’s true that he was the victim of a murder, which is a bummer. But he also had food in his belly, shoes on his feet, medicine in his pouch, a handmade knife, a quiver of arrows, and evidence of being completely at home in the untamed Alps. Except for the arrow in the shoulder thing, that’s a model I can embrace.

On Jay’s advice, I went looking for cottonwood for my hearthboard and spindle, a better choice than the who-knows-what wood I tried first. Cottonwood is a common tree in the Southwest, typically found in riverbottoms, the heart-shaped leaves reminiscent of higher-elevation aspens, but in my part of the Mojave Desert, it’s rarely seen. There’s a wash near me, however, with enough water to shelter a cluster of four cottonwoods tucked high in a niche. After a few days of storms, I spent an hour there, listening to the water burble and studying how cottonwoods grow and branch. What a difference it makes in your relationship to a tree, foraging wood for a higher use than fuel.

The cottonwood wood sits on my workbench. When I have the time, I’m going to forge ahead and try to figure it out on my own. If I fail, I know Jay is there to guide me. The last time we spoke, he’d spent the morning teaching his daughter and a bunch of six year olds to make friction fire. I wonder if Thoreau knew how to do that?