Will to Live: Dispatches from the Edge of Survival

by Les Stroud

  He screamed for the flashlight, so that he could send a distress signal in Morse code across the evening sky. He didn’t need to. The ship had changed course and was heading their way. They were saved!

  When the Toka Maru II—a Japanese fishing trawler—pulled alongside the Ednamair, Dougal, his wife and children, and Robin felt a feeling of elation like they had never felt before. Soon they and the dinghy were on board the ship. They were weak and unable to walk because of all the time they had spent in the cramped quarters of the raft and dinghy, but were otherwise fine.

  Over the course of the next four days, the kindly crew of the Toka Maru II treated the Robertsons like royalty. They ate, bathed, and slept the days away until they arrived back in Panama. Ten days later, Robin flew back to England.

  The Robertson family chose to make the return trip, ironically enough, by ship.

  * * *

  The Robertsons

  ELEMENTS OF SURVIVAL

  Knowledge 10%

  Luck 45%

  Kit 20%

  Will to Live 25%

  Almost an even split across the board. Dougal and his family had a nice mix of everything you need to get through a survival situation. They certainly had knowledge, though it was largely limited to Dougal’s seamanship and Lyn’s medical knowledge; their sea survival skills were fairly minimal. Luck was a huge factor in their survival, whether it was gifts of food from the sea, water from the sky, or the rescue ship that stumbled across their path. Dougal had no emergency survival kit of his own, but the one on the life raft was a huge boon to the family’s survival. Finally, he and his family had an intense will to live, as illustrated by their decision not to rely on rescue for their salvation, but to paddle themselves to safety, if need be.

  * * *

  Chapter 6 - Surviving Sharks (Part One)

  Sixty feet below the surface of the warm Caribbean Sea, sediment from an old shipwreck is stirred up and visibility is reduced to a foot in front of my face. Particles swirl around my oxygen tank and regulator, blotting out the view through my dive mask. In the meantime, I’m being bumped and jostled by huge beings covered in skin with the feel of rubbery sandpaper, their mouths filled with razor-sharp teeth. One tries to go between my legs, another hits my shoulder with the force of a hockey check.

  Less than twenty-four hours ago, I received my dive certification. Most people get their certification and complete at least ten open-water dives to gain experience before they start pushing the limits. Yet there I was, on my first dive ever, trying to stay balanced on the deck of a Caribbean shipwreck. I just hoped I was breathing correctly.

  I struggle to hold my body in a comfortable position, a proposition made much more difficult by the heavy cage full of dead fish I hold in one hand and the spear in the other. I’m attempting to feed the twenty-five reef sharks circling around me, all ravenous for a taste.

  Ten feet away swim two cameramen who capture it all on film. Idiotic, you say? Probably. But for some reason, TV producers are obsessed with ratings, and they seem to think that my role as Survivorman makes me a suitable candidate for this kind of thing.

  To be fair, I did grow up a huge fan of Jacques Cousteau. So, after forty-five years of snorkeling experience, when the chance came to dive with sharks, I jumped in headfirst.

  When I was asked to host the twenty-fifth anniversary of Shark Week for the Discovery Channel, I may have played it cool on the phone, but I was jumping for joy. Sometimes, the chance for the thrill of a lifetime has to be accepted without questioning the repercussions. The opportunity may not return.

  Coast of Florida

  I grew up wanting to be like Tarzan. I watched those Johnny Weissmuller movies religiously every Saturday morning. But our shark wrangler, Manny Puig, actually thinks he is Tarzan. Hell, he might actually be! “I’m going to get you to catch a ride on a great hammerhead shark’s dorsal fin, Les!” Manny proclaims. “I’m in!” I call back.

  Three hours later, Manny and I float in the gulf waters off the coast of Florida, me in my trunks and Manny in his Speedo. Manny scrapes a knife against the side of a dead fish (the sound is supposed to attract hammerhead sharks); I’m trying not to swallow salt water through my snorkel. Suddenly, producer Scott Gurney screams, “Get Les out of the water—now!”

  I pretend not to hear, and dunk my head under the water to get ready for the ride. The hammerhead is about ten feet below me, doing side-to-side chomps on the bait; the sound is remarkably audible under the water. Without warning, Manny grabs my forearm and slams my hand down onto the shark’s surprisingly rough dorsal fin. I’m not ready, and haven’t yet taken a full breath of air, so off I go on a seven-foot-long shark ride of naturalist, shark-loving bliss. The hammerhead comes back a few more times, and I free dive down to caress him on a few of his passes until he swims away.

  But Manny isn’t through with me yet. Next, he wants me to hand-feed a lemon shark. Don’t let the name fool you: lemon sharks can be very aggressive and are big enough to rip a man to pieces. “They can be really nasty, these lemons,” he cautioned. “Without warning, they just get pissed at you, turn around, and snap your hand off.”

  Nevertheless, I’m soon floating in six feet of murky water with two-foot visibility, with Manny again scraping dead fish. This is just eerie, because I can’t see a thing. There will be no warning. The big lemon shark will just appear out of nowhere and cruise past my very bare feet, all while I’m holding bait in my hand and scraping it with a knife.

  Four hours into the test, I dangle the fish below my body, trying not to think about the cramps developing in my arm. Finally, a big lemon rises from the depths, lifts its head, and rips the dead fish from my hand.

  Mission complete.

  Bahamas

  Dive shop owner Stuart Cove and I kneel beside one another, forty-five feet underwater on the deck of a rotting shipwreck. The twenty-five Caribbean reef sharks circling us, some as long as nine feet, come within inches of us to take a hunk of fish off our spears.

  As the pieces start to get smaller, my confidence increases, so I figure I’ll just use my hands. Big mistake. I’m waving a juicy morsel of tuna in the water when a shark suddenly turns more quickly than I expect and takes the bait—and my hand!—in its mouth.

  The shark chomps down on me. I’m surprised by the feeling, which is very similar to the bite of a large dog. It’s a good thing I’m wearing protective chain-mail gloves, because otherwise I’d be typing this manuscript with only one hand.

  The shark’s teeth cut down to my knuckle, but, thanks to the chain mail, not through. I thrash and pull my hand out while delivering a left jab to the shark’s side to push it away. As it turns, it takes the cameraman’s arm in its mouth; fortunately, he too is wearing chain-mail gloves.

  When we surface, my air has run out due to the excitement. But that doesn’t stop me from yelling, “That had to be the coolest thing I have ever done!”

  Chapter 7 - Sought Solitude, Found Death

  FEW FIGURES HAVE CAPTURED THE WORLD’S COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION AS POWERFULLY AS CHRIS MCCANDLESS HAS. BRILLIANT, ATHLETIC, AND STRICKEN WITH ONE OF THE MOST ACUTE CASES OF WANDERLUST EVER DOCUMENTED IN THE POPULAR MEDIA, MCCANDLESS’S NOMADIC DAYS WERE MADE FAMOUS BY THE PUBLICATION OF JON KRAKAUER’S ARTICLE IN OUTSIDE MAGAZINE, BY KRAKAUER’S SUBSEQUENT BOOK, INTO THE WILD, AND BY SEAN PENN’S FILM OF THE SAME NAME. YET AS POWERFUL AS THE MCCANDLESS STORY MAY BE, THE FACT IS THAT CHRIS DIDN’T HAVE TO DIE.

  He was young, strong, supremely confident, and fed up with modern society. So Chris McCandless set out on a journey, one where he would not only shed the layers of conformity that had been heaped on his shoulders by the outside world but also discover who he truly was. For nearly two years, Chris McCandless lived that dream, traipsing along the fringes of society. Then he decided to head into the Alaskan wilderness. It was the last place he’d ever call home.

  And while it’s difficult to find fault with a young idealist seeking an existential experience through wi
lderness living, the fact is that McCandless was woefully unprepared for what faced him when he set off into the Alaskan bush in April 1992. As soon as he took his first step on that untamed soil, he was writing the prologue to his own death sentence. But Chris McCandless didn’t have to die.

  McCandless’s idealistic and romantic view of the world’s wild places was, at least in part, born of the authors he adored, people like Jack London and Henry David Thoreau. They seemed to forge in him a certain philosophical arrogance that made him dislike society and yearn for a place where he wouldn’t have to compromise his ideals.

  But idealism and arrogance are dangerous partners to bring into the cold Alaskan wilderness. Nobody romanticizes how painful it is to get frostbite or how awful it is to go without food for days on end, but these are the realities of most survival situations, and they seemed lost on Chris.

  Although he certainly started marching to the beat of his own drummer much earlier in his life, the road to his eventual death began shortly after he graduated from Emory University in June 1990. Without a word of notice to friends or family, he loaded what few belongings he had into his old Datsun and started driving west. His goal, apparently, was to leave behind the trappings and structure of modern-day society. Here was a young man who wanted nothing to do with schedules or responsibilities, meetings or deadlines, or the encumbrances of material possessions. He got exactly what he wanted—and, unfortunately, much more.

  Shortly after his journey began, McCandless shed his legal name and started calling himself Alexander Supertramp. He traveled across the country throughout that summer and fall, living, essentially, like a super tramp. He hitched rides with strangers, hopped trains, and occasionally fell in with other vagabonds he met on the road. He took the odd job, though he alternated these forays back into the structure of modern-day society with periods where he lived with little money or human contact.

  And as romantic as Chris’s days on the road may seem, it’s important to remember that absolutely none of this would have prepared him for what awaited him in the Alaskan wilderness, regardless of what Krakauer might have intimated. In fact, McCandless didn’t experience anything close to hardcore or true wilderness living until, on an impulse, he bought an aluminum canoe near the California–Arizona border and decided to paddle four hundred miles down the Colorado River to the Gulf of California, where the river finishes its journey in Mexico.

  As with everything he did as a super tramp, McCandless didn’t prepare at all for this significant undertaking. In some ways, he had every right to be arrogant. He was very smart, a natural salesman, great with people, and a terrific athlete. And he was certainly successful at surviving on the fringes of society. But this skill set, upon which his arrogance rested, means little in the wild, whether it’s Alaska or the Colorado River.

  And although McCandless survived more than two months in the canoe, he certainly had his share of mishaps. He got lost almost every time he had to do some route-finding, and was continually bailed out of trouble by accommodating Mexicans. He may have proved he could survive on minimal amounts of food, as he subsisted on little more than five pounds of rice, but surviving on minimal amounts of food is not the greatest challenge of wilderness survival. And he would not run across too many helpful people out in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness.

  In early 1991, McCandless eventually found his way back across the border from Mexico and into the United States. He had been on the road for more than six months and showed little sign of losing his love of the new life he had created. He spent most of that year wandering around the southwestern U.S., following much the same pattern he had established in 1990: work a little, slum a little.

  As 1992 began, McCandless decided to fulfill one of his life’s dreams and head to Alaska. His first stop was South Dakota, where he stayed with a friend and earned some money. Then, in mid-April, he started hitchhiking northwest. McCandless reached Fairbanks, Alaska, about ten days later.

  The most dangerous thing about McCandless at this point in his travels is that he had convinced himself that he could actually survive in Alaska with minimal supplies. After all, he had made it through the previous year and a half, including his river journey. Why should Alaska be any different? Well, Alaska is different—much different.

  McCandless had defined himself through his charisma, and usually had other people around to help him out, to feed him, put him up, or drive him somewhere. So yes, he was terrific at surviving, as long as he was working on the fringes of society and interacting with other people. He used his charm, not his survival skills, to get him through those situations.

  Well, guess what: charm counts for absolutely nothing in the wilderness. You can’t charm a fish onto your hook or wood to burst into flames. Your personality is not going to shelter you from the cold and wind. And there’s a big difference between finding a place to sleep at a truck stop and surviving in the bush. McCandless’s survival skills were all based on having the trappings of society—those same trappings that he loathed so much—at his fingertips.

  In recounting the McCandless story, I can’t help but feel that the ultimate cause of his downfall was his arrogance. He didn’t have to go completely unprepared into one of the earth’s harshest climates, but he did. Why? Because he was sure he was clever enough and fit enough to survive. And yes, he likely planned on staying there for only a few months, and yes, summer was approaching. But those are very poor reasons to ignore the fact that surviving in the wilderness—let alone the Alaskan wilderness—is brutally hard work.

  I understand that there was a part of Chris that didn’t want to know what he was getting into, so it would all be new—novel and pure. But it would not have been a slight to his idealism to have taken the proper food and supplies with him. In fact, it probably would have helped him, because it would have given him a little more free time to expound upon the beauty and vastness of the natural world around him.

  Most people don’t have the luxury of planning for their survival situations. They happen, you’re thrown in, and that’s that. But McCandless had, in fact, been dreaming about an “Alaskan odyssey” for years. And yet, he scoffed at the opportunity to plan. That’s not admirable, idealistic, or even cool, it’s foolhardy.

  When I go out into unfamiliar wilderness, no matter where and no matter how experienced I may be, I always make it a point to spend time with someone local who knows the area and can teach me relevant skills. Doing this does not remove the romantic appeal of the wilderness. McCandless seemed to think it sufficient to take into the bush whatever he had learned in hippie camps, trailer parks, and truck stops.

  * * *

  Day Pack Supplies

  Hiking through the bush with a minimal pack is always liberating. But a few basic items can make a huge difference. I would keep the pack itself to a medium size to avoid back strain. Along with the supplies listed on the next page, I would bring a lightweight “bike ‘n’ hike” tent; a sleeping bag rated to 10 degrees below freezing; a lightweight Therm-a-Rest (self-inflating air mattress); a full change of clothing; a headlamp with spare batteries; a small digital camera; writing paper and pen, or a small musical instrument like a harmonica (depending on how you like to express yourself creatively); a small cook set with lightweight cutlery, cup, and plate; a small folding saw and/or hatchet; signal flares; and as much high-energy travel food as I can realistically carry. For a gun, my good friend and expert arctic survival guide Wes Werbowy recommends a Remington 870 with a short barrel and slugs or SSG shells for bears.

  As well as a belt knife, you should carry these items somewhere on your person:

  • bandana

  • compass

  • cup (metal, collapsible, for boiling water)

  • emergency LED flashlight (small)

  • lighter (my preference is a butane lighter that works like a little blowtorch)

  • magnesium flint striker

  • multi-tool or Swiss Army–style knife (with a small saw b
lade)

  • orange garbage bags (1–2, large)

  • painkillers (a few)

  • parachute cord or similar rope (approximately 25 feet, ¼-inch thick)

  • solar or “space” blanket (small)

  • strike-anywhere matches in waterproof case (with striker, just in case)

  • whistle

  • Ziploc bag

  Although this may sound like a fairly weighty list, you can carry a couple of the items—the whistle and the magnesium flint striker, for example—on a piece of rope or parachute cord around your neck. And when the other items are spread out among your various pockets (wearing clothes with lots of pockets is helpful!), you hardly notice them at all. They simply exist as part of you and should present no problem. And if you become separated from your pack, the items you carry in your pockets can make a world of difference. In Chris’s case, it might have been a better idea to pull a small toboggan behind him rather than carry a pack on his back.

  * * *

  So, what did McCandless take with him? Jim Gallien, the last person to see McCandless alive, said his half-full pack seemed to weigh only twenty-five or thirty pounds, ridiculously light for someone planning a several-month excursion into a land still blanketed under at least a foot of snow. In it was a woefully inadequate collection of items: a ten-pound bag of rice (his only food!), a .22-caliber rifle and ammunition (a poor choice), and some camping equipment. The heaviest part of McCandless’s bag? The nine or ten books he toted along.