NEAR ISABELLA, MINN. ‑ In a breakneck, bumper-to-bumper culture, taking a convenient route can become mindless habit. Consider groceries. It's easy to forget that food doesn't come from a supermarket; it's just available there. And for some people, even fish eggs are edible when they're labeled caviar.
Micah Friedman and Christine Cole define a different perspective. It's one of self-reliance, sustainability and mindful choices. They reside in the bush near Isabella in northern Minnesota where an abundance of their groceries comes from the land where they live.
Friedman, 30, made his way to the North Woods from Oklahoma City where he said he grew up skateboarding. Initially, he came to learn primitive skills at the Traditional Ways Gathering on the Bad River Reservation near Lake Superior in Wisconsin. He claims no professional degrees, but over the past 10 years he has acquired a bounty of experience in a landscape and culture that offers him primitive methods of hunting, harvesting and crafting.
Cole, 27, said she grew up in a typical middle-class American family. After graduating high school from the Perpich Center for Arts Education, she attended Northland College in Ashland, Wis., where she earned a degree in sustainable community development. However, she had another yearning.
"I knew at a young age that I wanted to buy land and live in the woods," she said. "I did make it through college, but it wasn't what I wanted to be doing. I always knew I wanted to be out here doing something different."
The two are well aware they could live an entirely different lifestyle: Get jobs, live in a town, buy most of their food from a store. They sometimes take on seasonal employment for a deer processor, in construction or at a resort. But for the past three years, their year-round home is an 8-by-20 cabin they constructed on their 25-acre property that is surrounded by public land. Infrequent trips to the grocery store are usually for items like bread, eggs, dairy products and spices. Procuring food from the wild is a substantial part of their lives.
Stigmatized delicacies
Wild rice, grains and berries are among their harvest. So are wild meats like beaver, snowshoe hares and bottom-feeder fish. Occasional roadkill is part of their diet, too. They recognize these meats are stigmatized in American culture. They find that ironic. Friedman admitted he believed some of the stigmas, too, until he found out just how edible those foods are.
He also explained that stigmas often translate to wasted food. He cited how beavers are typically harvested only for their pelts. Anglers sometimes leave suckers to die on creek banks because they think suckers compete with game fish. And while cultures worldwide have traditionally eaten snowshoe hares, many people in American society don't even think hares are edible.