Survival of the Smartest

I just finished a fascinating book by Laurence Gonzales called Deep Survival. I've never read a book like this before, so I'm very glad I came across it.

I first discovered Gonzales a couple of years ago when I had a subscription to National Geographic Adventure. It's a terrific magazine that basically gives city dwellers like me all kinds of reasons to wish they lived in driving distance of a decent backpacking trail. I constantly found myself mentally adding exotic wilderness trips to my list of things to do before I die, and that is why I did not renew my subscription - I knew I'd never have either the money or the chutzpah to accomplish most of these expeditions, and considering the possibility of them began to depress me. The main thing that stuck with me from this magazine was the occasional article by Laurence Gonzales. He typically wrote feature articles on various accidents that had taken place in the wild, and what the victims might have done to prevent these accidents. He would always add some kind of moral that made it sound as if his ideas were actually quite philosophical rather than merely practical, and this was intriguing to me.

So I finally picked up his book, and I am very glad I did. In many ways it is an extended version of the articles he writes for Adventure; there is no shortage of accident retellings or practical survival strategies. But it is also much more fully developed than these articles; the book gives him room to both clearly identify what makes a survivor and to extol the father he admires. This latter subject was of great interest to me; it's evident that without the experiences of his father, Gonzales would never have cared about survival to begin with. But the elder Gonzales was a fighter pilot in World War II, and became a prisoner of war after his plane was shot down over Germany. His ordeal is an endless source of fascination for his son, to say nothing of the fact that he survived it. Though most of the book deals with the types of survival situations an Adventure reader might concern himself with (avalanches, riptides, ice climbing falls, lightning storms), the heart of it is Gonzales' admiration of his father and the fact that he managed to survive the stress of piloting in war, a fall from 27,000 feet, and the malnutrition and lack of medical care he experienced in Germany. What's never quite clear is how Gonzales became interested in wilderness survival when it really isn't anything like what his father experienced, but part of the beauty of this book is the way that he convincingly argues that all survival is the same, and that someone facing a job loss or terminal illness requires the same coping mechanisms as an unfortunate fellow caught in an April blizzard wearing only a T-shirt.

Gonzales writes like a journalist, reporting the facts of an accident while simultaneously creating a narrative that cliffhangs at all the right moments, holding its place as he exposits about survival in general terms, only to pick up the story and resolve it just in time to end the chapter. Some of these retellings work better than others. I was reading as fast as I could to find out what would happen to the crew of five sailors lost in the Atlantic as three of them quite literally went crazy, but I cared a great deal less for the group of snowmobilers trapped beneath six feet of snow. Some of the variation in my interest level might have been due to the technical details that Gonzales offers. He explains a lot of neurological science in the first couple of chapters, which is borderline over my head, and in later chapters he often gives in to jargon associated with the sport about which he's writing, which can make it difficult to picture the scene as it unfolds.

Despite the fact that I sometimes felt a bit muddled in the details, the big picture of this book is truly remarkable. The more I read, the more enthralled I became with this idea of the "survivor," and the more determined I became to be one. A number of Gonzales's platitudes were striking in their similarity to Biblical principles, and he does quote the Bible more than once (though it's with an air of "look what a great suggestion this is"). Perhaps the most compelling of these is what he calls "the first Rule of Life: Be here now." This is such a simple concept, but Gonzales makes a convincing case for the fact that most people fail at this rule, and that if they were more successful at following it, they might have a better chance of surviving in the wilderness. Be here now essentially means to accept the environment in which you find yourself, to adapt to it as necessary, and to be constantly aware of any new clues you receive about where you are, rather than making assumptions. This seems basic, but Gonzales points out that our brains are constantly making "mental maps" of our surroundings, and these maps are replete with untruths based on past experience and hoped-for futures. Only with a great deal of mental discipline can one disable this particular function and attend to his actual surroundings.

In the same way that Adventure once did, this book made me want to get out into the wilderness and get myself lost. But beyond that, I found it extremely useful on two levels. I was astonished to see that its principles could be applied to even the most micro-survival situation, and work. I can give two examples from yesterday alone, which I discovered as I was finishing up this book. The first occurred in the middle of the day, as I was trying to get from one job to the other. On Sundays, I coordinate the elementary classes for two of Redeemer's services on the west side, one at 9:15, and one at 5:00, and in between the two I help out at the Sunday large group meeting of the college ministry I work for, which is at noon on the east side. Ordinarily getting from the west side to the east side is not a big deal. In fact, walking through Central Park is quite nice, and on days when it's too cold or wet to walk, there are plenty of cabs and buses to make the trip for me. One Sunday a year, however, this whole system breaks down, and that is the first Sunday in November when the New York City marathon takes place. I think marathons are just fine, and I have great respect for people who run 26 miles in one day. But there is no room for one to run 26 miles in New York City, which means that a lot of bridges get closed and a lot of roads get blocked off. The finish line for the marathon happened to be in the middle of the park right around 67th St, which is exactly where I would normally walk to get to the east side on a Sunday. I knew this in advance, and so I planned to walk along the south end of the park, at 59th St, since I had been told by those who seemed to know that the marathoners would come over the Queensboro Bridge, run up the Upper East Side, and come into the park from the top. I was all the way to the southeast corner of the park before I discovered that this was not true. In fact, that corner and the entire length of 59th St was closed, surrounded by barricades lined with spectators, and guarded by cops. It looked as if my only choice was to walk all the way back to the west side, cut around Columbus Circle, and make my way back in the mid-50s. This prospect was not appetizing. But I had just read the part of Deep Survival where Gonzales describes the survivor's tools of mind: gratitude, humility, wonder, imagination, and determination. And I decided that, in this small situation that could hardly be called dire, I would see if these things applied. First, I took a moment to be grateful, for the fact that I had not one, but two jobs, and that they were so close it ordinarily took me only about twenty minutes to walk from one to the other. I knew that it was a very minor complaint to get worked up about the fact that my usual way was blocked and that my plan B wasn't working either. Already I was feeling better. Next I focused on humility. I was not the master of this environment, I was subject to it, and I knew that I needed to reject the notion that things ought to work according to my plan. This included not allowing myself to judge the organizers of the marathon, who did not seem to think it important to provide pedestrians with a clearly marked, straight shot out of the park. I have never organized a marathon before, and I don't know all the different things that are involved, so it was pompous to think that I could have done it better. Next, wonder. I happened to be in the part of the park where there is a small lake surrounded by dozens of gorgeous trees. It is peak week in New York, and these trees were dressed in a myriad of beautiful fall colors. Rather than be consumed by frustration that I couldn't get where I needed to go, I instead focused on the display of nature around me. Stopping to smell the roses really does serve a purpose. Next I needed some imagination, resourcefulness. I took a look around me to assess what was at my disposal. I immediately noticed the R train station at 59th and 5th. I never get on the train at this station, because I'm very rarely coming from this part of town to any place beyond walking distance. In fact, if I got on the train, I would only be riding it one stop, ordinarily out of the question for me. The amount of time it takes to wait for a train to come could be double the walk time between one station and another. But I needed to do something different from what I'd normally do, because my normal solutions were failing me in this new environment. There wasn't any way to get where I wanted to go above ground, so I would have to go below ground. And that leads me to determination. I knew that, no matter what, I had to get to work, so giving up was not an option. I would take the train one stop, and then resassess and move on from there. I would not sit down and refuse to move until all the barricades had been taken down, which was a bit tempting.

It's almost laughable to consider that I actually applied these five tools to a situation that was in no way an emergency. But one of the fundamental theses of Gonzales's book is that we are all surviving life, one day at a time, and those who make it with a little bit more joy and a little bit less permanent damage tend to use these tools frequently, regardless of the nature of the situation. And these principles aren't the only ones that work in real life. Later on that night, I was headed home from the 1 train station at 28th St. I live on the east side, so I was walking across town. It was dark, but there's never any shortage of people out on the streets at night, and I've rarely felt unsafe. I was just turning off Madison Square Park to walk down 24th St, something I've done a hundred times. A man was coming from that same block, hailing a cab on Madison Ave. As I passed him he said, "Miss, I'd be careful walking down that street." It was weird, because no one has ever given me a warning like that before. And as I said, I've walked that same route over and over, at all hours. A big part of me wanted to say thanks, but keep walking. Since I was finishing Gonzales's book, though, I hesitated. Gonzales says that "rigid people are dangerous people," that someone who holds fast to a plan in the face of contradictory evidence is signing his own death certificate. I doubt that anything going on on that block last night could have been so dramatic, but the principle applied. It was important that I consider my surroundings and allow the facts to inform my actions. For one reason or another, I'd been warned off walking down 24th, so I continued south on Madison. I'll never know what would have happened if I'd gone on my way, but that's not the point. The point is that I took the sure way out, and I'm still here to tell about it.

I hope that I can generally be a more flexible person for having read this book. The other level on which it really gripped me was the way it spoke to the emotional center of a survivor. Because the same emotions can be engaged in an emotionally trying situation as in a physically threatening one. Losing my job caused a lot of the same neurons to fire as getting lost in an unknown wilderness might have. So the point is not so much what to do if you ever find yourself in that wilderness. It's the importance of cultivating emotional stability, so that whether you do or you don't, your always ready for uncertainty and misfortune. Gonzales says, "One of the toughest steps a survivor has to take is to discard the hope of rescue, just as he discards the old world he left behind and accepts the new one. There is no other way for his brain to settle down." He says this in the context of a story of a man lost in an unfamiliar mountain range for three days, but I think it's just as true for someone who has lost their job. It plainly articulates the thought process I so haltingly described in previous posts when I was trying to explain what it was like to resign to my circumstances without losing hope. It turns out that telling yourself you will not be rescued is a survival tactic. It forces you to rely on yourself to survive, and keeps you from sitting down to wait for someone to come get you. If you tell yourself that no one will, you take responsibility for your own plight.

The part that most resonated with my life now described someone who is always aware of risk and the possibility of tragedy, but who does not allow those possibilities to paralyze him. "Good survivors ... plan for them and have an earnest hope that they will manage. But they do not care overly much that they might not. They accept that to succumb is always a possibility and is ultimately their fate. They know safety is an illusion and being obsessed with safety is a sicknes. They have a frank relationship with risk, which is the essence of life. They don't need others to take care of them. They are used to caring for themselves and facing the inherent hazards of lie. So when something big happens, when they are in deep trouble, it is just more of the same, and they proceed in more or less the same way: They endure." I hope this is the kind of person I am now. I hope that my experiences have made me take myself less seriously, and that I understand now that nothing has to destroy me. Yes, one day I will lose my life, and there is something in all of us that fights to prolong that moment as much as possible. But the very inevitability of that moment brings a great deal of freedom. I don't have to wonder if I will die, only when and how. So whatever adventures come my way, and whatever the risks inherent within them, I can face them boldly. There is no value in living as it it were possible to put aside risk altogether; one can only take life as it comes, hope for the best, and have a healthy respect for the fact that some people die merely by stepping off a curb at the wrong time. Others spend months at a time adrift at sea, stranded on 14,000 peaks, lost in vast unmarked forests, and survive. There are ways to increase your chances of fitting into the latter group, but even those will die some day; no one is immune.

"Survival is the celebration of choosing life over death. We know we're going to die. We all die. But survival is saying: perhaps not today. In that sense, survivors don't defeat death, they come to terms with it." I don't know if I have or haven't, but this book helped me immeasurably both in understanding the inner qualities of a true survivor, and in accepting the short-term success of any survival. A terrific read.