Deep What?

Little Bigelow Shelter, ME
Mile 2002

Deep Survival endorses, somehow, the fact that survival in extreme situations is the result of the survivors' competence. I take issue with that hypothesis: the primary decider in extreme situations is luck, and lots of it. But given the hypothesis, he makes some interesting assumptions about the nature of a survivor.

If any through-hiker were to follow his rules for survival, for example, they would never, ever finish the trip. "If you're sweating in cool weather, you're working too hard". Horse puckey. You go until you can't go any further, then you find something inside that makes you go beyond that. I've hiked until I felt like the mountain was beating me, extravagantly and at leisure, like the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse beats Nicholas Cage in Raising Arizona. No need to squirm or wiggle, I remember thinking. The heavy blows come all the same.

It seems that there are two personae in extreme situations- one is the survivor, and another is the acheiver. The two types have little in common. After all, survivors specialize in getting out of trouble. Acheivers specialize in getting into it.

That said, it's still a pretty good book, with some good real-life lessons in it. Survival is a very important part of acheivement after all.

As a postscript, it turned out to be a good decision to get off Washington when I did- there were three Lifeflights from the Presidentials that evening. I'm glad not to have been on any of them.