Barefoot in Washington

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Barefoot in Washington

Postby nanuq » Thu Feb 06, 2014 1:08 am

No, those tracks in the Rockies have nothing to do with Bigfoot.

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/02/02/hes_a_naked_barefoot_thrillvivalist_and_a_tv_star.html

TACOMA, WASH.—It’s easy to understand why people occasionally report sightings of Bigfoot in the mossy forests of Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula.

What else could explain a fast-moving biped with long flowing hair climbing trees and plunging into icy streams?

It might be Sasquatch.

But it’s probably Mick Dodge.

Fourteen years ago Dodge was working as a heavy equipment mechanic at Fort Lewis, a U.S. army facility near Tacoma, Wash. Dissatisfied with the nine-to-five grind, he gave up civilization for a life in the rainforest, living off the land, sleeping in tree stumps and bartering for necessities.

A television series about Dodge’s unusual lifestyle, The Legend of Mick Dodge, recently premiered on the National Geographic Channel, focusing on his adventures in the mountains and the Hoh rainforest.

But that’s only part of who he is, Dodge said.

The former U.S. Marine has spent a lifetime maintaining extreme physical fitness. Look beyond his impish blue eyes and flowing hair and you’ll see broad shoulders and well-developed muscles.

“That’s my real passion in life,” Dodge said inside a small log cabin on a friend’s forested property along the Sol Duc River near Forks, Wash.

“I just step out the door and choose a direction.”


Dodge is a native of the Hoh. His great-grandfather was the first in his family to settle there, living in Forks. Mick grew up there and in other places around the country as the son of a career marine.

It was his father, Dodge said, who instilled a lifelong love for fitness.

Every day at 5 a.m. Dodge’s father would roust his son.

“‘Get your feet on the deck!’ We’d run three miles. I wouldn’t wake up until halfway through.”

Dodge said he spent six years in the marines and is a Vietnam veteran. After the marines, he spent years bumming around the country.

By the late 1990s, Dodge said, he was working at Fort Lewis. But the job hindered the time he wanted to spend in the wild lands and his physical training.

So he quit and moved to the forest.

Dodge created what he calls the Earth Gym. Picture a YMCA in the forest, where nature provides most of the equipment for physical training.

Using cargo nets, straps, ropes, stones, limbs, burls and other found and created gear, Dodge teaches his techniques to students who come to him via websites and word-of-mouth. He eschews the fluorescent-lit confines of urban gyms with their high-tech equipment and linear movements. Instead he uses a connection with nature to teach movement.

Who needs a treadmill when you can run upstream in the Sol Duc River like a human-size salmon? Asked to demonstrate his technique, Dodge gazed out at the rushing waters.

“I’ll jump in the river for you . . . in August,” he replied with a laugh.

Dodge is 62 now. Aches and pains can make him cranky. In winter, he enjoys a warm cabin. He has a girlfriend. But, he said, he can stand only a few days cooped up inside four walls before he feels the need to run. He loves to take to the forest and move as fast as he can, losing himself mentally for hours, sometimes for days.

“I just step out the door and choose a direction,” Dodge said.

Along the way he eats what he finds. From his neck hangs a tooth from a sea lion he found washed up on a beach. He took it after he ate from the remains.

“I’ve honoured him ever since,” he said.

Dodge said he once ran from Washington to California and back pulling a two-wheeled cart. He flirted briefly with the running community that took off in the 1970s.

Invited to a race in those early days, he said he couldn’t understand why a woman was trying to sell him a bib number. He declined the purchase and ran the race anyway. He was the first to cross the finish line but scurried under the tape, fearful that if he broke it, he might have to pay for it.

“I dodged under it, and I’ve dodged the running crowd from then on,” he said.

Whether walking, running or climbing, Dodge usually does it without the benefit of shoes, sandals or any other kind of footwear. In 1991, he made a vow to live barefoot. The move cured his plantar fasciitis, back pain and hammer toes, he said. It also allowed him to interact more intuitively with the natural world.

“Once I put shoes and boots on, I walk with a dominator’s attitude,” Dodge said while wearing knee-high buffalo-skin boots with elk-horn buttons.

But he’s not a barefoot fanatic, he explained. After making the vow in 1991, “I took off up to the glaciers and almost lost my feet,” Dodge recounted.

Recently, an author sent him a how-to book on going barefoot—hundreds of pages long—hoping for an endorsement. Dodge declined. If Dodge wrote a book on the subject, it would be one-sentence long: Take your shoes off and walk. Or, as he more poetically puts, it, “Land your feet and the earth will teach.”

And it’s not just Dodge’s feet that go bare. He often trains in the nude or, as he calls it, “nekkid.” Viewers saw some of that in the series — with crucial parts discreetly blurred.

What viewers didn’t see on “The Legend of Mick Dodge” is Dodge wearing plastic garments. Instead he wears buckskins on TV. While they are the clothes he wears in dry weather, Dodge often dons artificial material for rain protection.

“The art of living out here is the art of staying dry,” he said.

But the show’s crew often shot scenes out of sequence. And the occasional appearance of plastic would have ruined the continuity of the episode. So, he got wet. And annoyed.

It wasn’t the only conflict Dodge had with the show’s producers, the Seattle-based Screaming Flea Productions — creators of Hoarders. As with many reality shows, Dodge was given a script with lines to say. Dodge protested.

“I wouldn’t say those things,” he recounts. In one episode the producers wanted him to hunt a bear. Dodge refused—he no longer hunts.

It became such a point of contention between Dodge and the suits in New York that he sent a videotaped message of protest to the top brass at the National Geographic Channel, he said. The execs relented. The bear-hunting episode turned into a mushroom-hunting episode instead. By the end of the 12th episode, the crew would just follow Dodge and capture his natural dialogue.

“It would be easier and faster to give him lines to say. But he’s not an actor. He’s a real person,” said Liza Keckler, vice president of development at Screaming Flea.

Though he was paid to appear in the series, Dodge said he turned his salary over to a non-profit, Olympic Mountain EarthWisdom Circle. Dodge doesn’t use money, he said, instead choosing to barter for everything. He doesn’t own a car, cellphone or TV. He hasn’t seen himself on TV and doesn’t want to.

Dodge wants people to know he’s not some strange hermit living in logs, or a survivalist.

“I’m a thrillvivalist,” he clarified.
nanuq
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