Simple Living-Recreation

Continuing with one of my favorite themes, ‘simple living’, consider recreation and its many facets. Americans, common people I am speaking of, work hard and generally put in a lot of hours on the job. But we have learned the benefit of recreation, our generation has made it a major industry. I will not claim to have saved much money on my chosen forms of recreation, but since money is so important a commodity in a simplified lifestyle, the question begs to be ask, “What kinds of recreation is found compatible to a simplified life?”

Since this is “Ernie’s World”, I am expressing my own ideal of recreation and the ways I go about enjoying those pursuits. Some forms of recreation is just plain unsuitable to someone who has chosen a life, whether by choice or circumstance, that does not produce a high income. Many things that Americans consider ‘normal recreation’ are just too expensive for my pocketbook, even if they appeal to my appetite. These days travel is a great recreation and enjoyed by a large number of people. I traveled a fair bit in my younger days, but seldom for pure recreation. I find the tourist “traps” to be expensive places to visit and more often than not, turn out to be a letdown in that the hype was more than the reality. No matter how you go about traveling in these times of high energy costs, it is a costly undertaking.

If one lives in a city and practices a simple living philosophy, there are lots of low-cost activities to do for recreation. I would be found in a library pouring over the oldest books on the shelves, libraries are free for public use and great places to visit.

Living in the backwoods calls for other forms of recreation. First, it costs us a considerable amount of money just to make our necessary trips to town. I have given up the recreation of local runabout trips. Where we currently live there is not much to see, when you have seen one farm, you have mostly see the what represents a central MN farm. They don’t vary very much, even in details.
When we lived 50 miles north of here, we were in the lake and forest country. There was always something to do close by. Lots of good fishing lakes and rivers. Thousands of acres of state and paper company land within walking distance of our house that was free for the exploring, hunting or hiking.
Ruling out leaving home, our forms of recreation are somewhat limited, but only by our imaginations. My main activity that can be described as recreation is conducted from early September to mid-November in the form of deer hunting with bow or rifle. I won’t claim it is a “cheap” sport, because if the truth is told, what hunters spend on license, bows, guns, clothing etc., adds up to enough money to buy a lot of meat, if that is the only consideration. The facts in the case are that very few hunters are hunting for the “meat”. Rather we are hunting because we simply want to be in the woods. Bow hunting requires a lot of time in the woods, since any shot must be up “close and personal”, the bow hunter will have a lot fewer opportunities to take a deer. On the other hand, he will see a lot more deer than those who only hunt the rifle season, due to the amount of time spent in the woods and the undisturbed conditions of the wildlife.

My ideal of hunting has changed over the years. No longer do I enjoy “suffering” the cold and stiffness that results from sitting in a tree stand for several hours every day. To cure this, I built what we call a ‘hunting shack’, it is really a glorified ground blind, but since it is built for comfort we call it a shack. It is fully insulated, including the floor and ceiling. I have installed a box stove that once fired up will turn the small space into an oven, if I get too free with the wood. I don’t have a recliner, because that might make too much noise if I want to position myself for a shot out one of the 4 windows built for the purpose. Instead I found a swivel rocking chair that is quiet and I can still prop my feet up on a stool for maximum comfort for the “grim vigil” as I call the hunts. Of course to make the time more enjoyable, I also take along something to read. Usually my little Acer netbook that I have downloaded hundreds of free books on. Now that is recreation!

Since my business is mostly conducted at home, the only escape I get from seeing work to be done is to get out of sight. Woodworking used to be one form of recreation, but that got ruined when I started building furniture for income. Somehow, at least some of us, when we turn our recreation into income producing affairs, we lose something. No longer is it relaxing to turn wood into something useable and nice, it becomes “work”. I have determined that the only difference in building a piece of furniture for our own use and building a piece for profit, lays in my subconscious. For a piece to be sold I expect a minimum number of flaws, whereas pieces for our own use I feel less pressure to make a “perfect piece”, which, incidentally, has never been made in my shop.

There are other forms of ‘homegrown recreation’ that is compatible with simple living and does not ‘break the bank’.

My wife combines her love of gardening with the necessity of producing good food. Now I used to enjoy garden work. But the garden lays too close to “my job” for me to find any relaxation in leisurely puttering in the garden. For, all the while, my eyes roam to the woodshop or lumber yard that always has some work a-waiting. I find that I barely make time to even see the garden during the season that it is most interesting. That would be just before the harvest work begins, when the plants are young and thriving but not yet producing “more work”! I can make “recreation” out of ‘consuming’ the products from the garden however, but since the over consumption of food is also a “hazard” not to be overdone, I am not sure where the boundary is between eating a meal and ‘recreational eating’, I am thinking it is somewhere between beans and watermelon.

In our household there is no question that we find more recreation by reading than anything else. We don’t have TV, but all three of us are bookworms. I find it nearly impossible to sit through a movie, I would much rather read than observe, but that is only a personal taste.

Other forms of recreation that are easy on the wallet include; writing, which is one area that I am working on. Some of us go through our whole life being readers and just naturally think of writing “someday”. Since time waits on no one, it has become clear that if I am going to do any writing, I best get with it before my brain gets any weaker, this blog is my “test” and I have already learned that it takes a degree of discipline to force myself to sit down and write a post, but once I get started if is a form of recreation. Whether I will write anything beyond this blog and my daily journal for my children and grand children is yet to be seen. Then there are hundreds of outdoor things that we can do in a rural area that can’t be done outside a city ‘backdoor’. Like shooting our Blackpowder guns or modern rifles.

Speaking of shooting rifles, I will close this blog entry out with some humor about shooting. It was not very funny at the time, but it is now. We raised two hogs for meat this past summer, something we do every year or two. We have never had any trouble at all with the ‘health’ of the pigs we have raised, until this year. For one, it was a rainy summer and one of the hogs got pneumonia. Now pneumonia in a hog is not what one might expect. There is no sign of sickness except the pig will go “off its feed” and just not grow. No sign of hard breathing or anything, one of them just would not eat. After some research and then medicine, it was ok. But then one day me and our daughter was shooting our Blackpowder rifles and shot for an hour or so. For several days after the event the pigs we off their feed again and both of them seemed to be ‘sick’ or at least did not act like a normal rambunctious pig. They finally started eating and we did not know for some time what the problem was that time. Until the early goose season opened. My wife was out feeding on morning. The pigs came bouncing out of their house like normal to get their breakfast when some goose hunters let loose with a string of shotgun blasts. The pigs took to their house and would not come back out to eat all day. That is when we discovered that they were “gun-shy”! I have been around hogs much of my life and never heard of one being “gun-shy”, but these two surely were and that explained why they went off their feed when we were target shooting, which was right close to their pen to begin with. It must have been a horrifying experience for the poor dumb creatures. I have know many dogs that were “gun-shy” and a few people, but never a pig! Just goes to show that living in the country is always a “learning experience”, if nothing else.