Rite of Passage Experience
Options and cool stuff
This is part two of our transmission on innovating functional rite of passage experiences for the modern day.
Part one
Experiences versus Rituals
A boy desires to be a man He’ll do it anyway he can. Rites of passage—transitions from childhood to adulthood—have been on many of our minds lately. Our culture seems to be lacking them. What to do about the lack should be of interest to adolescents, children, anyone who has children, anyone who desires to have children, anyone wishes to marry someone’s gr…
In this transmission we suggest a mountain of options to help you innovate, and bring up some cool stuff.
Options
Pick a trail somewhere that your network of friends maintains. Have guys do several week stints hiking it with Pulaskis doing maintenance.
Have some kind of charity that your network has a special relationship with. Ideally a soup kitchen or something so providing food is service. Have some kind or organized hunt or herd where the boys annually kill, slaughter, process, and distribute--maybe even preserve.
Get several boys together for a month long sting of physical training, working on building network facilities, and maybe other training from network guys on investing, business start ups, family formation, political engineering, elite formation, etc.
Easier options that are still meaningful enough to count. Do a serious sailing trip. Do a serious hike or horseback expedition (more than one week). Have some kind of agreed upon hunt + butcher + jerk (maybe the boy heads out into life with 100 lbs of jerky he made himself). Maybe some kind of grand tour thing for battlefields and historical sites like Mt. Vernon. Maybe an agreed on summer job--construction, or working a farm, or doing a stint as an Alaskan fisherman. or lumberjacking, or forest fighting.
Do a stint as a community support person or whatever it's called in South Africa. https://blog.exitgroup.us/p/58-community-self-defense-in-a-declining
The ideal scenario would be 1-3 months during the Northern Hemisphere summer right after graduating college but it could conceivably be earlier or later. There would be some designated person or organization in South Africa they would be assisting who would be running the program. I don't think it would be a problem if the family or the boy had to pay their way--I don't think getting paid to do it is a necessary part of the experience--probably even OK if the SA side people got some pay, though not so much as to make it clear that it’s just adventure tourism. What is important is that the experience accomplishes something meaningful. I don't think the boys would have to be the point of the spear to make it meaningful, it could literally just be something like standing watch at night and radioing in, or doing medical. Ideally also there would be some advance training involved to give the boy some sense of purpose or direction before going. Medical and so on.
Huge difficulties of course--finding someone in SA willing to run it; finding something the boys can do that would actually be useful, not excessively dangerous, and still exciting and/or a little dangerous; expense; getting a real sense of the risks including the legals risks with our complete unfamiliarity with the environment (what would the SA gov think).
SA is a long way away and (maybe contrary to perception) actually heavily regulated.
I deeply respect and understand the more aggressive end of these choices. "Aim small, miss small." I wonder if they might be possible with more attainable wins under our belts.
Medical is an area where we have an advantage. Every VFD can get grants for basically unlimited medical training. It’s given to us free by government and is a luxury elsewhere.
I once saw a Twitter thread on anti-poaching operations, which I remember being mostly volunteer. Are there any areas in the US where poaching is a problem, where guys with radios out in all weather could be useful by just walking around and alerting the authorities? Places where old US cooperative norms are breaking down? Some fisheries? A national or state park would be even better since there would be less of a lift in learning how to handle a boat.
an 'environmentally sensitive' area near the border where our guys don't intervene with the border crossers at all but just alert the authorities so they can quickly handle the migrants before environmental damage. For jurisdiction reasons, maybe in the Big Bend country somewhere?
I’d go on anti-poacher safari in a heartbeat
I think being productive is more important than being coordinated. Like if its sailing, go to some fishing ground that isn't big enough for commercial fisheries but where a boy (or us) could still catch and process a hundred pounds of fish, something like that--or even more! Maybe the boy stocks his own freezer and then sells the rest to his dad’s friends and its a recognized way we help a young man get a launch in life. The point is that doing something valuable makes the whole thing more serious.
My brothers and I have talked some about maybe just having our boys at the right age be responsible for buying/raising a beef, slaughtering, hanging, butchering, packing, and then we buy it from them at a premium.
Somewhere with a hog problem?
the hog hunt is already productive in nature, a big selling point, but what if we processed the hog meat for pet food or for feeding to chickens? Sounds like good work for a young man
I know a sympathetic guy who organizes outdoor adventure with father-son experiences in mind. Www.mountainsmove.org. He aslo has lodging and gear hook-ups. And horses.
do something involving drones, whether it be hunting or patrolling or whatever. Ukraine and Armenia and a couple of other places make drones mastery the new knighthood.
There is a catholic mission trip group that takes kids to New Mexicos and has them learn how to build adobe homes. Building a home the ancient way has a romance to it.
Disaster clean-up with your son
volunteer with your son for another steader’s local political campaign
Cool stuff
We have had some deep discussions on passage experiences. The quotes you see above are from them. Here’s more.
a step-by-step series of rites of passage/initiation that move through the technological eras in a symbolic way
E.g., making fire. Making shelter. Feeding self from what's available. Capturing and preparing game. Recognizing local flora. Orienting around sun and stars. Skills in hand-fighting, wrestling, blade fighting, firearms...drones. Fundamental principles of power, leadership, group management... What else?
OK, my actual number one choice is doing a stint as riot police somewhere where there are actually riots. If you've never done this, I feel sorry for you. I just don't see how it could happen. Maybe my second number one would be operating a privateer style cutter to get to Chinese trawlers on behalf of the Chilean or Peruvian government, but that also seems impossible.
Going to create a fight night
Canadian Engineers created a cool iron ring ritual. It works because (1) you have to do a hard engineering degree and (2) you then get to be an engineer
Inspired by this discussion to take a young son with me to help a friend who got hit by a near-tornado. Great experience. The boy made a difference, he helped.
