Why Are We Surprised?

You had only to live through the last two decades as a reasoning adult to see that there is a decline in how we treat each other, how we interact with others around us. The minimum effort we exert to communicate with each other, to understand before we judge, because let’s face it, we judge. I’ve read that it’s how we establish our baseline in society, to determine where we think we stand in our peer group, and outside of that group. We look at others around us, and compare ourselves to them, and generally will find them lacking in one absurd way or another, to bolster our own self image.

You don’t care? To a degree, you’re being dishonest. Of course you care. It’s why we all act differently when we’re around family, versus when we’re around our co-workers, or in a grocery store. We want to appear to have it all together, that we are doing just fine, whatever we think that looks like to each group I just mentioned. Mr. Happy Nice Guy. And we’re pretty damn picky about who we let see otherwise. ‘Not-doing-fine’ is considered a weakness. Not so much by others. I think most people can be empathetic when they realize someone is not having a great day, because, well, they’ve also had not-great days, and they know how that feels.

But we don’t let ourselves off that easily. Why? Well, because we look around at our group, at those we are often around, and well, they all seem to be fine, and that’s good, but you’re not fine, and that’s not good, so you judge yourself as ‘less than’, or weak in some way. And we can’t have that. But are they fine, really? Isn’t that a dangerous way to draw a baseline of your own well-being, by looking at how others ‘appear’ to be doing? That baseline is kind of like the trapdoor that drops away from the guy standing on the gallows with a noose around his neck. And we put the noose around our neck when we misjudge our well being by comparing ourselves to how we think others are doing, or what they may think of us, how they think we’re getting along.

Truth is though, and I believe this, is that many of us don’t want to know how someone else is doing. “Jeez, I’m dealing with my own problems right now, I don’t want to hear this guys problems.” I’m that way quite often. Is it selfish? It certainly is. Is it justified? Ask me when I do it, because at the time I’ll likely have a reason, be it good or bad, as to why I feel that way.

Its rare to have that person in your life that will just listen, and you can see them empathize with you. They don’t start telling you how that very same thing happened to them, and how they pushed through, blah, blah, blah. They just listen. And when they ask you what they can do to help, you know that even if you were to humble yourself enough to actually ask for more than just a listening ear, you know that this person would do just what you ask. No questions.

And that, my friends, is rare these days.

To be able to be that person that just sits and looks that person in the eye and hears every bad, boring horrible detail of their day/week/month/marriage/relationship without judging, without offering unwanted advice, just listen. It’s rare.

To do something nice for someone, and just shut up about it, do it without anyone knowing how great you are for being so big-hearted. It tells you why you do it. Can you just help, and be quiet? Good, then it’s not about you. It’s about just wanting to help, with no reward, no acclaim.

But back to the title. Why are we surprised? How is it possible that we expect things or people to be any different? We can’t. We tend to fill our lives with so much irrelevance, and pretend that it’s important, sacrificing valuable space we may have actually had in our lives for anything of real relevance, of real substance.

What is truly relevant to me, may have little to no meaning to you, and that’s as it should be. And its not my place to judge you in a bad light because we don’t share the same ideals. Will I do that very thing? Will I judge you because we disagree? Of course I will, because I’m flawed and for various other bad reasons, and so will you. As hard as we try not to, its who we are, and its how we’re wired. Friend judges friend, wife judges husband, son judges father.

My goal is to recognize that that’s how I’m wired, be aware of my own behavior, keep myself healthy by being honest about who I am, and what I need to do when I see a healthy reason to change my behavior. Not convince myself I’m right, or better than, or well off by thinking less of anyone else, regardless.

The LORD detests dishonest scales, but accurate weights find favor with him. Proverbs 11:1

“Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.” C.G Jung

Not Good Enough

A while back I was in the office, and a gentleman from one of our support sections was in the office. Somehow he’s involved with an update to some lifesaving equipment that has been undergoing some structural updates. Improvements in materials, improving durability, reliability.

The conversation turned to a part that was initially manufactured where we all work, then handed off to an outside contractor. We had all noticed that the part from outside did not fit it’s mating surface correctly. When asked about this, this gentleman said that it was ok, on the drawings the spec said plus or minus one degree..

What drawings? I asked. He showed me the drawings, for this modification to a quite simple but important component of an important piece of lifesaving equipment. A drawing we were never given to look at before it went into production. “Where did the plus or minus come from?” I asked. No one could give me an answer. Couldn’t tell me why we were never given the drawings either.

“One degree isn’t that big a deal, right?”, I was asked.

 I said, “would plus or minus a degree be a big deal in a rotor-head gearbox?” No answer.

“I’ll tell you why that one degree is a big deal. This is life support equipment. Rescue equipment that absolutely has to work, every time it’s deployed. No questions. Whomever is receiving this equipment to the deck of their boat is highly likely at the end of their list of options to get home in one piece, to get back to any dock or anchorage.

Without that equipment they are going home in a helicopter, or a rescue boat. They are most likely struggling to salvage a livelihood.

So yea, that one degree is a big deal. Why? Because if we give you one degree of wiggle room on this piece of gear, what do we settle for the next time we do this kind of work? What corner do we cut then?

Pardon me but no. Please don’t come in here nervously laughing your way through a technical coin toss for 1 degree of accuracy in a piece of our equipment. Because what you’re really telling me, at least the impression I’m getting from you in this conversation, is that you don’t place a high degree of importance on this equipment. And that’s not acceptable. Ever.

Shelter and Signals

Gimee Shelter..

The third step of the 7 steps is ‘Shelter’. Let’s face it. If you are reading this, you are a semi-hairless bipedal mammal. You need to maintain a core temperature that hovers near 98.6˚F and aside from our fairly modest nature, we use clothing to make up for our inability to regulate our body temperature beyond a degree or two either side of that core temperature. So, I’ll ask you; what is your primary shelter? The textbook answer is, ‘whatever you are wearing. If that is so, what is your secondary shelter? Well, that would be anything else you can use to separate yourself from the elements that would rob you of your body heat, or overheat you, threatening your fragile body core temperature.

O.K., now let’s exercise the dynamic aspect of the 7 steps. Here’s my scenario; in my particular emergency, As evening approaches I recognize that I have become “disoriented” during a leisurely afternoon hike, and I need to extricate myself from an area now exposed to high winds and rain that weren’t  in the afternoon forecast. Because of my exposure, I’m wet and cold, and beginning to shiver.  I inventory my condition and I know I need shelter beyond what I’m wearing. I find some thick evergreen trees with low branches, forming a natural protected area, so far, so good.  I’m out of most of the rain and wind, so I run through the first steps again, Recognition. How has my situation changed?  Is it better or worse? Inventory. What’s working for me, what’s working against me? I’m out of the rain and wind, good. But I’m still cold, this is bad. I need a fire, because I don’t have any dry clothing. Do I have something to start a fire? Yes, a lighter, check. Now, what to burn? Small fallen tree limbs seem fairly abundant under these evergreen trees, and appear to be dry, even in this rain. Now I’m getting somewhere.

With a small fire started I’m warming up, slowly getting dried off. My attitude even seems to be improving. O.K., back to the first step, recognition. My situation has improved and upon further examination, I remember that I did tell my family where I was going to be hiking, and when I expected to get back. So depending on how my family feels about me, someone should be looking for me soon. So, what’s the next step?

Give me a sign..

Well, if someone is looking for me, I want to be sure they can find me. After all, I am pretty well concealed under these thick tree limbs, trying to stay warm and dry. And if I hear any searchers in the woods, I want to be able to let them know where I am. I need to develop some type of signals.  Our fourth step is Signals, or more clearly Emergency Signals.

 Emergency signals need to do two things well. Attract attention, and convey a message. And emergency signals come in many varieties. Aural, or sound producing, electronic signals, such as VHF/FRS radio’s, EPIRB’s, PLB’s, ELT’s, even cellular phones. And finally, visual signals.

Any type of emergency signal needs to contrast with its surroundings to attract attention. And once we have someone’s attention, we need to send a message of HELP! A bonfire on the beach is usually just a bonfire on the beach, but three fires lined up evenly on the beach are an emergency signal. A single gunshot in the woods can be a successful hunter, but three evenly spaced shots, repeated two or three times is an emergency signal, perhaps from that same hunter.

So something as simple as a small whistle on your jacket zipper, or a small LED flashlight on your belt or in your fanny pack, can be the difference between being found, and being passed by in the woods at night by a search team. You may be surprised at what you carry on your person daily that can be used as a signal. The screen on your cell phone or PDA can be used as a signal mirror during the day. I once used the small screen on my Garmin Etrex GPS receiver as a signal mirror to signal another instructor across Lake Powell, near the Stateline Boat Ramp.

Even when your disposable lighter runs out of fuel, the striker can still be used to throw sparks into a tinder bundle, or signal in the dark. When a key chain is shaken, it makes a noise that is not normally heard in the woods. Other items in your environment can be used to create signals. Logs and debris may be laid out on the beach to indicate your position or spell out S.O.S. Remember, contrast is the key to creating an effective emergency signal, and you are only limited by your imagination.

From One Storm to Another

These few paragraphs, the short story in them, happened during a difficult time in my life, during the mid 80’s. Difficult times that were largely of my own making. I was making poor decisions, and blaming the outcome on other people. It took several more years and more bad decisions with bad outcomes before circumstances reached the point where I had to make a choice to change that behavior, or, well, I don’t know what would have happened for sure. But I have an idea.

This may read at first like a romantic adventure, but it really was the last act to end a chain of bad decisions. I just wish I had returned from that trip, and kept trying to make things better for myself and others. But at that time some lessons seemed to need to be repeated to really sink in.

Just sitting. Watching her breath as she slept. The blankets rise and fall. Staying awake as long as I can to keep the two small fire places stoked. One shallow fireplace on each wall of this very old, very small one room cabin. If I had to walk out to the highway tonight I would surely die of exposure. Temperatures had dropped even further after the snow stopped and the sky had cleared. But we didn’t see that happen. We had carried up an expensive bottle of scotch that had lasted until after sunset. And to open the one door to the porch meant giving up what heat had built up to the subzero outside. We had brought in all the firewood that was on the porch earlier while it was still snowing, and even through the hazy glow of too much scotch I knew we wouldn’t have enough wood to keep both chimneys hot.

Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, finally Canada and New Brunswick. We had just packed up all of her stuff into her suitcases, put them in the back of my ex-wife’s car, and just started driving north. Two days I think. I mostly remember Maine. Well, before that, driving across a bridge in New York, you could see the city. But Maine, so beautiful.

The pee in the bucket next to the door had frozen, probably not long after I tunneled under the quilts next to her. I don’t remember falling asleep. I do remember waking up. And when I looked at the fireplace, I remembered putting the last bit of firewood on the fireplace closest to us, and farthest from the door. Now, not even a hint of an ember in either fireplace. Just my breath, each breath as I got up and stumbled into my boots.

When we braved the outside there weren’t any tracks to follow back to the road, I had no memory of the direction we came from walking up here. I followed what looked the most familiar, deep snow all the way back to the car. A miracle I still had the keys in my pocket. When I look back on that hike up to that cabin, I shake my head, how many things could have gone wrong.

That morning we found some food, then she took me down to see the Bay of Fundy. Later we crossed a causeway in blowing snow to Prince Edward Island. This was the furthest north I’d ever been on the continent. I had met her on an Ice Patrol out of Gander, Newfoundland.
Cold there in Gander, yes, but not this kind of cold. I had an old pair of ski pants, some old leather hiking boots and several thermal layers but God the cold cut right through.

I left her at her Mom’s in Moncton. And then just drove back to North Carolina. Back to my rental trailer near the base I was stationed at. Just a stroll across the field to the enlisted club. I don’t remember the drive back to North Carolina. I remember returning my ex-wife’s car, all in one piece, full tank of gas. But I don’t remember much else.

I don’t think it was too long after that, the following summer maybe, when my ex-wife and 3-year-old son were in an accident, at a traffic light one weekend afternoon, at the base. That day I was diving offshore the Outer Banks, and a CG lifeboat was sent out to get me. The boat station officer of the day told me that my son was dead, wife critically injured. ‘Have a safe drive back to E-City’ he said. I got in my truck and headed inland. It was a long drive back.

The OOD was wrong. My ex-wife was beat up but OK. Travis’s skull was severely fractured, his brain severely and permanently damaged.

The next few months I wouldn’t be helped by faith or God or encouragement, or money, or friends. But I knew how to drink, and it worked to get me numb enough to get through each day, and sometimes to finally sleep, or just pass out.

1985, my divorce was final, my young brain-damaged son was tucked away in to one care facility, waiting to be moved to another, and the military transferred me across the continent where I had no family or friends, to be a newly-minted helicopter rescue swimmer in a new program that was developed after the Coast Guard had reached their limits, and failed miserably trying to rescue several mariners one dark, miserable night during a winter storm near Chesapeake Bay.

From one storm to another.

What’s in Your Wallet??

What’s In Your Wallet??

The second of the seven steps is ‘Inventory’.  The Encarta Dictionary associated with my word processor defines inventory as “the act or process of making an inventory, or the period of time when this is done”. Additionally, inventory is “a list of things, especially items of property, assets, or other resources.”

Once, while I was living in Sitka, Alaska, a Coast Guard HH-60J helicopter was forced to land on a remote coastline to deal with a small electrical fire and the associated smoke in the cockpit. All ended well, in that the crew was safe and the airframe was saved. It was noted in the report afterwards that (paraphrased) “upon extinguishing the fire and securing the aircraft, the crew reviewed the Seven Steps of Survival to plan the next action.”  They looked at where they were, who knew of their situation and location, what tools they had with them, and began to plan their next step. They utilized the step of inventory to assess their liabilities and assets.

We should run an inventory on the different facets of our emergency situation. Right now we’ll start with location. Is it safe or is it not. Can I reduce the risk to myself and those with me by moving? Is it safe to move or travel, or should I wait? For most of us this is an instinctive step that we carry out without much forethought. Is it unsafe and scary? Yes, run away.  O.K., all better. That thought process takes about .5 seconds. But this step, inventory, becomes more involved after that, and takes into account other important aspects of an emergency or survival scenario. What’s working for me, and what’s working against me? Am I too cold, or too hot? Am I injured, and how seriously? Can I treat the injury? Am I dehydrated or fatigued? What shape are my teammates in? Do I have all my team mates? Can I help without endangering myself? Is this situation long-term or short-term? And as your situation improves or deteriorates, you reapply this dynamic step, inventory. You update your information you’re using to build a plan.

In the Army manual FM 3-05.70, the step inventory is covered in ‘Sizing Up the Situation’. You are encouraged to check yourself for injuries and give yourself first aid. Then get a feel for what is going on around you. And finally, have a close look at your equipment and its condition. What is it designed for? Can I use it for something else? In my last article, I described the survivor of a car crash who survived three days before rescue; drinking rainwater she had collected using a steering wheel cover. So cameras with a flash become a signaling device; dental floss becomes shelter building material, etc. This is “Inventory”.

Gimee Shelter..

The third step of the 7 steps is ‘Shelter’. Let’s face it. If you are reading this, you are a semi-hairless bipedal mammal. You need to maintain a core temperature that hovers near 98.6˚F and aside from our fairly modest nature, we use clothing to make up for our inability to regulate our body temperature beyond a degree or two either side of that core temperature. So, I’ll ask you; what is your primary shelter? The textbook answer is, ‘whatever you are wearing. If that is so, what is your secondary shelter? Well, that would be anything else you can use to separate yourself from the elements that would rob you of your body heat, or overheat you, threatening your fragile body core temperature.

O.K., now let’s exercise the dynamic aspect of the 7 steps. Here’s my scenario; in my particular emergency, As evening approaches I recognize that I have become “disoriented” during a leisurely afternoon hike, and I need to extricate myself from an area now exposed to high winds and rain that were not  in the afternoon forecast. Because of my exposure, I’m wet and cold, and beginning to shiver.  I inventory my condition and I know I need shelter beyond what I’m wearing. I find some thick evergreen trees with low branches, forming a natural protected area, so far, so good.  I’m out of most of the rain and wind, so I run through the first steps again, Recognition. How has my situation changed?  Is it better or worse? Inventory. What’s working for me, what’s working against me? I’m out of the rain and wind, good. But I’m still cold, this is bad. I need a fire, because I don’t have any dry clothing. Do I have something to start a fire? Yes, a lighter, check. Now, what to burn? Small fallen tree limbs seem fairly abundant under these evergreen trees, and appear to be dry, even in this rain. Now I’m getting somewhere.

With a small fire started I’m warming up, slowly getting dried off. My attitude even seems to be improving. O.K., back to the first step, recognition. My situation has improved and upon further examination, I remember that I did tell my family where I was going to be hiking, and when I expected to get back. So depending on how my family feels about me, someone should be looking for me soon. So, what’s the next step?

When I post next week, you may be surprised by what comes next, if you’re not already familiar with the Seven Steps. As always, any comments, suggestions or questions are always welcome.

So What Do We Know?

So What Do We Know?

Athletes know that a muscle group will lose strength and atrophy if not stretched and exercised regularly. Pilots know that their skills will deteriorate over time if not practiced.

The same principal applies to our emergency management and coping skills. It’s about dealing with stressful situations each day and flexing and developing these skills.

How do you react in a true emergency? Do you panic and wait/hope for help? Do you remain calm, look at all the facets of the problem individually and act on experience or logical assessments? Chances are that you are somewhere in-between. But you didn’t just wake up that way one morning. You have developed your emergency management skills over your lifetime, influenced by good and bad examples provided by family members, people you looked up to, teachers, etc. And these skills are refined as we deal with each day, each event, and each stressor.

In this next section from the next article describing the Seven Steps to Survival, I’ll look at the beginning of the first step. It’s recognized by different authors by different names, but it boils down to being able to recognize when you’re in danger.

Stay tuned..

Survival is not a 12 step program, or is it?

Rick McElrath

When I first became involved in outdoor safety and survival education with AMSEA (Alaska Marine Safety Education Association) in 1993, I believed that survival was what we did when the boat sank, or we became misplaced in the woods, or up a mountain or out in the desert. I believed that what I needed was the right equipment, and good judgment.

But after studying many different survival stories, participating in some survivor interviews, and living through some of my own experiences, I have begun to understand that we use survival skills in our everyday life, as we explored in my last article.

Yes, equipment is important, and it needs to be of good quality and more importantly you need to know how it works, understand its strengths and weaknesses. And good judgment helps us avoid unnecessary difficulties on a daily basis, and it has saved many lives.

But what do we do when our judgment fails? When the equipment fails? What is there to fall back on?

Well, a plan is good. Checklists are great. But it would be difficult to keep all the checklists for all the emergencies that we have the potential to fall into, rolled up neatly in a binder in our hip pocket. Oh, I guess you can store scores of checklists in your smartphone, and it would be useful right up to the point where the battery dies, or you drop it in the water.

What if I told you there’s a checklist that you can keep in your head that applies to just about all forms of trouble you can find yourself in? And what if I told you that you can memorize this checklist in about 15 minutes? Wait, there’s more..

During my first marine safety and survival class in Sitka, Alaska, the first order of business was to learn the ‘7 Steps of Survival’. These dynamic steps could be applied to any survival scenario or situation you found yourself in. And if Providence was in your favor, using these steps may likely extend your survival time on land or sea. But checklists like this are not new. I can think of two besides the 7 Steps to Survival, and both are effective in dealing with emergencies or survival situations.

Laurence Gonzales, author of ‘Deep Survival’ lists 12 rules of survival. The U.S. Army survival manual, FM 3-05.70 lists 8 survival ‘actions’ based on the letters in the word ‘survival’, and suggests that using these steps will help you develop a survival pattern.

So let’s look at the contents of some of these checklists, and see how, with appropriate training, we can apply them in emergencies or survival scenarios and hopefully, stay alive to tell the good story.

First, the 7 Steps to Survival. And remember, as I said before, these steps are dynamic. These steps are applied anytime during the emergency and re-applied as the situation changes.

First Things First

The first step is ‘Recognition’. When teaching these steps, I ask participants what they believe the meaning of recognition is, as a survival step. Sometimes they want to find a ‘deeper’ meaning, something more complicated. But this step isn’t cryptic, or bogged down in any ethereal dogma.

Recognition is simply the act of recognizing if what is happening is an emergency and demands immediate attention and decisive action. Acknowledging the emergency for what it is helps to sidestep the potentially deadly state of denial that can come after the initial confusion. Confusion is normal at first, while you parse out the details, but confusion can develop into denial if we fail to acknowledge and accept our situation. Taking positive action based on training and experience is the best first step to stave off denial in yourself and hopefully your teammates.

The Army manual has a similar step, a phrase starting with the first letter of the word survival. ‘Size up the Situation’. It describes the need to find a place of security, determine if the enemy is attacking (remember, Army manual), determine what is happening in the battle-space before developing a plan. So this is very much like the step, ‘Recognition’ from the 7 Steps. It goes on to break that first step down in to three areas to focus on; Surroundings, Physical Condition, and Equipment. They are so practical, the U.S. Army; but also very effective. What’s going on around me, what’s going on with me, and what tools do I have to work with.

In his ’12 Rules of Survival’, Laurence Gonzales starts with ‘Perceive and Believe’. It deals with avoiding immobilization by fear and denial. In the step of recognition, you look ‘with eyes open wide’ at what is happening and admit to yourself that, “no Dorothy, we are not in Kansas anymore”, and take appropriate action. Mr. Gonzales goes on in his steps to list ‘Stay Calm, Use Your Anger’ as the second step, and ‘Think, Analyze, Plan’ as the third. Both of these steps are critical to developing a realistic assessment of what is happening and what your immediate actions need to be, based on your experience and training. This, essentially, is “Recognition”.

Two Strikes..

There are several facets of survival behavior, that if succumbed to, can, and most likely will lead to injury, or demise. I cover two of the important ones in this installment.

Panic

In describing survival events, Laurence Gonzales, author of ‘Deep Survival, Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why’ describes panic, but not as we may picture it. “..in many cases, people just panicked. When we say “panic” we normally think of people screaming and running around, but that is not the only kind of panic. There is another kind of panic in which you just don’t do anything, and that is a very common form.” Panic often manifests itself as a failure to act. Just sit down and not do anything.

Individuals with less life experience to draw from may look at these moments and having no experience to draw from, won’t know how to behave. This can lead to inappropriate behavior, and further confuse and complicate the situation. People run down into sinking ships and drown. Others, struggling to get their carry-on luggage from the overhead compartment will asphyxiate as the burning plane fills with smoke. These are documented events, and illustrate the type of irrational behavior that has been observed in these types of emergencies.

Denial is not a river in Egypt

The brain problem-solves in a linear fashion. A general statement, I know. Our brain can’t truly multi-task, as in perform two tasks at the same time, independent of each other. We generally do better when we can follow a single train of thought, through to fruition. We can stop, move to another problem solving scenario, switch back, etc.

When we problem-solve, we move from one possibility to another, until we find the most desirable solution and then execute our decision.

After we apply our solution, we observe it’s affect on the problem. We’ll ‘record’ or remember the result and how it felt, good or bad. Did it resolve the problem? Yes, it felt good. Or, no; it didn’t work, it felt bad. I tried something else, it worked, it felt good, and so I logged the results. We’ll do that the next time the problem is similar. This isn’t a conscious process, it’s just how are brain works to problem solve.

So in dealing with life as it comes at us, we develop and add to this library of experiences and emotional responses.

When deciding how to deal with a situation, we mentally go through this library, find what fits best, and apply that resolution against the problem.

But what happens when we have no experience in our library that guides us? At this point of ‘no results found’ in our search for a resolution, we have to stop and use logic to solve the problem. Logic is good but forces you down different paths of reason until you find a resolution, and in the grand blueprint of things, logic is a time-hog compared to the system of emotional bookmarks created by experience. In linear fashion, we look for possible solutions and find none. I’ll try this. Nope, doesn’t work. O.K., I’ll try this. Nope. What about this? Negative results, and so on.

In many life-threatening emergencies, time is a luxury; the disaster at The World Trade Center, September 11th, 2001, with the loss of 2, 998 lives. Also, the sinking of the M/V Estonia in the Baltic Sea, September 28, 1994, 852 lives lost.
Many people died immediately. Even if they could have reacted appropriately, they simply did not have time.

But many perished because they could not process the reality of the emergency; that something as big and immovable as the World Trade Center Towers could be attacked or completely collapse to street level.

The reality that the M/V Estonia, a 515′ long ferry that had been carrying passengers, cargo and vehicles between Germany and Norway, could sink and was doing so at an alarming rate, the crew unable to save her or get the passengers off safely. The enormous weight of these realities was too large for many to comprehend. So large that they could not recall any past experience that would apply in resolution of the problem of self-rescue. And logic didn’t apply; logic worked against the possibility of either of these events even happening. Although the World Trade Center in New York had been attacked before in 1993, and large ships sink every year, when it happens to us, initially we can’t believe it.

According to John Leach of the University of Lancaster / UK, in a catastrophic emergency such as these, 15-25% of us will be stunned or bewildered, and for most this is a transient behavior,, it doesn’t stick around. We then gather our wits and move on, actively seeking a solution to the problem.

But another percentage of us will not move past the stage of confusion or bewilderment, we will freeze up or act irrationally, unable to do anything. “This can’t be happening to me, can’t be happening at all.”

Conversely, many lives have been saved because people took what they saw, heard, felt, smelled, and tasted at face value; assumed an emergency and to the best of their ability, went away from danger.

They went down the stairs of the World Trade Center to the street; up the ladder or out the door to the outside of the M/V Estonia and into the life-rafts. I’ve said before in the classes that I teach there are no statistics to illustrate how many lives have been saved because we heeded a warning or symptom, or a gut feeling.

When we stand there looking at the weather report planning a flight, looking out the window at the horizontally-petrified windsock and say, “No, not today, it just doesn’t feel right.” When we’re backing our boat trailer down the ramp, and there’s that nagging feeling that the weather just doesn’t look right, and we decide to drive back up the ramp and go home.

You may have had similar experiences, and right now, as you read this you’re re-experiencing that warm and fuzzy of knowing you made the right decision.
Or perhaps at one time you didn’t heed a warning, didn’t take the forecast at face value. You went anyway, and regretted it. If you’ve experienced that, you may recall that feeling in the pit of your stomach as you read this. This is the saved experience in your library that you will refer to when searching for an appropriate behavior when a similar situation presents itself in the future. That is that ‘emotional bookmark’, or ‘somatic marker’ as described by Antonio Damasio, noted by Laurence Gonzales in ‘Deep Survival’.

Next week I’ll wrap this up with the final installment, and begin an investigation into The Seven Steps of Survival.

Survival Behavior-The Will to Survive

This is the second installation of the article I started posting last week.

We often hear about the will to live, but are given no benchmark to quantify it, or to understand if we ‘have it’ or not. Please leave any comments or questions.

Will to Survive


As an organism the human body wants to survive and will do what is necessary within its power to do so. A drowning person will focus on keeping their mouth and nose above the water to catch a breath, and will expend large amounts of energy to accomplish this. They’ll do this to the exclusion of making any cries for help,a s the simply don’t have the air to waste. They appear to be trying to crawl out of the water. This ‘drowning behavior’, or struggle to stay afloat is a gross expenditure of energy and depending on water temperature and surface conditions as well as the persons’ physical condition, the drowning person will tire and sink. As a Coast Guard Rescue Swimmer, I’ve approached distressed people in the water that would have gladly used my head as a step-ladder to get into the helicopter rescue basket that dangled by a cable from the helicopter. They were probably glad to see me, but had little concern for my welfare outside of my ability to get them out of the water. Getting out and staying out of the water was their only priority.

So what separates the business-as-usual process of getting from the start of our day through to the end, making minor adjustments as we go, from a scenario where we are at risk of injury or death unless we respond to save our own lives? What may constitute an emergency for me may barely raise a blip on your emergency radar, and visa versa.

In April, 2003 Aron Ralston, an experienced high altitude climber and skier became pinned by an 800-pound boulder that fell onto his right arm while he was climbing down Bluejohn Canyon in Utah. After 6 days of struggling to get free, he cut off his own hand above the wrist using the dulled blade of a cheap aftermarket multi-purpose tool. He leveraged against the pinning boulder to break the radius and ulna bones in his lower arm. After freeing himself he hiked/climbed out, and was rescued at the mouth of the canyon that day. Many people who read this story and some who commented on it publicly asked the same question, either to themselves or privately: What would I have done? Could I have done that?

We do what we know how to do. We do what we always do.


When asked how he managed to severe his own hand, Aron Ralston said that he “entered a flow state”; that he wasn’t thinking of the future, just of what was in front of him at the moment. It was interesting to read that he had ‘been there before’ many times (referring to the ‘flow state’) while climbing.-This ‘flow state’ he described is a coping mechanism he uses in stressful or concentration-intense situations. The good news is that you don’t need to be a climber or an explorer to use this tool. We all have it, it’s an involuntary mechanism that the organism, you and I, use to focus on what is most important at that time, in that moment. It’s how your mind boils down all the input it is receiving, enabling us to bring our abilities to bear on solving the core problem or what we perceive is the core problem. The difference between Aron Ralston or other experience-intense individuals, and other people, who aren’t quite so high speed, is that Mr. Ralston has been actively developing this coping mechanism over time. He has been building a mental library of similarly stressful experiences to draw from, memories that will influence the organism’s behavior. Feelings tied to actions that have had a positive outcome in that type of situation.

Aron Ralston had never amputated a limb before, or performed any other types of surgery for that matter. But his experiences with high stress events enabled him to manage this event, take it and dissect it, and deploy a mindset that looks at what is taking place now and compares it to events in the past. Does this look familiar? Does this feel familiar? How did I cope with this feeling before? And keep in mind that by the sixth day of his ordeal he was dehydrated, hypothermic, sleep and nutrition deprived. He was coping with several facets of strain and distraction. But he had reached a point where he knew that in order to survive, he was going to have to remove himself from that which was holding him under the boulder in that canyon. He knew he couldn’t move the boulder. He had tried that part of the puzzle and couldn’t make that part fit. He analyzed what he needed to do to escape and live, he planned each step and he executed his plan. If you read his story about this, his clarity at that point is unnerving. But he had used this process before. Evaluate, refer, plan, execute. Rinse, repeat.

Back to Julian McCormick and Tillie Tooter, whom we had left hanging inverted by their seat belts. When they realized they could not extricate themselves, they evaluated their surroundings and started to tend to their immediate needs such as thirst, hunger, and their injuries. Julian drank stream water, and ate a fish he had caught, raw. Tillie used the steering wheel cover to divert rainwater to where she was so she could drink. She inventoried her food, which consisted of a cough drop, some gum, and a peppermint candy. Julian, like Aron realized that he was going to have to take responsibility for his own rescue in spite of his injuries. Tillie Tooter realized that in her predicament, she would be unable to get back up to the road unassisted. So she drew on her experiences of having to be patient. She prayed, putting her faith in a system outside of her control to get her out of that car. And later in the ordeal she began to accept the possibility that she may not be rescued.

Next week I’ll discuss two common enemies of solid survival behavior.

(Previous entry in this series–(https://rickmcelrath.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/survival-behavior-why-we-do-what-we-do-when-life-gets-strange/)

Egg Therapy

I have an egg farm in my backyard. There, I said it. Four mature hens, and four hopefuls. I say hopefuls because I only need a total of 6 laying hens, so two of the pullets aren’t going to make the cut. Now I could make a joke here about chicken and dumplings being on the menu for those two, but in my chicken world, there’s no need to be butchering a perfectly good egg layer. As Captain Barbossa said, “waste not..” I will simply take these two extras to the local weekly “chicken trade”, (this actually exists, you can’t make this up) and unload these two for enough cash to turn into another 40 pound bag of laying mash, which for the unfamiliar is chicken food for hens laying eggs. I’ve never read the contents of this bag of magic pellets to see what separates it from any other chicken food, just what exactly the contents are that promote egg laying. As long as these four hens are dropping 2-4 eggs a day, I don’t care if its ground unicorn. I’m only in this for the eggs.

This morning I was faced with a dilemma. Something in my hen’s small universe has slowed egg production in the past three days, and I opened the egg carton this morning to find only two large brown homegrown eggs staring back at me. This isn’t normal, we normally don’t go below 8-10 eggs in the inventory. Normally not a big deal, but I really wanted to cook Jeannie and Hannah a good breakfast this Saturday morning. And I cook eggs like I used to drink. If I can’t crack open 6 of these, why bother.

So I got the biscuits in the oven, got the bacon started, and sat in the living room with Hannah to watch part of another episode of Monk, while I pondered my egg shortage. When I got up to go turn the bacon I went ahead and cracked my two remaining eggs into a mixing bowl, poured in a little milk and stirred in some shredded mozzarella cheese, salt and pepper.

Being generally XL sized eggs, this filled the mixing cup better than I had thought it might, and I felt a bit better, but I still had this nagging thought that if I could just get one more egg in there…

Then it hit me. It’s Saturday, we had slept in a bit. There was a possibility that one of the hens may have already dropped an egg by now. Boom, problem solved. I slid on my shoes, quick stepped it out to the hen pen, and walked around to the nest door to claim my prize. I should have counted the hens visible as I walked around the pen. But I was on a mission. I opened the door, and hen #4 looked over her wing at me from the nest as if to say, “what? I’m busy here!” Snap! No chance of that third egg before the scrambles hit the skillet. And if I bother the girls too much, I get even fewer eggs.

So back to the kitchen, poured the scrambles into the sizzling skillet, pulled the biscuits out of the oven, plated the bacon, and called my ladies down for breakfast, hoping they would not notice the glaring shortage of scrambled eggs I was about to drop into a serving bowl. I fussed over the biscuits and bacon to draw attention away from the eggs. But as they made their plates, and scooped out some eggs to go with the biscuits and bacon and butter and jelly, no one seemed to notice what was so glaring to me. We had a good meal, I didn’t have to do dishes, and here I sit writing this story.

I’m grateful for what I have. I love my wife, I love my children. Life is good here, in spite of what life throws at us. There have been some things happen in the past three weeks that have been tough to get through, but coming out of the other end of them, I’m realizing that these events are as serious as I let them be. My faith in God, as variable as it seems sometimes, has yet again stabilized my outlook and ability to play catcher to what life throws across the plate at me.

And if those hens don’t increase egg production by at least 25% over the next 2 weeks, well, I guess we’ll eat fewer eggs..
Have a great weekend, I’m going to.

Survival Behavior-Why We Do What We Do When Life Gets Strange

This is the first part of an article I wrote for Frontline Magazine, a publication in Canada. I’ll be posting it in sections, each week for 5 weeks. I hope you enjoy it, and I look forward to hearing your feedback.

In recent years the word ‘survival’ has taken on a new meaning to those who may consider themselves safe from anything related to the topic.

From the comfort of our recliner we can watch Bear Grylls or Les Stroud among others, show us what NOT to do in the desert, or on a glacier, or on the plains of Africa, or once we find ourselves there, perhaps how to survive and find our way out. This allows us to live precariously through their heavily edited footage, and feel relatively secure in our knowledge of starting a fire with two sticks or procuring safe drinking water if we wake up in one of these environments. We’ll commit these skills to memory as we make our trip to the fridge or the bathroom during the commercial break.

The reality is that we use survival skills everyday. To make it from our home to where we work, navigate through the day, and return home when our work is done. We survive financially, spiritually, and in our personal and professional relationships. It’s simply a matter of degrees, and once we’ve become established in our daily patterns we take this process as the status quo of doing business. After that we don’t usually need to ponder our routine outside of the incidental adjustments; unless something happens to cause a major interruption in that routine.

And depending on severity, that interruption is where our attention is directed away from the daily routine and focused on what our next course of action will be; to recover from that interruption and get back into our routine, or to simply survive that moment.

In September 2007, 18 year-old Julian McCormick lost control of his vehicle and landed upside down in a ditch just off of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway less than one mile from his home. In and out of consciousness and hanging from his seat belt, Julian survived eight days by drinking stream water and capturing and eating a fish from the stream. In spite of his serious injuries, he was later able to extract himself from the vehicle and crawl up the embankment and signal for help, lying near the edge of the highway where he was rescued by passing motorists.

August 18, 2000, then 82-year-old grandmother Tillie Tooter was driving on Highway 595 in Broward County, Florida on her way to pick up her daughter at the airport. She was in no particular hurry, driving about 50 mph in the slower lane of traffic. She was hit from behind without warning and sent careening off the suspended highway down into the swampy mangrove forest below, rupturing a disc in her spine and severely injuring both arms. Her vehicle was upside down, and she was suspended from her seat belt. She survived by drinking rainwater and eating a cough drop, a peppermint candy and some gum. She was rescued three days later.

There is a trend here. And it’s not that they all ended up suspended upside down from their seatbelts, or even that they were all using their seat belts.

Theses people were in a familiar area, doing something that they did regularly, (driving) and without much planning or forethought. Then without warning they were placed in a life-threatening situation that required them to take action to save their own lives or possibly perish. Don’t think it can happen to you? Neither did they.

Next week I’ll continue with the next part of this. When you close this article, stop for 15 seconds to consider how prepared you are to deal with anything that’s NOT in your schedule for today, or tomorrow. Because when things out of the ordinary happen, 15 seconds can seem like a really long time.

Second Installment -The Will To Survive- (https://rickmcelrath.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/the-will-to-survive/)