I was 15 years old when the movie, Jeremiah Johnson, starring Robert Redford, was released. I went to see it with my brother and father in Kansas City. The film had a profound effect on my dad as I think it had a lot to do with his decision to move west to Oregon several years later.
The movie also had a profound effect on me as well. As a decidedly odd teenager with a hardly a friend in the world, the idea of disappearing into the mountains -- never to be seen again -- was very appealing. It motivated me to read several books on wilderness survival and to daydream about escaping from a world I often couldn't understand.
By my late teens, the idea of hiking away into oblivion became strong. With my meager wages from a variety of jobs, I began to purchase the kind of equipment that a mountain man would need. For all my daydreaming, however, I think I always knew deep down inside that the life of a woodland hermit would never work out for me because of three glaring reasons.
The first reason is that I am a hopeless klutz. I am an accident waiting to happen. Even if I had set off to disappear into the uncharted wilderness, chances are great that I would have injured myself before I got much of any place.
Closely aligned with Reason #1 is the fact that I am not mechanically-inclined in the least. In a forest near my home at the time, I practiced my woodsman skills and I failed miserably most of the time. I tried to build a rudimentary log cabin, but I could not seem to cut the notches in the logs so that they fit. I somehow managed to cobble together a makeshift structure, but it leaked profusely and the front door kept falling off.
But the biggest reason I knew I could never leave behind modern society to live off the land was that I was a big fraidy cat!! Everything makes me anxious. I don't deal well with the unexpected. My life needs to be regimented and patterned -- the antithesis of hiking off into the unknown!
So, the life of a mountain man has never been anything but a grand fantasy for me. I still daydream about it to this day.
The movie also had a profound effect on me as well. As a decidedly odd teenager with a hardly a friend in the world, the idea of disappearing into the mountains -- never to be seen again -- was very appealing. It motivated me to read several books on wilderness survival and to daydream about escaping from a world I often couldn't understand.
By my late teens, the idea of hiking away into oblivion became strong. With my meager wages from a variety of jobs, I began to purchase the kind of equipment that a mountain man would need. For all my daydreaming, however, I think I always knew deep down inside that the life of a woodland hermit would never work out for me because of three glaring reasons.
The first reason is that I am a hopeless klutz. I am an accident waiting to happen. Even if I had set off to disappear into the uncharted wilderness, chances are great that I would have injured myself before I got much of any place.
Closely aligned with Reason #1 is the fact that I am not mechanically-inclined in the least. In a forest near my home at the time, I practiced my woodsman skills and I failed miserably most of the time. I tried to build a rudimentary log cabin, but I could not seem to cut the notches in the logs so that they fit. I somehow managed to cobble together a makeshift structure, but it leaked profusely and the front door kept falling off.
But the biggest reason I knew I could never leave behind modern society to live off the land was that I was a big fraidy cat!! Everything makes me anxious. I don't deal well with the unexpected. My life needs to be regimented and patterned -- the antithesis of hiking off into the unknown!
So, the life of a mountain man has never been anything but a grand fantasy for me. I still daydream about it to this day.
For me, the scenery in the movie is the star. The plot is secondary. I imagine those people who really lived that way had a challenging life.
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