am Nation A short film by Sara Schaumburg

A Romance Gone Wrong

By David Fisher

I want to drop myself in the middle of the wild and survive. I don’t want any luxuries. No cell phone in case of emergencies, no gas stove for when my firewood gets wet, and no Power Bars stashed away for when I’m too lazy to search for food. I want to live a life as starkly different as possible from the one I have lived for the last 20 years. I want to know what it feels like to survive.

Some of the soul-searchers among us might crave the prospect of walking into the Alaskan wilderness with only the supplies they can carry on their back. Others might simply want the cheap thrill of wrangling with a 10-pound salmon and grilling it up for dinner. Regardless of the intensity of the adventure of choice, the motivation behind it is the same. It is the urge to get a taste of what living off of the land is really like. For Americans, this type of self-reliance is a novelty. It is how we spend our weekends or summer vacations.

This wanderlust in many of us is not shared the world over. Americans, Europeans, and Australians are well known for their adventuresome travels. The majority of Thais, Chileans, and Kenyans, on the other hand, are not. Perhaps affluence is not the only boundary

between these demographics. Maybe the people who feel the greatest urge to venture back in time and live off the land, if only for a weekend, are the ones most detached from it.

This is an intuitive idea with which many of us are probably familiar. We all have a natural affinity for escaping, whether it means bringing home a twelve pack after a long day at the job site or heading to a national park after a stressful week in the office. This seemingly innocent desire to get away may have larger implications than many of us, myself included, care to contemplate.

By definition, the place to which we escape is not the place that we call home. But it is probably someone’s home. And no matter how many summers in a row we have been going there on vacation, we don’t know the ins and outs of the place half as well as the people who have lived there for a lifetime.

In late April 2006, I had the opportunity to dabble with my fantasy. My plan was to go to the banks of the Mun River in Thailand and live off the land. I would eat fish from the “Mother Mun,” find veggies in the fertile marshlands, and generally live it up, self-reliant style. Actually, I was infinitely more excited to be doing these activities than any of the locals generous