If you had to survive alone in the woods, could you do it (entertainingly)?
Eric Felten
To look at it, you’d think Labrador was lush. The dense tree line comes right down to the water’s edge, and at least from above in a helicopter, or from the river, bobbing offshore in a boat, the forest is verdant and, one would think, dense with game. Out on the water, you could be forgiven for thinking the fish must be ready to wriggle their way over the gunwale and right into your waiting landing net. Such is the scenery for the most recent season of Alone, the popular survivalist TV series that airs on Netflix.
And yet, for all the fragrant pine and undisturbed forest undergrowth, a natural wilderness unspoiled by ravenous man, the 10 contestants can hardly find a bite to eat. Several contestants have spent time living among indigenous peoples of the Americas. They have learned how to skin a muskrat and smoke trout. But much of what they might have learned was of little use because tribal strategies for getting food don’t work very well when one is alone.
OUR PLANET II IS GREAT ANTI-HUMAN ART
But of course, surviving all on one’s lonesome is the point of the contest. The Alone contestants are allowed a few tools to make the forest hospitable: a bow and nine arrows, a hatchet, some fishing line, and a tarp. But no guns. It is a testament to the game-changing nature of the old boomstick that to contrive a truly hopeless survivalist situation, the rifles have to be left behind.
More than one of the Alone contestants managed to put an arrow right through the head of an unsuspecting squirrel. Not that it did much to stave off starvation. To find a squirrel, and get a good angle on the little fellow, entailed no little tiptoeing through dense and clinging underbrush and plenty of exhausting climbing over fallen trees jumbled on steep slopes. And for little meaty payoff.
There were a few grouse to fricassee and even the occasional beaver on the menu. But nothing could be found that would make hunting, at least hunting the smallish critters the terrain presented, worthwhile. Which made for a rather less than dramatic series, a contest that became little more than an exercise in who could starve the slowest. The survivalists were doing anything but survive.
The fellow who won adopted a radical strategy. He went on a hunger strike, consuming nothing but water and expending no extraneous effort at cooking up squirrel on a stick. That doesn’t exactly make for exciting television.
Which suggests a new, revised, and reinvigorated sort of survival show. Let’s call it On Ice. The challengers would each take a ship as far south as they could go and then man the lifeboats when the expanding ice crushed the ship. Then, each team — let’s let them compete in groups of four — pulls and pushes a sled across Antarctica. Sure, they might be starving, but at least there would be some action.
And if that doesn’t appeal to the TV studio executives, I’ve got an idea for a family survival show — Donner: Pass or Fail.
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Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?