‘Pilgrim Pat’ Quilter of Laguna Beach Trades His Creature Comforts for Buckskins and Living History, Emulating the Rugged, Pre-1840 Lifestyle of Hunters and Trappers : True Grit

Grizzled mountain man Pat Quilter hefts a crude throwing tomahawk in his grizzled hand, his sweat-scarred buckskins rippling with the movement. In a face hemmed by his unkempt bushy beard and hair, his eyes narrow. His sinews tense, and the ‘hawk slices through the air, embedding with a resounding thud into an upended section of tree trunk.

A little higher and grizzled mountain man Pat would have had to strike out for the wilds of his next-door neighbor’s house: “Excuse me, but I believe that’s my tomahawk stuck in your stucco.”

Instead he walked past his gleaming BMW and into his own modern semi-Spanish-style Laguna house. This mountain man thing isn’t what it was 150 years ago.

I first met Quilter two decades ago, when his garage-sized Costa Mesa business was building guitar amps for many local bands. That company slowly grew to the $30 million per year QSC Audio Products (if you’ve gone to a movie theater, the Coach House or seen touring acts such as Jimmy Buffett, you’ve probably heard their pro-line gear), during which time Quilter came to be quite businesslike in his appearance. Though I hesitate to utter such a vile word, yuppie is a term Quilter has used in describing himself.

It was surprising, then, to run into him at Anaheim’s National Assn. of Music Merchants trade show in January and find that he’s had a hair explosion. His locks and beard were not merely long, but wild looking, sort of like having nose hair all over.

At least he was wearing normal clothing at the show. For a while he had taken to wearing his handmade buckskins to the office. “But I got so scroungy-looking that the guys have informed me that I really ought not to burden them with that,” Quilter complained.

It isn’t just the looks. A set of use-seasoned buckskins conveys an olfactory ambience that is rather like being in the vicinity of a dead and untidy deer. Quilter’s buckskins are only a year old, but they are mapped with sweat, grime and other wash-day worries. Not that he plans on washing them.

“That’s kind of heresy. You can wash them in Woolite in the cold cycle, and some guys do, but that’s not authentic. As far as we can tell from the old journals, ‘Unwashed save by the rains’ was one of the quotes of the day.”

The we here refers to the members of the buckskinners movement, of which Quilter is but a newcomer. In something of a more fun parallel to Robert Bly’s men’s movement, a lot of guys (and some women) are taking to the woods in a primitive manner, emulating the rugged pre-1840 lifestyle of American hunters and trappers.

Quilter guesses there must be thousands of buckskinners among us in the state, since he has seen in excess of 600 at a single gathering. Those take place over weekends and holidays with varying degrees of historical severity. At most of them, participants drive their tents, tepees and other gear into a site, then park the vehicles out of view some distance away. (Quilter leaves the BMW at home, instead taking a Citroen 2cv he’s named Two Ponies. “It’s only got 29 horsepower, but it feels like 30,” he claims.)

The ideal is that, were a stranger to walk into the scene, there would be nothing to give him the impression he was anywhere but in pre-1840 rustic America. In reality, though, at most events--often called rendezvous or voyageurs --Coleman ice chests lurk under blankets or tooled leather covers, and modern cigarettes dangle from more than a few mouths.

At the extreme end is the American Mountain Men, a hard-core buckskinning organization Quilter aspires to join. Their meets are held at off-road sites where participants must pack in their gear. Hence, shelter is often just a bedroll, and the food certainly doesn’t come out of a cooler.

Quilter has photos of an AMM meet he attended (cameras are a tolerated anachronism), one of which is labeled, “A Barbados sheep brought in for slaughter. . . . Killed quickly and clean, with due ceremony.”

“It’s funny; around the house I’m as squeamish as the next person,” Quilter said. “Out there you don’t think about that. When we slaughtered the sheep, the guy cleaning him did the ‘Dances with Wolves’ thing with the raw liver, cutting it out, taking a chunk off it and holding it out for anyone else who was interested in it.

“I gave it a try, and it was perfectly good. Kevin Costner’s take in the movie was authentic: You’re going ‘Uggh,’ holding this quivering, dripping organ, but when you bit into it, it’s chewy, kind of like wet sponge cake, and doesn’t taste anything like cooked liver. It was mild, with a nutty taste. So you kind of choke down the first bite and then go, ‘Hey, that’s good!’ ”

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So what is it that leads a successful 47-year-old to go nipping at sheep entrails? As Spiro Agnew was wont to do, let’s blame it on the hippies.

“Remember in the late ‘60s how hippies were going around in fringe and Indian outfits? (Neil Young, for one, affected that look at the time.) I never really made it to card-carrying hippie. I wore my hair long, but I never really left the family fold. I was fascinated, though, by that sort-of Indian look, and started wearing buckskins a lot,” Quilter recalled.

That interest wound up on the back burner for several years as his business grew. He learned of the current buckskinning movement via magazines but kept his interest at arm’s length until after he entered a sobriety program 1 1/2 years ago. “As part of the program you are encouraged to go out and do new things, and that’s what galvanized me to try it,” he said.

He went to a gun show in Pomona, figuring the muzzle-loaders there could tell him more about getting involved. Like most of us, Quilter has an interest in looking like he knows what he’s doing, so it wasn’t the most graceful of entries into the buckskinning world when he tried on a too-small period shirt at one booth and got stuck in it. A couple of buckskinners helped him out of it, and rather than laugh at him, they accepted his interest and invited him to a gathering.

“I entered this world with trepidation, thinking it would be like joining a biker club where I’d have to prove my manliness or something. But we’re talking about real gentlemen here, not in the Fred Astaire sense, but in the sense of people who have the basic confidence to know they don’t need to be rough.

“Some of them are very rugged former Green Beret types, who definitely understand the uses of violence as much as anyone on the planet. Then there’s a strain that is more the Deadhead type, people who want to be closer to nature, enjoy the outdoors and seek the spiritual side of it. And everyone I’ve met has been honorable and undemanding and possessed of a great deal of mutual respect,” he said. Though Quilter has a very rare 1930s National resonator guitar that is his pride and joy, he thinks nothing of leaving it and other valuables unattended at his camp at rendezvous.

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The son of a career Marine (who ended up a general), Quilter moved often in his childhood. He dreamed of having a stream to play in, but the closest he ever came to rustic living was when the family moved to Emerald Bay.

Though his mind would wander through speculative historical adventures--”I still wonder about things like ‘If I was suddenly transported back to the Roman Empire, could I build a car there?’ “--in practice he was “a skinny kid growing up in the suburbs. I never felt as manly as I wanted to be. Later, even though with the help of other people I was working 70-hour weeks building a good company from scratch, I always still wondered if I had true grit .”

If nothing else, he has achieved true grime. Not counting household and office wear, he has amassed 90 days of field use on his buckskins--including time he and a new-found buckskinning friend spent building a log cabin with hand tools near Julian--and they look it.

“It’s like a journal of where you’ve been,” Quilter said of his weathered outfit (real buckskinners don’t wear underwear, by the way). There also is a sense of living history to what he’s doing:

“There are some records of where mountain men went and what they took with them, and once in a while a reflection on the privations they suffered. But you rarely get a record of the ordinary day-to-day things that happened, because they were too commonplace to them. If you keep a journal now and mention that you went to L.A., you don’t explain how you started the car or any of the little things because everybody takes that stuff for granted. So the only way to find those things out is to re-create the lifestyle as closely as possible and see what happens. After a few months of hard service, you certainly see what happens to your clothing.”

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Quilter made his outfit in conjunction with an experienced buckskin seamstress. They used commercially tanned hides, though he supposes someday he’ll make a set using traditional brain-tanned hides (you really don’t want to know the squishy details of brain-tanning). He’s cut his work week back to 40 hours and hasn’t turned his TV on in two months, because he’s busy making camp chairs or tooled leather covers for the guitar and hammered dulcimer he takes to gatherings.

His fellows have nicknamed him Pilgrim Pat--meaning he’s an earnest beginner--though he hopes to earn a more substantial title.

“One of my best friends and guides in this is named Spotted Owl. I think he got that name in something of a spirit quest or a dream. But I have another friend named Spotted Elk, whose outfit is make of elk skin. He came back from using a dark outhouse one night with wet spots on the front of his pants. Someone yelled, ‘Hey look, it’s Spotted Elk!’ and by morning this name had gone through the camp. Sooner or later I suppose I’ll do something sufficiently goofy to warrant a name,” he said.

Far more than any moniker or new duds he could hang on himself, Quilter values the internal changes buckskinning has brought him. For most of his life he has regarded himself to be a cautious loner, or, as he also put it, a nerd.

“Through personal insecurity or whatever I’ve always had some difficulty in reaching out to other people. If push came to shove, I’d rather withdraw. I feel like I’m more bonded with the rest of humanity now. Out there you do need to ask a lot of questions, and they are very helpful people. I’ve made lots more good friends since starting this than in the 15 years before.

“Buckskinners in a fairly conscious way are fleeing the downside of the big city. And the worst part of the big city is that your enemy is other people, and you become very suspicious of other people. When you get out of the city, your enemy, if you will, is Mother Nature. That’s putting it wrong, because nature is your friend if you know how to get along. What you’re up against is reality . And out there, people are your friends now, someone who can help you. You know you have to pull together to get by.”

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So far Quilter has only attended buckskinning events in California (an easy city-bound introduction to its world can usually be found each March at Anaheim’s Hobby City, in an event called a Shivaree, though this year’s has been canceled due to construction). This year he hopes to branch out to attending national events. Meanwhile, his home is slowly filling with handmade items he makes for his outings, such as a badger-skin camera pack.

It’s a far cry from the circuit boards one finds in his audio amplifiers, neatly laid out like miniature planned communities of silicon and copper.

“I can’t explain my fascination for buckskinning, except that it’s so much the opposite of my normal fussy technical personality. Getting to get out and get scroungy in the dirt focuses the mind in a whole different way. Instead of this civilized intellectual exercise, planning things out months in advance, it’s basically, ‘OK, I’m hungry, what do I have to do to be able to eat?’ It’s a purely physical thing, where you’re enduring the cold, the wet and the hard ground.

“When we’re building a cabin, our efforts are going directly into a result we’re going to be able to appreciate. Usually in life, you go to work, do something that may or may not be meaningful to you, get the money and then go buy things that other people have done in a factory environment that may or may not mean something to them.

“It’s real easy to lose track of the meaning of life. I can’t say I have any handle on the meaning of life, but I think part of it is experiencing more. I know that I have experienced more, on a direct meaningful level, by learning how to do things the hard way,” Quilter said. “It’s been a blast, and it’s changed my life.”