It's Personal Basic Instinct The long-eared owl hoots every two seconds—for hours on end. I know this intimately after lying awake, shivering much of the night. The hoots, the cold, and the pine needles sticking into my left cheek are my only companions until dawn. I heard about the two-day survival course, in which you go into the Arizona wilderness with nothing but a knife and a water bottle, from a friend. As a chronic overpacker whose 10 essentials are more like 37, I was immediately intrigued—and slightly alarmed. No food? Without an hourly feeding, I become severely cranky. No coat? I cling to my down jacket like a toddler to her teddy. But still, I wondered, what did people do before Gore-Tex, propane stoves, and tents? And could I do it if I had to? So I enrolled in the course, run by Tony Nester (a modern- day Davy Crockett) with the Ancient Pathways survival school (www.apathways.com) in Flagstaff. In May, Tony, co-instructor Eliot Spaulding, 13 other women, and I carpooled an hour outside of Flagstaff to the Sycamore Canyon Wilderness. We pulled our gear from the cars to start the trail-less tromp through the ponderosa pines—my stomach was already grumbling, my pack felt freakishly light, and the skies threatened rain. Then I saw something odd: one of the participants shoved a bag of what looked like apples, bananas, and energy bars into her backpack. Huh? I looked around as people pulled their packs from trunks. Down jackets and rain slickers were strapped onto them. Ahem? And through the mesh of a JanSport, I saw the outline of what was clearly a PB&J sandwich. No fair! The extra clothing and gobs of food violated the instructions I had received from the info packet and the website and from talking to Tony on the phone weeks beforehand. Panic—like when you lose your wallet, lock your keys in the car, or leave the stove on—jolted through me. I felt naked (gearwise), foolish, and annoyed. In a martyrlike (but terribly jealous) mood, I swallowed my panic and concentrated on the skills that Tony and Eliot began teaching us after we’d hiked about a mile to the flat, forested area where we would spend the night: how to start a fire with flint or a stick and bow, where to find water in the bend of a dry river, and how to build an insulated shelter with branches and pine needles. We had just finished building one type of structure (a bed frame of branches, belly-button high, filled with pine needles), when Tony pulled out a space blanket, saying, “You can place this on top, if you’ve come prepared, which, of course, is what this class is about.” That was the final pine-needle straw. “I thought the class was about being unprepared!” I spoke up. Ha, ha, everyone laughed, thinking I was joking. “No, seriously. I thought it was about having just a knife,” I groused. “Well, it’s about surviving for a week with only what you have in your daypack,” Tony said. “Seventy to 80 percent of people who get lost are day hikers who think they’ll just be gone a few hours.” That explanation sufficed for the moment, but I cornered Tony later. “I thought we weren’t supposed to bring food or clothing.” “That’s how we did it at first, but people would sneak in gorp and power bars, and I got tired of being a policeman,” he said. He started telling people they could bring snacks if they wanted, figuring they probably learn better when they’re not suffering and miserable anyway. With some groups, however, that quickly devolved into full-out feasts—as I witnessed when people broke out their lunches: burritos, hoagies, cinnamon gummy bears, exotic trail mixes, and rice and beans. I didn’t know if the other participants had received different instructions or simply interpreted “snack” differently, but I did know that my stomach was growling. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s cinnamon bears . . . Evening approached very slowly. Focus. Focus on Tony’s fount of info: Boiling a handful of pine needles provides more vitamin C than orange juice. Spanish moss on trees works as an antibiotic when shoved into cuts; sap then serves as a bandage. A cotton ball rubbed in Vaseline will burn for five minutes even in rain or wind. The hands-on instruction made me feel confident that I could persevere for a week or two if an outing went awry. But more than that, interacting with nature in this functional way made me feel connected to the landscape rather than just a visitor. I asked Tony if society somehow collapsed, could he—who tracks mountains lions, carves arrowheads, and trains Special Forces soldiers—survive? His answer surprised me: “Maybe if there was a tribe of us, codependent on each other. Doing it alone is very hard.” He then distinguished survival skills—eeking out an existence for a couple of days—from bushcraft skills: “living day to day off the wilderness as our ancestors did.” The latter requires years of practice and, over the long term, help from one another. I caught a glimpse of that when night fell. Some people hadn’t finished their shelters, so the rest of us helped pile on pine needles, quickly finishing the job. Afterward, one woman shared wet wipes for our scratched, dirt-black hands. And around the campfire, outfitted with self-carved spoons, people siphoned salted cashews, salmon with crackers, and cinnamon bears my ravenous way while Tony cooked up wild rice and tortillas. My full belly temporarily alleviated the frigid cold, but around 2 a.m. I crawled from my coffin-sized lean-to, supplemented my meager clothing (long-sleeved shirts and pants) with one of Tony’s space blankets, and finally said goodnight to the hooting owl. I awoke only when sunlight broke through the forest canopy. That morning, collectively comparing degrees of bad sleep over shared cocoa, we had become what Tony had said is often most helpful for survival: a tribe. |
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