Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
[ 7 ]
“
It's easy to imagine that wilderness survival would involve equipment, training, and experience. It
turns out that, at the moment of truth, those might be good things to have but they aren't decisive.
Those of us who go into the wilderness or seek our thrills in contact with the forces of nature soon
learn, in fact, that experience, training, and modern equipment can betray you. The maddening thing
for someone with a Western scientific turn of mind is that it's not what's in your pack that separates
the quick from the dead. It's not even what's in your mind. Corny as it sounds, it's what's in your
heart.
”
—Laurence Gonzales, from
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
We all hope that the world will keep on working well, disaster will never strike our town, clean
water will always flow out of our tap, the lights and heat will always come on at the flip of a
switch, and that we will always be able to buy all the food and gas we need whenever we so de-
sire. Most of us will probably never face a crisis without a home, or at least some kind of roof
over our heads. However, real life rarely replicates a TV sitcom, is usually somewhat unpre-
dictable, is often downright messy, and can be ruthlessly unforgiving. This chapter provides a
condensed survival manual to help people cope with those times when life gets truly messy and
you suddenly find yourself without access to goods, central services, and perhaps even shelter.
Topics covered include basic survival strategies and using your intuition; assembling a survival
kit; developing a survivor's personality; locating and purifying water in a survival situation;
starting a fire; foraging for edible plants, bugs, and other critters; hunting, trapping and fishing;
building a shelter; and making snowshoes, rope, and simple tools.
Your personal survival in harsh physical conditions and other emergency situations in-
volves more than simply applying the right techniques. A synergistic combination of skill, intu-
ition, action, wisdom, good judgment, training, preparation, and the most important factor of
all—the determination to survive—will give you the best chance for success. It pays to be both
mentally and physically prepared for survival. The mentally prepared person has a “can do” at-
titude, sees problems as obstacles to surmount, and has learned basic skills for dealing with sur-
vival situations. The common personality traits of survivors are just as useful for adapting and
