Reading the Ground: What your feet know, that you don't!

The episode explores the life of Tom Brown Jr., a renowned wilderness survival expert and tracker. It highlights his childhood mentorship under Stalking Wolf, a Lipan Apache elder, and his decade-long wilderness wanderings, honing his survival skills. The episode also draws parallels between Brown and Chris McCandless, emphasizing the importance of proper preparation and mentorship in wilderness survival.

Children learn about the world through movement, actively exploring physics and developing spatial and situational awareness. As adults, we become efficient at navigating familiar environments, relying on digital tools and losing touch with the ground beneath our feet. This “Digital Blindness” diminishes our ability to read the world, a skill that can be regained by engaging with our surroundings and utilizing the sensory information our feet provide.

Thank you as always for taking the time to listen!

Until next time, Just Keep Trying!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to the Movement Sherpa Podcast. I'm Chris, a physical educator, author, and lifelong student of movement. Every week I explore different facets of the movement world. Not to improve athletic skills, but to expand understanding of the language of movement, with the core belief that movement is for everyone. I want to start today a little bit like I did last week with another fascinating person from history. But let me ask you a question. How long do you think you could last in the wilderness away from all civilization? One day? One week? An entire year? What about ten years? Because that is exactly what the person I want to tell you about did. I want to start today's episode talking about Tom Brown Jr. He was one of the most prominent wilderness survival experts. This is a guy who spent his life bridging the gap between ancient wilderness skills and modern civilization. This is a guy who dedicated decades of his life to teaching environmental guardianship and tracking. His life is like something out of a Hollywood movie. And oddly enough, the 2003 movie The Hunted is actually based on his life and experiences. If you don't know the movie, it stars Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio del Toro. Let's see here, it actually has a great tagline. It follows an elite tracker tasked with hunting down a former student who becomes a rogue special operations operative. That's a mouthful. Really, uh the plot is partially inspired by a real-life incident where Brown was actually tasked upon by the authorities to help track down a former student. Let me tell you about this Hollywood adventure life of his. At the age of seven, Tom meets his best friend's grandfather. And his grandfather was named Stalking Wolf. He was a Le Pon Apache Elder. And for the next decade, Stalking Wolf mentors Tom and his best friend Rick in everything from advanced tracking to wilderness survival. This man instills this deep spiritual approach to nature and to nature awareness. So you can imagine after ten years of this intense mentorship, I mean, Tom even refers to him as grandfather in his book. But just after the decade-long training, Stalking Wolf passes away. But that's not all that happens. Not much long after Stalking Wolf passes away, Tom's best friend Rick dies in a tragic automobile accident while traveling in Europe. And this devastated Tom. It seems so similar to our story from last week, but again, something dramatic prompts action. And this prompted Tom to leave civilization behind. He spent ten years wandering the wilderness alone. And during this time, he completely lived off the land with zero, with no tools. And it even says in his book that he traveled quite often without a knife. So when I read about his story and his well, especially his deep desire to remove himself from society, I was reminded about another person from history who I think he who made a similar choice. And his name is Christopher McCannless, and his life and his experience was his experiences were brilliantly captured in the book Into the Wild by John Krakower. If you don't know John Krakower, I think he's probably one of the best writers of our generation. You know, as I as I looked at both Tom Brown Jr. and Chris McCannless, I realized they both shared this deep rejection of modern life. And they had this desire to just shed all of the societal expectations of them. And they they both had this belief that like that that absolute truth could only be found by just going into the wild to be immersed in nature. Unfortunately, the differences in their preparation, intent, and environments explain why one survived a decade wandering and building a legacy, and while the other only survived 113 days. You see, Tom Brown Jr. didn't have romantic illusions about you know being in nature. Uh his decade-long training by Stalking Wolf prepared him for how brutal and how real survival in nature actually was. And all the skills he had kept him alive. But Chris McCannless, on the other hand, was driven by this romantic idealism. He was a fan of authors like Thoreau and London. But most importantly, he did not have the 10 years of wilderness training, and Chris went off to live in the harsh environment of Alaska. And unfortunately, with minimal equipment and barely any food, he lost his life. Now I would love to spend more time on Chris and his story, but that will be for another episode. But if you are looking for a great read, I highly recommend Into the Wild. You won't be disappointed. I don't know about you, but I can't imagine leaving civilization behind and spending a decade wandering the wilderness. And the flip side of that, though, having survived 10 years in the wilderness, I can't imagine what would bring you back to civilization. But that's exactly what Tom did. He said he realized his purpose, his vision, was to teach others and to protect the earth rather than hide away in the woods. Upon returning to civilization, though, he struggled to find anyone who shared that same passionate passion about like ancient survival and the skills that he had honed so greatly. But a breakthrough came when a local sheriff sought Tom out to help him find a lost person. Tom was successful at locating the individual, which launched him into this multi-year career with all different law enforcement agencies. He helped find missing persons, lost hikers, and even fugitives hiding in the deep wilderness. The man had a, like I said, a Hollywood-like life. He authored 16 books. He was a technical consultant for Hollywood. He even in 1978 founded the Tom Brown Juniors Tracker School. What an interesting individual, if you ask me. And he passed away August 16th, 2024. He was 74 years old. And he left the operation of the school to his family to continue his legacy of teaching people how to read the ground. On today's episode, the physical educator in me is taking over, if you will. Today, I want to change the way you think about your feet. They're not just the pegs that carry you from place to place. They are one of our primary sensory organs. Most of us think our eyes are responsible for finding the path ahead. But in reality, our feet are meant to read the ground so that our eyes are free to kind of read the world. So my son and I were hiking a few weeks ago, and the funny thing was we weren't even 500 yards into the trail when he began asking if I knew the way back to the car. It seems funny as an adult because we hadn't made any drastic turns, we hadn't chosen an alternative path in the trail, but maybe it was something about not knowing where the car was and being in a strange environment that made him start to question and start to think about you know, does dad know how to get back? And that's what got me thinking about an idea for this episode. Because a tracker, I am not. Okay. Someone like Tom Brown could tell you who passed through a patch of dirt. Um, they could probably tell you if they were injured or not injured, you know, how much they weighed. I bet you Tom could probably have told us what color socks they were wearing. And then there's me. I can struggle. I will lose my car in a parking lot. But you know, that's where this idea for this pod for this episode of the podcast really started brewing. I tried to first look at the idea of reading the ground like my children do. I thought about so many times that I have tried to traverse a parking lot with my kids. Okay? There's there I am yelling for them to take my hands so we can safely cross the parking lot. And I'm not sure if you can relate. If you don't have kids, it's it's a lot. They they will stop at cracks in the pavement, they will hop over the dividing lines, they will balance on curbs, and don't even get me started on puddles, because that that could take minutes of their attention. And as adults, right, we we we're stressed out, we're we're rushed, and this action by them can be really frustrating. And we tend to assume that our children are distracted, right? We think, can we please, please just get from the car to you know wherever we're going. But what if I told you it's not necessarily distraction? One of the things that years of teaching physical education has taught me is how children don't actually waste movement. Every detour, climb, every hop across a puddle is telling you something. And after years of watching them do this, I really started to realize that activity that they do is how they learn the world and they learn how it functions. And it's not just them moving through it, they are learning the world through their movement. You know, in fact, researchers have found that children under about the age of 10, they're constantly underestimating distance. Unlike adults, children's brains are still learning to combine that the information between the visual, the balance, the auditory, and their motor function, sort of how they make a cohesive map. Think about it. Children will climb things that they don't even need to climb, like tree roots and rocks or or low walls outside restaurants. My parents who are listening will why not you maybe you've been like me and obliged to apologize saying, sorry, they're climbing on things. But listen, every step, every curb, every patch of grass, it teaches children how to read the ground. When you look at it like that, the climbing isn't strange at all. Maybe it's how a growing nervous system calibrates itself. That sounds a little scientific, but I like it. One of my favorite ways to think about is this from inside the walls of my classroom, I am often reminded that adults, we explore places, but children, they explore the physics of the place. And obviously, you know, they couldn't explain it like that. You know, their movements are like micro experiments in gravity, friction, and balance. And they're measuring instruments for all this experiment. There's not rulers and labs, it's it's their feet. Enter the conundrum. After thousands or even millions of steps, our brain becomes incredibly efficient. It it no longer is consciously studying the ground, it begins to predict. It knows whether a curb is too high, if the ground is stable, or whether you could jump over a small puddle on the ground. Our nervous system has become astonishingly good at reading the ground, and it's gotten so good that we actually stop noticing it. And don't get me wrong, efficiency is a wonderful thing. It's one of the reasons we can carry groceries and talk and drink our coffee and walk without without falling. But there is a price for this. It seems like the the better we are at predicting the world around us, the less attention we pay to it. The ground sort of falls into the background, and we don't realize where we've been walking really for years. I don't know, maybe this is why so many adults describe things like hiking, walking barefoot on a beach, or or even hopping across rocks over a little stream as calming. Because these environments, they interrupt that that autopilot, and our it's like our feet feel alive again. Our ankles, they wake up, we're our eyes are scanning the ground around us, our balance comes back, and it's it's like the world becomes detailed again, and it's not because anything changed, our attention did. And I do feel like we have traded our our natural observation for like digital navigation. Does that sound too technical? Not technical, but if my phone battery dies and I don't know where and I don't know where I need to go, I'm I have to start asking for help. Now, if it happens to my brothers, totally different situation. They have like some built-in compass. It's like they always know where they need to go or or where they are. It's easy to laugh about, but there's a serious point I think I'm trying to get to. If like, do you understand that less than 1% of the population could actually track something or someone in the wild? Like, good or bad, I think we've become incredibly good at reading our screens, not so good at reading that world around us. In fact, I wonder I wonder what would happen to all of us if tomorrow we woke up with a condition I call digital blindness. No, not visual blindness, just no GPS, no apps on our phone telling us where to go, no blue dot pointing to where you are, and you know, no weather telling you what it's gonna happen. And I tell me if I'm wrong, but I'm thinking I wouldn't be the only anxious person. Now, let me be clear, I do very much enjoy being out in nature, and I do my best to not have my phone in my hand. But I would be lying if I said it wasn't in my pack, ready to go at a moment's notice. Because reading the ground isn't about becoming Tom Brown Jr., it's about regaining a habit that our nervous system it never abandoned. We've just stopped paying attention. And honestly, that matters because attention is a skill. Maybe that's why time spent on a trail feels so different from time spent on a treadmill. You could do a mile on a trail and a mile on a treadmill and have a totally different experience because the treadmill doesn't really ask anything of you other than stay on. Where when you are outside on a trail walking, it keeps your attention. Now, I want to dive in a little bit more of the science about our foot. Believe it or not, the human foot has about 200,000 nerve endings. This is one of the highest densities in the entire human body. It's literally designed to read information like temperature and pressure and balance on a like on a moment-to-moment basis. And because we have so many nerve endings packed in such a small area, this is why like an injury or a minor like a minor irritation, like stepping on Legos. That's why it hurts so bad. Okay, these nerve endings are vital to our daily functioning. They so scientifically they branch out from your sciatic nerve. It you know, it originates in your lower spine, and this forms the foundation for what is known as your proprio reception for the lower half of your body. Okay, what is proprio reception? Great question. By definition, it's the body's ability to perceive its position and movement in space without looking. Um, but I'll I'm I'm gonna tell it to you the same way I teach it to my students. So if you can, do me a favor and close your eyes. Hopefully, you're not driving or walking. I'd like you to stop for just a moment. And what I'd like you to do is, eyes closed, touch your nose. Touch the top of your head, touch your elbows, touch your shoulders, touch your knees. And you can now open your eyes. How did you do that? How did you know where all these things were without looking? That's called proprioreception. Okay, so the sciatic nerve handles the lower half of the body, the upper half, proprioreception, happens between the area of your shoulder known as the brachial plexus, and then through your spinal nerves in your neck. That's proprioreception. I want to be clear that reading the ground isn't just some wilderness skill, because there are several types of awareness that are vital to our survival. Two of the ones that I want to talk about really quickly are known as spatial and situational awareness. Spatial awareness is like where is your body compared to objects around it. So if you were reading the terrain around you, uh when your foot senses a slope in the ground, or you touch loose pebbles, or you transition from dirt to grass, okay, it you you immediately alter, you know, like your center of mass. This is this is your spatial awareness. Then there is situational awareness. And situational awareness is about paying attention to the environment around you for not only for your safety, navigation, efficiency. When I talk about it in the classroom, I note to the students that do we look both ways before we cross the street? Well, of course we do. That is that is situational awareness. What is happening around you? Why you don't ride a bicycle with your eyes closed? Now, someone might be listening to this right now as they're walking down a busy street surrounded by poured concrete, and you might think, okay, Chris, that's great, but there's nothing to read on a sidewalk. And I think that's where that digital blindness actually trips us up. We think concrete is like dead space, and it's not. There is so much information in the urban setting, and it it just you just have to pay attention to it. I want you to think there's messages in concrete, right? The density, your feet can feel the difference between solid concrete and loose brick pavers. If you think about temperature, right? We we can concrete absorbs and radiates heat differently than asphalt or metal covers. Um and that's like even the the the shape of concrete, okay. Like if you if you live in an urban situation, you know that the surfaces are are engineered to move water. And so sidewalks are pitched up to help shape that. So the concrete has a large amount of information. Again, it comes back to attention. There's another part of reading the ground that I find almost magical. Um I call it the the barefoot time machine. Uh when I take my shoes off and close my eyes and go walking through the grass and know this isn't some pseudoscience about grounding or realigning anything. But when I when I walk through the grass with my bare feet, I can I I travel back in my mind to when I was a kid and and I enjoyed discovering balance and jumping and running and all the things that the ground was teaching me. And maybe we all should do that from time to time. Not trying to send you on some quest or anything like that, but take the shoes off. Feel the ground between your toes. Who knows where it'll take you. I hope you enjoyed today's episode from the stories about Tom Brown Jr. to maybe a new appreciation for your feet and everything they can do for you. If you like today's episode, subscribe so you never miss an episode. And I always appreciate a review or a rating. Share this with a friend. I certainly certainly wouldn't complain about that. Uh I've got movementsherpa.co where you can go and check out the Sherpa shop for all your movement sherpa gear. My next episode is called Balancing Point. Why riding a bicycle is more than just balance. That's it for our journey today. Do me a huge favor. Go outside, lift your face to the sun, move around a little bit. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be yours. I'm your move with your boat, and I'll talk to you.