When things go wrong—even little things—who survives? Who spends a night in a hole in the snow, and who dies?
Words :: Jon Turk // illustration :: Lani Imre
Planning a ski tour alone in unfamiliar terrain, I park the car, skin up and look around. The car might be hard to find at the end of the day, so I mark a waypoint on my Gaia GPS. Later, as the winter sun drops toward the horizon, friendly snow begs me to take one last run. As darkness sinks in, I pull out my phone and check Gaia. A dialogue box pops up: “To enhance your experience, we are updating your maps.”
Then the screen goes blank. And stays blank. Now where is the car, exactly?
When things go wrong—even little things—who survives? Who spends a night in a hole in the snow, and who dies?
My dear friend Bernice Notenboom is a survival consultant for a TV reality show called Alone. Participants are sent out into the forest on their own with few tools, little gear and no food. Everyone forages for themselves and the person who stays out the longest wins.
In the last season, Bernice felt that two of the candidates were particularly strong. One was, Bernice told me, “a 50-year-old tree-hugging hippie who was positive about what Mother Nature was going to teach her.” The other was an organized, methodical, goal-oriented man who was “determined to win.” Guess who lasted the longest? The hippie.
This should be no surprise because it brings up the old cliché of “It’s the journey, not the finish line.” On a real expedition, careful, methodical organization and planning are essential, but it’s awareness that keeps you alive. And it doesn’t do much good to suddenly realize that you need to be aware only after trouble looms. When you’re caught in an avalanche, somersaulting down the mountain at 100 kilometres per hour in a churning mass of snow, it’s obviously too late to start thinking seriously about the feelings and sounds of the snow under your skis.
It doesn’t do much good to suddenly realize that you need to be aware only after trouble looms.
Survival happens when you are aware all the time, even—especially—on those glorious days when the sun is shining, the powder is fresh, and the internet app told you that the snowpack is stable. Survival happens when you have accumulated a storehouse of knowledge before bad things start to happen.
And that storehouse of knowledge best accumulates when your journey is joyful, when you’re constantly watching, listening, learning from nature, observing the crystals growing outward on fir needles, seeking the wisdom and the language of those crystals.
So, as a trivial example, on that day my mapping program failed me, I had been staying aware of the landscape since I left the car. This awareness was not a chore or a task to complete, rather it’s what I do when I’m walking through the woods. It’s why I’m there. So, after swearing at the clueless programmers who shut my phone down, I traversed across the slope until I intersected my uptrack and made it back to the parking lot just before dark. No big deal.
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And perhaps these observations are so obvious we don’t need to write about them, but I’m not done yet. I’m reading a book, We Are in the Middle of Forever, which interviews modern Indigenous teachers about a different order of survival—not that of an individual, but of humanity. And beyond humanity, a peaceful transition/survival for Mother Earth, from the polar bears to the butterflies. In the book, Ilarion Merculieff, a Unangan elder from the Bering Sea, argues that humanity has been taking the wrong track since people started thinking with their brains, not their hearts.
When I was in Siberia, I met a few old people who grew up herding reindeer from their earliest infancy, with no urban interruptions. Reindeer herding is not a swashbuckling activity, no cowboy riding and roping. Instead, it’s a slow task of sitting and watching, listening for danger and becoming a quiet comforting presence for the deer—it’s thinking from the heart. When the Soviets took those reindeer herders’ children out of their nomadic camps and put them into schools (similar to the Canadian residential schools) and taught these children to think with their brains and not their hearts, the kids lost something vital. Modern herders told me that no one who was forced into the Soviet schools has the power and wisdom of those who spent their formative years in the camps, watching the deer.
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We, children of our own schools, can never truly learn to think with our hearts—but we can journey in that direction.
And this story has a happy enough ending, as long as you don’t take me too seriously. Remember: The world isn’t always fair. Good deeds and noble thoughts are not always rewarded with rosy outcomes. I have too many friends who loved the wilderness, who were aware, alert and super-competent, but just got unlucky and didn’t survive. Buddha said it: Bad things happen to good people.
But maybe there is one guarantee. If you love the trees, act from your heart and travel through the wild spaces with your senses active and brain quiet, you will have a good life, however long you navigate the whims and ravages of this world. (Or at least have a shot at winning a reality TV show.)
Dr. Jon Turk is a scientist, author and National Geographic award-winning explorer. He spends his winters living in a van, biking and playing in the desert with his partner, Nina.
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