Survival Methodology

That’s right, survival! What is survival anyway? Thanks to Bear Gryls and the ever popular Survivorman, survival strategy and methodology has become a household topic.

Survival means to take the steps necessary to simply stay alive, typically in hard or otherwise inopportune circumstances. To many that means being able to conquer what nature throws at us such as, hard climatic conditions, being lost, or loss of a backpack. To others that means, making sure everyone stays safe and warm during a prolonged power outage. Perhaps taking a step in a different direction survival, to a certain age group, is learning how to cope with out texting for a few hours!

I would submit to you that all of these mindsets are true survival. Survival mindset is exactly that, a mindset. I have studied with experts and on my own for years in the art of survival methodology. Last year I took a class in survival in the beautiful Smoky Mountains, from an instructor who is known virtually worldwide as a “survival expert”. There is no denying that he is exactly that, an expert. He taught our group many things, from edible and medicinal plants to navigating without a compass or GPS, to building our own debris hut or survival shelter. What I discovered throughout the class was that the things he was teaching as survival were merely things I had been doing most of my life for fun!

What most people would call “survival” most of our grandparents and theirs before them, would simply call natural living. For you see, survival, is not learning how to conquer or defeat much of anything, it is rather learning how to work with the circumstances that a given situation puts you in. Now don’t get me wrong, there are times where someone may be lost and without quick access to shelter, water, and food. That may be a situation where a survival mindset is of the upmost importance. For example what is most important, food, water, discovering where you are, rest? There is definitely a priority list of things to go through in your mind when you find yourself in this sort of situation (which we will cover in our next column).

These are all skills that are now lost to us thanks to big box stores and easy access to food and the fact that water simply comes to us by turning a faucet. Please don’t misunderstand me; I enjoy these things as well. But, these are places and ways of convenience that we all take for granted I believe. Generations not to far removed from our own, pumped or gathered their own water from a well, or creek. Slaughtered and processed their own domestic animals, or had wild game opportunities around them as well. Taking it a step further, many generations before our own, Native Americans were a part of their environment, not conquering it. They thought of rivers as “the long human”, because these waterways were alive and vibrant to them and worked with them to keep them alive. Conversely they would never do anything to harm their sources of water. Even in my lifetime, I am now 40, our closest river has gone from a waterway that I played in as a boy, to one we would not dare drink from without lots of purification and cleansing.

The ability to work with the circumstances is above all most important. If you think to yourself, “Oh no, I am in big trouble”, then you are exactly that, in big trouble. If, on the other hand, you think something along the lines, of “I can do this” or “We will be just fine”, it goes a long way in your chances of survival in any given situation. When I travel alone, particularly in the forests and other backwoods of Kentucky I typically take a memento of my family, in the case I am lost or otherwise hurt such that I cannot find my way out. A remembrance helps in the mindset, of why one wants to return to normal life and goes a long way in keeping one’s spirit awake and alive for the hardships that may occur.

Survival, self-reliant living, relying on nature, emergency preparedness, are all buzzwords for these ways and methods that I look forward to exploring and covering with you in the future. Just so you know I am neither a “survival nut” nor a “tree hugger”, I suppose I am a little bit of both, or maybe better said, I am neither. Whatever I am, I look forward to getting on this trail with you and finding things together.