Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Watching a grown man cry
Overall this has been a real once in a lifetime experience. It was hard, really hard and unforgettable. Sometimes the hardest things are the most memorable and that’s certainly true of this. I remember the journey between Dogpack and Tincup most vividly. I had difficult times and great times. I had one of the most beautiful places on the planet all to myself, I could swim naked in the lake, get up in the middle of the night and howl at the moon and I came pretty close to some of the big icons of the wilderness. At my first camp got within 20 metres of a large moose and on the creek I almost bumped into a moose surrounded by white timber wolves. I came pretty close to a bear and filmed a caribou swimming across a lake, American eagles would come and check me out and for 50 days I lived off the wild. It makes me smile to think of it – a big smile.
Anyone else out there catch Alone in the Wild on the Nat Geo channel? Scotland-born Ed Wardle, a self-described adventurer, not a survivalist, decided to live out a boyhood dream of living alone in the Yukon wilderness for 90 days. The three-part series covered in sometimes excruciating detail Wardle’s struggles against hunger and loneliness, his Stephen Colbert-magnitude dread of bears, his successes, and his ultimate failure to meet the goals he set for himself.
This was truly remarkable TV. Not often you get the chance to watch a man waste away from starvation and go mad from solitude. Although Wardle had a rifle and a shotgun, he was bound by Canadian law to confine his hunting to fish and small game (“rabbits, ground squirrels, porcupines, fish and plants”). Even ducks were off limits, and forget about bagging a caribou. This left him (as best I can tell from watching the series) the six pounds of rice and oatmeal he packed in with him, whatever leaves and berries he could find, a number of sardine-sized fishes, and two porcupines. He lasted 50 days, and every day he spent hoping to catch a salmon. He never did.
As for what happened to Wardle’s mental state — and that deterioration is the real meat of the program — he states,
Lack of food was the catalyst. I couldn’t think straight without enough food and so I lost the point often. Isolation on its own wouldn’t have got to me so fast and fear I can deal with. Add to that the responsibility of making a tv series on my own and putting myself out there and all together it proved a pretty powerful cocktail of stresses.
Wardle’s on-camera breakdown was more roller coaster ride than plummeting drop. He had good moments and bad moments, each largely determined by the presence or absence of food. According to this blogger/outdoorsman (great discussion on his blog, by the way, with radically different views among the commenters regarding Ed Wardle), it takes 3000 calories per day to survive in the bush. Hard to believe Wardle managed more than 1500, and that would have been on days when he dipped into his rice and oatmeal stash.
Whether you believe Wardle was pathetically unprepared for his adventure (as one commenter on that blog argues) or that his survival 50 days under such harsh circumstances was nothing short of miraculous, it’s hard to ignore the fact that this guy is really trying to survive for the long haul — unlike Bear Gryll (of Discovery Channel’s Man vs. Wild), who infamously spent some of his ‘nights in the wild’ snug abed in a hotel room. Even Les Stroud (of Discovery Channel’s Survivorman), an experienced survivalist, would spend only a week at a time on his excursions. With the exception of his South Pacific island show, he would starve for a week. It’s tough finding food in the bush.
If you get a chance to see Alone in the Wild, watch it. If you missed it, you can get a flavor of the show by watching a few of the videos posted at National Geographic’s show site, here.
D.
I haven’t seen the show, but if you’re going to try to survive in the bush, the Yukon is a pretty tough place to do it. Even the native people, who knew how to live in such places, didn’t go into the interior much. There’s just not enough food there. They stuck to the coast in that part of the world.
I watched Survivorman when he went to Labrador, which is at roughly the same latitude. Stroud had a team of dogs and a rifle. He found a way cabin and he still bailed out on day 3 or 4. There are reasons those parts of the world are still very sparsely populated.