I’ve been meaning to get on this forum for a while but was one of the unlucky folks who had trouble registering.
I grew up in a small village of about 1,500 people in eastern Québec. I used to really like walking in the woods, getting my feet wet stepping in the small streams and dreaming of building a cabin there. I also liked walking on the rocky beaches of the St-Lawrence river (which we called “the sea” because you really couldn’t see the other side from where we lived). But I was also conflicted. I hated how people were riding their motocrosses and ATVs, abusing the landscape and making me feel unsafe. I also felt like I was the strange bird with all the other kids living with both their parents, a house and a car while I was living with my 2 siblings under the care of our single mother in the only apartment building of the area. My father was diagnosed with schizophrenia when I was only a few years old and I couldn’t find it in myself to share this with potential friends. So I felt like I didn’t belong there and wanted to move to the city where anonymity and diversity were commonplace (and ended up living in Montréal for several years).
Fast-forward to adulthood, I was (and still am) living the life of a privileged white man. I have two kids (8 and 4 years old) who have already learned to live and depend on an urban environment. I’m a software engineer and I think that everyone working in technology is paid too much for the value we provide (which, in a lot of instances, would be negative value). I started learning about rewilding through my learnings about nutrition/paleo/health when I got some early signs of retinopathy in my left eye due to complications of type 1 diabetes. I got that reversed pretty quickly by changing habits and that proved to be very enlightening because the current prescribed way to dealing with type 1 diabetes wasn’t working well at all for me. When you start to doubt one thing that you’ve taken as a given all your life, it’s easy to start questioning more!
I got some introduction to rewilding through Unlearn, Rewild which I bought used at a festival with books about the environment and through Daniel Vitalis’s Rewild Yourself podcast (which I got disinterested in at some point but found useful for some time). I’m not sure which one came first but meanwhile, I was also reading every night trying to go deeper and finding some direction. I forgot to mention that I was living in San Francisco at the time, having moved in 2012. I felt stuck in what I could do because my ability to roam the land/live in the United States was tied to my employment. I felt stuck so we started planning to head back to Canada where we would be a little more free. I’ll spare you the details but we decided at the last minute to stay in the United States, find a new home and accepted to spend a few years locked in the world of a 9-to-5 job while going through the green card process that would allow me to stay without being tied to my contribution to the economy. So last summer, we traveled in our Volkswagen Vanagon on the west coast in search of a place to settle down and we finally ended up in Portland, in great part because of the rewilding community here.
I still struggle everyday with not having the opportunity (unless I were to decide to break the rules) to leave my job and reconnect with nature and live what I’ve been reading and aspiring to. But the biggest challenge for me is sharing this desire with my kids while still living in the city. I want them to learn to live a real life, which means not learning to live as a member of the civilization/system dependent on it. But everyday, they’re learning to get better at living in an urban environment and that probably means more things to unlearn later. We often feel isolated because of our different way of looking at the world (although I’m not sure I can say that about our kids yet) but we also feel isolated because we’re still very new to the area and we’re not as comfortable speaking English, French being our first language. This isolation, you might imagine, creates tension inside the home from not having a group of people to talk to/hang out with.
Fortunately, I got to know a few very nice people through Rewild Portland (, Peter) and I’m hoping we make more friends going to the free skills share/members hikes/classes. I’m also going to be doing rewild 201 in February which I’m very excited about.
Oh and I haven’t put too much thought in my username of boarkid
. I’ve been using this at work after we joked after seeing the picture from a terrible zoo in the 1930s where people were riding animals. Apparently, the kid looked like my son which prompted colleagues to speculate that this was a picture of me as a young boy (disregard the fact that I was born in the early 80s and not the 30s). I started using “boar kid” after that. And when came time to pick a username, I was thinking that boars are cool now so I might just stick with it.
Looking forward to learning and sharing from everyone here!
Update: I decided to drop boarkid
and change my username to my real name to make my identity clear. I’m thinking it might be better if I eventually meet more of you in real life