On the Move, Woven in a Net
Six days in the wilderness, eating fish stomach fried in rattlesnake fat
This story is about six days in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. It was six days off the phone. It wasn't enough — I want six months. No phone is easy with a dozen cool people present all the time. I got a taste of the primordial habitat and I want more. I met some curious cats out there in the bush. It’s funny how we can meet more people in the wilderness than in cities.
“Welcome to the desert of the real.”
Morpheus
“It’s time, we’re going.”
“Right now?”
“Right now.”
I get out of the car and into the plane. The pilot shuts the door. The sun is rising over Montana.
Janahlee stands outside the plane. “Wait do you guys want breakfast?” she inquires over the engine noise.
The pilot opens the door.
Janahlee hands me a bear burrito and says, “There was a situation and Jordan’s not going to be there when you land. He’ll be there at nine.”
“Okay, thank you.”
The door shuts. The plane taxis past a few cows, then stops.
“We’ll let the engine warm up for a minute,” says the pilot through the headset.
There are two women on the bush plane with me. I met them yesterday. We are flying into the wilderness to meet Jordan Jonas, Cade Cole, seven pack horses, and a few other strangers, for a wilderness survival course.
The pilot throttles us forward, off the ground, flying West, into the mountains. We pass over several ridges. There’s a dirt road with an SUV parked at the end. It’s long behind us now.
“I have a question,” I say.
“Yessir?” says the pilot.
“Where are we going to land this plane?”
“You’ll see.”
“I hope so.”
“They didn’t give us parachutes, so I think we’ll be OK,” says Kathy. She hits her vape and asks, “Are we going to do a water landing?”
“No ma’am.”
Kathy is a wife, mother, and Vegas cocktail waitress of twenty years. She’s tough as nails, has unlimited energy, and brought two nicotine vapes.
We surpass more ridges. The steep terrain has huge exposed rock slabs where not even the most badass pine trees can survive.
We trim the treetops of a high ridge. The pilot cuts the engine, dips, turns, and sets us down in a field along a river.
The pilot and I get out and he starts handing me bags. The girls are taking photos. All the bags are out. The pilot gets back in the plane and takes off.
It’s cold. The sun is behind the mountains that surround us.
“Well, this is weird,” I say.
We build a fire which adds a little comfort.
Two hours later, Jordan and Cade arrive with the pack horses, who carry most of our food and gear. Two horses fell off a cliff. A mudslide washed out the trail so the train went up and around but a horse got spooked and pushed two others down the mountain. They tumbled sixty feet, but survived. One of them is still alive because the saddle flipped to her stomach, stopping her from being Shish Kebab’d by a fallen tree.
The crash site is littered with food and camp gear.
Jordan is sick, Cade is recovering.
“Man, I wasn’t gonna say this but I felt so sick I just grabbed a bunch of medicine and took it,” says Cade Cole. “I woke up in the night with such a bad stomach ache, man, I shit myself. I thought it was decongestant but it was laxatives.”
Cade finds a field mouse. He picks it up and shows it to the group. The mouse squirms. He releases it into the grass. It flailing and fails to run away.
“Must’ve broken its spine,” says Cade.
He drops his boot heel on the mouse several times before one final squish.
Hell of an unintentional welcome.
The group is silent.
I start laughing. People make wide-eyed, half-laughs and look around.
My notebook is out. I wonder if people think I’m a journalist. Right now, the writing is an emotional management thing. Release the tiller, I write.
The gang's all here so we launch an eight-mile trek toward our intended campsite. In an ideal situation, I would have lightweight wool socks, summer hiking pants, taped feet and grippy hiking shoes. I have shorts, cotton socks, running shoes, and blisters forming.
It’s 102 degrees. The sun is directly overhead. Three miles in, I switch to flip-flops to cool the hotspots. I plow through the brush in shorts and flip flops, trying to keep Jordan within eyesight.
Five miles in, the group is gathered together in a smidge of shade. Jordan breaks out lunch. It’s a classic American, school-lunch sandwich. One for each of us.
“I like that there’s multiple pieces of meat,” says Maria, who grew up in Russia.
We swim through more brush.
“How much further to the campsite?” I ask a disappearing Jordan.
“Twenty feet.”
This was inaccurate.
Half a mile later, we reach the campsite — a partially shaded dirt shelf on a mountain. A creek flows nearby. A hot and steep hike on loose terrain separates the camp from our water source.
Jordan picks up a small shovel and begins digging for water.
Is this a joke?
He cuts a branch off an elderberry bush and hollows it out using a rusty wire that he scavenged. He sticks the wooden pipe into the mountain and spring water shoots out. Fresh drinkable mountain water flows nonstop.
Back home at my apartment, we have running water that I never drink, and it ain’t free. All that advancement and we’ve gone backwards.
“How’d you know that was the spot?” I ask Jordan.
“I saw the boulder was dry on top and damp below, so I dug it out.”
With spring water flowing in our camp I morphed from concerned to euphoric. Many sticks serve us well that week. Fires, shelters, fishing poles, cookware, weapons, and plumbing. The stick is a formidable resource.
“You could kill an elephant with a sharp stick if you hit it in the right spot,” says Cade Cole.
I ask him about the rifle that is next to me. he custom-made it for himself.
“Have you ever shot a wolf with it?”
He tells his shooting-a-wolf story.
I’m glad men like this exist to keep it going. Soft times make weak men. Weak men create hard times. Hard times make strong men.
The first night, I sleep under the stars. I lay there with Dani, a London photographer who until tonight, had never seen a shooting star. Throughout the night, I feel movement on my skin. Sweat or bugs or both. I take half a milligram of xanax. That, as always, did the trick.
On this Jordan Jonas survival course, there’s no specific schedule or rules. Jordan demonstrates skills—participation, attention, and presence are entirely voluntary.
There are large swaths of time to carve spoons and forks, make horse hair fish lures, shoot bows, craft arrows, fish, swim, talk and whatever else you can think of.
Jordan is trying to carve a whistle. I brought in a $7 plastic recorder. As his whistle fails to make a sound, I play a note behind him. He spins around for a good laugh.
Dani and I bushcraft a chess board with hand-carved wooden pieces. The pawns are stones.
Jordan makes an announcement. “On Thursday and Friday we’ll only eat what we catch and gather, for thirty-six hours.”
More or less, fish, clams, and berries are the only items on the menu, in the confines of government regulations.
On the hike to the camp, we stopped and swam at a beach spot on a river. In that hole, we spotted lots of fish, including salmon. Those salmon swam nine-hundred miles from the ocean to get here. After three nights at the mountain camp, the plan is to move our camp to that beach.
We pack up and descend to the river trail. At a crossing, we decide to split up. One group walks in the river, fly fishing along the way, while my group hikes to the beach on the trail above.
After an hour and a half of hiking, my group reaches the beach site. We scout our new home. There’s bear poop, lots of firewood, and still many fish. I scale a cliff to get a top-down view of the water. I can see dozens, literally dozens of fish resting at the bottom of the hole. That’s our food supply. Berries and clams don’t cut it. Unfortunately, the other group has our factory fishing gear. We have our sticks with paracord and bushcraft lures. It’s not going well.
I have no food for the group. I clear and flatten the beach, preparing it for sleep. I build a rock bench for us. David and I build a hot fire and find flat rocks for cooking. Hopefully, there’s something to cook.
David is from the financially wealthiest county in Connecticut, not far from where I grew up. Months before this, he sold his marketing technology company to private equity, which means he is sitting on millions. He’s on vacation with us, eating river clams.
We hear a gunshot.
Jordan and the rest of the crew arrive with a dead rattlesnake and six fish.
Let’s go.
On top of that, I now have a factory fly fishing setup with weights and lures to attract these fish I’ve been staring at for three hours. They had me chasing. Now I have them chasing.
I focus on my hands and reel in an appetizing whitefish. My first fish. It flops on the rocks. I lift up a large rock to smash it.
“No no, smaller one,” says Maria. I change rocks and bash it three times.
Maria picks up my fish then finds a stick. She jams the stick through the gills and out the mouth. She turns, looks me in the eyes, and says in her Russian accent, “Welcome to the jungle.”
Dinner is around the fire.
I pose the question, “Is this the first time someone has eaten fish stomach fried in rattlesnake fat with elderberry juice, mint and lemon?”
“It expands the palette,” says Rich, who packed in the lemon. “The elderberry expands it one note.”
“The rattlesnake fat expands it an entire octave.”
The snake meat is delicious. My beverage is mint tea with elderberry extract and fish eggs.
The sun sets. It’s time for bed. We lay out on the tarp on the beach, ten meters from the bear poop. It’s dark.
I’m rummaging through my pack looking for my last xanax.
“This beach is better than the mountain,” someone says.
“It’s flatter, that’s for sure.”
I locate the precious sleep inducer.
“Where’s the stars?" asks Kathy.
“The clouds are covering them.”
“This is dumb,” says Jordan.
I laugh. The xan falls into the sand. It’s a sand bar now.
“‘This is dumb’ – Jordan Jonas,” I say.
“There’s a quote for your book,” says Kathy.
I find it and stash it for another time.
We rise with the sun to catch and cook breakfast.
Dani has a satellite phone that warns us of an impending rain storm. It doesn’t dawn on us that we should do something — or even tell the rest of the group.
It starts pouring rain. We scramble to gather our belongings. The tarp we slept on is now the roof above our heads. I hook a corner of the tarp to a bush and recruit two others to hold up the tarp above our heads, creating an impromptu shelter for our gear and our crew.
The rain lightens and the group decides that now is a good time to set out on the five-mile hike back to the airfield. Tomorrow morning is extraction. I tape up my feet for the hike back.
We’re at the airfield for the final fire on the final night. With a dozen people of this caliber, the stream of stories and jokes flows on and on. Uninterrupted.
“Don’t worry officer, this is a trout that identifies as a salmon,” jokes Greg, an entrepreneur from Oregon, and a repeat customer of Jonas Expeditions. “She wanted a dog, I didn’t want a dog, so we compromised and got a dog,” another banger from Greg.
Two thirds of our crew are entrepreneurs. Who would abandon the certainties and comforts of material abundance in exchange for the desert of the real? The entrepreneur.
The real requires peril and survival demands creativity.
The wilderness demands we exercise our faculties. This expedition has largely been figure-it-out-as-you-go. That’s what entrepreneurs do. Bringing a new product or service to the market is a tricky slog — a game of survival that doesn’t usually go as planned.
“Man, they made chorizo-flavored spam, but they discontinued it,” says Cade. “Man, I cried.”
I look at Dani, we laugh. “I’m gonna write that down,” I tell her.
“What are you going to do with your writing?”
“Hide it.”
Cade again, “I’m a man of God, I try to be honest, but I’ll fuck an insurance company.”
“Matthew 6:8,” says Jordan. Perfect timing, unplannable execution, and irreplicable delivery.
David, who graduated from Harvard, says “I read Matthew 6:8 and it doesn’t say that.”
I smile.
“Oh, I get it now,” he says.
The fire blazes on. It’s dark; people start reflecting.
“In a way, this is like coming home,” I say to the group. “To the environment we grew up in.” By ‘we’ I mean humanity. By ‘environment’ I mean our nomadic hunter-gatherer tribe. A courageous creative collective, if you will.
“We evolved for this lifestyle,” says Jordan.
“It’s amazing how simple life can be,” Kathy adds.
“I was embarrassed when I saw Jordan just has one set of clothes,” I say.
“Me too,” says Jordan. He looks at his clothes. “Oh crap!”
“I’m just happy to be out here with you guys and get away from things, get away from the real world,” says David.
“You mean get to things.”
“Right, exactly. This is the real world.”
The night rolls on. More jokes, more stories.
“Kids don’t have a chance against the forces of tech. A divided attention is such a disadvantage in life,” says Jordan.
Nothing focuses the mind like love and survival.
“Hypothetically, we could have the best of both worlds if we play it right,” he adds.
Let’s see how well we can play it.
Two nights in a row, I woke up under the stars and all I could do was write. I wrote over and over, “Further, see it through.”
This trip has reminded me of that one-word message: Further.
“I have a life and I have lived it. I have done my best. I played my part. I read my lines and picked up my cues and hit my marks. I was born a child and I became an adult, and then I went further, as far as there is to go, all the way to a weird and empty place called Done.”
Jed McKenna
It’s a month later. I invested a lot to make that trip happen. I filled a notebook and now it’s gone. I’m still pissed. My preference would be to have that fucking notebook.
What is the universe creating? It’s not up to whoever ‘me’ is.
All we can ever lose is illusion.
I lost the notebook to remember this:
you shall possess the origin of all poems.
To know what I wrote, in its entirety, I say unto thee: open eyes, body moving, woven in a net.
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them for yourself.
Walt Whitman
Swept out to sea
I look at the world
And there’s my journal
It is written
Hobo Jordo
At age eighteen Jordan rode trains around America. He found a town in Virginia giving away houses that he could fix up. Jordan’s Christian practice led him to Russia to help build an orphanage. He wound up in Siberia with ex-cons who introduced him to reindeer herders. Jordan herded reindeer, trapped, learned Russian and survived in the Siberian wilderness for years. On a whim, he applied to go on History Channel's survival competition called, Alone. Three years later they called him. On the show, in the Arctic by himself, he killed a moose with a bow. A wolverine started to steal his moose meat so he killed the beast with an ax. After thriving for seventy five days in the Arctic, Jordan won half a million dollars.
“The show was easy,” Jordan says, “Russia was hard.”
After the television show, Jordan went on a hunting podcast that Joe Rogan listened to. Joe sent him a message, “Hey, I loved the podcast, if you’re ever in L.A. let me know.”
“I was like, well, I guess I'll be in L.A. next week,” Jordan says he told Joe.
Three years ago I listened to that JRE episode and visited Jordan’s website.
This morning, Jordan and I are boiling river clams in a rusty scavenged can.
Pretty soon Jordan ‘figure-out-the-details-later’ Jonas will shoot a rattlesnake and we’ll eat it.
Writing about a wilderness experience is re-drawing the Mona Lisa with a fork. Also, I lost all the notes I took. I filled a journal and if I had to guess, it’s found a landfill. Every stream finds the ocean.
Blessed is thou who finds my notes
For they shall see inside of a man
A man they will never know, nor ever find
Back to the clams boiling in half of a rusty can — it’s an Idaho clam bake. We flew out of western Montana into the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness in Idaho. Officially, there’s a one hour time change. But in our situation, the time is whatever we say it is.
It’s amazing that this experience is something you can sign up for.
Thanks for reading
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I talked with dozens of people from all around the world via curiosity conversations. Schedule here: https://calendly.com/chrisjames3/30min
Have a great rest of your day.
Wait holy shit is that Jordan from Alone?! I've been wanting to do a trip with him for forever!
"The xan falls into the sand. It’s a sand bar now." - this gave me a chuckle, awesome work man!