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Wild with Sarah Wilson
I FOUND MAMMOTH DUDE: Special episode
Ep. 76
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I share a glorious, wild, life-affirming story in this special episode. Some of you might have read my book This One Wild and Precious Life and remember the bit where I wind up in Mammoth in the Sierra Nevada and rant at a young guy sitting in a vegan smoothie café about his single-use plastic cups (he was drinking several vegan beverages). He takes it well and asks to read a few pages of the book (I was working on the draft of the climate chapter as we spoke). "Wow! Can you put that mind-blasting stuff in dot points?" he asks. I said I would if he quit his stinking single-use habit. I kept my end of the deal (I shoehorned the whole climate catastrophe into bullets!!). And, it turns out, so did he!!
It was an adventure to find “Mammoth Dude” because - wait for it - he’s now quit consumption altogether(!), lives off-grid in a trailer in the forest with his dog and... had read my book! This chat brought me so much joy. We cover capitalism, loneliness, leaning into people, the magic of meeting strangers and those margins I put in my books for writing notes in. But the story gets even better…following our chat, Mammoth Dude (Avi Pell is his name) went on to live out one of the life dreams he flags in our conversation.
If you want to see the video version of our conversation, and the details of the epic Mammoth Lakes hike I did, as well as the beautiful email convo between Avi and I (clue: he's started a hiking company and I'll be joining him on one of his tours!) I'll be sharing this with my membership community. Join the family at sarahwilson.substack.com
You can grab your copy of This One Wild and Precious Life here.
I mention Sylvain Tesson's book Consolations of the Forest, you can get it here.
And don't forget to favourite Wild on Apple and Spotify.
If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page.
Subscribe to my Substack newsletter for more such conversations.
Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious Life
Let’s connect on Instagram! It’s where I interact the most.
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