98.6 Degrees: The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive Read online

How do survival situations happen? How do they start? These are loaded questions. A more accurate one would be, “How don’t they start?” Murphy’s Law, remember? That which can go wrong will. Flat tires, freak weather, wrong turns, broken limbs, and a million more scenarios exist for screwing up in the woods. More often than not, life-threatening affairs are the end result of several seemingly insignificant events. Taken one at a time, they would have little effect, but when compounded they can kill. Therefore, a main part of any survival strategy is to recognize danger signs early so corrective action can be taken.

  One of the more common ways to meet your maker is couched innocently enough in the simple day hike. Can you guess why? Have you ever heard someone say, “Ain’t nothin’ gonna happen, honey. We’ll only be gone for a few hours. It’s just a day hike!”

  Day hikes are notorious for compromising lives because they lull people into a sense of complacency in regard to properly preparing for a trip. Phrases like “We don’t need that extra sweater,” or “Leave the water in the truck!” can end up putting people six feet under.

  Many people have died less than a mile from their vehicles without even being in the wilderness.

  A few years ago, in the Arizona desert, an elderly couple made a wrong turn in their car and found themselves traveling a dirt road on the outskirts of Phoenix. After getting stuck in a sand wash, the woman abandoned ship to walk toward a major interstate that was clearly in view. A few days later, searchers found her body less than a mile from the highway, dead from dehydration and hyperthermia. Her frail husband, who stayed with the car, died as well. A rearview mirror dislodged from the vehicle and aimed at highway traffic might have brought help their way. What a terrible waste. Proper preparation can save your life—ask anyone who’s died of exposure; they’ll tell you.

  Killing You Softly: Enemies to Your Survival

  While it’s impossible to complete this list due to the infinite variables present within human nature and Mother Nature, many outdoor travelers commonly face the enemies below. While there are no guarantees in a survival situation, proper planning, coupled with quality survival training and subsequent practice, will prevent many of these from occurring in the first place.

  • Anxiety and fear (these two, when mixed with the power of the imagination, are voracious killers)

  • Pain and injury

  • Illness

  • Cold and heat

  • Thirst and hunger

  • Wetness

  • Fatigue and sleep deprivation

  • Boredom

  • Loneliness and isolation

  • Complacency and the desire for comfort

  • Stubbornness (refusal to recognize and stop actions jeopardizing survival)

  • Promises (unrealistic guarantees made to self or others leading to stupid behavior)

  • “Get-home-itis” (setting and trying to maintain unrealistic time lines)

  The last three enemies often subtly work their infectious death magic together, slowly, but surely, eroding away your good judgment.

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  SURVIVAL VS. PRIMITIVE LIVING, OR “LIVING OFF THE LAND”

  If you fail to get you and your loved ones out of a modern survival scenario, you will all die. It’s not like the bar is closing at 1:00 A.M. and you’re down to your last six-pack, or getting a flat tire three blocks from home. It’s a serious life-threatening situation with little regard for the environment or anything else. You may resort to felling live trees, burning obnoxious petroleum products, or un-daintily harvesting materials necessary to keep you and those you love alive. You will be subjected to tremendous mental, emotional, and physical stress. You will need to strictly abide by the laws of how the body loses and gains heat through conduction, convection, radiation, evaporation, and respiration. Often, unless blessed by a favorable event during your survival ordeal, you won’t be given a second chance if you blow it.

  There are very few rules, but your main goals are to regulate core body temperature and get rescued from your predicament as soon as possible.

  The Modern Survival Scenario

  Survival situations come in as many shapes and sizes as there are zits on a teenager, and can last for various periods of time. You can be dead in a couple of minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months. However, the average survival scenario lasts for 72 hours, or three days. Statistically speaking, this is the amount of time that passes before searchers find you dead or alive—as long as you have someone searching for you. The whole focus of this book is betting on the fact that you’ll be rescued within a three-day time period—largely because you bothered to tell someone where you were going. This obviously does not mean that you should give up if your predicament lasts longer, but instead means you will have to try even harder. Never give up trying to survive. If you become compromised in the woods today, the chances are high that you’ll fall into the modern survival category.

  Primitive Living

  A primitive living situation is a long-term commitment. There is no getting rescued because you’re already home. If you find yourself in this situation, chances are your uncle is wearing a buckskin loincloth chewing on a piece of dried pack-rat meat.

  Differences

  There is much confusion regarding the difference between a modern survival scenario and primitive living skills. They are two completely different scenarios whose main objectives overlap: the main objective in each is to stay alive, one short-term (statistically) and one long-term. For the average outdoor recreationist, primitive skills should take a backseat to learning modern survival skills if learning to survive is the main intention. In other words, discover the magic of making fire by friction after you perfect using matches.

  In any event, all modern survival skills originated from primitive skills, and the beauty of knowing both is empowering. If I lose my knife, I can make one from stone. If my magnesium and matches go down the river, I have the potential to create fire with sticks.

  To effectively teach modern survival skills, one should be well-versed in primitive skills as well. Nothing imparts the mind-set of being able to do more with less and the possibilities of improvisation like living primitively. Like everything else, however, times change and with that change comes an array of modern goodies that can prove valuable to your survival.

  I attended a gathering several years ago and watched a friend and renowned primitive skills instructor use nearly an entire book of matches to light a fire. This same person can make a fire with sticks in less than twenty seconds. Learning survival skills is much the same as learning martial arts. Would you rather face an assailant with a half a dozen throwing stars or an Uzi? Modern-day samurai warriors would certainly carry a full arsenal of automatic weaponry and other technological gizmos. There is an old saying, “Don’t carry a knife to a gun fight,” especially if you have a choice in the matter! With the samurai, only the look of the tool has evolved over time, but the intention behind the tool—the warrior mind-set, physical training, and common sense—has essentially remained the same.

  One of the main illusions confusing a primitive situation and a modern one is the importance of food. Remember, the average modern survival scenario lasts three days or less. I know people who have fasted for forty days and none of them were named Jesus. In fact, a normal well-nourished adult has sufficient fat stores to live for sixty to seventy days, albeit in a controlled clinical setting. Soldiers in the field, when subjected to serious food restrictions have routinely maintained a relatively normal workload for up to nine days. During World War II, the well-known Minnesota starvation studies found that a loss of less than 10-percent body weight did not impair physical performance. It was only when the subject continued the starvation pattern for longer periods of time and lost more body weight that physical performance began to nose-dive.

  Teaching a basic survival class how to catch food with a variety of traps and snares is not only unrealistic and impractical (imagine your urban sixty-year-old aunt setting up sco
res of dead-fall traps), it ignores the more important issue of regulating body temperature. Besides, unless you trap for a living, your chances of harvesting more calories than you’ll use dinking around is debatable. In extreme cold weather, food would be nice since digestion generates metabolic heat, but it doesn’t replace the hat and parka. Most of us have ample calories stored around our waist to get us through the most compromising modern situations.

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  SURVIVAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE IMPORTANCE OF PROPER PRIOR TRAINING

  “Rule your mind or it will rule you.”

  —HORACE

  Survival is 90 percent psychology. When the chips are down, it doesn’t matter what you have buried in the backyard or how many books on survival you’ve read. If you’re a mental and emotional basket case during your survival episode, you’re toast.

  The benefits of a positive attitude are many, and they range from improving your health and aiding disease resistance to putting more cash in your bank account. Science has proven that attitude, self-esteem, and humor influence changes in heart rate, hormones, and body chemistry. All living cells respond instantaneously to every thought and feeling we have. Like donning a pair of colored glasses, how we think and feel about the world affects our perception about everyone and everything. If the world looks like hell to someone, so be it. For that person it turns out to be just that. Another person will experience the world as blissful; and so it is, at least for him or her. Put another way, your psychology creates your physiology.

  Training in the physical skills necessary to survive is rather easy when compared to the psychological aspect of survival. People who die in survival situations experience psychological death long before their physical bodies check out. Fear, anxiety, embarrassment, anger, frustration, guilt, depression, confusion, boredom, and loneliness are common reactions to emergency stress. All will attempt to strip you of hope, coercing you into giving up the fight for life. As we will soon explore, in life-threatening situations, the line between a survivor’s physiological and psychological responses becomes rather transparent.

  A friend of mine is a police officer on the local SWAT team. At times he’ll get a call in the middle of the night about a hostage situation to which he immediately responds. Once there, he reports to the commanding officer, who issues him a specialized weapon. On one particular evening, the magazine cartridge for the rifle is wrapped with blue tape instead of red. Instantly his adrenaline plummets. It’s a drill. There is no hostage predicament. Every movement for the rest of this night, while valuable, couldn’t possibly compare to the adrenaline rush before seeing blue tape wrapped around the magazine.

  Prior training for the unexpected emergency is a wise move. It has been proven that repeatedly practicing something makes a deeper and deeper groove within the limbic system, a system which commands certain behaviors necessary for the survival of all mammals. Physiologically, practice makes perfect, or pretty darn close.

  Put Up or Shut Up

  All people thrust into a survival situation go through the process of identifying the particular threat or threats and then formulating a plan to deal with them. The amount of time you have to go through the steps below is dependent upon what’s happening. Your reaction to the scenario might happen in a few seconds (grizzly bear charge) or days, and will continuously fluctuate as more and more information about your predicament is revealed.

  Reaction to the scenario:

  1. Recognition phase.

  2. Speed (body functions react: blood pressure increases, heart rate quickens, etc.).

  3. Adaptation or nonadaptation (fainting).

  4. Steps taken for survival.

  The increased proficiency developed through practice cuts down on the reaction time needed to perform a skill, thus using a lot less energy. This last point is critical since you will not always have just gulped down a heaping bowl of cereal and awakened refreshed from ten hours of beauty rest when the emergency begins. You will usually be ragged around the edges and unraveling fast with few supplies to help ward off death.

  Scientific studies regarding learning and memory point directly to the neurons of the brain. An adult human brain contains approximately 12 to 15 billion nerve cells, of which we use a paltry 4 percent of its potential. Like a biological dating game, these neurons, or tiny information processing cells, hang out and attempt to make connections with other neurons. Many are quite good at this, as some individual neuron connections number in the thousands. The more the brain is “used,” the more connections are made and the higher your SAT scores are. Dendrites, tiny tree-like structures, use their many branches to funnel electrical signals into the neurons themselves. When the proper signal trips the neurons’ trigger so to speak—and not all of them do—the neuron sends its own message down a stalk-shaped axon. The axon funnels the information through junctions called synapses, which then lead to the dendrites of other cells.

  Memory, the act of recall and recognition, is based upon two variables. One involves how many senses (sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste) are involved to stimulate the remembering. The more senses that are brought into play, the greater the memory. The other variable assists in forming the pattern for the memory itself. Memory involves repeated firings between dendrites. When a new skill is acquired, the fresh information has a hell of a time jumping the synaptic gap between dendrites. There’s no pattern to follow, no well-worn path, as the skill has embarked upon “the road never traveled.” The first time a new skill is learned and a connection between dendrites made, the brain releases a slippery, fatty protein called myelin. Initially, like a newly intimate couple in desperate need of lubricant, the new information has a rough time crossing over. Each time the connection is activated, however, more slippery myelin coats the dendrites, until eventually, with enough practice and repetition, the connection is fully lubed and can operate quickly with minimal effort. The more survival skills an individual has that have been practiced physically and otherwise, the better odds they have for those skills coming to the forefront during a stressful emergency. For the survivor, multiple, thoroughly lubricated myelin connections preprogram decisive, speedy solutions to deadly scenarios by directly dropping critical motor movement patterns into the central nervous system.

  While the quest for perfection can kill you quickly in the outdoors, accomplishing a skill well is a real confidence builder. This calming confidence penetrates deep within the individual, past the conscious mind, allowing the person to get into action quickly during crisis situations, minimizing the potential for “freeze ups.” Freeze ups, becoming immobilized by fear and panic, typically result from experiencing a threat that is perceived as beyond the ability of the perceiver to effectively deal with.

  Situations are stressful to people because they see them as so. To some, going without toilet paper in the wilderness pushes major buttons. Having never wiped their butt with a rock, stick, or other natural nicety, new synapses must be created on the spot.

  All perceptions can be altered with proper training and subsequent practice. Practice reduces response time, which in itself might save your life. Mother Nature is full of variation—variation that may give way to fear or panic if left unchecked. The more mock situations you put yourself through, the better adapted you’ll be to real-time stress.

  Scads of incidents point to the fact that those who mentally and physically rehearse emergency procedures benefit from automatic action when a crisis occurs. Imagery has been used for as long as there have been people. When building a house, you produce an image in your mind about how you’d like the house to look. This information is given to an architect who then makes the image tangible on paper. The image is then filled with the power of emotion and sweat equity and—Wham!—the building manifests itself from thin air. Mental imaging, used by top athletes for decades, strengthens the motor programs of whatever you visualize in your head through low-level stimulation of the muscle fibers involved. The action of striking a match for instance, can
be improved upon by properly striking the match as a moving image in your mind. Playing out what-if survival scenarios, and the correct reactions to them, have an equal value. Visualizing a number of correct reactions provides options while further boosting confidence. In other words, mental practice, to a point, further greases the synapses between dendrites.

  It is not so much what you believe in that matters, as the way in which you believe it and proced to translate that belief into action.

  —LIN YUTANG

  The Ten (Eleven) Essentials

  Although generic in its format, the following list, usually referred to as “The Ten Essentials,” highlights the skills and know-how any trained outdoors person should possess. While lacking in its advice regarding hot temperatures, and the importance of adequate sleep, which I’ve added as number eleven, the list’s overall effectiveness is proven and timeless in its application.

  1. A positive attitude.

  2. Fuel to burn: food.

  3. Adequate hydration: water.

  4. Ability to stay warm and dry: clothing.

  5. Ability to get dry: shelter.

  6. Ability to get warm: fire.