Will to Live: Dispatches from the Edge of Survival

by Les Stroud

  For Yossi, though, the dreams came at a perfect time, because his journey was now bordering on intolerable. He was constantly hungry and getting weaker by the day. Yet he trudged on mechanically through the jungle. The trail was still visible, but often blocked by thick brush and streams that seemed to become more difficult to cross with each day’s new rain. Like so many people in survival situations, Yossi also found strength in prayer and faith that someone was looking out for him.

  When he finally found the place where he believed he needed to cross the Tuichi to reach San Jose, the skies opened up and a terrible storm ensued. The rain poured down all night; by morning, the Tuichi had risen dangerously and was filled with debris. It may seem incredible, but torrential rains can cause a jungle river or stream to rise fifteen to twenty feet in just a few hours. In Ecuador, I fell asleep in a hut while the rain poured down. I was awakened by a great rush of sound and ran to the river’s edge, only to find my dugout canoe—which had once been on dry land—about to snap the rope that secured it to a nearby tree. It took a great deal of patience and careful manipulation to get close enough to it (now in four feet of rushing water) to be able to untie it and bring it to higher ground. Without it, I would have been stranded for good, as it was my only transportation.

  Yossi lay down to wait out the storm, but soon felt water running down his back. When he got up to fix the makeshift roof of palm fronds he had erected the night before, he was shocked to see that his entire campsite was being flooded. Both the Tuichi and a nearby stream had crested their banks. In only minutes, the water was up to his waist. Yossi was almost swept away in the flood, but grabbed onto trees to keep himself on his feet. He slowly made his way, sinking in the newly formed mud with every step, to higher ground, where he found a place to spend a cold, wet, and windy night. On a survival expedition in New Guinea, I once built my shelter too close to the river, and when the rains began to teem down, the river rose quickly and dangerously. I spent the night awake, watching the flood as it came within a foot of my shelter—four feet higher than it had been when I bedded down. Luckily, it stopped there and I didn’t have to go to higher ground. The additive survival force of good luck served me well that night.

  Yossi awoke the next morning—his seventeenth alone!—and was determined to make it to San Jose. As he fought his way back through the newly formed swamp to the Tuichi, he imagined he heard a sound high above. Looking up, between the treetops, Yossi saw a small plane glide overhead. He screamed and waved, to no avail.

  When you are on the ground and can clearly see the plane overhead, all you want do is yell out, “Why can’t you see me? I’m right here!” But to them, you are, at best, a small speck on the ground. The smoke from your campfire may look just like the million other wisps of steam rising from pockets of water below. Your clothing is dirty and blends in with the forest, your shelter green, brown, and gray . . . the perfect camouflage. So unless you have a time-tested signal method at your disposal—bright colors, a huge, smoky fire, words spelled out in massive letters on the open ground, a signal mirror, or a perfectly timed shot from a flare gun—your chances of being seen are dependent on luck.

  As the plane flew away, so did Yossi’s last bit of optimism. Finally, he cracked. He threw himself to the ground and prayed for death. But as he asked God to take him, a beautiful young woman appeared before him, weeping. Yossi knew it was his responsibility to comfort the woman and lead her to safety. Once again, he regrouped and forged ahead, determined to save the imaginary woman.

  Yossi’s choice not to fight this hallucination and instead run with it could quite possibly be the most important one he had to make, and it speaks to Yossi’s greatest strength as a survivor: he made decisions. He never sat back and waited for things to happen to him. As a survivor, you must be willing to make a decision, right or wrong, and stick with it. Survival is a proactive undertaking; there is no room for passiveness. So you must make your own decisions, or, as the adage goes, the decision will be made for you. Making your own decisions is vital, even if it means following a hallucination.

  I think the hallucination represents some kind of greater inner survival mechanism that most of us don’t ever tap into, let alone understand. It would seem that when Yossi had given up all hope, some part of his spirit rose to the forefront to push him along even farther. It created a focus and a purpose for him in otherwise intolerable circumstances. He was no longer fighting just for himself. He had a responsibility, if only to an imaginary girl.

  He eventually made it back to the Tuichi, but there was no bank, only a bluff dropping twenty feet into the turbulent waters. Yossi decided to lead the girl back to a large beach he had rested upon a few days earlier. Here, he rightfully decided, he’d have the best chance of being seen by the plane. This is an important tactic in any survival situation, especially if you think that people are looking for you. In essence, you must always help them find you. Being rescued is not a one-way street, it’s an interactive undertaking. Your job is to do all you can to be visible to your rescuers. Finding a person lost in the Amazon jungle makes finding a needle in a haystack seem easy. On a very long drive through the jungles of Peru while shooting my series Les Stroud Beyond Survival, I looked out the side window of the Jeep 4x4 to a drop-off that was about a thousand feet down and completely thick with dark-green jungle foliage. This went on for hundreds of miles. If I had crashed off the road at any spot along the way, during the constant rain storms (and of course it was the middle of the night), I am confident that, without military-style infrared search-and-rescue abilities (an impossibility in the middle of Peru), I would have been lost forever.

  The quest for the beach was a race against time. Yossi was physically drained, not much more than skin and bones, and his body was breaking down rapidly. His trench foot had worsened to the point where walking was almost unbearable. At times, he crawled on all fours to ease his suffering. But he continued on, determined to get the young woman to safety. As evening fell, Yossi came to a puddle of water in the mud and walked through it without thinking. In an instant, the puddle swallowed him and he began to sink. Yossi panicked and began to thrash around; that only made the quicksand take him more quickly. Now immersed to his waist, Yossi contemplated suicide, but yet another sense of determination took hold. He calmed down, regained his composure, and methodically wiggled his way to freedom. Clearly, Yossi’s great supply of the first additive force of survival, the will to live, was able to override the force of bad luck.

  Half dead, Yossi curled up on the jungle floor for the evening, wrapping himself in his poncho and mosquito netting, convinced he would be rescued the next day. Sometime during the night, he realized he needed to urinate, but was too exhausted to get up. With no other choice, Yossi relieved himself in his pants. He enjoyed the feeling of warmth so much he did it twice more during the night.

  As the night wore on, Yossi was startled by something pinching hard into his thigh. He reached down to the spot to find that what he thought was an ant had dug into his flesh and would not let go. Yossi killed the creature, but was startled by more bites down his legs. He began to fight like a madman, but the biting continued incessantly. All night long, he was overwhelmed by what he thought were ants. They came at him from all sides. They bit his face, the back of his neck, his chest, waist, and legs. One even took several bites of flesh from his rotting foot before Yossi was able to kill it.

  As morning dawned, Yossi pulled himself to a sitting position and was horrified to find that the earth around him was teeming with thousands of swarming red termites. They had been attracted to Yossi’s urine, eaten through the mosquito netting and poncho, and latched themselves onto anything they could find, including Yossi’s flesh. Horrified, he shot up and ran from the spot, crunching termites under his feet. This is a perfect example of how just one brief moment of giving in (urinating in his pants) can snowball into something quite horrible. In a survival situation, you must measure every action carefully to make sure that i
t won’t turn into something you’ll regret later.

  * * *

  How to Get Out of Quicksand

  Getting caught in quicksand or mud is only worsened when you struggle to free yourself of the muck and mire. You can’t win a frantic struggle in quicksand, so each movement must be slow and calculated. Imagine trying to get yourself out of the deep end of a pool without using your hands, instead employing a rolling movement across the water. The same is true in quicksand and mud: straight up and out is nearly impossible. Rather, the path to safety lies in keeping your body flat and rolling across the surface with your feet behind you, not dangling below. It’s very similar to getting yourself out of a frozen lake when you have broken through the ice. Roll with your chest until you are on safe ground.

  * * *

  Yossi stumbled and crawled through the jungle, determined to make it to the beach, where he would either die or be rescued. Later that day, he came across a beach, though not the one he had been seeking. Nevertheless, it had a hut in the middle of it, in which Yossi collapsed. After an hour of rest, he explored the beach, and was shocked to find that he was back in Curiplaya. The place was radically different than when Yossi had last rested there, though, as the floodwaters had washed away most of the huts. He spread his poncho out as a signal and set to the task of tending to his rotting feet, an agonizing task given that they were little more than festering, skinless flesh at this point.

  Yossi lay in the hut, contemplating his fate. Death was certainly an option, but having survived nineteen days alone in the jungle, he began to realize that perhaps he could do more, particularly if he stayed put. Maybe, just maybe, he could survive an entire season until the San Jose residents returned to camp in Curiplaya.

  He was roused from his plans by a distant drone. He did not get excited, though, as he was convinced he was hallucinating yet again. But when the drone grew louder, Yossi could ignore it no longer. He got up and staggered out of the hut. Getting out of a canoe on the beach were four figures. One of them was Kevin. And while Yossi may have hallucinated the young lady who accompanied him on the trip back to the beach, Kevin was 100-percent real.

  After their separation at the Mal Paso San Pedro, Kevin had scoured the banks of the Tuichi for a couple of days looking for Yossi. With no sign of his friend, he floated down the river on a dried balsa log. He floated past Curiplaya and was on his way to San Jose when he spotted two men hunting in a tributary stream. They led him back to San Jose, where Kevin hoped to find Yossi. Nobody in San Jose had seen Yossi, so Kevin hired raftsmen to take him down the Tuichi to Rurrenabaque, where he again hoped to find his friend. People there told him Yossi had no chance of surviving the waterfall over the Mal Paso San Pedro, and even if he did, he would have starved in the jungle.

  Undaunted, Kevin took a flight to La Paz, where he began to work the bureaucratic machinery of the Israeli embassy and Bolivian government. Precious days later, he finally convinced government officials to begin a plane search for Yossi. Every step of the way, officials assured Kevin there was little, if any, chance of finding Yossi alive. The plane search proved futile, but Kevin pressed on. He returned to Rurrenabaque, where he hired a local man, Tico, to boat up the Tuichi as far as the Mal Paso San Pedro in search of Yossi. The going was slow because of all the debris that now floated down the river, but Tico was a master navigator.

  Day turned to evening, but there was still no sign of Yossi. Tico was disappointed, but he informed Kevin that they had to turn around at the next suitable beach and head back to Rurrenabaque. As the boat began to turn around, Kevin was astounded to see what seemed like a corpse emerge from a dilapidated hut: Yossi Ghinsberg.

  * * *

  Yossi Ghinsberg

  ELEMENTS OF SURVIVAL

  Knowledge 5%

  Luck 20%

  Kit 15%

  Will to Live 60%

  Yossi was a true survivor. He was hampered on many fronts. He had almost no knowledge of the Amazon, or how to survive there. His kit was adequate and helped him on his journey to survival, but it was certainly lacking many critical elements. Luck was so-so, as it sometimes ran bad and sometimes good, though having Kevin stumble upon him on the beach was a near miracle. Yet Yossi did not let any of this get in the way of his intense and overwhelming will to live, the one factor that ultimately brought him back to safety—alive.

  * * *

  Chapter 2 - With the Waorani

  My introduction to jungles came through classic Tarzan movies. Those films may have been black and white, but in my imagination the jungle glowed in Technicolor: thick, green leaves drooping everywhere, steamy jungle vistas shrouded in gray fog, the echoes of multicolored birds ringing through the canopy high overhead—that’s my version of paradise. This time, though, the jungle will be my reality. For the next seven days, I’m going to try to survive alone in the Amazon.

  Having never really paid attention to high school geography (after all, they made us study iron ore extraction in Pittsburgh!), I’ve lived with two assumptions about jungles. One: you have to be wealthy to consider going to the jungle. Two: wherever they are, they are a lifetime away. It never occurred to me that so many vast, thick rainforest ecosystems could exist so close to my home in North America. The Amazon basin stretches from the northern part of South America to central Brazil in the south, with the Andes on the west and the Atlantic coast on the east. The Amazon River is the epicenter. I’m headed to the eastern Andes of Ecuador, the headwaters of the Amazon.

  It’s a six-hour taxi ride through the eastern Andes from Quito to the small, edge-of-the-jungle air base in Shell. Flying out of Shell is a risky venture. The only safety-conscious and experienced pilots are the missionaries, but they’re not permitted to fly anyone who isn’t associated with their missions. Enter anthropologist and linguist Jim Yost. He lived with the natives in this area for ten years and is one of only half a dozen people in the outside world that can speak their language. He also has connections with the missionaries, so he helps me arrange a flight deep into the headwaters of the Amazon River, where I will be a guest of the Waorani.

  The Waorani are considered one of the most violent peoples in the history of civilization. In former times, sixty percent of adult male deaths were homicides, mostly revenge killings. Most of the killings came at the end of a spear, often in the dead of night. The perpetrators will sneak up on a hut, burst through the thatched grass walls, and drive a spear into someone’s chest as he sleeps. In the 1950s, this remote area of the Amazon became infamous when five missionaries were massacred by the Waorani.

  What happened after the massacre makes for an even more incredible story. The wife and sister of one of the slain missionaries moved in with their relative’s killers and brought them Christianity. The Waorani were profoundly moved, and the tribe embraced the concept of forgiveness. Since then, that concept has spread and the entire culture has begun to evolve from one of violence to one of understanding. As I contemplate my stay with this tribe, I realize it’s still a relatively new development for them.

  It takes only a few minutes in the air to leave what, to me, looks just like northern Ontario: large expanses of untrammeled bush broken up by roads, dwellings, and mines. But we are soon flying over a vast expanse of dark green jungle that stretches quite literally as far as the eye can see. Somewhere down there, I’ll be left alone for a week.

  Our destination is the Waorani village of Snake River. From the sky, I can make out a tiny grass airstrip in the middle of the dense forest. Jim Yost, photographer Laura Bombier, and I are about to enter a land lost in time.

  The entire village comprises eight huts peppered over two acres of barely tamed rainforest encircled by a chain-link fence that was freed from an abandoned oil company camp and now serves as protection from jaguars. Most of the huts here were made with milled wood, courtesy of the Norwood sawmill shared by this and five other villages in the area. Eight families inhabit the eight buildings. The roofs are made of corrugated tin, also libe
rated from abandoned oil camps. The ground is a combination of hard-packed mud and rooster and dog droppings. Beyond the chain-link fence lie hundreds of miles of mosquito-filled, snake-slithering, jaguar-prowling, spider-crawling, ant-infested, wasp-buzzing jungle heaven!

  Waorani etiquette dictates that, after disembarking the plane, you wait on the edge of the village until you are invited to enter, even though the huts are a mere ninety yards from the airstrip. This tradition could see you standing there for many hours, if not all day, until some elder decides to give you the thumbs-up. Fortunately for us, they are excited to have visitors and to see their old friend Jim, whom they call Warika.

  Six Waorani help us with our gear, and we walk across a small wet area where we are cautioned to watch for snakes. Over ninety percent of all adult Waorani have been bitten by snakes—deadly snakes. We look down often.

  The only sanitation in the village is a lone outhouse situated right in the middle of the village, the only spot not protected by fences. Unbelievably, it actually has a flush toilet, courtesy of a hose tapped into a distant stream. In anticipation of our arrival, the villagers have built a traditional hut with a thatched roof. Once the mangy dogs and the rooster are kicked out, it becomes our home.

  The first order of business is to hang our hammocks. Now, I can totally relate to the comfort and beauty of sleeping in my hammock at the cottage on a lazy weekend afternoon, but the thought of spending more than twenty nights curled up in one makes me wonder if I will get any sleep at all.

  After settling in, Jim climbs into his hammock and waits. For what, I’m not really sure, but Laura and I do the same. Perhaps it is hammock practice time? The only activity for the next few hours—other than trying to get comfortable on a thin piece of nylon stretched between poles—is trying to relate to the three little girls who will become our constant companions during our stay in the village. They dare each other to inch closer to me to see if they can poke this odd-looking stranger from behind. They are all under age seven; two of them have never been out of the jungle.