Survival, both primitive and high tech, has become a sport of sorts in recent decades, inspiring multiple television shows, hundreds of books and all sorts of specialized schools and practitioners. It's not always easy to distinguish between the real thing and the hype, but almost any outdoors person would enjoy a field course on the subject - and might even learn a few things that could be life-saving in a pinch.

        I can well imagine getting lost in the woods: perhaps losing the trail as happened to well-known public radio personality Ted O'Brien not long ago, or crashing a small plane into some vast northern wilderness.

        O'Brien was lost for a much-publicized three-day adventure in the White Mountains, though it was only his ego that suffered the brunt of the ordeal. Still, when you read that he went up without a compass, matches, map or cell-phone, wearing sandals, and somehow estimating that a 12-hour hike over rough terrain would be a six-hour jaunt for a 60 year old, you have to wonder: what if?

        Despite hearing search planes and having some food, even O'Brien became fatalistic: "Well, if this is where it's supposed to end, then alright." He kept his head (Rule #1), managed to keep warm enough, and eventually encountered some rescuers in what is frankly a pretty well-trafficked area.

        Well, if you can drown in two inches of bath water, I figure you can probably get lost almost anywhere. O'Brien's experience, along with a more general insecurity that follows on the WTC bombings, anthrax scares, and the rapid approach of middle age, served as provocations to seek a bit of survival knowledge in the event something were to happen to me. In the process, I discovered I am not the only one interested in the subject.

        People love tales of survival: tales that are meant to entertain, enthrall, allow us to escape from our daily rut, but alas, rarely educate. Reach back to Robinson Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson. Recall the fearless crew of the Minnow castaway from their three-hour tour onto three seasons on "Gilligan's Island," or the eponymous "Lost in Space" Robinson family. These poor souls enjoyed creature comforts that rarely exist in true survival situations. DeFoe's Crusoe had a wreck conveniently offshore for two weeks from which to ferry, along with more essential goods, cheeses, wine, rum, a dog, two cats, and enough armament to equip, literally, a dozen others. The space age Robinsons had a doctor on board. Their stories, therefore, are less than instructive.

        Current culture prefers things more directly threatening, or makes it up. The Y2K scare didn't amount to anything, but proved a financial boon to the survival industry. The movie "Cast Away" made the extremely unlikely seem possible, while various forms of the show "Survivor" manage to portray struggling man at his most selfish. In the last week alone (I kid you not) I've come across three articles on survival in popular publications. Bloodlust exists. The real TV portrayals of "survival situations" (that's what the pros call them) are something like a modern Coliseum where you just know the audience is turning their thumbs down on some of the participants.

        The infamous 9/11 events have also proven a boon to the genre. Such an unforeseen attack seems to challenge our most basic sense of security, and so provokes an interest in utter self-reliance, as if the system can no longer protect us. This is, in fact, already happening with survival businesses that supply long-storage foods, gas masks, antibiotics and related products, unable to meet orders. Survival schools and survival experts, you would think, would be jumping on board this bandwagon. That they are not reveals something rather laudable that warrants attention.

Professional Ethics

        Producers for the TBS show "The Worst Case Scenario" were working on the "Face Off Challenge" segment that sought to pit survival instructors against one another in exotic locations - all expenses paid and a fee to boot. They approached one of the rising stars in this field, Tim Smith of Jack Mountain Bushcraft & Guide Service, to be one of the competitors. Instead, this gentle bear of a former college hockey player, who spent a large part of his summer vacation bushwhacking through Canadian boreal forest, turned them down. In a spirit of fellowship, however, he did point the producers to other instructors. And here's the thing; they all said no.

        There is an explanation as to why these people didn't take advantage of an opportunity to promote themselves, their schools, and in many cases their books, in what is frankly not the most remunerative of professions. David Alloway, who runs David Alloway's Skills of Survival program out of the Chihuahan Desert, put his rejection this way: "We should all get a million dollars. If one doesn't make it, no one gets a nickel. In true life emergencies people should act as a team, not competitors. Such competitions are antithetical to what good instructors teach," says Alloway. "It sounds like they found someone to do it (but) they found someone to lay down in a tub of rats on Ripley's, so no miracles there."

        Survival, the real thing, is about cooperation. It's cooperation with fellow survivors, and cooperation with nature. Cooperation, by necessity, goes to extremes in genuine survival situations. In 1820, for example, the Nantucket whaleship Essex was stove in by a whale, forcing the crew to embark on a voyage of immense proportions across the open Pacific in a few flimsy, open boats. They ran out of food and water in short order. As people started to die, the survivors fell back on an established law of the sea: they ate the dead. Then, as the dead ran out, they drew lots to determine who amongst the living would be killed to provide sustenance for the others. Imagine the remarkable sense of camaraderie to agree to such a lottery in the first place, and the even greater one to refrain from demanding a "do over."

        In a survival situation there aren't many opportunities for do overs, which is why I chose to explore the subject with Tim Smith last October. Driving north on a 28-degree October day to Tim's camp, thinking about sleeping in the rough, I caught site of snow-covered Mount Washington in the distance - but not so distant as to comfort me that I wouldn't be caught in a killer storm. I also had this notion that Tim would make me eat bug and worms. (We didn't, but he said we could.) In short, while this was just a training episode, I was nervous.

The Most Important Tool

        Experts say the most important tool in one's survival kit is a brain, preferably your own. This sounded rather glib when Tim Smith first expressed it as we embarked on my survival tutorial, but after several days of deliberately getting lost in the New Hampshire woods I began to understand what he meant, i.e. think first, act second. Tim takes a practical, yet scholarly, approach that strongly hints at his Mensa membership, prep-school education, cultural anthropology degree, Master's in Education, wilderness medicine training, search and rescue work, and more than a half dozen other hard-core survival programs. It's quite a resume.

        His most basic advice is that if you find yourself lost, the best thing to do is sit and calm down. Stay where you are, build a bed of branches (to keep the damp cold of the ground away from you), and maybe build a fire for comfort. Then simply wait for help: the vast majority of lost souls are found within 72 hours of getting lost, and people can survive for weeks without food as long as they have water.

        Tim has studied this. He imposed on himself an 11-day fast with no ill effect, although, presumably, he got really hungry. Zen practitioners will find a kindred spirit in much of his sage advice. We scrambled through woods that all looked pretty much the same - at least to me! I couldn't tell if we were walking in circles or not. If I closed my eyes and twirled in circles a few times, I would have had no way of knowing where I started. I was, in short, lost.

        Let me point out though, that if you're going to get lost, one of the handiest things to have with you is a survival expert. As we walked through the old second growth forest, Tim mused about various and wide-ranging survival topics: myths, survival kits, behavior and circumstances that lead to injuries, items you never leave home without.

        Tim observed, and got me into the habit, too. He stopped frequently to point out something of interest. On a birch tree was true tinder fungus; Innonotus obliquus if you favor the scientific approach, or "chaga" if your school has Indian roots. This fungus will catch a spark and develop into a glowing ember for minutes while the practitioner gently blows on it to create fire. I did this using a knife and a rock, and let me tell you there are few things more satisfying than creating fire from such basic ingredients!

        There on the ground was sphagnum moss, which serves as an antiseptic sponge, absorbent diaper lining, or au natural toilet paper in a pinch. The leaves of that blackberry bush make a great tea. Those pine needles can be steeped to provide more vitamin C than an orange. The boiled bark of that birch tree has salicylic acid and will quell a headache or fever. The roots of these cattails can be eaten. (They tasted like starchy coconut.) You can also eat the shoots, the pollen heads, use the seed pods for insulation, weave the leaves into a basket or blanket, and use the stalks to make arrows or a hand drill for fire starting.

        Those red berries are wintergreen and are a wonderful snack. Those red berries are partridge berries and, while pretty dull, provide some nutrition. Those red berries are wild raspberries. Delicious. And those red berries? They'll kill you.

        We engaged in this walking education for several days, but the more I learned, the more I realized we could go on for weeks with each season presenting new challenges and new opportunities. Example: you can eat burdock shoots in the spring, but they're tough and unpalatable by fall.

        Tim wasn't primarily focused on food. He would identify various trees and their numerous uses, most of which weren't culinary. We dug for spruce roots, considered the Cadillac of cord material; so much so they can be used to lash branches together for a shelter or to make the string for a bow drill. The sap pockets - which I never knew existed - can be used as an antiseptic for burns or boiled down to a thick glue. Indians used it to seal baskets and make birch-bark canoes.

        My perception of the forest began to change. From just a bunch of trees and underbrush, it became an array of willows, pines, oaks (acorns were a staple of the Indians and are still a terrific survival food once you leech the tannin out), blueberries, Indian cucumbers, hemlocks, and burdock. Burdock roots cost $10 a pound in health food stores, but the plant is common and easy to find once you know how to look. Rock tripe, that gray leathery lichen that grows on boulders, adds a bit of substance to watery stews and is said to be almost palatable. More so if you're starving.

Fire and Direction

        Food and fire: these were often the topics of our discussions. While neither, in Tim's opinion (and who am I to argue?), are the first needs in most survival situations (those honors go to shelter and reducing panic), they are the main focus of most survival books. There's probably a good reason for that: a book that advises you to simply sit still would not have much cachet. Fire making, hunting and fishing, and plant identification, while immensely challenging skills to master for a survival situation, manage to hold the imagination of armchair explorers.

        Tim's advice on fire is stark: once you've had to make fire by other means, you will never leave home without matches again. Although he could make a fire with almost anything, he always carries a waterproof container of strike-anywhere matches. To teach this valuable lesson, he had me attempt to create fire through a variety of methods, with varying degrees of success. Flint and steel, using an old piece of a hacksaw blade and steel wool for tinder, worked, as did whacking my knife on a piece of quartz. I managed to get smoke, lots of it, from my bow drill, but despite Tim's encouragement ("You're almost there, you're almost there!"), I never quite got that glowing ember to sprout flame. Tim did, though, and in a matter of seconds, then topped that feat with a display on the hand drill.

        "This is how our ancestors did it," he explained. Survival mastery for people like Tim isn't simply about staying alive in the wild; it's about connecting to nature, to our roots, to a common ancestry. The ability to survive is the starting point, but appreciation and respect are the results.

        Near the end of my apprenticeship, Tim asked me which way was camp. I was about to shrug ignorance, but then recalled a small lesson from the day before. That morning we had used the old concept of the sun rising in the east, setting in the west, to gauge a vague sense of the four major directions. I also knew camp was somewhere to the south. So I looked at the sun to determine where south was, and was totally confused.

        This is where a watch comes in handy. If you point the hour hand at the sun and look at the direction that is halfway to noon, you will be pointing south, or at least more south than north.

        "Over there," I said, pointing.

        "Not bad," said Tim, to my immense satisfaction. If you're in the Southern Hemisphere, just point the noon position to the sun and halfway to the hour is north. I mention this just in case.

        There are several schools of thought on teaching survival, and several real schools to go with each brand of survival philosophy. Some focus on locale, so there are courses in deserts (high and low, American and Australian), as well as schools that focus on survival in northern Canadian spruce/moose haunts, the Arctic, the sea, and New England. Don't laugh at the last: Maine has the most uninhabited forest in the lower 48. More people die on New Hampshire's Mount Washington than on any mountain, anywhere!

        There are schools that focus on aviators, kids-at-risk, sailors, mountaineers; schools for the winter, summer, fall, and/or spring. A surprising number emphasize primitive skills such as flint knapping and brain tanning hides. It's said that every animal has enough brains to tan its own hide (although, presumably, not enough brains to avoid proving this). More than a few schools are based on Native American culture and the tradition of the grandfather/teacher. One enthusiast even hunts for bear in Alaska with a primitive spear thrower called an atlatl (in vain, so far, which seems like good news for both him and the bear).

        When people think of bushcraft and survival, the icon that often comes to mind is that of a grizzled old woodsman wearing rancid woolen clothes: someone who doesn't speak much, inarticulately when he does, and who has gained his arcane knowledge through a curmudgeonly preference for woods over people. Jeremiah Johnson comes to mind. Maybe Gabby Hayes without the gab. If that's what you imagine, most professional survival instructors will prove disappointing. You also won't find many instructors dressed in camouflage and griping about the government, either. There is a world of difference between the paranoid and the genuine survivalist. Indeed, many so-called survival schools are as much about teaching bushcraft and building an appreciation for nature as they are about survival per se.

        I was very fortunate that Tim was generous enough to allow me our few days together. You can read all about survival in the literally hundreds of books on the subject that are out there - most of which tend to be repetitive and, all too often, inaccurate. But walking with a knowledgeable instructor, being mentored in truly difficult skills like friction fire making and shelter building, gets you much farther, much faster than armchair adventuring. Now I carry matches with me most of the time.

        Tim has a bigger goal in mind - to build an appreciation for nature, self-reliance, wilderness skills, and the people who cultivate them. To that end Jack Mountain Bushcraft & Guide Service offers a series of courses in everything from basic survival, to explorations of Maine's wild rivers, to an ambitious college program (the Earth Skills Semester Program) that will take a group of students from snowshoes in Maine to canoes in the Everglades. Maybe, if they're diligent, they'll manage to make fire.

        David Ader is a resident of Sudbury, MA, who loves the outdoors, fly fishing, and exploring the wilds we have in our own backyards. His day (and all to frequently early morning and night) job is V.P. in charge of bond analysis at Thomson Financial. His avocation is writing.

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