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BOOK REVIEW

Survive !

Essential Skills and Tactics To Get You Out of Anywhere – Alive

Les Stroud / Collins, 2008

Reviewed by Jeremy Derksen / jderksen@shaw.ca

When Les Stroud teaches wilderness survival, he tests his students by asking them to collect enough firewood to last a night. Without even looking at their piles, he then sends them back out to collect five times what they have. Still, writes Stroud, many don’t have enough to keep a fire going until morning.

This simple but poignant example from Stroud’s book, Survive! Essential Skills and Tactics to Get You Out of Anywhere – Alive, emphasizes how poorly equipped and educated most people are to handle a basic survival task. Collecting water, finding food, building a shelter and starting a fire– these critical skills are often neglected by seasoned backcountry travelers much less the average person. Add an extra degree of difficulty– injury, disorientation, harsh weather, lost equipment–and the fragile balance of life can quickly tip.

As host of the popular Survivorman TV series, an expert survivalist and a member of the Explorers Club, Les Stroud is an encyclopedia of survival techniques, both common and bizarre. His experience and ingenuity have gotten him through challenging ordeals in many of the world’s most inhospitable places ranging from the Kalahari Desert to the Arctic, and the Caribbean Sea to the jungles of Papua New Guinea. In Survive!, he shares the benefit of his hard-earned knowledge, from basic techniques like how to use a fire-bow to fashioning winter boots out of automotive upholstery.

The book is structured with perfunctory chapter titles like “Survival Kits,” “Signaling,” “Water,” “Fire” and “Survival First Aid.” But make no mistake; this is not just a dry textbook. While Stroud lays out step by step in fine, illustrated detail, the techniques for such skills as constructing a solar still, he also spices the text with personal anecdotes, case studies and the sardonic observations of a wizened bush veteran.

Stroud is at his best when he’s bucking conventional wisdom. In a survival situation, one of the most important traits you can have is the ability to adapt. Pack and prepare all you want–Survive! includes extensive survival gear checklists to assist with this step–but you can’t predetermine the setting, timing or logistics of a mishap. It is the nature of such events that they will come as a surprise.

That doesn’t mean that survival can’t be practiced by developing skills through repetition, knowing your tools and participating in survival scenarios. However, real life doesn’t follow a script. It requires you to improvise, break rules, think beyond convention– and this is where Survive! shines.

The unique tips and survival counter-theories Stroud presents force the reader to reconsider accepted wisdom. He brushes aside fears of water contamination: “If your choice is between drinking untreated water and dying of dehydration…drink.” While he advocates purifying water when you can, Stroud advocates drinking unpurified swamp water if necessary. “In all but the rarest circumstances,” he writes, “drinking untreated water won’t kill you.”

As for setting priorities, Stroud argues that if immediate safety is established and there is no urgency about shelter, signaling becomes priority two. “You never really know when a potential rescuer may appear,” he explains. “You need to be ready to signal immediately and at all times.”

Stroud also applies his unorthodox approach to survival tools. “You are more likely than you think to come across abandoned junk that may be useful,” he writes. “Don’t consider what it is, but what it could be.” Flint, waterproof matches, lighter or fire-bow are all good methods of starting a fire, but Stroud notes you can also spark a blaze with a car battery or the sun’s reflection through an ice cube. The list of uses for otherwise unlikely objects is extensive and MacGyveresque: fishing floats from bubble gum, goggles out of a snowmobile cushion, snowshoes from spruce boughs, moss cups for catching water. He even shares a legitimate use for belly button lint. The point is simple: don’t overlook anything.

At its heart, Survive! is a field manual. Most people won’t memorize all the techniques in the book, at least not without years of practice. While useful and entertaining to read on the couch, this is a book meant to accompany the traveler. But if there is a lesson to take away, it’s Stroud’s creative, no-holds-barred approach to finding a way to survive in desperate circumstances. “Set fire to a small island if you have to,” Stroud writes. “I could live with myself if I had to take drastic measures to be rescued. How about you?”

For fuel, there’s always the pages of Survive!—in particular, the two blank pages at the back of the book conveniently labeled “Fire Starter.” The unwritten point on those pages, that there is nothing too holy in a survival situation, is perhaps the best advice to remember should it arise.

Jeremy Derksen suffered hypothermia while backcountry skiing in Yoho National Park, B.C., in his early 20s. This led to an abiding interest in first aid and wilderness rescue. He is a fiveyear member of the Canadian Ski Patrol System and has backcountry experience across western Canada. Ski editor at Vue Weekly Magazine, he has published in Unlimited Magazine, major Canadian dailies and appeared as a ski industry expert on CBC.

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