h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What would you rather have the guy doing, stamping papers in an office while wearing a tight tie and expensive suit?

Not necessarily that! But the folks who stamp papers in offices over here … at least earn salaries, and on their off time can do some more fun sort of things. I might endure office work myself, if I got some pay and a bit off time for painting or doing nature outings ...

That's fair enough.

Human nature is fascinating in its diversity. Maybe this diversity is a survival strategy. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, a very large number of people basically became nomads. Hobos, among other things. We still have hobos. We will always have them. I'm grateful to one of them for writing "Big rock candy mountain."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLKdxjCpw6U

Interestingly enough, my great grandfather and his twin brother were hopping trains all across the U.S. This was during that period. From upstate new York to Oregon they traveled. Eventually my great grandfather became an engineer who traveled around the country building dams so that cities and towns could have municipal reservoirs. My grandmother lived in a lot of different places as she accompanied her father.

Nowadays we still have restless people who travel a lot. But not like the ones from those earlier days. Now you make reservations ahead of time. You check bus, train, and airline schedules. The hobos went places without knowing where they would sleep, or what (or if) they would eat.

It is more and more difficult for hobos to survive. Well I don't think the ones who live *here* are having much fun. They sleep in the bushes, making themselves little resting-dens that I sometimes come across on hikes. But life is getting more and more expensive, there's a squeeze on *everybody*, so people are getting more and more reluctant to give money to beggars. And these folks still have to eat … really, over here, even basic food now costs a pretty penny. And they need water, and clothes ...

Am I safe in assuming that there aren't a lot of edible plants on the veldt?

I've heard legends about communities that lived in oak forest and survived by eating acorns. I treat these reports with a bit of skepticism, but I know the procedure for taking the bitter tannin out of acorns to make them taste better. This might hep me survive some day -- there are three huge oaks near my house.

Oaks are not native to the Southern hemisphere now, but they may have had evolutionary origins there.
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2019/06/07/Oak-tree-has-evolutionary-roots-in-Southern-Hemisphere/2121559912586/

Also, the Dutch Eaat India Company brought oak saplings to South Africa. Those trees are now quite large
http://www.internationaloaksociety.org/content/good-oaks-south-africa

Hello again! Well … there is food indeed available from the plants in the veld, but … to get enough of it every day, you pretty much need to be a hunter-gatherer trained in the lifestyle and you need to cover about 10-20 miles each day, just looking for it.

Yeah it's funny that we don't have oaks. The only plants of the Fagales, the group to which oaks belong, that we have, are Waxberries/Bayberries, genus Myrica (or Morella) of which we only have four or so species.

A group related to oaks, but present in the southern hemisphere, is the Southern Beeches or members of the genus Nothofagus. They occur in South America, Australia and New Zealand - but not South Africa! I have no idea why not!

And yes we have oaks here that were planted subsequently to European colonization. We have some nice ones here in Polokwane and also a few big ones in the forest region of Magoebaskloof. The biggest ones are in the Cape … I haven't yet seen those, though …

You can call a guy an 'oke' here, it's actually from the Afrikaans word 'ou' ('old guy') which is just a general term for a guy.

As I understand it, the very first oak tree grew from a beech seed.

Oaks do everything well, but they don't excel in much of anything. So, once they are established, it's pretty uch clear sailing the rest of the way.

Except when they are competing with beeches for light in a thick forest. Beeches can survive with little light while they are small, so being shaded by taller oaks doesn't bother them. But once they get ever so slightly taller than the oaks, they spread their canopies and shade the oaks out.

Beeches have their areas of weakness, too, especially during climate change, when ice ages come and go. The climate zones where beeches grow are fairly narrow, so stands of beech can "travel" to the brink of a place where they can no longer go. This limits their ability to get ahead of climate changes.