It’s easy to dismiss Donald Trump’s supporters as bad, racist terribly racist people or ignorant hicks. Especially after that disastrous, out of control protests at the US Capitol where a number of people were injured and killed, and a lot of politicians ego hurt even more. But I’m not willing to write off their party in one swoop, or say that all conservatives are bad even if maybe they’re investing too much stock in the lamest of ducks — former President Trump.
Long after the results were known, the Trump – No Bullshit banners can be found farms, rural homesteads, and other properties around America. While some have disappeared, inevitably dumped in the trash sent to landfills and set on fire in burn barrels and other stuck in barnyards and attics, others keep them up as a sign of resistance, much similar to how liberals across America in 2017 proudly displayed signs on their lawns that said RESIST!Their opposition not totally irrational, many of them are already hurt under the Biden administration policies – such as the limited availability of ammunition for hunting and target shooting.
I respect conservatives for having their views and being politically involved. They may not treasure their current political status, but so is the results of the disastrous administration of Donald Trump during the pandemic. I don’t view them as ignorant or racist or bad. Many of them who make their living off the land or hobby farm, know a great deal more about the natural world then do I. Farmers and homesteaders are not stupid people by any stretch of the imagination, although you can question maybe their lack of knowledge of big picture things when it comes to the policies that make up national policies for the big urban areas. They should advocate for what they believe is right, moving beyond the failed administration to better representatives going forward.
Do I agree with all conservative policies or ideology? No, I consider myself to be more of a liberal or maybe a libertarian. But I don’t think we should be afraid of the smell of silage, mud or blood. Just because folks make the products that we all depend on, and support the other guy for president, doesn’t mean they are bad or evil. They in many cases are advocating for what is best in their interest, just like us Democrats advocate for what is best for our cities and more urbanized, diverse areas.
In 1841, a young Wellsboro man named George Washington Sears and a young New Yorker named Herman Melville shipped out of New Bedford, Massachusetts for whaling grounds in the South Pacific. Both returned home to writing careers: Sears as the famed woodsman, outdoor writer, early conservationist and poet known as “Nessmuk” who has since vanished into obscurity, and Melville as the author of the obscure novel Moby-Dick, a critical and commercial failure rediscovered as a great American novel in the Twentieth Century.
It’s time to rediscover Nessmuk.
George Washington Sears was a bearded, “shiftless,” diminutive, five-foot-three, 109-pound character, a legend in the bars of Wellsboro and on the lakes of New York State, who was a famous American outdoor writer for Forest and Stream magazine, author of the classic book Woodcraft who invented and popularized solo canoeing and light-footed camping, a poet compared to Whitman in his lifetime and called “the hook-and-bullet Thoreau” today, and an early conservationist who was trained in the ways of the woods and waters as a child by “an athletic young brave” of the Massachusetts Narragansett tribe named “Nessmuk.”
George Washington Sears (December 2, 1821 – May 1, 1890) was a sportswriter for Forest and Stream magazine in the 1880s and an early conservationist. His stories, appearing under the pen name, "Nessmuk" popularized self-guided canoe camping tours of the Adirondack lakes in open, lightweight solo canoes and what is today called ultralight camping or ultralight backpacking.
Canoeing had been popularized by Scottish lawyer John MacGregor in the 1860s, but the typical canoe trip of the day employed expert guides and heavy canoes. Sears, who was 5 feet 3 inches (1.60 m) tall and 103 pounds (47 kg) had a 9-foot-long (2.7 m), 10 1⁄2-pound (4.8 kg) solo canoe built by J. Henry Rushton of Canton, New York. He named it the Sairy Gamp (the name of a Dickens character) and in it he completed a 266-mile (428 km) journey through the central Adirondacks. He was 62 years old and in frail health (tuberculosis and asthma) at the time. William Henry Harrison Murray's Adventures in the Wilderness, published in 1869, had praised the Adirondacks as having a healthy atmosphere for consumptives and Verplanck Colvin's enthusiastic writing about the Adirondack wilderness had further inspired the trip. The Sairy Gamp was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution and is now on loan to the Adirondack Museum.
He grew up the eldest of ten children in South Oxford (now Webster), Massachusetts. He took his pen name from a Native American who had befriended him in early childhood. He was fascinated by the few books about Native Americans his family possessed, which left him with an abiding interest in forest life and adventure. A period of factory labor while still a child left him with a fondness for the writing of Charles Dickens. At age twelve he started working in a commercial fishing fleet based on Cape Cod and at nineteen he signed on for a three-year voyage on a whaler headed for the South Pacific; it was the same year (1841) that Herman Melville shipped out of the same port bound for the same whaling grounds. On his return, his family moved to Wellsboro, Pennsylvania where he was to live for the rest of his life. However, he continued traveling for adventure, from the upper Midwest and Ontario to an Amazon tributary in Brazil (in 1867 and again in 1870).
Sears wrote Woodcraft, a book on camping, in 1884, that has remained in print ever since. A book of poems, Forest Runes, appeared in 1887. He died at his home in Pennsylvania seven years later. Mount Nessmuk, in northern Pennsylvania, is named after him.
