The Blog
The sketch above is of Bill McConnell in our lawyer’s office in Beverly Hills which is a perfect metaphor since our show, which he inspired, is a show about ancient skills in a modern world A 39-year-old white man, Bill McConnell, is a primitive skills expert. Navy Seals and our U.S. Border patrol come to Montana to train with him. He even works with indigenous tribes like the Apaches, Kootenai and Haidi, helping them re-learn skills their ancestors knew. And he runs camps for kids and adults outside of Bozeman, Montana at the Past Skills Wilderness Camp, the school he founded. (www.pastskills.com)
The first question people ask is, “How does he know all this? What’s his background? How did he learn this?”
And the answer to the question starts with Bill’s best friend, and Grandfather, Willie. Willie was a former underwater demolitions expert in WWII (the precursors to the Seals) who was working for Ford Motor Co. when he got laid off. Willie spent his free time in “God’s country”, the mountains of Pennsylvania, Willie called the time spent in the woods “skinkin”. (I have no idea why.) And Bill loved going out ‘skinkin’ with his Grandfather.
When Willie took Bill with him, they carried nothing in, no food, and no water. Willie taught Bill what was edible, how to find drinking water, how to start a fire, how to catch and cook brook trout. As many natural born hunters do, he soon took up the challenge of bow hunting, which created a need to improve his tracking and awareness skills. As he excelled, his passion led to wanting to make the bows, arrows and tools that indigenous cultures had used. And that process gave him an insight into the cultures that made them.
The life long passion that Willie inspired in Bill created a quest for knowledge, learning, and teaching that has allowed Bill to interact with amazingly diverse groups. He learns by teaching, and teaches to learn.
What Bill would say, is that we all stand of the shoulders of the giants. That by not carrying those lessons forward, we lose not only part of who we are, but also limit our ability to truly excel. The Navy Seals understand this. Trained by the richest nation in the world, equipped with the best technology available, they still seek out the ancient skills from the warrior cultures like the Apaches and the cultures before them that have been around for thousands of years. It’s why they make the trek to Montana, not to learn how to survive nature, but to connect in ways we have forgotten.
Maybe now would be a good time to shut down the computer, take a drive out of the city and go for a hike.
Leave the Ipod behind.
