Call of the Wild : City Dwellers Learn American Indian ‘Earth Skills’ at a Mountain Institute

It was “Quest for Fire,” the Southern California version.

At a private nature reserve in the Santa Monica Mountains, nine grown-ups who had adopted Indian-style names such as Marmot, Wolverine and Bobcat hunched over a blanket and furiously tried to make sparks and smoke.

Some glanced steel strikers off chunks of flint while others rotated sticks with fire bows.

Sharon (Snake) Puppe and Jorge (Jack Rabbit) Lopez tried it the hard way. They took turns swiveling a long wooden spindle between their palms with a rapid back-and-forth motion. Its point dug into a cottonwood fire board and squealed like a worn fan belt.

Lopez, sweating, finally gave up.

“Forget it,” he said.

“Where’s my lighter?” Puppe asked.

Old-fashioned fire-starting was just one of the American Indian “earth skills” that mountain man Randy (Roadrunner) Childs taught last weekend.

His class--which stopped far short of actually building a fire--was typical of those offered by the Wilderness Institute, a nonprofit organization run by Childs’ brother Bradley. The brothers, who live with their families in Thousand Oaks, think up ways to lure Southern Californians out of the cities and into the sage.

“It’s not recreation. It’s a form of experiential education,” said Bradley Childs, who founded the institute in 1984.

A metropolitan-based wilderness institute may seem contradictory, but Bradley Childs said nature is closer to the cities than many people think. He said a bobcat once wandered onto the institute’s parking lot in Agoura Hills, just off the Ventura Freeway.

“Wilderness,” he said, “is a state of mind.”

The institute conducts most of its classes in the Santa Monica Mountains.

In some canyons, he said, “if you filter out the occasional plane that goes by overhead, or that downtown Los Angeles is only 45 minutes away, you could be in any wilderness area anywhere.”

Three times a year, the institute mails out a course catalogue. Its fall classes include beginning rock climbing, pine needle basketry and an obstacle course for families that uses ropes. On one overnight excursion, students will forage for delicacies such as acorns, chokecherries and wild grains.

“They’re going to pick ‘em, cook ‘em and eat ‘em,” Bradley Childs said.

Because as many as 70% of its students are women, the institute offers single-sex hikes, ropes courses, rock climbing and even feminist storytelling sessions.

Not that men are overlooked. The institute also has ropes courses and a two-day wilderness gathering for men only. Other classes are designed for people in wheelchairs.

Bradley Childs said the institute’s most popular offering is its Sunday morning brunch hike. The reward for a three-mile walk is a tablecloth laden with bagels and lox, fruit, pastries and other goodies.

Corporations are also discovering the outdoors through the Wilderness Institute, Bradley Childs said. The institute offers “customized outdoor experiences” for companies such as Exxon and GTE and even the Internal Revenue Service.

“The goal is not to rough it. It’s to have an off-site experience, to have a chance to get in touch with yourself and your teammates so you can be effective working as a team,” he said.

Other programs target schools and disadvantaged youths.

Classes aren’t cheap. The five-hour earth skills class costs $45. A beginning rock climbing class is $60, while the two-day men’s wilderness gathering is $165. But Bradley Childs said that with the cost of insurance and catalogues, the institute loses money or breaks even on its classes.

Bradley Childs learned his way around the Santa Monica Mountains as one of the original rangers for the national recreation area. He found the job on his way to Alaska.

“My goal was to be a park ranger. It was just funny to find it in Los Angeles,” he said.

He now represents Ventura County as an advisory member of the Santa Monica Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority. He was appointed by Ventura County Supervisor Maria VanderKolk.

He and his brother have been practicing their American Indian skills since they were kids in Michigan.

In his office, Bradley Childs has a photograph of him and Randy in the wilds of suburban Detroit, where they grew up. Bradley, 5, is wearing an Indian headdress and aiming a wooden gun. Randy, 12, is too old for such adornments.

“A lot of my own confidence and inspiration comes from wilderness experiences,” Bradley Childs said.

Other family members sometimes participate in classes. Brother Greg Childs, a psychotherapist in San Diego, will teach the men’s wilderness gathering with Randy and Bradley in December.

Bradley Childs, now 37, handles the institute’s administration while Randy Childs, 44, prefers to remain outdoors as the institute’s chief instructor. He has a private consulting business that designs ropes courses for institutions.

While Bradley Childs is smoothly groomed, Randy Childs looks more the part of the mountain man. A beard covers much of his weathered face. Silver hair falls below his shoulders when it is not put back in a ponytail.

For his earth skills class, Randy Childs strolled down a trail in the nature preserve and explained how Indians chewed willow bark to cure headaches and how acorn powder was used to make porridge, like Cream of Wheat, after the acorns were leached of tannic acid.

Barbara Allawos, a confident 12-year-old who was one of three children in the group, already knew about edible vegetation. She offered a plant as a sort of hors d’oeuvre.

“Nibble on the end,” she urged. “It tastes like licorice.”

It did.

Randy Childs gathered the class around a blanket, lit sage leaves in a bowl and passed it around so everyone in the class could wave some of its sharp smoke onto himself.

Then he passed around a series of bottles from a wooden box. The bottles held mountaineer stuff that he has collected over the years: acorns, shelled, unshelled and powdered. Chia seeds from sage that were like tiny gray sesame seeds. Pine nuts. A liquid made from bone marrow that looked and smelled like paste. Small pieces of pemmican, “one of the first trail bars to come along.” Two-year-old jerky. Sinews from a beaver tail.

Other items from the box were a knife carved from obsidian, melded to a cross-section of bone; antlers from white-tailed and mule deer for comparison; and more deer bones--a hoof attached to a foreleg and knee, the joints fitted as precisely as pieces of injection-molded plastic.

It all came from “the supermarket and hardware store all around us,” Randy explained.

Later, he showed the group how to make cordage, a kind of rope, from the long fibrous leaves of a yucca.

Tom Shanley of Newbury Park gently mashed a leaf between two stones to separate the fibers. Green sticky sap from the leaf collected on his thumb and fingers.

“I’ve always been interested about learning basic skills,” Shanley said. “I’ve spent a lot of time by myself in the outdoors. You never know when you’re going to need something.”

Monica Nolan, also of Newbury Park, said she came for her Girl Scouts.

She’s taken institute classes on wilderness skills and navigating with a map and compass, and said she has passed on her knowledge to Troop 839 of Sequoia Service.

“I haven’t gotten them too lost yet,” she said.

Lopez, who lives in West Los Angeles, said he and his wife also are regular students of the Wilderness Institute.

“People get in a better mood when they get out of the city,” he said.

A few managed to create yucca-fiber friendship bracelets, and Randy Childs moved on to the most difficult skill of the day--starting fires.

“The one thing you learn in survival class is to always take matches,” he told the group. “We’re going to learn to appreciate matches today.”

Hot and sweaty after his own demonstration of fire-making, Randy Childs took a break in the shade of an oak tree.

While his students labored to produce the smallest sparks and wisps of smoke with the primitive tools, the mountain man cooled off with a can of Mountain Dew.