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

  Note: Outside of an ever-changing Mother Nature, the proverbial wild card lies in human nature and how it reacts to stress. Make every effort to get to know the other people in your tribe before crisis strikes.

  7

  WHAT IT TAKES TO STAY ALIVE: COMMON POWERFUL PERSONALITY PATTERNS FOR PEAK SURVIVOR PERFORMANCE

  The following personality traits were found, at least in part, among those who have lived through life-threatening events. The list was compiled by folks who collect information on survivors. If you live through a life-threatening experience, they may want to interview you to see what you’re made of. Keep in mind that these attributes make for a happier person in general, whether in the bush or the city. Ignoring these patterns could win you a spot on an altogether different list: the autopsy report.

  Common personality traits of survivors

  • The ability to keep calm and collected.

  • The ability to improvise and adapt.

  • The ability to make decisions.

  • The ability to endure hardships.

  • The ability to figure out the thoughts of others.

  • The ability to hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

  • The ability to maintain a sense of humor.

  Calm and Collected

  The ability to keep calm and collected sounds trite, but it is the foundation of a positive survival mind-set. It is the ability to prevent fear and panic from taking over your world, as both possess amazing powers to incapacitate body and mind. Prior training, whether physical, mental, or otherwise helps you deal more effectively with this ugly pair. It’s physically necessary at times to STOP your body to allow greater clarity to surface.

  STOP is a much-used acronym found in many survival books.

  The “S” stands for stop, which means to physically stop your body, sit down, and chill while attempting to lower your heart rate for greater mental and emotional clarity.

  The “T” stands for think. Now that you have stopped your body, think about your situation.

  The “O” stands for observe. While you sit thinking about your situation, observe all you can about your surroundings and the options you may have. Doing so allows the brain to analyze and identify threatening information gathered through the senses.

  The “P” stands for plan. While you sit thinking about your situation and observing the possibilities, you start to form a plan.

  Once the threat or threats have been assessed, the brain forms a strategy to deal with the issues at hand. This strategy will be affected by several factors, including prior training and practice, exposure to similar events in the past, fatigue, dehydration, and so forth. Once a plan has been developed, the brain shoots it off to the central nervous system to activate the required motor movements. Depending on your predicament, this process can happen in the blink of an eye or over a period of several hours or days.

  The Swedish word for stop is stopa. Since a large part of my heritage is Swedish, I’ll use the “A” and have it stand for act. No plan, no matter how well thought out, is worth beans unless it’s acted upon.

  Improvise and Adapt

  The ability to improvise and adapt allows you to make use of every opportunity. It enables you to pack survival gear with more than one function, gear that allows for creating other gear. Traveling to any developing country imparts a profound respect and understanding of what can be done with limited resources. Most Americans have had it so good for so long, that their ability to adapt has become weak and flabby. They are slaves to the discount stores and their offerings of returns or cash-back guarantees. We rarely fix things anymore in America because we can return them.

  Breathe Deep!

  The power of breath control has been used for centuries by enlightened masters and warriors to accomplish everything from gaining greater clarity and calmness in the face of chaotic situations to controlling physical pain. Science is just starting to unearth the physiological proof that so many Americans seem to crave about why this is true. Unchecked fear and panic can easily lead to hyperventilation or, at the very least, anemic shallow breathing, which greatly impedes survival body resources and reaction times by elevating the heart rate, reducing oxygen to the cells, hindering concentration, and impairing the production of Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP), responsible for producing energy and heat. In fact, scientists have discovered that oxygen is the most vital component for the production of ATP, so breathe freely. In short, when the heart rate skyrockets due to increased stress, physical or otherwise, gaining control of breathing helps regain mental functions, motor skills, and energy production.

  Simple Breathing Exercise

  1. Inhale through your nose. The nose screens out harmful particulate matter from the air we breathe as well as warms excessively cold air. Nose breathing also boosts concentration.

  2. Take a slow deep breath through your nose and into your belly, causing it to noticeably rise.

  3. Breathe out through your nose or mouth, emphasizing and lengthening the exhalation, and repeat as necessary. The long exhalation, a phenomenon that occurs naturally when we sigh, helps activate the parasympathetic nervous system’s relaxation response. Keep your awareness and concentration focused upon your breathing as you slowly inhale and exhale.

  4. If you wish, count to three during your inhalation, hold the breath for three counts and then exhale for as long as is comfortable. If counting is distracting, blow it off and simply breathe slowly, fully, and rhythmically.

  Make Decisions

  The ability to make decisions allows you to thoroughly yet quickly formulate a game plan and then dutifully follow it through. I attended a college that has new students attend a thirty-day backpacking trip at the beginning of the school year. Four days after our group met, we were dropped off into the woods with instructors and seventy-plus-pound backpacks. The trip was grueling and involved miles of boulder hopping over knee-busting terrain. Before each meal we “group processed” about what we should eat. “Should we have spaghetti or falafel?” said one person. “Well, I don’t know ... falafel gives me gas,” said another.

  Meanwhile, back at my growling stomach, I prayed for a general consensus and a hot meal. Although we eventually ate, our tribe routinely burned thirty or more minutes each evening debating over food choices. In a life-threatening predicament, every decision is important.

  Be decisive and take responsibility for your decisions. There’s no room for passing-the-buck politics in the bush. Gather all the information possible about your surroundings and situation, formulate a plan, then do something about it! If plan “A” doesn’t work, go to plan “B,” and so on. Keep in mind that doing something about it might mean remaining where you are and conserving energy while awaiting rescue. Don’t be afraid of failure and embarrassment by creating a game plan that doesn’t work. You’ve already screwed up, or you wouldn’t be in the situation—so what have you got to lose? Emergencies involving several people will need special finesse and leadership to obtain the intelligent discipline and organization required for success.

  Endure Hardship

  A survival situation is not comfortable. By its very nature it will tax you physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Your ability to endure hardship will be tested to its fullest extent. There are two great enemies to your survival and to life in general. One is the desire for comfort and the other is complacency. If this sounds like a summary of 90 percent of modern America, maybe it’s just a coincidence. Desiring temporary comfort can spur you into making decisions that are irrational—all at the expense of a whim—and may be what propels you into a compromising situation in the first place. Comfort isn’t bad, but there is a time and a place for it. You do want to make yourself as comfortable as possible during your episode, physically and otherwise, but don’t weenie out and let a whim jeopardize your life. Training body and mind far in advance of emergencies helps you deal with potential hardship. Realistic survival training cultivates a positive attitude
and propels your mind into the land of “I know I can” instead of “I think I can.”

  Figure out the Thoughts of Others

  Is the ability to figure out the thoughts of others some sort of psychic hotline thing? Think for a minute: How can intuition work to your advantage? Put yourself in your rescuers’ shoes. Which direction will they come from? Where might they go first? What will they expect you to do as a survivor? Being sensitive to your surroundings includes the people in your party. Watch members of your group like a hawk for symptoms of fear, hypothermia, dehydration, and a host of other nasties. If your situation becomes long-term and resorts to cannibalism, having a good sense of intuition may come in handy around camp. Remember, what befalls one member of the tribe befalls all members of the tribe.

  Hope for the Best

  and Prepare for the Worst

  “The Ability to Hope for the Best and Prepare for the Worst” should be a bumper sticker, and somewhere it probably is. This is a heavy statement taking into account two major concepts. Hoping for the best is maintaining a positive attitude regardless of the seeming difficulties at hand. Preparing for the worst is just that: proper preparation. Get into the habit of doing both before any outdoor excursion.

  Maintain a Sense of Humor

  I have to admit that I added the ability to maintain a sense of humor. Humor is truly the grease between the gears, and has a great effect on human psychology and physiology.

  I look to the Native Americans for a great example of this. Living in the Southwest, I’m frequently bombarded with tacky white-trash images of Native Americans. One of my least favorite images is the stoic guy riding the horse, slumped over and looking pretty whipped. The never-smiling face of this Hollywood Indian sports a streak from a small tear rolling down his face.

  Several years ago I was given an informal Indian name, much to the delight of my Yavapai friends. It’s Mayete (pronounced ma-yeh-tee). Can you guess what this means in Yavapai? It means “penis.” My point is that the native people I know are constantly ribbing each other. Humor is very much a part of their lifestyle, far from the rigid stoicism sometimes pinned upon them from images like those I mentioned. Sure, all indigenous peoples were treated with astounding injustice for decades and many still are. But for most tribes, long before the coming of the white man, nature could be almost as callous. It’s estimated that in the ancient Southwest one out of three babies died from disease and malnutrition before they were a year old. Fickle desert rainfall and drought made resources unpredictable causing tribal feuds, raiding, and warfare. And still the native person smiles. Many native people created special names for each other specifically to conjure up humor, such as “rat penis”—so much for the macho Indian names of the movies.

  My point is this. As important as your body is to you, it’s just a body. Do all you can to preserve the life within that’s sacred, but don’t forget to have some fun.

  8

  THE MOST COMMON WAY TO PUSH UP DAISIES IN THE OUTDOORS

  The optimal ambient temperature in which humans are able to maintain body temperature without stress is 79° to 86°F (26° to 30°C). Statistically speaking, if you end up the loser in a survival situation, you’ll die of exposure.

  Exposure is a generic term for dying of hypothermia or hyperthermia. Mammals and birds are warm-blooded, or homeothermic, meaning they can maintain a relatively constant inner-body temperature, whereas other critters such as reptiles and attorneys are cold-blooded, or poikilothermic, meaning their body temperature varies according to the temperature of the environment.

  In humans, core body temperature alternates in cycles throughout the day. While daily activity is responsible for some of this cycling, our body’s circadian rhythm accounts for the majority. For the average person, inner temperatures are usually lowest in the early morning, around 97.9°F (36.6°C), with the late-afternoon high being approximately 99.3°F (37.3°C). Age is also an important factor, as some thermoregulatory responses are not fully developed until after puberty. Folks in their late sixties and older get screwed in three ways—from less sweating in reaction to heat, to reduced vasoconstrictor response and shivering in regard to combating the cold. Although body-temperature regulation between men and women is similar, several subtle differences in females are apparent, including a smaller blood volume, lower hemoglobin concentration, smaller lean body mass and heart, greater percentage of total body fat, greater surface-area-to-mass ratio, smaller shivering response, higher body-temperature set point for sweating, and geometrically thinner extremities. Females also have the added bonus of monthly temperature variation related to the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and menopause.

  Hypothermia

  From the Greek hypo meaning “under”, “beneath,” or “below” and the Greek therme meaning “heat.” Hypothermia is the dropping of your body’s core temperature below 98.6°F (37°C). Controlled hypothermia is sometimes used in surgery to temporarily decrease a patient’s metabolic rate. If your core temperature dips to 92°F (33°C) or less, you’ll no longer be able to help yourself if you’re traveling alone.

  Hyperthermia

  From the Greek hyper meaning “over,” “above,” or “excessive” and the Greek therme meaning “heat.” Hyperthermia is the raising of your body’s core temperature above 98.6°F (37°C). Anyone who has ever experienced a fever knows how wicked a few degrees above normal can feel. It was caused by a resetting of your temperature regulatory mechanism in response to fever-causing substances such as bacterial endotoxins or leucocyte extracts. At 107°F (41.6°C), the physical cells within your body literally begin to melt.

  Fluctuation in core body temperature, high or low, of even a few degrees can severely compromise your ability to survive. To control its inner temperature, the body must be able to sense a change in environmental temperature and respond accordingly. To do so, the body is equipped with warm and cold receptors located in the skin, spinal cord, muscles, and brain that begin physiological changes to quickly deal with outside extremes. Many variables contribute to the development and severity of hypothermia and hyperthermia, including a person’s age, sex, health, nutrition, and body size; exhaustion; exposure; duration of exposure; wind; temperature; wetness; medications; intoxicants; and prior adaptation to heat or cold. Regulating core body temperature is called thermoregulation and is made possible by the wondrous physiological responses and reflexes called vasoconstriction, vasodilation, shivering, and sweating. Aside from basic physical necessities such as airway, breathing, and circulation, thermoregulating body temperature should be of prime importance in planning your next outdoor journey, regardless of its duration.

  Temperature regulation in humans represents the balance between heat production from metabolic sources, such as digesting a corn dog, and heat loss from respiration and evaporation (sweating) and the physics of radiation, convection, and conduction. The metabolism of food to generate body heat is king, as decreases in core temperature elicit a metabolic response that is ten to twenty times greater than a similar reduction of skin temperature alone!

  Once hypothermia develops, the heat deficit is shared by two body compartments: the shell and the core. Your outer skin, or “shell,” consists of .065 inches of skin and has an average area of 2.2 square yards. This means that on an average, your shell accounts for only 10 percent of your total body mass. The rest of it is considered “the core.” In other words, your body burns through calories like a madman when it senses a drop in core temperature.

  Temperature regulatory mechanisms act through the autonomic nervous system and are largely controlled by the hypothalamus. The big “H” responds to stimuli from nerve receptors in your skin, the largest organ in the body.

  When It’s Cold

  In a cold environment, body heat is conserved first by the constriction of blood vessels near the body’s surface (vasoconstriction), keeping the majority of blood (heat) in the core. Doing so allows the body to use the skin and underlying fatty layer as insulation.
r />   The one area of skin that doesn’t constrict blood flow is the scalp, which remains at a fairly constant temperature regardless of outside extremes. This is one reason why the head (and neck) loses and gains heat like crazy. In its attempt to regulate temperature, the body is a master at changing blood flow to the skin. With blood vessels dilated wide open in hot weather, it can circulate in the skin alone more than four quarts of blood every minute. In cold weather, blood vessels constrict skin blood flow to an amazing 99 percent of the former, a mere 0.02 quarts per minute! Ironically, when temperatures continue to drop, blood vessels in the skin dilate (vasodilation) and, if temperatures drop further, alternate back and forth between dilation and constriction in the body’s attempt to ensure that the skin remains undamaged from the cold. The result is your red nose, ears, hands, and other appendages in the wintertime. If outside temperatures continue to plummet, however, surface blood vessels constrict continuously.

  Second in the body’s response to cold is uncoordinated waves of muscle contractions, more commonly referred to as shivering. Shivering utilizes small parts of the skeletal muscles called motor units that contract around 10 to 20 times per second and can increase your metabolism fivefold! The energy needed for shivering comes from fats and simple sugars (carbohydrates) and can be used up quickly unless you consume additional food. Shivering decreases when carbon dioxide levels raise (a poorly ventilated shelter) or when the oxygen in the air becomes thinner (extremes in altitude), and through the use of alcohol, which impairs the shivering response. Since blood vessels are essentially the pipes your body uses to heat itself by forcing warmed blood throughout the body, ingesting substances that dilate surface blood vessels is a dumb move. Purposely constricting blood vessels is also a bad move, whether through nicotine use, dehydration, or another means. Dehydration slowly turns your blood into ketchup, making it that much harder for the heart to circulate the sludge around the body in order to keep inner temperatures stable. Low temperatures also change the composition of blood, making it thicker by up to 21 percent, by increasing the number of particles, such as platelets, red blood cells, and cholesterol. Another heat-conserving feature most impressive in Bigfoot and other really hairy folks is goose bumps, or piloerection. Goose bumps raise body hairs, thereby creating tiny air pockets of insulation.