The wilderness has always held a mystery in and of itself. This wilderness started with Adam and Eve being driven out of the Garden of Eden. We lived in caves. We built mud huts of grass and clay. Then we learned to make brick and slime for mortar. As we evolved, we learned to make concrete and steel to building top cities of the world’s major civilizations. However, the wilderness of deserts, jungles, and forests has fed and cloth humanity for thousands of years.

I have continuously, since my time in the Marines, kept what I learned from the years of survival training classes. To gather my food from whatever means necessary to do what our ancestors did for six thousand years. I learned to hunt by stalking my prey downwind with cover and concealment. I have learned by eating edible herbs like lambs-quarter, wild onions, lettuce, dandelions leaves and roots, and Jerusalem artichokes. For added protein, I also learned to eat termites, black ants, grubs, grasshoppers, and certain beetles. When rabbits, deer, and quail were not available.

I could even catch fish in a stream or river with homemade lures, worms, insects, or a kernel of corn for catching catfish, and I would starve to try to catch one. In addition to the lures, I learned to use clothing or vines for netting to catch prawns and crayfish. I have learned to navigate by the stars, Lensic compass, or by using the moss on trees in some areas in the Northern Hemisphere to get the direction of South and not North.

I didn’t have these skills as a boy growing up. Because my father never taught available to teach me these wood-craft skills. I never was in the Boy Scouts. For a moment, I was just in the Cub Scouts for six months while I was eight years old. However, all of these skills I learned of hunting and gathering. I learned this while I was in the  Marine Corps. And I paid close attention to everything I learned in Boot Camp and the Fleet Marine Force.

 I have been trained in Woodland warfare and survival, Urban warfare and survival, Jungle warfare and survival, Cold-Weather warfare and survival, and Desert warfare and survival. Not to mention the years of weapons and ordinance training I got. I can shoot various rifles and shotguns, grenade launchers, the standard issue 45 caliber pistol, large-caliber machine guns, and other ordnances. This type of training every soldier would learn while with the units we served under different divisions. I was also trained as a Basic Electrician generator operator and Journeymen Electrical Equipment Repairman with Military Occupational Specialty numbers 1141 and 1142. However, I no longer need this information because my weapons of warfare are not carnal anymore. So, this information is all but gone, and I prefer a Compound bow to do my hunting. I only hunt the occasional Mule deer when I snag one four-point or eight-point buck.

I love going on short hikes near the Mount Peavine area or driving to the Hunter Creek Trail. I would like to Hunters Lake in the Carson Wilderness range. Because of my lower back limitations, I would go on short hikes. I would have to drive there and hike the mile-long walk the hike would take all day. Then I will camp the night, and then I’ll come back the next day. I am not saying I’m a mountain man, but I have those skills still in my memory. And I use them now often before I lose them.

It keeps me sharp, and the nature surrounding me keeps my mind from thinking about my psychological struggles. The local birds would make sounds of them singing their love songs to God as I watched the herd animals of the Mule deer grazing in the sagebrush. In the Sierra Mountains, I would watch the wolves and the coyotes caring for their young. These natural sights would give me the peace of hearing God’s Spirit. At the same time, I would listen for the call of the wild that helps me hear and beckons my soul into calmness. I am more concerned with seeing these beautiful animals that get my heart jumping for joy than killing one for supper. I just hunt for the sport of it all, and whether I catch my quarry or not gives me the rush.

This event keeps my mind happy and enjoying the stupendous outdoors. Today, I am writing this story because I was, as a child, forced to enjoy my appreciation of the outdoors. I am thinking of my mother, Mildred L. Jones. She gave me another tool to answer the call of the wild. This calling of the wild gave me healing and understanding about overcoming my life struggles. She was the first Drill Instructor I ever had in my life. I need to give my readers clarity on why I say this.

In the Old Testament, the book of Deuteronomy, Chapter Thirty-two, verse eleven, this scripture reads: “As an eagle stirred up her nest, fluttered over her young, spreadiest abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings….” This tearing of the nest is what I experienced while living with my late mother.

From the time I was nine until I was seventeen. My mother would stir up our home where I lived on Belafonte court in Portsmouth, Virginia. She would provoke me, and that would make me want to leave. The house I was trying to settle in and get comfortable in my thinking. She started to notice her son. My personality traits of being reclusive and melancholic were my dominant traits while I was a child. The flapping of her wings and the tearing down of the nest were always twofold.

As I told many of you, I suffer from chronic depression and profound psychosis. Meaning since I was seven, I would hear a voice and see shadows of demonic creatures. Later, I would see dead people who would cause me to withdraw from others. I would some days not want to get out of bed or leave my room. I would isolate and hide in my cave. Though I would write, do my drawings and paintings. I would hide from the world around me.

However, my mother would make me go outside. It wouldn’t matter why or the reason, but sometimes my mother’s disruptive stirring of our nest-like home would make me go out to play in our three-acre yard, whether I was doing yard work or just being a child at play. Her wings would flap and flutter to stir me to get angry, and her consistent stirring of my emotion added another personality trait of being choleric. Yet, like the Drill Instructors I had in the Marine Corps, she would stir me into action to get out of bed.

I would get on my bicycle to escape the noise and ill-treatment. This ill-treatment I ran from the nest is how I found and explored the wooded areas around Cavalier Manor near Lakeview (now called Lake Cavalier), Crystal, and Rotunda Lake. I learned Shotokan karate and Judo at the YMCA. I had a tryout for the neighborhood Pop-warner football team, Little-League baseball, and my Highschool Marching band. The method she was using drove me to graduate from High school.

I left home to join the United States Marine Corps to find another form of dealing with my fears, hatred, and anxieties and attacking my fears, punishing those that raised me to hate, and stuffing my anxieties into the plan of just attacking my paranoia. Of course, there was a flaw to this emotional plan of always being on the offensive. I would drink when I wasn’t shooting my demons to numb my pain. I was used to being yelled at as a child. Moreover, I never cared what was being said to me as long as the “N” word was never used or if my superiors wouldn’t call me a bastard or a half-breed. I would just plow through my days.

All the same, I kept my barring and learned discipline, which the martial arts and boot camp helped give me these qualities. As I said, the problem was the pain of all of this warfare never gave me peace. I would continue to fight my demons alone, with three ex-wives, five children, and never having a place to call home in my urban wilderness. This feeling kept me in a fight-or-flight mode of operation. The guilty of not answering my call, the daily storm of depression always raging inside me.

Until I began to start down the path toward recovery when I decided to enter the Continuing Care Program at the Sierra Nevada Department of Veterans Affairs Hospital in Reno, Nevada; as I told you in other stories, this was where I was born. It was here I was trained in a different form of discipline, instead of the Katas of the martial arts or the training and learning how to survive from the Marines. I was giving tools and an invisible toolbox to hold my resources of the knowledge of recovery. Instead of being judge because of my illness.

I was receiving the treatment and care, for all the years of abuse, pain, and loneliness in my soul. I was starting to find freedom, and peace to hear Gods voice. Instead, of hearing  the voices of vulgarity, and negative whispers of my psychosis. Since the year of two thousand eight, when I first came to the PRRC (Psychosocial Rehabilitation and Recovery Center). I have better adapt with the mechanism to the path of recovery. The light of God still shines a little brighter, and I see myself in a better light. God’s voice speaks softer, and he is loving in my soul. I see the beauty of life with seeing the good, bad, and yes even the ugly events that society brings. I’m not seeing through rose-colored-glasses not by far.

We still live in the world, and there is a real Devil that still is here. However, I keep my guard up and I stay alert, because the Devil is a roaring lion seeking whom, he may devour. Don’t be confused about my position about trying to merge the Christian doctrines of Christ with psychology. They are two sperate disciplines, and if an unsaved person is possessed. They may need Christ Jesus deliverance. However, if they are mentally ill, they need help with three-fold program of medicine, therapy, and hospitalization if they don’t want to be delivered, or aren’t ready to reach out to Christ.

Moreover, I’m not trying to be one of his victims ever again. I am daily putting my trust in Christ Jesus. And it is Christ whom, is making me more than a victor; instead of, being a victim. Instead of what, I was trained to do by just surviving in this journey through the wilderness. I see the call of the wild every day. I apply the uses of the spiritual and natural laws, as well as, what the people at the VA Hospital program of the PRRC has taught me. I have combined both what I was taught by Christ Jesus and humanity to grow closer to mankind. This Michael Tsaphah writing for “The Chronicle.” Until next time, God Bless.