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Originally Posted by mrnoodle
If you want to know what it's like to live off the land successfully, find a copy of "Alone in the Wilderness," a documentary filmed in Alaska in the 60s or 70s. It's been on PBS recently, but I don't know who the guy is. I'll google it later.
Anyway, he spends every waking moment either getting food, building shelter, or making improvements to his food and shelter. Lived like that for years before he finally got too old and had to go to a nursing home, where he died pretty quickly. You want tough? That old man was tough as nails, and as gentle as could be. I need to watch that again.
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I saw that when it was on our local PBS station recently. It was laughable. First, the film was sped up so it was faster than real life. It was most obvious when he was sawing or hammering that it was being shown at about 1.5 speed or so. Laws of physics determine how fast you can swing a hammer. Doesn't matter how strong or fast you are, two people with the same length arm will swing a hammer of identical weight at the same speed. That's how pendulums on clocks are able to be used to tell time. He was clearly swinging his hammer faster than any human I've ever seen. The saw too. Also, for any given task, he would show 1 step (usually the most visually insteresting one) and skip the other ten steps he had to follow to get to that point and to go past that point.
Yes. He built a log cabin in the wilderness. Yes. That's hard work and it's not something seen on TV every day, so it's neat to watch. But that "documentary" was so biased as to the amount of work you can get done in a set period of time that I would almost classify it as fiction. Shows like "This Old House" make it look like you can do significant amounts of work in a weekend afternoon. It's part of the way material is presented on TV to keep it interesting, but at least those home improvement shows don't speed up the reels.