‘Embrace the slowness’: He left the Twin Cities for a life in the Minnesota woods
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In every corner of Minnesota, there are good stories waiting to be told of places that make our state great and people who in Walt Whitman’s words “contribute a verse” each day. That's the theme of our series “Wander & Wonder: Exploring Minnesota’s unexpected places.”
Nate Johnson is an expert tanner of animal hides, builder of woven wood baskets and maker of beautiful knives and hand tools. He lives in the woods south of Bemidji. If you’d met him 25 years ago, it’s the last place you would have expected to find him.
Fresh out of college in 2000, he quickly built a reputation as an arts promoter, launching the successful Twin Cities film and music festival Sound Unseen. After three years, though, he gave it all away. Wanting to live simply, he changed his life and never looked back.
“I decided to just let it all go and start over,” Johnson said on a recent day as he readied a bucket of pig brains to tan an animal hide he’d spread across the grass at his farmstead.
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Over the years, he sought out teachers who helped him master ancient crafts that were once a mystery to him. He earned just enough to survive, living in a tent or a yurt in the woods. At 48, he has no regrets about a life spent seeking knowledge rather than wealth.
“A lot of my friends are super well-established in a long career with the sort of stability that comes with it,” said Johnson, who’s found happiness now teaching others to work with their hands.
“I’ve invested all my energy into knowledge — and not into probably sensible financial options.”
‘Learn how to do things myself’
Johnson’s desire to live simply resonates with many who feel stressed in a world that seems beyond their control. When he made his decision, though, he wasn’t sure what starting over meant, just that he needed to change.
“There was like this deep inner voice that was guiding me in those directions,” he recalled. “I didn’t really think about it as a choice, it was just something that I felt compelled to do.”
Despite success at a young age, Johnson said he felt like he “was at the mercy of the system” and he wanted options.
“I was pretty good on the phone and writing and things like that, but my skill set felt really limited,” he said. “I decided I wanted to learn how to do things myself.”
On this warm late-August afternoon, he shared his tanning knowledge with friends Jim and Sharon Walker. Jim brought a buffalo hide from an animal he killed a couple of years ago on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, where he is a tribal member.
“A brain bowl for you,” Johnson said as he handed Sharon a pot of pig brains made soupy with an immersion blender. The fats and oils in the brain are a traditional method for softening animal hides. “Don’t be shy. Slop it on.”
Johnson, who is single, earns a living now teaching and selling things he makes.
“I find I get more joy from teaching lately than I do from doing,” he said as he showed the Walkers how to rub brains into the buffalo hide.
“I’ve learned a lot from Nate over the years,” said Sharon, a retired nurse practitioner and member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. “He’s a great person to know and to learn from.”
She’s taken several classes from Johnson over their nearly 10-year friendship.
“I was so impressed that he used to live in a yurt,” she said with a laugh. “He’s just so connected to the environment.”
Jim is a retired teacher who hunts and harvests food, but hide tanning was new for him. “I’m kind of a rookie,” he said as Johnson explained the process.
After rubbing the pig brains into the hide, they folded it into a neat square package tied with rope. Later, they will need to spend hours stretching and rubbing the hide with metal tools to turn it into soft leather.
Johnson makes and sells those tools. They’re popular, he said, because of a resurgence of interest in hide tanning. He likes to teach it, in part, because it’s hard to learn.
“It challenges them physically which then is a mental challenge, and then the rewards are commensurate,” he said of his students. “At the end of a three-day class, you often have people almost in tears because they’re so proud of what they did.”
‘Embrace the slowness’
The farmstead Johnson purchased this year near Bemidji has an old barn and some outbuildings he plans to use for teaching more classes in everything from hide tanning to basket making.
He is often invited to teach classes for tribal members on area reservations. Many of his classes are closed to the public but he hopes to widen signups next year.
Johnson said that many of the people who take his classes don’t stick with the craft they learn because the process is so time consuming.
“An adjustment you have to make is just to separate yourself from the idea of how long you think something should take and what it's worth financially,” he said. “Embrace the slowness of it.”
He’s content with the fact he’s spent most of his life motivated not by wealth but by curiosity and “a certain amount of idealism.” He’s accumulated a range of skills and a learners mindset.
“I’ve learned to embrace failure, as I think everybody has that goes on the journey of learning. To get to a certain point you do have to understand failure as the crucial ingredient,” Johnson said. “It’s easy to forget that it takes time to get good at things.”
