98.6 Degrees: The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive
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• Six to eight cotton balls saturated with petroleum jelly in brightly colored film vial.
• Credit-card-sized magnifying lens in a brightly colored sheath.
• Flashlight and lanyard with two AA batteries.
• Two spare AA batteries with date of purchase.
• Extra carbon-steel knife with sheath.
• Clear plastic drinking tube.
• Collapsible, 1- to 2-gallon water container.
• Two 55-gallon barrel liners or three large-capacity leaf bags.
• Heavy-duty space blanket.
• Wool or synthetic stocking cap.
• Cotton bandana.
• 100 feet of 550-pound-test parachute cord.
• 3 x 5-inch glass, sightable signal mirror with brightly colored, duct-tape-reinforced pouch.
• Homemade first-aid kit.
• Uncle Peppy’s patented power pack stack.
• 7.5-minute topographical map and compass.
• Two candy or nutrition bars.
NOTE: Other items can be added to customize your survival necklace such as an LED light, small compass, metal match, and so forth.
Choosing the Right Instructor
Many “survival instructors” can be found on the Internet, in print, and elsewhere. Most probably have good intentions, while others see an opportunity for extra income due to the increasing popularity of self-sufficiency training. It’s important that you choose your instructors wisely. The advice you take dealing with the safety and lives of you and your loved ones should come from a very knowledgeable source. You’re learning skills that could save your life—you’re not buying a toaster oven. Regardless of an outdoor school’s apparent size and media appeal, the number-one variable into the quality of their program is the quality of their instructors.
The following are tips to help you choose a good instructor whether you’re looking for skills in outdoor survival, primitive living, or home preparedness. Remember, any school is only as good as its instructors.
1. Ask to see the instructor’s resume. Has your potential instructor been teaching for ten years or ten weeks? In general, self-reliance skills require many years of training and practice before proficiency can be obtained. Ask to see if the instructor has been teaching skills continuously during their self-proclaimed years of operation. It’s not uncommon for someone’s “30 years of experience” to include the 20 years in the 1970s and ‘80s when they operated a full-time bug-extermination company.
2. Train from someone who teaches survival skills full time if possible. Would you feel comfortable seeing a physician who practiced medicine three months out of the year? Large schools with dozens of instructors have the impossible task of attempting to keep them employed full time. Since finding year-round work in this business can be challenging, locating an instructor that fits this category will tell you something about them—that they are either very good, very lucky, or both.
3. If your primary interest is primitive-living skills, train from someone who lives in your geographic region. They will be the most familiar with your local flora and fauna. Learning to harvest cactus fruit from an Eskimo is sketchy at best. If quality concerns you, the longer dedicated instructors have lived within the geographic areas they teach, the greater experience they’ll be able to pass on to you.
4. Ask around about the instructor’s background. Are they known and respected by their peers? Are they in the trenches teaching or just a figurehead for their organization? These days, unfortunately, the school with the best Web-page designer and brochure is thought to be the best wilderness school as well.
5. Beware the “expert” as nature is too full of variables to support this type of personality. Large egos and cocky attitudes are all too common in the field of wilderness survival. One of the more unfortunate manifestations of this mindset is the failure to be open to learning new material. Any instructor who tells you there is only one way to do a skill is destined to be upstaged by a humble student who has no preconceived bias as to how that skill is done.
6. If your interest in learning survival skills runs deeper than experiencing a cool “Eco-vacation,” study with someone who knows primitive-living skills and modern-survival skills. Most outdoor schools confuse “modern-survival skills” with “primitive-living skills.” Although there is overlap between the two, learning to flint knap a stone knife has limited value for your 59-year-old aunt if she’s thrust into a wilderness survival situation. Ultimately, and when taught in the proper order, knowing both sets of skills gives you greater potential for success when dealing with a survival scenario. When the chips are down, a bow drill is no substitute for matches and the know-how to use them.
7. Before attending a hands-on course, make sure the student-to-qualified-instructor ratio is low. Unless you’re getting a price break, hands-on instruction involving more than ten or twelve students will cause the course quality to suffer because you’ll spend more time watching than doing. I specify “qualified” instructors, as large schools often have a heavy instructor turnover rate, and therefore rely on “interns” (future instructors working for free to gain experience). It should go without saying that interns have not yet achieved the field experience and knowledge base of a core, lead instructor.
8. Is the field course you’re thinking about taking really taught in the field or just “outside”? Training responsibly in a small group allows you to harvest materials directly from the wilderness for maximum learning and enjoyment. A course that supplies all your raw materials could just as easily be taught in a grocery-store parking lot.
9. You get what you pay for. If you ever need to use your skills, you’ll find them to be priceless.
Happy Training!!