What kind of candyass, anesthetized culture have we created when our species is at the mercy of wild turkeys? The reason we bring this up is because they finally caught that turkey that’s been grinding New Jersey Turnpike traffic to a halt the whole week. Forget the visual where one of the main arteries to the financial capital of global civilization is being blocked by something that feeds on acorns and bugs. This is bigger than that.

Suburbanized bien pensants from places like Seattle and Boston – we’re now talking about purse-lipped scolds use “self-actualization” non-ironically and think camping trips begin at REI – will lecture you endlessly about getting back to nature. But let them encounter an actual animal and they’ll flee in fear. They’re writing articles to each other on how to cope with being – quote – “terrorized” by wild turkeys. And then there’s this:

I have to admit, initially I was charmed. Turkeys! In Berkeley! How quaint! How colonial! Isn’t this communion with nature the very reason we moved to the hills? … That is, until the day we rounded a bend to find a gang of fowl marauders glaring at us as if to say, “What are you looking at, pal?” The birds had a good three inches on my girl. I stepped between her and them, and with a bright, “It’s O.K., honey,” which fooled neither avian nor child, hurried past. Since then, we’ve taken a different route to the swings.

Before we get to a video – which you have to watch at least through the minute mark – here’s Wikipedia’s entry on turkeys: “turkeys are very cautious birds and will fly or run at the first sign of danger.” Now you’re ready for this:

We are literally ceding territory and property to turkeys. It’s important to emphasize territory and property because they’ve been the central focus of struggle since the history of life itself. On a lower level they’re how we measure animal dominance in the wild. On a higher level they’re how we gauge the ebb and flow of entire civilizations and empires. We take your stuff: strength. You take our stuff: weakness. Territory and property are the markers of victory and defeat. And we’re losing them to turkeys.

So here’s how this is going to go. We’re not going to exagerate and advocate a turkey killing spree or anything like that. This is serious. If you see a turkey and it attempts to challenge you – that is, to remove you from its demarcated territory or to attack your biological offspring – simply refuse to give ground. Make a loud noise. Wave a stick. If need be, bluff charge. Tell it “no turkey, I am a human being and I’m eighteen or nineteen rungs above you on the evolutionary ladder, and so it is you that will have to yield.” If things get really nasty follow up with “… lest I kill you, stuff you, cook you, and eat you in order to convey to my status as an apex predator.” Seriously now.

Newest Threat To Global Civilization: Mean-Looking Turkeys © Vagabondish.

Photo of the Moment: Wild Mountain Goat at Whiskey Bend © Vagabondish.

As we grow older, we accumulate more Stuff at an exponential rate. By the time we move out of our second womb (Mom and dad’s house) and into the real world, most of us have enough Stuff to fill up a small apartment (or at least a dorm room).

The desire to acquire more and more Stuff is hardwired into the human psyche. That’s why the average person lives a more or less stationary existence. Most people pick one spot on the map as the place to while away the bulk of their days. They buy homes, cars, and mountains of consumer goods in order to construct a comforting illusion of permanence and control.

Luggage Pile, England © geishaboy500

It’s entirely possible to live for months at a time out of twenty pounds (or less) of gear in a backpack.

The Traveler by necessity lives a very different sort of life. For him, possessions aren’t a safety blanket, but an anchor. You can only comfortably hike with so much weight, and checking heaps of bags at the airport is a waste of time and money. Most of the things we think we need are actually dead weight; it’s entirely possible to live for months at a time out of twenty pounds (or less) of gear in a backpack.

I’ve learned a few tricks for living well while traveling light, and every trip I take teaches me new ways to improve on my set-up. Consider this article my way of paying it forward to less experienced travelers. If you follow these four rules, you can keep the amount of bullshit you lug around to a minimum, without sacrificing any essential comforts.

#1: Find Out What ‘Essential’ Really Means

It doesn’t take much to keep a person going. If you’re staying in hostels or hotels every night, you could conceivably get by with a couple changes of clothes stuffed in a rucksack and nothing more. Of course, a backpack full of clothing isn’t going to be nearly enough for most travelers. Even the lightest packer will want to bring along a few books to manage his boredom and a camera to record his adventures.

Your first step before packing for any trip should be to write out a list of your ‘essentials’. Find out what things you absolutely need on hand in order to be comfortable on your journey. If life without it won’t make you miserable, then don’t bring it. Try to keep your list of essentials to no more than five or six things.

For example, my essentials are:

• 2 changes of clothing
• contact solution/spare contacts
• my laptop and netbook (I work while I travel)
• a book for pre-flight reading
• camera

If I have all of that and nothing more, I can enjoy myself indefinitely overseas.

#2: If You Can Find It There, Buy It There

This obviously doesn’t apply to expensive items like laptops and cameras. I’m directing this one at the obsessive-compulsive packer, who has to bring something for every conceivable situation. Sure, if you haul that bag of beach gear with you on your trip to Galway you might end up using it, but it’s more likely you’ve just added ten pounds to your pack for no good reason.

Many novice travelers try to prepare for every possible situation and wind up loaded down with pounds of unnecessary crap. Do you really need six towels? Or even two? What are the odds you’ll need back-up shoes? If your regular pair gets soaked, pick up some cheap loafers from a local store.

The same goes for things like spare batteries, extra changes of clothing, blankets, pillows and the like. If you really end up needing them, you’ll be able to find them easily in any reasonably developed country. Depending on where you travel to, you might even save money by buying it there.

Eternal Wanderer © mamnaimie

#3: A Good Carry-on Bag Is Priceless

My laptop bag is fantastic. It’s got easy-access pockets for currency, cameras, phones, and water bottles, plus a spacious inner cavity that’s got enough room for my laptop, netbook, and odds and ends like a worldwide power converter. Everything important goes in my carry on bag, while my checked backpack only holds clothes. That way if the airline loses my baggage, I still have everything I need with me.

If you want to travel on the ultra-cheap, you might even look into packing everything you need in your carry-on bag. Ryanair offers incredibly low-cost flights to everywhere in Europe, as long as you don’t carry more than one piece of baggage. They’ve got very strict restrictions on how large that bag can be, and a weight limit of 10 kg.

Go on, test yourself. See if you can fit everything you need inside of a laptop bag or travel satchel and have it weigh in at less than 10 kg. If you can manage that, a whole new world of bargain bin exotic trips await you.

#4: Consolidate Your Entertainment by Going Digital

Are you a voracious reader? Does any long air trip for you necessitate a stack of books that outweighs the rest of your gear put together? If so, you need to look into picking up an e-Reader. An e-Reader is a tablet computer designed to be loaded up with hundreds of electronic copies of books. Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble both have e-Readers (the Kindle and the nook, respectively) and both have online stores filled with hundreds of thousands of e-book titles.

An average e-Reader will weigh a pound or two at most. That’s far, far, far less than the weight of several dozen paperback novels. You don’t have to use an e-Reader though. All e-books can also be read and displayed on laptops or netbooks. However you do it, converting the bulk of your reading material into an electronic form will save you a vast amount of space and weight.

The same is true for movies. Don’t bring a portable DVD player, or a bulky laptop and a big stack of DVDs. Buy your movies off iTunes or copy them from a DVD to your computer’s hard drive. You’ll be able to bring a lot more entertainment with you for no additional weight.

On the subject of laptops … avoid massive, seven pound machines with 17″ screens and virtually no battery life. Netbooks and CULV notebooks both offer 6-7 hours of battery life (some have much more) and usually weigh under five pounds. Most don’t have an optical drive, but if you’ve ripped your DVDs to your hard drive that won’t be a problem.

Obviously, these four rules don’t represent the final word on traveling light. The best way to learn how to live a portable life is to do it. Pack a bag or two and spend a few weeks living in a foreign country. Take notes on what works and what doesn’t, alter your list of essentials based on your own travel experiences. Living out of a backpack is an art, and as with all art the only way to get better at it is to practice.

Failures are how we improve. If you forget something crucial and have a miserable trip, you’ll be that much more likely to remember that thing next time around. In the end, the best way to learn how to be a world traveler is to do it. Get out there, have an adventure, and devise a few tricks of your own for living well without living large.

And don’t forget to post your hard-won lessons in the comments section below!

The Way of the Hermit Crab: 4 Rules for Better Backpack Living © Vagabondish.

Photo of the Moment: Pelican Supper in Naples, Florida © Vagabondish.

Seattle couple Christopher Miller and Brandy Meissner sold everything, bought a fishing boat, and were en route to Hawaii with their two dogs to start a commercial fishing business. That didn’t go exactly as planned, and instead of a placidly floating across the Pacific they hit a bit of a rough patch. And by “rough patch” we mean they encountered a storm that generated 40 foots waves, putting them and their 38 foot fishing boat in peril.

The upshot is that when the rescue team did appear on the horizon, it arrived in the form of Princess Cruises’s Golden Princess, one of the largest cruise ships on the planet. If we ever need to get plucked out of the ocean in the midst a bone chilling torrential downpour, we definitely want the ship doing the plucking to have a Lotus Spa, a gym, a fitness area and almost a dozen hot tubs. That just seems like good planning. Knowing how to prepare the dogs in preparation for a mid-sea water rescue – even better planning!

“You’d go up, up, up and then come crashing down,” said Meissner. They sent out a signal and the cruise ship “Golden Princess” came to the rescue. ‘They altered course and were on our position about 12 hours after the signal,” said Miller. The two got ready to abandon ship, but they weren’t the only ones on board. The couple’s two dogs, Romeo and Akilah, were with them. “We deployed our life raft, we put on our survival suits, the lifesaving equipment, put life vests on the dogs, taped up their paws really good,” said Miller.

The story is still ongoing, of course, since the couple still needs to track down what’s left of their boat. We’re given to understand that those things come equipped with all sorts of robust tracking devices, so fingers crossed.

In the meantime we know it’s the puppies you really want to see, so here’s another one. For more pictures you should go to the gallery that accompanied the writeup. All the pictures come courtesy of whoever was doing onboard photography for Princess Cruises, which is deservedly getting some earned media out of this.

© Princess Cruises via KING 5 TV

Seattle Fishing Couple & Their Two Puppies Rescued From Storm By Cruise Ship © Vagabondish.

Christopher Elliott, ombudsman for National Geographic Traveler magazine, is indignant. He knows someone who knows someone who was on a flight this one time and there were other people on the flight and those other people were having fun and – oh! – it was all so annoying.

This anecdote proves to him that his decade-long push to forbid in-flight drinking is justified. He wants all airlines to follow the lead of Bahrain’s Gulf Air, which banned alcohol by parliamentary decree on Islamic grounds. And while he admits that federal laws limiting the consumption of beverages are “not what you would call permissive,” he nonetheless has seven reasons why no one should be allowed to drink on planes at all any more ever. He does not appear to be joking.

The list isn’t particularly imaginative – what if you need to drive but drink anyway, what if you’re in Alcoholics Anonymous but drink anyway, etc. Flights are, to that extent, no different than any other alcohol-infused situation. The real secret to what’s behind this condescending teetotaling lecture is numero quatro:

4. It’s annoying – Just listen to Terry Ward’s account of her last flight from Orlando to Newark. “I sat next to a group of guys who were on their way to Montreal for a boys’ weekend,” she remembers. “They started drinking right after we took off and didn’t stop. Hard liquor the whole flight. I thought the flight attendants would stop serving them but they didn’t, because one of the guys was tipping them $20 each round.” Instead of cutting off the passengers, she made all of their drinks doubles, as they requested. “It was completely obnoxious,” she adds.

Poor baby. She got on a flight expecting everyone to be as positively irenic as she is. Instead she found people enjoying the flight, tipping their servers well, and not upsetting so many people that they got cut off. But this was still too much joviality in too enclosed a space for Ms. Ward.

Now we don’t really drink on long flights any more. We’ve flown tired, we’ve flown sick, and once we even flew in the midst of some pretty severe food poisoning. But the only time we’ve actively prayed for sweet death was when we woke up over the Atlantic with a hangover caused in equal measures by red wine, cheap liquor, and a crummy wedding. Remember that scene in Gone With The Wind where bloody limbless soldiers are rolling around on the battlefield begging God and man to put them out of their misery? It was just like that. So not so much with the aviation-related imbibing for us.

As always, two contrasting points. Of course there’s always a balance between the antics of individual passengers – or theatre goers, or stadium attendees, or party revelers – and the rights of the people around them. Everyone paid to be in the same place at the same time, and folks have to live and let live.

But we still return to the same question we always ask in these circumstances: when did we start letting the people who are obviously the worst at having fun decide what the rest of us get to do? Buy some noise-canceling headphones and an mp3 player. If drunken morons get through those, then you can complain.

War on Fun Goes Airborne With “No Drinking On Flights” Campaign © Vagabondish.

Photo of the Moment: Whirling Spanish Dancers, Argentina © Vagabondish.

Photo of the Moment: Sunset at Shira Huts Camp, Kilimanjaro © Vagabondish.

The sun is preparing to set on yet another week of failed sobriety – hello, weekend – and so it’s time for our weekly Friday self-esteem boost. We obviously do this primarily for you the reader, though there’s also a bit of self-interest involved. Some time around Sunday morning we’re going to be able to look at something and say to ourselves “well, at least we’re not that guy.” Ergo Vagabondish’s Citizen Of The Week.

Your contestants this week: the East Tennessee man who passed out in a ditch with a loaded shotgun and a machete, the robbers who spent the night in a garage filled with their stolen goods, the Chinese burglar who was convinced to take a nap by his victim, and the Aussie burglar who feel asleep while picking the lock of a Perth shopping mall. The money line from that last story: “fell asleep… with the wire still in his hands and also in the door.”

It was a close call between the Southern guy – whom the judges appreciated for the shotgun plus moonshine plus ditch visual – and the international jewel thief-level criminal who thought “well this is a nice lady I’m robbing, why not take a nap?” Ultimately though, our panel will always reward incandescent stupidity more than lazy stereotyping, so the Chinese gentleman it is:

A woman in China convinced a burglar that he looked very tired and should take a nap, promising him to give some money once he woke up. The woman tied the intruder with a rope when he fell asleep and phoned the police. A Qingyuan county court in eastern Liaoning province sentenced the accused to six years in prison for attempted robbery, the China Daily reported Thursday.

How tired must he have been to stay asleep while he was being tied up? And if you’re that tired, why not take a nap beforehand? We’ve been doing this Citizen of the Week series for almost a month now, and if there’s one thing we’ve learned is that you should never commit a felony without being well-rested and well-fed. Not too well-fed of course, because then you might get sleepy and end up like these morons.

Vagabondish Citizen of the Week, Sleepy Supervillains Edition © Vagabondish.

Photo of the Moment: Sunset at Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia © Vagabondish.