Coming at things from the "left"

I didn't come with a "standard issue" life. So It really can't be much of a surprise that I've ended up now with a non-standard issue way of working.

Born in Anchorage Alaska, which in the early 1960's had this odd white american frontier/techno island thing going on (heavy with airplanes) positioned amid an indiginous culture not that many generations out of a "lithic" (stone age) culture. I recall playing with my toy trucks and my stone ax, and bone hunting lance... equally comfortable with the "lithic" technology of the indiginous people. I recall my great aspiration at age 7 was to become a Sled Dog "musher".

My father built our home, (actually a cabin). It had only one bedroom and remained unfinished during the 9 years we lived with him. He worked as a carpenter putting up some of the larger buildings in Anchorage of the 1960's. But on his own time he loaded his own ammunition and aspired to be the "great white hunter". Having learned how to fabricate things (both metalic, wood and leather) by hand from his father and during a 7 month trip aboard the 3 masted schooner Wawona in 1947, I was exposed quite early to the notion that doing it myself might be "better" than buying what I need.

Being an avid hunter and fisherman, he brought home the bulk of our families meat supply from his hunting trips. I recall trying to stay out of the way as my parents processed his latest "kill", be it a thousand pound Moose carcass, hundreds of pounds of copper river red salmon (caught by means of an indian style fish wheel, legal for use by us whites in those days - 1962) where we worked far into the night cleaning, cutting, smoking, canning, freezing and preserving.

Oddly enough, my mother never developed the knack of cooking fish, so I only found out in my later life just how succulent a fresh "copper river salmon" really is when cooked on a cedar plank on a grill... I didn't know what we had.

We left Alaska 3 months prior to the big earthquake, and moved to Washington state, where I experienced the shock of living in a "Modern" city. I recall seeing freeways for the first time, and challenging my mother to explane to me how there could be "winter" with no snow (it rains in the winter on the West side of the mountains in washington state.

We lived for a short time with some people who had horses, and I got some rudimentary riding skills. We lived by various lakes and streams, and in mountains and deserts.

I eventually ended up with a "stepfather" who had a side interest in raising livestock, so I learned early how to milk a goat, feed calves by hand and build barbwire fences. There were also numerous moves (I can pack a truck tighter than just about anyone I know).

I went to a lot of different schools, and learned that the struggle to adapt socially was tougher than just about anything nature could throw at me.

In due time, I had a lot of different kinds of jobs, ranging from the typical entry level lawn mowing and landscaping tasks, to work in a foundry.

During the first oil crisis in the 1970's my brother and I did a lot of experimenting with alternative energy.

I used to make Hydrogen gas (by means of electrolisis) in our attic, and I recall my brother building an 8 foot parabolic structure (from cardboard and aluminum foil) that would focus sunlight, and could generate a fairly tightly focused hot spot that would almost cook a meal.

I also stood by as he went all out to produce about a half gallon of 186 proof alcahol that we drank maybe a teaspoon of (out of curiosity) then put the rest in his motercycle, where he got about 30 miles of transportation out of it.

The point is, I experienced enough to discover early, that there is NO singular right way to be or to do things, so I've always been able to experiment, and if something didn't work one way, I'd try something else.

In college I'm sure a lot of my friends were convinced I was crazy, or had aspirations of being some sort of lazy jobless bum because I didn't want an 8 to 5 job in some corporation. Having a collection of Mother Earth News magazines that promoted the "back to the land movement" and having seen the abuses of life as a wage slave, I was convinced there was a better way, and experimented with different approaches to that end.

So here I am, 30 years later, working as in a corporation giving all the appearances of "falling off the wagon" and abandoning my principles.

But then...

Little did they know... that the "world" as they knew it would change so drastically. Where in former times it was a "normal" expectation for one to progress through school, either the military on into college, on to career with one company (or at most 2), family and retirement in a fairly predictable order.

Who would have thought that the kind of "stuff" I was talking about in 1978 would become "the normal thing" now at the turn of the millenium?

Please e-mail any comments, questions or suggestions to
Michael Erickson
Page Last Revised: Saturday August 24, 2006