Will to Live: Dispatches from the Edge of Survival (28 page)

Mawson waved his glove and called to his friends with a weakened voice. After what seemed like an eternity, one of them looked in his direction. Seconds later, the three men were abuzz with activity, shouting, waving, and running in his direction. Salvation at last! It was Mawson’s friend Bickerton who reached him first. Bickerton lifted the skeletal figure of Mawson onto the sledge, looked into his eyes, and burst out: “My God! Which one are you?”

The
Aurora
was recalled by wireless communication, but bad weather and ice conditions prevented the ship from coming to shore. Mawson and the six men who had stayed behind to search for him faced the terrible reality of their situation: they would have to spend one more year in their small hut at Cape Denison before the ship would be able to make it through the ice pack during the Antarctic summer, reach land, and return them to Australia. In hindsight, it was likely the best thing that could have happened to Mawson. At the main base, he could at least spend as much time resting as he needed to heal himself; a long, rough ship voyage may well have killed him.

Though they seemed interminable to Mawson, the next ten months were spent in the relative comfort of the main base. The men were well stocked with supplies, and Mawson even made a sledge journey the following spring. The
Aurora
returned in December 1913 to pick up Mawson and his men. Moved by the image of the wild Antarctic landscape as the ship pulled away, Mawson made the final entry in the diary he had kept for more than two years in that accursed land:

We bring no store in ingots
Of spice or precious stones
But what we have gathered
With sweat and aching bones.

Late in February of 1914, Mawson and his mates set foot on Australian soil once again, more than two years after they first landed at Commonwealth Bay. Mawson was still pale, shaky, thin, and hairless—but alive.

Epilogue

Ninety percent of survival is said to be in the head. Yet the majority of suffering is felt in the skin—blistered, raw, bleeding skin.

While working on this book, I was also producing my new TV series,
Les Stroud Beyond Survival,
which focuses on the cultural and land-based survival of various indigenous peoples around the globe. During the writing of the
Karluk
story, I happened to be in Canada’s high Arctic, hunting, fishing, and traveling on a frozen landscape with the Inuit. With the hard-learned stories of the
Karluk
still fresh in my mind, I organized my trip with an eye toward survival.

Although I had been reassured that my food, supplies, and all other pertinent necessities required for traveling in the Arctic would be taken care of, I decided to look after myself. In no way did I intend to insult my guides or undermine their own careful plans. But in reality, I still had to consider the worst-case scenario. What if their supplies were inadequate? What if they were injured or suffered a heart or appendicitis attack?

We were some 150 miles—a solid twenty-four-hour snowmobile ride at high speeds, through fairly unforgiving territory—from safety; temperatures were frigid. It was no slight to anybody for me to make sure I had my own survival covered. In fact, it kept me from being a potential liability should something go seriously wrong. This is the survival mindset.

In going through the ordeals articulated in these pages, a new reality has become clear to me: luck plays a more important role than I originally thought. When the will to live is weak and giving up a constant consideration, luck can be the one factor that turns things around, perhaps even leading to salvation. When the will to live is strong but the circumstances seem almost impossible to overcome, luck can provide relief and further open the door to rescue. When physical suffering is nearly unbearable and suicide seems like to only form of relief, luck can offer enough respite so that pushing through the pain becomes a viable option. And when the survival gear is scant and largely useless, luck can provide the tools to turn the situation around. For some, good fortune takes the form of a gift—the turtles the Robertsons used as food. Others make their own luck, as Mawson did when he built his rope ladder.

So, just how much of survival boils down to luck? Better yet, how much of survival is in the hands of fate herself? It’s a powerful debate, but only one of myriad questions we can ask about survival ordeals. Was there really a guiding spirit that assisted so many of those who claimed its presence during their ordeals? Or were these simply the hallucinations of malnourished victims in desperate situations?

Equally fascinating is the role individual personalities play in survival. Juxtapose Mawson’s powerful leadership with the pathetic squabbling of the
Karluk
’s crew. Consider the unbending will to live and passion of people like Yossi and Nando with the near-apathetic acceptance of circumstances by the Stolpas.

Knowledge, luck, kit, and will are the four additive elements of survival. Yet the scorecard doesn’t end there. Add to these personality, fitness, ability to obsess over details, ability to forget the details and focus on the big picture, ability to MacGyver otherwise useless items into more useful things, humor, imagination, ability to endure physical suffering (that’s a big one), ability to find motivation in emotions, and finally, intelligence. These are the many variables of survival. And there are likely even more.

Tell us that someone has a strong will to live, and we respond with a yawn. But listen to tales of Mawson wrapping the bottoms of his skinless soles back onto his feet and climbing out of deep crevasses in bone-numbing temperatures, and you jolt to attention. When Yossi was impaled in the anus while slipping down a muddy slope; when Jennifer Stolpa had the presence of mind to drizzle precious ounces of water from her mouth into baby Clayton’s; or when a group of Uruguayan rugby players looked on as parts of their dead teammates were slowly being revealed by melting snow . . . these are the stories of survival’s final ten percent, stories that make me wince and shift uneasily in my chair.

That’s where most of us tend to live these kinds of exploits—from our chairs. And that’s how it should be. These stories aren’t adventures, they’re horrific ordeals. Many people lost their lives, others were scarred for life.

It’s too easy to judge someone else’s plight while sitting comfortably in our own homes. Why didn’t they just . . . ? Why wouldn’t they just . . . ? But if there is one thing I have learned about wilderness survival, adventure, and life in general, it’s that there is no such thing as “just” doing something. The struggle to survive is a harrowing ordeal, a nightmare of monstrous proportions. Problems and challenges that, from our comfortable vantage point, have obvious solutions, can be insurmountable obstacles when you are really there. With that in mind, I can’t ever truly say what any of the victims in this book did was right or wrong. They did what they had to, and nobody will ever understand that unless they go through the same thing.

I am often asked where the toughest place to survive is. But that’s too general a question. Was it any tougher for Yossi in the jungle than it was for Mawson in the Antarctic? Did the Robertsons have it better than the Stolpas because they were in the tropics? Did Chris McCandless have an easier go of things than Nando Parrado? Can I—who have
voluntarily
placed myself in multi-day survival situations—even dare to relate to the intensely painful, soul-wrenching experiences of the people in this book? I doubt it. My perspective stems from the practical. My comparisons come from years of studying and practicing survival. But these people, for all their right and wrong choices, their strengths and weaknesses, their intelligence and idiocy, actually suffered through
real
survival ordeals. Most survived. And that’s the fundamental difference.

Ten years from now, I could rewrite this book with a completely different set of stories. For as long as there are humans on this planet, we will find ourselves venturing into the remote wilderness. And even though the advent of technology like SPOT devices makes it much more difficult to get truly lost, accidents will still happen, people will still be unprepared, and common sense will still be ignored. And so, we will continue to find ourselves falling into experiences we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemies.

And when that happens, I hope we have, if nothing else, the will to live.

Further Reading

Bartlett, Robert A.
The Last Voyage of the Karluk, Flagship of Vilhjalmar Stefansson’s Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913–16, as Related by Her Master, Robert A. Bartlett, and Here Set Down by Ralph T. Hale.
Boston: Small, Maynard, 1916.

Bickel, Lennard.
Mawson’s Will: The Greatest Polar Survival Story Ever Written.
South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press, 1977, 2000.

Bredeson, Carmen.
After the Last Dog Died: The True-Life, Hair-Raising Adventure of Douglas Mawson and His 1912 Antarctic Expedition.
Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2003.

Ghinsberg, Yossi.
Back from Tuichi: The Harrowing Life-and-Death Story of Survival in the Amazon Rainforest.
Translated by Yael Politis and Stanley Young. New York: Random House, 1993.

———.
Lost in the Jungle: A Harrowing True Story of Survival.
New York: Sky
horse Publishing, 2009.
Golden, Frank, and Michael Tipton.
Essentials of Sea Survival
. Champaign, IL.:
Human Kinetics, 2002.

Kamler, Kenneth.
Surviving the Extremes: A Doctor’s Journey to the Limits of Human Endurance.
New York, N.Y.: St. Martin’s, 2004.

Krakauer, Jon.
Into the Wild.
New York: Anchor, 1996, 1997.

Logan, Richard.
Alone: Orphaned on the Ocean.
Green Bay, Wisc.: TitleTown Publishing, 2010.

Mawson, Douglas.
The Home of the Blizzard: A True Story of Antarctic Survival.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1915, 1998.

McKinlay, William Laird.
Karluk: The Great Untold Story of Arctic Exploration.
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976.

Niven, Jennnifer.
The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk.
New York: Hyperion, 2000.

Parrado, Nando, with Vince Rause.
Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home.
New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006.

Read, Piers Paul.
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors.
New York: Avon Books, 1974.

Robertson, Dougal.
Survive the Savage Sea.
Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Sheridan House, 1973, 1994.

Robertson, Douglas.
The Last Voyage of the Lucette.
Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Sheridan House, 2005.

Acknowledgments

I promised my publisher that my schedule would allow me much more time to concentrate on this book, free from the crazy time frame I dealt with when we published my first book,
Survive!
Of course, that wasn’t the case; while writing this book I traveled around the globe ten times in eight months filming for my series
Les Stroud: Beyond Survival.
So, once again my good friend and ghostwriter Mike Vlessides came to my rescue, researching all of these stories with me, and helping me put together what you have in your hands. Once again, Mike, I couldn’t have done this without you. In addition, Laura Bombier not only provided most of the photos for this book but also gave me the kick in the ass when I needed it to keep working and keep writing, just as she did for
Survive!

I didn’t take on all these stories on my own; I was blessed to have my survival cronies Doug Getgood, Fred Rowe, and Dave Arama throw in their thoughts on my perspectives on the various stories. Wes Werbowy, another extremely competent survival expert, who recently saved his own life by punching a massive polar bear in the nose, chimed in with some good advice. The author of
Alone,
Richard Logan, was gracious, too, in looking over my manuscript, as was one of the men of the hour, Yossi Ghinsberg, whose incredible tale is captured in this book as well as in his own. My legal team of Rick Broadhead and Dave Dembroski fought hard as always to keep the deal real, and without them, getting this whole thing to start would have been a frustrating exercise.

Behind me, as always, is my wonderful office team of Wendy Turner, Kate Heming, Yvonne Crawford, Dawn Lawless, and Brian Brewster, and just downstairs from them my incredible post team of Barry Farrell, Andrew Sheppard, Max Attwood, Andy Peterson, Graeme Fraser, John Pyke, Ryan Welcher, and my sis, Laura Mugridge. Trudging along all around the world was the brilliant field team for the new series: Dan Reynolds, Johnny Askwith, Peter Esteves, Brett Rogers, and Barry Clark (my paramedic for both
Survivorman
and
Beyond Survival
).

Thank you to Dave and Andrea Beatty for watching over my house. Thanks go out to my former teachers, John and Geri McPherson of Randolf, Kansas. Thanks to Mom and thanks to my brother, Bob Wilson, who inspires me. As always, a big thank you to my cousin, partner, and good friend, Peter Dale, who set me on this path with some great guidance and a bit of cash too!

For fans of my work and viewers of my shows, thank you for the constant encouragement and reassurance—I do read my Facebook page and I do get your messages. They keep me going. Please support Solid Rock Foundation of Phoenix, Arizona, and War Child in Toronto.

Thanks to Brad Wilson and Noelle Zitzer of HarperCollins, which is once again a most gracious, understanding, and helpful publisher—I look forward to another six books!

Raylan and Logan, I love you now and forever—you are my reason for living. Love, Dad.