The Hunt for Freedom

The job, the home, the mobile phone, the sense of security… former teacher MIRIAM LANCEWOOD gave it all up and shrank her life down to whatever she could carry in a 25kg rucksack. The Dutchwoman and her husband have now lived in the wilderness for eight years, and have found what we’re all seeking: happiness, time, and a cure-all that doesn’t cost a penny

Miriam Lancewood has no reason to hide. But, should she so choose, she could drop off the radar in an instant and disappear into the Rhodopes, the mountain range in southern Bulgaria that she calls home. The 1.6m-tall Dutchwoman knows exactly how to move around without leaving a trace, skills that she learnt from the land. Lancewood outwits wild animals that pick up her scent by climbing into the trees. “That way, they can no longer get wind of my scent, but I can target them from above.” And she gathers dry willow or pine for her daily fire. “They’re denser than other woods, so I can cook over an open flame without giving off too much smoke.”

Lancewood, 34, has lived mostly in the great outdoors for eight years. She’s never without a bow and arrow – or her husband Peter, a grey-haired man some 30 years her senior. The two of them are never in one place for long. And, at the godforsaken altitudes they frequent, no one asks them for a camping permit. The couple have now covered about 5,000km together.

Lancewood is a former PE teacher from a small town in eastern Holland; he grew up on a sheep farm in New Zealand and is a philosophy lecturer and trained chef. The two of them met while travelling in India, and one thing led to another. They trekked around the Himalayas, then Lancewood went home to New Zealand with Peter and tried to make a life for herself. On the surface, everything was fine: she had a teaching job, friends, a roof over her head. But inside she was in turmoil. “It took me four years of studying to realise that I didn’t enjoy teaching or working with children,” she says. “And I didn’t even like competitive sport, although I’d trained to compete in the pole vault at the Olympics. I felt like a failure.”

The pressure of maintaining a routine that didn’t feel right was unbearable. She yearned for freedom. “But I couldn’t even define what freedom was. And how would I? None of us grows up in freedom. We’re like budgies in a cage, not eagles in the air. All I knew was that I’d obviously lost my backbone due to all the comfort I was surrounded by.” Peter had similar thoughts. So, in 2010, they jacked it all in, sold their possessions and moved to the mountains on New Zealand’s South Island for seven years. Now, they’re exploring Europe. Later this year they’ll head to Australia.

No job, no address, no running water, no toilet, no bed, no car, no mobile phone. But for every thing Lancewood has given up, she says, she’s received something; her watch is gone, but she now has time. The sale of her car unleashed a previously hidden strength of will to get wherever she wants to go on foot. She swapped four walls for a green living room with no start or end. But she still has to work for it: Lancewood carries 25kg of kit. “I’m the younger, fitter one,” she says. Peter, who can feel every one of his 64 years in his hips and knees, lugs a 15kg rucksack.

They carry cooking utensils, a penknife, a change of clothes, a tent and a sleeping bag. If it rains for days on end or gets really cold, they seek shelter in empty huts. “But I can’t put up with enclosed spaces for long. You can’t hear the birds or the wind.” The couple don’t own sturdy shoes; they wear open-toed hiking sandals in both summer and winter. “If we wore socks or hiking boots, they’d always be wet. Your feet dry out more quickly in sandals.” And if it gets really cold in the winter, she just steps into a stream. The temperature of running water is always above freezing, at least.

Changed priorities: Lancewood gathers firewood five times a day

Lancewood doesn’t have filthy fingernails or missing teeth, or any visible signs of having abandoned civilisation. Though it has been six months since her last hot shower, she smells as fresh as a daisy. She could easily be the poster girl for some sportswear manufacturer. She has dazzling green eyes. Her legs are clean-shaven. Her teeth are pearly white. If she runs out of toothpaste, she makes do with ash. And when she couldn’t get rid of her dandruff during her first weeks in the great outdoors, she washed her hair in her own urine. “I’d discovered that tip in an old book of medicine,” Lancewood says. “It was revolting. I think that’s when I finally jettisoned the last of my social mores.” And her dandruff never came back.

Lancewood positively exudes health and strength. “Scaling down my possessions and hunting have changed me,” she says, putting down her hunting bow to fish an arrow from her rucksack. “My life outdoors has made me physically stronger.” She stretches the bow and narrows her eyes in concentration, her biceps quivering as they tense. “I think that very thing is the key to happiness: physical strength dispels fear, and the lack of fear in turn creates space for happiness and freedom.”

Lancewood used to be a vegetarian, but her new life rapidly changed her eating habits. When she withdrew to the wilderness in New Zealand and the first winter depleted her strength and supplies, she set her sights on catching an opossum, an animal seen as a pest in New Zealand. Weeks would pass before she succeeded. Lancewood taught herself to read tracks and imitate rutting noises.

“Eventually I laid a trap,” she says. “In those early days I’d never have hit an opossum with my bow and arrow or hunting rifle. My attempt to cut off my catch’s head with an axe went disastrously wrong. I cried for hours because the thing suffered so badly. And when it was finally dead, I had to skin it. It was a bloody, hairy mess. “No normal person would have liked [eating] it,” she continues. “It would have been much too tough and the taste too intense. But I didn’t know any different. Now I have a real craving for wild meat. It gives you so much more energy than the watery rubbish we get in village shops when we pass through.”

Lancewood hunts and Peter cooks. Hares, wild goats and birds are all dismembered with her mini-saw and the fold-out blade of her 20-year-old Swiss army knife; she doesn’t have special tools. And nothing is wasted. “I’ve never got sick from something I’ve hunted myself,” she says. A doctor friend regularly stocks up their firstaid kit. “We often get colds in Europe where we come across people every other day,” Lancewood says. “When we lived in isolation in New Zealand, we were totally healthy.”

The pair have covered 5,000km in the wild and are heading for Australia

When Lancewood first lived in the wilderness, her biggest problem was an unexpected one: boredom. “I didn’t miss the city. But I couldn’t just sit there doing nothing.” The books they’d taken with them were read and reread. Once Lancewood had cleared her sleeping place of stones, she’d frantically look around for something to do. “There’s constantly stuff to do in the wild – you have to collect firewood five times a day, wash the dishes and clothes in the river – but I felt bored and unbalanced. The problem was I had no aims or future. It was like I was walking through a fog, and that was scary.”

The fog lifted as her senses gradually heightened. “When I look at the mountains now, they’re not boring. I don’t just take in their outer form; now I notice their colour and mood, too. I can smell the rain coming. I can tell when an animal is watching me. I can hear the wind in the trees.” This may sound hippyish, but Lancewood doesn’t like the comparison. “The nomadic lifestyle is more like that of a top sportsperson. It’s designed to keep the body fit – otherwise you won’t hack it.”

She has also learnt the value of rest. “Sleep is an underrated panacea,” Lancewood says. After weeks in the wilderness, she began to notice how much her energy levels increased if she slept for 10 or 12 hours. “I wonder how much people spend on so-called superfoods. They sleep for five hours, mask their fatigue with caffeine, and then think healthy eating will take care of the rest. My advice is to go to bed early – you’ll be amazed. Problems are often just down to a chronic lack of sleep.”

Though she hasn’t had to see a doctor in years, Lancewood knows nature can’t cure everything. “I might live like some primitive beast, but I’m not crazy. If either of us got sick, of course we’d go and see a doctor. We’ve got money set aside for that.”

Every few weeks, she and Peter go to a town with their bank card to stock up on supplies and contact their families. They spend about €3,000 (£2,700) a year on food, clothes and hiking gear. They hitchhike rather than pay train or bus fares. And they make money from the interest on their savings. Peter sold his worldly goods years ago and stashed away €60,000 (£54,000). The sum has remained pretty constant ever since. “We have money,” he says. “We just want to spend as little of it as possible.” As far as Lancewood is concerned, money means one thing: time. “If I buy an expensive car, I have to slave away in a job for years to pay it off. But if I don’t spend the money in the first place, I have it for other things, like living.” Which is why she’s happy to give up comforts such as a hot shower or a clean toilet.

“You don’t have to be a millionaire to give up work,” she says. “Security can have the opposite effect. I often see beautiful houses that are empty because their owners are at work to pay for them. If I had to pay off loan instalments, I’d be worried about missing a payment.” If you stop looking for security, Lancewood says, you might get a chance to find out what freedom is. For her, it means having all the time in the world and getting to know nature.

If Peter should ever become less physically able, they’d give up on their current life. “We’d look for somewhere we could stay put, but it would still be somewhere out in nature,” says Lancewood. Peter nods and says he’d think about getting a donkey so that he wouldn’t have to carry his stuff on long treks. But they take care of problems as and when they arise, not before. That’s Lancewood’s motto. “Fear is contagious. Of course I get scared, like during really bad storms when lightning could strike at any minute,” she says. “But I’m also aware that fear passes as quickly as it comes, as long as you don’t feed it with thoughts to fan the flames.”

Adapting to life in the wild has taught her lots of things – chiefly, how to stay alive

Lancewood has one foot in the past and the other in the here and now. You can talk to her about tanning animal hides, but she can also discuss artificial intelligence. “I’ve found my place and it’s here in nature,” she says. “It’s like roots are growing from the soles of my feet.”

And then Lancewood is off again, almost silently, with her bow and arrow slung over her shoulder. A few seconds later she’s out of sight, swallowed up by the woods.

Watch Series Seven of Ben Fogle: New Lives in The Wild on Channel 5; channel5.com

Words - Waltraud Hable

Photography - Julie Glassberg