Survivors ready ? Set ?
Go: You find yourself in a survival situation. What do you do first ?
a. Make fire.
b. Find water.
c. Build a shelter.
d. Stay calm.
e. Sign a waiver.
If you answered e, congratulations and welcome to the first Survival Workshop at DeGray Lake Resort State Park. Park interpreter Jason Parrie has just handed you and your nine fellow students the waiver in question, and this is what it actually says:
“I the undersigned, binding my heirs, executors, administrators, estate and assigns do hereby release and will assume pay [yes, actual wording ] and at all times indemnify, protect and save harmless the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism, its agents, causes of action, claims, attorneys fees, demands, costs or damages as a result of property damage or personal injuries or deaths sustained by myself or my property [yes, yes, actual wording ] arising from or resulting from any act of the Department, officers, agents and employees or any other participants in the said activity or while traveling to and from the place at which such activity will be conducted.”
Personal injuries or deaths sustained by... me or my property ? Yikes. Who knew that signing up for this seven-hour, $ 35 class was such a brave idea ?
Before 10 students could bolt from the park lodge’s air-conditioned Heron Room with its long folding tables tidy under clean white cloths, Parrie assured them that no one was in or about to be in dire straits.
“This class is not a gnaw-your-arm off kind of thing,” he said. “It’s not a Bear Grylls, spend-threeweeks-out-in-the-jungle-with-a-toothpick-to-surviveon kind of a deal. That’s not the type of situation most of us find ourselves in, and I don’t have the knowledge to teach that.”
Park interpreters, he said, are professional explainers, not professional survivalists. (But he is certified as a professional responder and CPR / First Aid instructor by the American Red Cross; and the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission certified him as a Boating Education and Hunter’s Education instructor. And he’s also an American Canoe Association kayak instructor. )
“It will just be outdoors, and you won’t be near a snack machine,” he said.
“What this class is more about is situations that typical people will find themselves in and some basic, guiding principles and themes to help you get along,” Parrie promised. He added that most survival situations in Arkansas “resolve themselves — one way or the other — in one to three days.” Which was and was not reassuring. But as the instructive, humorous hours unfolded April 19, students did find themselves in imminent danger — from poison ivy, ticks, chiggers, sunburn, ruined hairdos and singed fingertips. All of which everyone survived.
SITUATION ROOM Maybe a tornado knocks down your house, leaving you wet and cold. Maybe you alight from the boat to sightsee alone in the Ecuadorian jungle. Maybe an unexpected storm descends upon Mount Everest. Or maybe, Houston, we have a problem on our way to the moon...
Whatever the particulars of the predicament, Parrie said, there are guidelines — priorities — that survivors simply must consider. Setting aside the signing of waivers, what should be top priority in a survival situation ?
This class included three boys and seven outdoorsy adults, and one of the boys was a Boy Scout. So suggestions flew like sparks off a flint.
“Make a fire ?”
“Find food.”
“Signal for help ?”
“Blow your whistle !”
“Get water ?”
A few liked the idea of making a fire on the theory that it would help a survivor stay warm and also purify putrid puddles for drinking, fend off ravenous woodland creatures and become a signal (perhaps drawing a helpful helicopter with one of those handy ladders upon which the survivor could ascend to safety ).
Yes but, Parrie demurred, attempting Socrates-like to draw the latent knowledge from their collective brain, what if you’re in a desert and it’s 110 degrees in the shade ?
“Find food, you need food.”
“Know where you are ?”
“Blow your whistle.”
Yes, it would be a good thing to know where you are if you happen to get lost, he agreed, but what needs to happen — inside your head — before survival can begin to uh... start ?
From the left-hand side of the classroom, Bryan Davis of Jonesboro joked to Tammy Jones of Hot Springs that first you need to recognize you’re in trouble. Parrie pounced upon the word.
“That’s No. 1,” he cried, “recognize ! Recognize the situation.”
Too often, he said, people who are in trouble don’t admit to themselves that they’re in trouble. They continue to climb Mount Everest. They go on fishing as their leaky boat takes on more and more water. They sit in their snowbound RV calmly writing in their diaries.
Contrast such complacency to the reaction of everyone depicted in the movie Apollo 13, he said. The minute the astronauts reported they had a problem, everyone on the ground gave up on Plan A, which was get to the moon, and focused on Plan B: get home alive.
Be like Houston, Parrie said, not like silly fishermen. “Plan A is gone. Plan B: stay alive. So what do you do ?”
As the chorus began again — “make fire,” “ find water ” — he scrawled “STOP” across the dry-erase marker board.
“Write this down in your head,” he said, adding that the letters were uppercase because each stood for something. And did anyone happen to know what those somethings might be ?
“Stop, Think, Options and Plan ?” said Phillip Warrick, a 10-year-old Boy Scout (Troop 30 ) from Little Rock attending with his father, Michael.
“The O usually stands for ‘Observe,’ but that will work,” Parrie said. And then he gave Phillip a 5 1 / 2-inch, liner-locking tactical folding knife, The Hawk. The Hawk wasn’t expensive (less than $ 5 on the Internet ), but it had a camouflage pattern on the handle and it came in a box and it was named The Hawk.
Suddenly students had a goal beyond surviving the workshop: answer a question and win The Hawk. Traci Overman of Glenwood, who had been sitting very quietly beside her husband, Johnny, began to answer all kinds of questions. “I want a knife,” she said. Meanwhile Parrie was back at the marker board, underlining the word STOP. “If you actually tell yourself, ‘Stop,’ you’ve done a couple of things,” he said. “One, you’ve recognized the situation. Two, you’ve spoken out loud, which means you’re breathing, and that’s always a good thing. And you’re now beginning to think, and that means you’re using — write this down in your mind — your No. 1 tool for survival. “ Better than fire, better than knives. Your hair ? No, your brain. “ Your brain is your biggest tool in a survival situation. It’s your brain that’s going to get you by.”
TO BE OR NOT “So you’ve stopped,” Parrie continued. “You’ve got control of our No. 1 tool. Now we’ve got to make our Decision to Live” — and the way he said it implied the capital letters. “That decision sometimes means doing things that you’re uncomfortable with.” Some nonsurvivors simply won’t decide to do whatever it takes, he said. Gnawing off your own foot. Making a signal by burning one of the tires on your recreational vehicle, which can’t go anywhere anyway because the mountain pass is full of snow. Eating things you wouldn’t otherwise care to eat. And here the park interpreter produced an orange plastic cereal bowl full of... Uh-oh. “In our bowl of dirt and grass, if you look around in there you’ll see a few tasty little morsels — mealworms and crickets,” he said, with relish.
Mealworms — how bad could they be ? “It’s got meal in its name,” someone quipped.
“I’ll eat it,” said Phillip, the Boy Scout.
Besides, these mealworms and crickets were nothing like the wiggling wet monsters of ragged survival nightmare: They were most sincerely dead and, as 14-year-old Steven Dees told his 10-year-old brother, Brayden, they were toasted and seasoned with spices.
“They don’t really taste like much of anything,” Tammy Jones noted.
“My worm broke,” Traci Overman said, meaning, “so I don’t have to eat it.”
“Let’s get you a cricket,” Parrie countered.
“How come you had to put them in dirt ?” Phillip complained.
Actually, it wasn’t dirt. It was cocoa powder.
“I think we need a prize for eating the worms,” Overman suggested, still clearly angling for The Hawk.
“The prize is you live !” Parrie said.
A MATTER OF DEGREES Relentlessly and with a great deal of humor, the park interpreter spent the morning pulling his class back toward the problem of priorities. So after you have stopped and as you’re looking around and observing your options, figuring out where you are and coming up with some kind of plan, what should you do soon ? This is something taught in military strategy, Parrie said, nudging the two former military men in the group. “Action ?” The word came from James Dees of Magnolia, grandfather of Brayden and Steven. Yes, Parrie said. Do something. Action helps fend off panic. “Sometimes it’s good to panic,” he noted. Panic comes with a rush of adrenaline, and that gives you increased strength, speed, heightened senses. Panic might help a swimmer yank his shirt free of a snag. But panic is not about thinking. “Most of the time you want thinking,” he said.
Returning to the laundry list of survival options, Parrie again challenged the class to pick a priority. What is it without which a human being will not last the one to three days it takes for most survival situations to resolve themselves “one way or the other” ?
Another Socratic exchange elicited agreement that humans can persist without food for weeks. (So eat up whatever you’ve got with you, he said, don’t hoard it. ) And they can get by without water for a few days — unless it’s very hot.
Why does heat matter ? Because “there’s a really important number you’ve got to think about,” he said: “98. 6.”
If it’s very hot and a person’s body temperature begins to climb above 98 degrees, that person has neither days nor weeks. If you’re in cold water, and your number falls, “you have minutes,” he said.
“Minutes,” he repeated, underlining the word. “In a survival situation, we’ve got to do whatever we have to do to keep our body at 98 degrees.”
He pointed to the word “shelter”: “This is what can get you the fastest.”
In other words, survivors, you might need to think about shelter first thing.
Shelter, he said, means clothing, a rock to block the wind, piles of leaves — whatever it takes to shelter yourself from the environment that’s taking your body temperature away from 98 degrees. READY, WILLING... UNABLE
After the morning of talking, thinking and gifts (not only The Hawk — see accompanying story ), Parrie took the class outside for an afternoon of nonthreatening but slightly competitive, hands-on attempts to practice basic but far from simple skills.
Before the day was gone, they had listened for the phony rattle of an alarmed speckled kingsnake; used a compass to wander through ivy-laden woods; searched for not-rotten fallen limbs to build a garbage bag and hay shelter; discovered that hay doesn’t only make you sneeze, it also makes it a snap to ignite your fire first so you’ll win The Hawk.
They’d dazzled their eyes with flashing compact discs and shocked their ears with plastic whistles. They’d failed to write “help” on a dirt road using available stuff large enough to be seen from the sky.
They’d made fires with waterproof matches and watched the flames fizzle out. They’d made fires using magnesium shavings and watched those fires die out, too.
The day’s final, optional challenge invo lved being dumped from a kayak and sloshing to shore where, wet and fortunately not shivering uncontrollably, they attempted to set fire to plenty of readily available dry tinder using either the magnesium shavings or thoroughly wet waterproof matches.
Traci Overman earned The Hawk. So did others. This was a fun time. But this survivor came away determined to waive whatever chances recklessness might offer of getting lost in the woods, flipping from a kayak or any other scenario that leaves me cold and shivering, trying to chip sparks into a pile of magnesium shavings to make fire.
No thank you, on behalf of all my heirs and assigns.
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