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[curbsideromance]

Gene Rosellini - Eldest stepson of Victor Rosellini, a waelthy Seattle restaurateur, and cousin of Albert Rosellini, the immensely popular governor of Washington State from 1957-1965. As a young man Gene had been a good athelete, and a brilliant student. He read obsessively , practiced yoga, became expert at the matrial arts. He sustained a perfect 4.0 throughout all of high school and college. At the University of Washington and later at Seattle University, he immersed himself in anthropology, history, philosophy, and linguistics, accumulating hundreds of credit hours without collecting a degree. he saw no reason to. The pursuit of knowledge, he maintained, was a worthy objective in its own right and needed no external validation. by and by Roasellini left academia, departed Seattle, and drifted north up to coast through British Columbia and the Alaska panhandle. In 1977, ha landed in Cordova. There, in the forest att he edge of town, he decided to devote his life to an ambitious anthropological experiment. "I was interested in knowing if it was possible to be independent of modern technology." He wondered wether humans could live as our forebears had, or if we have moved too far from our roots to be able to happily survive without gunpowder, steel, and other artifacts of civilization. With the obsessive attention to detail that characterized his brand of dogged genius, Rosellini purged his life of all but the most primitive of tools, which he fashioned from native materials with his own hands. "He became convinced that humans has devoloved into progressively inferior beings, and it was his goal to return to a natural state" He dined on roots, berries, and seaweed, hunted game with spears and snares, dressed in rags, and managed to endure all of the harsh winters. Rosellini's "experiment" streched on for more than a decade, but eventually he felt the question that inspired it had been answered. In a letter to a friend he wrote: "I began my adult life with the hypothesis that it would be possible to become a stone age native. For over 30 years, I programmed and conditioned myself to this end. In the last 10 of it, i would say I realistically experienced the physical, mental, and emotional reality of the stone age. But to borrow a Buddhist phrase, eventually came a setting face-to-face with pure reality. I learned that it is not possible for human beings as we know them to live off the land." He appeared to accept the failure of his hypothesis with equanimity. At the age of forty-nine, he cheerfully announced that he had "recast" his goals and now inteneded to spend the reaminder of his life walking around the world, living out of a backpack, covering 18 to 27 miles a day, 365 days a year. The trip never got off the ground. In Novemver, 1991, Rosellini was discovered lying facedown on the floor of his shack with knife through his heart. The wound proved to be self-inflicted. There was no suicide note. Rosellini left no hint as to why he had decided to end his life then and in that manner.