Hello! My name is Cork Graham. You might recognize me from my international bestselling memoirs, or my appearances in film and on TV, such as starring as the team leader on Discovery Channel’s 2015 #1 New Hit Series TREASURE QUEST: SNAKE ISLAND. If you’re old enough, you might even remember me as an 18-year-old and the only US Navy midshipman to have been imprisoned by the communist government of Vietnam, from 1983 to 1984.
What many who haven’t been following my writing don’t know is that I’ve been a successful Alaska homesteader since 2016, or that my first introduction to the homesteading lifestyle started back in 1990 when I was a returning combat veteran seeking peace and solitude to confront the physical and psychological effects of having been in heavy combat the previous five years.
Perhaps like me, you read and searched out as much information as you could on the subject of buying land and living rurally before you started out on your homesteading adventure, or you’re just starting out and are looking for knowledge from those who are really doing it 24/7, instead of those just writing books from weekend warrior forays into the woods and rural world, or playing farmer in the urban and suburban backyards?
I’ll be writing weekly on things for you to know, not from just information collected from others and transcribed in books and magazine articles, but from actually testing and using those bits of knowledge handed down over generations.
Through my various channels on YouTube, Instagram, Patreon, Full30 and this main website, I’ll deliver this time tested information that will help you be more knowledgeable in those decisions and actions that will help you be a better homesteader and one looking to thrive in the country, instead of just eking out an existence of survival.
Here you will learn how to pick and purchase a land, how to build a dwelling, start a crop, and get your livestock going. You’ll get solid information on the various types of tools and equipment to make the chores that every farm and homestead requires to be done, that much easier to complete—thinking smart and working hard will always trump just working hard.
If you’re like me, you weren’t born and raised in the woods. You’re probably a city kid like me. Sadly, that’s what’s happened over the last 50 years: a migration from our roots in the country that taught and nurtured our ancestors to achieve the greatness they did over the last two centuries, especially here in the United States—There’s a very clear reason why they called the generation raised mainly on farms and ranches during the 1920s the Greatest Generation.
Had they not gained the knowledge and fortitude gained by living rurally (a much higher percentage than can even be imagined now) I don’t know whether that generation would not have been extinguished by the Great Depression and World War II.
Moving to, and living in the country, was not easy for me my first time, but I had a lot of issues related to my prior five years in heavy combat, that could only be confronted by my living remotely in a cabin in Alaska the first time—fortuitously this gave me the time to complete my first memoir that became an international bestseller in 2004.
Years later, as I noticed events were leading us to a major economic collapse back in 2007 (an even seemingly as insignificant a small rise in oil prices that led to shelves at a supermarket in an affluent part of San Francisco), I knew that I had to return to a place that would provide food, water and shelter, and all I had to do was make sure it was secure and protected.
That place is the homestead I live on now in Alaska, having a lifestyle that many would calling prepping, farming or homesteading, but I just like to refer to it as living as we should be, like our parents and grandparents and their ancestors before them. It was clearly not a bad lifestyle for them. Some of it can be tough. Definitely not easy to start with, but like all things we learn, once you get the hang of it, it’s like waking up in the morning and brushing your teeth. Most of all, it offers a sense of peace, tranquility and feeling secure in knowing that as the infrastructure implodes under it’s own weight, as it clearly is now in 2021, those of us who aren’t as reliant on Uncle Sugar for our basic essentials will be that much better off.
As I learned from a USDA book more than 20 years ago, better to be the country mouse than the city mouse.
Be sure to subscribe not only here, but also at Patreon, Youtube , Full30 and my central website for the latest information either in podcast, video, or text.
Best to you!