Survival to the Fullest

I can’t help it. I’m addicted to reality shows involving survival in the wild. Not the competing survival shows where teams subliminate their essential humanities and sabotage each other to win the grand prize of a trip to Hawaii or whatever.   I am referring to those shows where people choose a simpler life living, as Lennie in Of Mice and Men says, ”Off the fat of the land.” Except in most of these “struggling against the elements shows” there is not a lot of fat. Many of these programs are set in Alaska or above the Arctic Circle or other rough terrains. I’m partially drawn to these reality shows because of my fond remembrance of my dad and I roughing it in the Adirondacks.  But after our fishing and hunting trips we returned to an urban, and later suburban, lifestyle. Not so the people in the shows.  They are stuck in the mountainous terrain of northern Georgia, or the frozen tundra above the Arctic Circle, or the grizzly-inhabited forests of the Alaskan hinterlands.

In our more hectic moments of our daily lives, it is normal to seek simplicity in a rose-colored past. The nomadic caveman, having secured his daily meal, was free to lie on his back and make constellations out of the stars.  Some of us even support a nostalgic return to our evolutionary roots by adopting a Paleolithic diet, feasting on grubs, and nettles, and wild grass—all so we can supposedly live to the caveman’s ripe old age of 28.

I enjoy watching the ingenuity of these hearty livers in, and lovers of, the wild.  In one episode I watched, while eating my tuna salad lunch, a coonskin capped man, alone in a Georgia swamp, spend half a day whittling a tool to spear his opossum meat and forest-mushroom dinner.  “The food tastes even better knowing you trapped it yourself and eat it with a tool you made.”  I looked at the chunk of tuna impaled on my metal fork and wondered if this were true….if I was missing out on a taste sensation because I was devouring a foodstuff I purchased from a store and consumed it with a device we received as a wedding gift eons ago.  I plopped it in my mouth and savored the morsel.  Nope.  I don’t think I was missing anything.   On the other hand, I doubt my friend in the swamp in Georgia would ever enjoy a chunk of tuna.

And so it goes.  The gentleman living alone in the wilds of Alaska spends three icy cold November days chopping enough wood to stoke his homemade furnace so he does not freeze for two days.  The episode was so chilling I went to my thermostat and kicked up the heat for a degree or two.  Then there is the woman living above the Arctic Circle who walks two miles to cut a hole in the river ice so she could procure drinking water and bathing water.  This took several trips—her sled tipped over once.  Watching her struggle to obtain one of life’s basics made me thirsty, so I went to my filtered water in the refrigerator and drank a tall glass, then showered.

Then there is the couple in Montana who spent weeks planting and cultivating a potato patch only to have it ravaged by raccoons.  I felt their anguish.  One year I planted two rows of green beans and just before harvest rabbits devoured my produce.  After my disappointment, I went to my backup plan—Acme.

I get it.  There is a distinct pleasure and sense of pride that comes with roughing it.  I enjoyed starting and maintaining campfires which provided not only heat for cooking and warmth, but a social center.  I enjoyed breathing in the forest air, filling my lungs with the vitality of life, studying the signs of the woods, learning the lore that nature offers to us.  I get it.  What I find to be offensive is the comments by the survivalists impugning my choice not to live alone in a harsh environment.  As one father tells his children sitting on the cold arctic ground, “Isn’t this better than going to a store to buy food?  The people back in the city have no idea where their food comes from.”  The children nod in agreement as they sip their tundra-grass soup.

One of the best lunches in my life occurred during a hunting trip to the Catskills with my Dad.  The temperature was just above zero, the wind was blowing hard making it difficult to hear deer approaching, and snow covered the ground.  My father built a small fire behind a sugar maple, brought out a can of mushroom soup and two day old Italian bread, opened the can and placed it on the fire.  Within minutes we were dipping the bread in the soup and devouring it between icy cloud bursts of breath.  Delicious. Here is a reality:  when exercising outdoors, climbing mountains while hunting, paddling canoes all day while fishing, or simply chopping wood, everything tastes great.  In the wild things taste better because we are so incredibly hungry the bark of a birch tree looks like an enticing hors d’oevre.

Whatever life style one chooses is absolutely fine by me.  My problem is the smugness several of these survivalists exhibit when they imply my life style (which includes running water, indoor plumbing, and a varied diet) is inferior to theirs on some moral plane. If the people in these shows are happy combing the ice from their beards and slurping the marrow from squirrel bones, I am happy.  (line from the movie Christmas Vacation while Chevy Chase is trying to rid his holiday home of the terrorist squirrel—“Where is Eddie?  Doesn’t he eat squirrels?”  “No, Clark. He gave them up when he heard they were high in choresterol.”) They provide hours of entertainment for me as I put another log in the fireplace and sip my port.   After all, we all only truly need three things: food, water, and shelter. The difference between those rugged folk and me is that my three requirements need less time to obtain thus freeing me to do other things like read books, sit in my backyard and watch the birds, and, yes, write blogs. In the wild those three necessities fill most days.  Henry David Thoreau, one of my heroes because he backed up his beliefs by acting on them, went into the woods to “suck out the marrow of life,”   to learn what nature has to teach us.  Most people know this about the transcendentalist.  They should also remember that Thoreau wrote a subsequent essay, “Why I Left the Woods,” explaining that, having learned nature’s lessons, he returned to society to see how they applied to “civilization.”

Humans are, by nature, gregarious creatures.  We define ourselves in the company of others of our species, and sometimes this survival is the most difficult challenge of all.  Negotiation and compromise test our skills on an almost daily basis, and our escapist fantasies are usually filled with notions of being alone in the wild with our only decision being “what’s for dinner?”  Surviving in the wild or struggling in the wilderness of humanity?  Who is to say which is more difficult or more rewarding?