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Survival isn’t as fun as it looks |
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Written by asap
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Wednesday, 10 May 2006 |
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I have no idea what time it is. My little shelter of rocks, sticks and pine boughs is cramped; one rock is poking me right in the backside. It’s 29 degrees. The fire needs stoking every 20 minutes. There’s no one to talk to. And God knows why, but the chorus of Steve Earle’s “The Devil’s Right Hand” won’t stop repeating itself in my head.
THIS is what surviving a night alone in the woods with little more than the clothes on your back is really like.
THIS is what happens when you’re watching television on a Saturday afternoon, scarfing a mound of potato chips straight off your own belly, and you see something on the screen and scoff, “I could do that.”
On TV, “Survivorman” Les Stroud makes it look easy. He even makes it look fun, with those witty comments he makes into the camera while he fashions fishing tackle from a credit card, bubble gum and an old spring.
He has turned a piece of tissue and lint from his sock into a “prison match,” then winked at the camera: “Don’t ask me how I know that.” He has managed to smile and joke while sitting in the middle of the Arctic in frozen mukluks while his igloo tried to fall apart around him. Even then, he looked like he was having fun.
But this is not fun, sitting in the dark in the woods. Why did I ever think trying to be like “Survivorman” would be fun?
“You’re right; it’s not fun,” admits Stroud, 44, who unfortunately is not with me on this windmill-tilting quest. “You never have fun when all you are doing is trying to survive.”
LES IS MORE
I am home. Warm. Inside. Stroud chuckles as I recount my failures.
“It’s surprising how difficult it can be to get a fire going,” he says in a telephone interview from his production office in Toronto. “Even when I do the show, there are certain things that I don’t want to show looking too easy because it might be a method that I’ve had three months to practice. ... I remember one time it took me 11 hours to get a fire going.”
Eleven hours? I gave up after 30 minutes.
The “bow and drill,” thought to be a “surefire” way to make fire from three pieces of wood and a lace from my boot, proved completely fruitless. It was too cloudy to magnify sunlight with my binoculars. And while rubbing two small pieces of cedar together produced smoke and one tiny, fleeting ember, its biggest byproduct was frustration. I eventually gave up in a grumpy huff.
In the end, what really drove me off the hillside wasn’t the lack of food or the cold or the fact that I had to cheat with the fire.
It was the boredom, the loneliness, the lack of any interaction.
At least a pine-cone friend would have kept me occupied.
Les Stroud, good man that he is, takes time to offer tips on my endeavor and compliments me on my own little adventure. | Only registered users can write comments.
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