![]() As we burned pallets and various other discarded wood items, I realized the primal And, finally with patience, I got to learn how to use my fire-starting kit that is in my gear. I was shown and taught many ways to start a fire. Dragging wood pallets that they have left in a pile on a previous trip into a fire that they had built. It was a silence that was a little jarring till today for a city kid that was used to the ebb and flow of an urban environment.Īfter function testing my AR15 and was happy with the performance of the beast, I jumped into the manly arts of tending to “the Land” with the guys. Even when we were shooting, after the forest absorbed the report of the various guns and rifles that we were shooting, the spaces between shots and words were filled with deafening silence. One glaring reminder the entire time I was at “the Land”, was that it was silent. I hopped out of Rodney’s pickup truck and began to help them setup for the day’s shoot. I don’t know much about vegetation, but whatever was growing in the open area of the property gave off this almost light purple hue. “The Land” when we finally got there, was amazing. So, seeing all the green that was turning into soft oranges and vibrant ambers was a soothing and welcoming sight. But, I played speedball, no walking around in the woods and flanking the enemy, I was geared up like a NASCAR pit crew member and diving behind inflated bunkers. This wasn’t really my first time deep away from an urban area, I have played paintball in some small fields that were in the middle of nowhere. It was a pleasant ride as I watched the suburb of Liverpool, NY disappear and the scenery slowly become Palermo, NY. The trip to the land was about 30-35 minutes of back roads travel. With my Palmetto State Armory AR15 and my Vanquest Skitch 12 in hand, I tagged along. They said some things needed to be tended to up there and I should come. “The Land” was 64 acres of private property that they hunted deer in and did many other things that the manly arts of survival included. Rodney and Kevin, my shooting mates, decided to pick “the Land” to have some shooting fun with. When presented with the option to shoot on someone else’s dime, I deferred to their choosing of location. ![]() I brought all my gear with me, paintball, shooting and my everyday carry stuff. Roaming in the wilderness to me basically meant walking around Central Park, which even then, I barely did that.Ī few days ago, I went up north to spend a week with the woman’s family before starting my new career. Let’s be honest, as I have written above, I am a city kid. ![]() The desire to know if I can hack it in other environments began to call to me. There is nothing wrong with being very comfortable in an urban environment and being able to survive in one of the few cities that people in other countries only dream about to live in, but as I grew older, I wanted more. As a child of lower-middle class Chinese immigrants, vacations to places that didn’t have an urban gray over-tone was basically the stuff of dreams, and this was fine. I had very little to no understanding about survival in any other scenarios other than the city. ![]()
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