Surviving Survival
A survival expert had the opportunity to teach his middle-school nephews the basic elements of survival over a long weekend. He approached a survival instructor (whom we have the good fortune to know well), and asked him to review his syllabus for the weekend: building two-man shelters, using a magnesium kit to start a fire, building animal snares to catch food, navigation by compass, and so on. Was there anything he was missing?
The instructor told him not to teach any of that. “Instead of teaching them camp craft, teach them how to be rescued.” Where would an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old have access to magnesium and flint in an emergency? Where would they get the compass? How long did they plan to be in the wilderness that they would need animal snares and advanced shelters? Instead, the instructor suggested they be taught to find a road, find ways to attract attention, and shelter simply near water. These are the skills that would save their lives for the next ten years, at least.
That advice is sound. The reality is that survival often comes down to using what little you have, and the ability to do much with very little is often the trick that saves lives. Unfortunately, survival has become a big business: and many enthusiasts have followed, purchasing hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of survival equipment. The more you depend upon equipment, the less you remember the basics. Another instructor states, “Often, there is a fundamental confusion between pure survival training, outdoor living, and camping. These are three different disciplines with three different goals.” Many of the so-called survival tools and survival skills belong in the other two categories.
Chongdo’s survival program certainly believes in stacking the deck in your favor. Anything you can use to increase your odds is immediately a good thing. However, there is the possibility of overdoing it as well, with heavy or cumbersome items that do not reflect the probabilities you are most likely to face. For example, many survival kits include fishing lines, hooks, and sinkers. These are only useful in areas where fish are plentiful. If your travels rarely take you to such areas, don’t carry them. Many survival items assume you will be lost in the wilderness for many days; if you are within 40 miles of civilization, you can simply walk to safety without using any of these items. There are people who pack for desert situations even though their travels never take them within one thousand miles of a desert.
For the moment, forget about gear, probabilities, and tactics. Generally, nearly all survival situations can be managed by using your head instead of your wallet. Without a solid knowledge of the fundamentals, none of those will do you much good anyway. By remembering the following in a crisis, your odds improve to a significantly high margin.
What to do when things go wrong:
- Check for injuries. If you or your party is injured to the point of incapacity, your odds change. This is often forgotten in survival situations: many equipment-based fire starting methods require two hands. Imagine trying to start a fire, or build a shelter, or even walk to safety when badly injured. Apply first aid to all injuries, including your own. Sadly, if you or another party member are injured, the following steps may become ineffective.
- Accept the reality of the situation. You are lost. Your vehicle has broken down. You’re separated from the rest of the party. The boat is taking on water and the radio is dead. Whatever the situation is, you need to accept that this is now a survival situation: it’s no exaggeration to say that the first few minutes of the situation can save you or kill you based on what you do. The faster you accept the reality, the better you are. But keep reminding yourself that you are alive. As long as you live, you can think. As long as you think, you can get out of this. Calm down, get everyone together and aware of the situation, and take a deep breath. As long as you’re alive, you can all get out of this.
- Inventory what you have. Your pockets may be empty. Your survival kit lost far away. You may be alone. But you still have options. Get to work, and find anything around you that can be used, modified, transformed, or salvaged. Think big: you may not need it today, but you may tomorrow. As an example, a vehicle that breaks down in the middle of nowhere is a real possibility all over the world. If you had nothing else, you can survive: a car can provide shelter (the frame), clothing (the seats), fire-starting materials (fuel, oil, padding), signaling (mirrors), and even water (large, flat metal surfaces collect condensation). Don’t limit yourself to what you brought, but what you can do.
- Decide on a strategy. Your overall strategy can change, fast. From hour to hour, you need to re-evaluate what you do next. But keeping it simple, you have three options:
- Stay put. Save energy, and shelter where you are. This works if people generally know where you were heading, or if you find a road or waterway that seems relatively well traveled. Of course, you may not want to stay in the exact spot you happen to be: instead, find a spot that provides you some visibility, but is closer to food, water, and shelter. And never stay in a spot that’s more dangerous!
- Go for help. If you are surrounded by nothing but trees, ice, or water, it may be that no one will find you for many days. Your odds will improve by finding help, rather than waiting days for them to find you. Be careful: walking uses up valuable energy, and may put you in greater danger if you leave the safety of shelter, food, and water. You may very well worsen your situation if you become hopelessly lost. But sometimes, it’s better to find civilization than to wait for them to find you.
- Bug out. In natural disasters, it’s not uncommon to need help. You may need to leave your home (what’s left of it), and find safety somewhere else. On the one hand, your home can provide you with many amenities that would seem like luxuries in other survival situations; on the other hand, you can only take so much of it with you. Knowing what to take, how to pack it and carry it, and what to leave behind is a genuinely valuable piece of knowledge.
- Prioritize. How do you know which of the above strategies to use? There are easily five priorities that you must follow. If you can meet these priorities, stay where you are. If you can’t meet even one of them, go for help or bug out.
- Shelter. Building a shelter is usually your first need. Why? Because doing so burns up a lot of energy. By doing the harder task first, you take less risk in the remaining tasks. How urgent is shelter on a beautiful day? It can save your life at night, or if it rains in a few hours. A simple thought experiment: if you’ve ever shivered climbing out of a swimming pool on an eighty degree day, you’ve experienced something valuable. Shivering is a bodily defense against hypothermia: if you continue to lose heat, you could die even on a warm day. If you know how good that towel feels after leaving a swimming pool, you understand how a small rain shower on a fifty degree day can impair you hours later. Remember: your shelter only needs to keep the wind and rain off you. It certainly doesn’t need to be elaborate, or even a tent: a pile of leaves that you can huddle under to stay dry and out of the wind is more than enough to save your life.
- Water. Once you have shelter, you need to think about water. You can survive days without food, but if you neglect hydration, the effects can be felt within hours. A dry mouth is an early warning that you need to find safe water. A headache can occur a few hours later: and by then, you are already in danger. Another thought experiment: recall the last time your were in the woods, the hills, or the desert and saw some wet ground. Would you drink that water? Probably not: it’s time to start finding water you would drink...and that can be miles and miles away. Because if you don’t find safe drinking water in the next few hours, you may wish you drank that muddy filth when you had the chance!
- Fire. If you’ve found water, you need to start thinking about fire. Fires take a tremendous amount of work for something seemingly quite simple. You need to gather tinder, kindling, and fuel...lots of fuel. Anyone who has experimented with basic firecraft learns that fire burns through woods very fast. A well-known rule of thumb is actually a conservative estimate: gather as much wood as you think you can burn in 24 hours, and then triple it. Think about this: generally, when people exhaust their supply of fire wood, they do so in the dead of dark. Imagine gathering more wood, far from your shelter, when you can’t see where you’re going, how to get back, and (assuming you find wood) whether the wood is soaking wet or infested.
- Food. Food is a much later priority because you can go days without it. Actually, the hardest time to go without food is the first 24 hours: your stomach pangs, and you get weak, a headache, and even angry. But the next day, you actually feel a little bit better. Eventually, you body adjusts, and you can go for a week without a high caloric intake. You can often find safe, simple foods where you are without resorting to eating insects, or needing to build time-consuming traps. Nuts, berries, and edible leaves (if you know the way to test for safety) can sustain you for days or more before your body becomes malnourished from a lack of protein.
- Signal. Your goal is not to survive indefinitely in the wilderness. Your goal is to be rescued. While you’re gathering your firewood or, later, collecting wild blackberries from a bush, you need to think about attracting attention to yourself. Do you see contrails in the sky from airplanes? Then you’re in some established flight path. Do you see roads? Rivers? Where is help likely to come? Do you use a mirror? Start a smoky fire with a car tire or salvaged motor oil? What signals can you send out that will draw attention?
- Expand possibilities. You have survived your first night! Good news, because you have proven to yourself that your skills can help you survive for many days. On the second day, you need to refine everything: build a better shelter. Collect more water and firewood. Gather more food, and start testing for edibility of other plants nearby. Build a more intelligent signal fire, or check your surroundings for a better way to signal your rescuers.
Once you understand the above framework, you can then start worrying about tools and survival kits. In fact, the smartest solution is to seriously evaluate your skills. What are you weakest at? In all actuality, the hardest aspect to the above is finding safe water. Unless you know how to do this in a wide variety of circumstances, this is where you can start adding knowledge, practice, gear, and equipment to your collection. Not good at starting fires? Then you can look toward tools and techniques that help you start a fire without matches.
Otherwise, you might not survive your own survival!