My oldest son is my free spirit.  He has made his living for years until recently in the woods harvesting wild edibles, sometimes hiking into the wildernesses for days in order to find the elusive mushrooms and other wild edibles he enjoys picking.  His stories of adventure are right there along with the adventures of Grizzly Adams.  He has lived it, living off the land for months.  He once decided to take a trip to Alaska to search for copper nuggets.  He hiked into the bush after catching a ride on a mail plane, 40 miles from the nearest human.  He camped for two weeks in a miner's deserted cabin, but he hadn't brought along enough food to sustain him, figuring he could live off the land.  Wrong!  The bears had eaten all the berries and anything else he might hope to find to eat.  He encountered gigantic moose, and numerous other animals prevalent in the wild.  He hadn't even brought along a weapon in case he encountered that Mama bear with a penchant for protecting her young, capable of decapitating him with one swipe of her paw.  He was in his early 20s, thinking like a romantic 20-year-old.  He got down to near starvation, having to eat a spawning salmon whose body tissue, although still alive, was already deteriorated to the consistency of Jello, in order to survive.  He claims it was the worst tasting thing he had ever put into his mouth.  That along with a small box of weevil infested pancake mix he'd found in the cabin.  When I told him the weevils probably added protein to his diet, he slugged me, playfully in the arm.  He almost ended up like the young man in the documentary "Into the Wild," who succumbed to his environment lying emaciated from starvation in an old school bus.  My son was two days late hiking to the small lake where he was supposed to meet the mail plane's last landing before winter set in, just days before the snow flew.  As he sat there on the bank, he was resigned to the fact that he would most likely die there on the edge of that little lake.  Thankfully the mail plane's pilot felt bad for the young adventurer she had left in the wilderness, and she made the trip back to find him camped on the lakes edge, half starved and more than happy to see her.  His adventures in the wildernesses across the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest picking his wild edibles would make such a wonderful read, from the mountain lions and other things of nature he experienced.  But I can't get him to stop long enough to write about his encounters with nature.  Maybe I can get him to at least do a recording that I can transcribe and write it for him!   Some of his tales as told to me inspired some of the adventures I wrote about in my book Libby’s Ashes.