Emergency

by Neil Strauss

  All night, the pattern continued: a vague semblance of comfort, followed by a powerful need to urinate. I couldn’t understand how anyone enjoyed this hellish torment. Mankind had invented the mattress, the comforter, the asphalt-shingle roof, and climate control for a reason. In comparison with Brown’s stories of surviving in the wilderness with no tent, sleeping bag, or even clothes, I felt incredibly lame.

  I could order room service like nobody’s business, though.

  In the morning, I walked to the campfire, where a dozen students had already gathered. I asked them how they slept. “Just fine,” they replied.

  When I said I’d been cold all night, they looked at me like I was the retarded kid in class.

  An older man wearing a military vest with at least eight pockets in the front took pity on me. “You know,” he walked up to me and confided, “the secret to staying warm in a sleeping bag is not to wear any clothes.”

  “Really? I thought clothes would be good for insulation.”

  “Think about it: your body was designed to warm itself. Your legs, when they’re touching, will heat each other.”

  “But what if you have to go to the bathroom? Isn’t it cold getting out of the sleeping bag all the time?”

  He smiled and patted the upper left pocket of his jacket. “That’s why I carry this.” The head of a crushed water bottle poked out of the flap. “Never have to leave the tent.”

  Though the sight of his emptied urine container revolted me, it also filled me with inspiration. That night, I promised myself, things would be different. I would be prepared.

  There was just one last thing that worried me. “What about the ticks?”

  The question triggered a group discussion of Lyme disease. According to one of the volunteer employees, half the people working at Tracker School had been infected. “I had it pretty bad,” he said. “Half my face was paralyzed for about a year.”

  My newfound hope drained out of me. I couldn’t wait for the week to end. I didn’t like camping. I didn’t like cold. I didn’t like facial paralysis.

  I noticed that most of the instructors and volunteers spoke with disdain for the modern world. They called sneakers foot coffins, in comparison with traditional Indian moccasins; they referred to cell phones as ear prisons; and cotton was death cloth, because it loses the ability to insulate when wet. They seemed to believe everyone driving cars and going to offices and watching television in the outside world was unfulfilled because they didn’t know these far superior native skills.

  One of the lectures that day was on stalking animals. It was taught by Brown’s son, Tom Brown III. After describing the areas where we would most likely find game, he told us, “One of the major rules of survival with all living things is conservation of energy.”

  It was the third time I’d heard that rule at Tracker School. If it was true, then the instructors’ scorn for the modern world made no sense. The automobile, the Internet, the nuclear bomb—they’re all means of making transportation, communication, and warfare quicker and more efficient. Thus, they all obey the same natural law animals do: conservation of energy.

  By the end of the day, I was tired of this primitive superiority complex. Just because a Native American did something two hundred years ago doesn’t make it better than what we do today.

  When my BlackBerry happened to ring once, even though I didn’t answer it, the students and volunteers nearby turned to glare at me in disapproval. Tracker School was turning out to be a cold, inhospitable place, full of pompous hippies and deadly ticks, run by an aging egomaniac. So I decided to flaunt my foot coffins and ear prisons and death cloth in their face. Throughout the rest of the lectures, I sat and texted Katie on the BlackBerry to my heart’s delight.

  I couldn’t wait to get home.

  That night, as if in retaliation for my cynicism, the temperature dropped to 44 degrees and rain began falling in cold sheets. I noticed a student with a crew cut and his shirt off standing halfway outside the lecture shelter. He was smoking a cigarette with a faraway look in his eyes. He seemed completely oblivious to the elements. I envied his tolerance, strength, and centeredness.

  I distinctly recall the night that followed as one of the worst of my life. I was sick to my stomach from the three meals of stew they’d served that day and spent half an hour in the outhouse before returning to my tent. I kicked my muddy sneakers off outside and crept into my spinnaker-cloth cell. A few wet spots had already formed on the floor. I quickly inspected the tent but couldn’t figure out where the leak was coming from.

  Then I took the old man’s advice for staying warm and snug. I put an empty water bottle next to my sleeping pad, peeled off my clothes, and quickly slipped naked into my ultralight sleeping bag. I brought the BlackBerry, my only lifeline to the modern world, into bed with me so the rain wouldn’t damage it.

  Though I pulled the sleeping bag drawstring as tight as possible, I couldn’t get warm. The thin layer of down didn’t provide enough insulation, and my body couldn’t generate enough heat to compensate. When my knees touched each other, they felt like snowballs.

  Half an hour later, not only was I colder, but I also had to pee. I reached for the water bottle and felt wetness. When I switched on my flashlight, I saw that my sleeping bag, raised a few inches off the ground by the pad, had become an island floating in a shallow lake. I’d clearly done something wrong when putting my tent up.

  I raised myself to my knees, lowered the sleeping bag carefully beneath waist level so it didn’t fall into the lake, and unscrewed the cap on the plastic bottle. To make sure I didn’t miss, I pressed my dick firmly into the opening of the container and then released. Instantly, droplets of warm liquid began hitting my hands. I couldn’t understand why this was happening. Maybe it was performance pressure. I stopped the flow, readjusted, and started again.

  This time, it was worse. The urine streamed down the outside of the bottle and into the open sleeping bag below. I stopped again. I didn’t know what to do. It was too wet and too cold, and I was too naked, to go outside. Besides, the ticks would be crawling all over me in a second, burrowing their Lyme disease–infected heads into my private parts.

  No wonder I’d sworn off camping when I was a child.

  I had no choice but to continue. Maybe I’d been pressing the bottle too tightly against myself. I lowered the container a little and emptied the rest of my bladder onto the sides of the bottle, my hands, and my sleeping bag.

  It’s moments like these that make a man believe in God. Because someone must be laughing somewhere. That night, as I pulled my wet, stinky sleeping bag around me and cinched myself inside, I was a sitcom for the universe.

  I fished for the BlackBerry and called Katie to complain.

  “I fucking hate it here.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m wet, cold, naked, and covered in urine.”

  “What happened?”

  “My tent’s leaking. It sucks.”

  “You should get a bigger tent, like for six people. With a wood floor.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have called her. I wasn’t in the mood to humor her cheerleader fantasies of what life was like. “Have you ever even been fucking camping before?”

  “No. I don’t want to get bitten to death by mosquitoes.”

  “Then let me tell you about the fucking ticks. You’ll love them. They suck your blood and give you diseases that make your face freeze.”

  I proceeded to have a complete breakdown—whining, sniveling, yelling into the phone. I was pissed at Tracker School and every smug moccasin-wearing motherfucker in it. I was pissed at Justin and his lightfuckinguseless gear. I was pissed at nature for creating rain, cold, and ticks. And soon I was pissed at Katie for nothing that was her fault.

  By the time I was done with my harangue, the water level had reached the top of the pad and begun dampening the bottom of the sleeping bag, making its thin layer of insulation completely ineffective. On top of everything, I was so wo
rried about Lyme disease that I kept trying to peel off my moles, thinking they were ticks.

  Eventually, I lay there, in my 44-degree urine-soaked cocoon, and just gave up. I made the guy from Into the Wild seem like Grizzly fucking Adams in comparison.

  I was forced to conclude the inevitable: I was a sniveler.

  This whole attempt to learn survival was starting to seem like a pipe dream. I was addicted to the three C’s: comfort, civilization, and convenience. If the shit hit the fan, I would be the first to get sucked into the blades.

  All those stories about Tom Brown living in the woods for weeks at a time at the age of eleven, with nothing but the clothes on his back, seemed impossible.

  I rolled onto my side, pulled my knees up to my chest, and heard a splash. I ignored it and tried to go to sleep, despite my bladder’s sudden push for more relief. Like a trapped houseguest in a bad vampire movie, I just needed to survive until the sun rose so I could be safe another twelve hours—until night fell again.

  As dawn leaked into the tent, I woke up and felt inside the damp sleeping bag for my phone. It wasn’t there. I looked over the side of the island, and there was my precious BlackBerry—lying facedown in the lake. That must have been the splash I’d heard the night before. My lifeline to the outside world had been severed. And, as upset and urine-soaked as I was, I had to admit that perhaps justice had been served.

  If I was truly going to learn to live without the system, I would have to let go of my dependencies on technology and the outside world. Nature had spoken. The sitcom of the gods had its punch line.

  That morning, I asked my usual city-idiot questions around the campfire. “Were you guys cold last night?” “Did your tents leak?” “Were you uncomfortable?” And just like the previous night, everyone replied no. One student said he’d actually found a female volunteer to share his sleeping bag with. I hated him for that.

  “I even slept naked to stay warm and that didn’t work,” I told them.

  “That sounds like a good way to get hypothermia,” one of the other students replied.

  “Are you sure? Some guy told me yesterday that your body keeps itself warm that way.”

  Another student said that was true only for certain types of sleeping bags. Someone else said it was only true if the alternative was wearing death cloth. And a volunteer informed me that it just plain wasn’t true. I didn’t bother to ask them about the water bottle.

  I guess I’d learned that the wrong survival tip can, in the right situation, kill you.

  While we were talking, Brown stepped out of a new black Hummer that just barely fit onto the narrow trail. “Take a look at the ground,” he yelled at us. “It’ll be the last time you see it that way.”

  He turned away, then shouted back over his shoulder, “You’ll soon be as obsessed as I am.”

  I wanted the level of comfort with discomfort that Brown and that shirtless smoking guy the night before had. I needed to stop sniveling and toughen up. So what if I was wet? So what if I was cold? So what if I was covered in my own urine? As long as I didn’t develop hypothermia, I wasn’t going to die from it.

  I decided to get advice from the military officers taking the course. Evidently, the government was paying Brown close to a million dollars to design a program specifically for the marines.

  The leader of the battalion was a tall blonde in his thirties. After some small talk about what type of enlistee makes a bad marine (people raised by “octopuses” who coddle and smother them) and a good marine (people who follow orders without questioning them), I asked what I really wanted to know: “How can someone learn endurance?”

  “I think about that a lot,” he replied. “I see some people in certain situations put up with all kinds of pain and humiliation and struggle, and then in other situations, they crap out after just a little work. True endurance, I think, comes from the inside. It comes from motivation and belief in what you’re doing.”

  I thought about those words and realized that I was resisting the whole camping experience—approaching it with a tight sphincter, as McNeese would say. With my ultralight technology, I was trying to protect myself from nature rather than letting go and trying to get closer to the earth, like Brown preached.

  “Do you know what I think when I see a backpacker?” he had shouted at us during our orientation. “I think the same thing when I see a scuba diver or an astronaut. They’re aliens to their own environment. If something goes wrong with their equipment, they’re dead. They’re dead because they don’t belong.”

  Near my campsite, there was a sweat lodge still smoking from recent use. I’d never seen the inside of one before, so I opened the door, crept inside, and sat near a pile of warm rocks in the center. I hugged my knees, rocked back and forth, and tried to empty my head and allow my logic brain to loosen its grip over my wild brain.

  Something else Brown had said in one of his lectures popped into my head: “In a survival situation, you’ve got to know when to let go of your humanness and become an animal. Because if you hold on to thought, there is restriction.”

  He was right. The more I thought about the cold and the rain and the ticks, the more power I gave them over me. How smart is a duck, really? And an ant—how big can its brain be? If they can figure out how to survive without electricity and running water and gas and fast food, why can’t I?

  It was only 44 degrees, after all. I could withstand that. And if I took my tent down and asked someone to help me pitch it correctly, I wouldn’t have to deal with leaks again.

  If I wanted to become a survivalist—in fact, if I wanted to become a human being fully engaged in life—I needed to start enjoying nature instead of fearing it.

  In Los Angeles, I didn’t let the very real possibility of a high-speed car crash keep me from getting on the freeway. In New York, I didn’t let the very real possibility of being mugged keep me from going out at night. So why was I letting a tiny little tick, whose worst effect can be cured with antibiotics, ruin the outdoors for me?

  Perhaps I wasn’t actually scared of nature, then, but of the unknown. If I wanted to get past this, I needed to stop resisting the one man who promised to make nature known to me.

  I left the sweat lodge an hour later with a new attitude—not just toward Tracker School, but toward life. And I didn’t even have to sweat for it.

  Later that day, I sat in the lecture shelter—with not just my ear prison gone but my resistance to nature gone—and listened to Brown talk about tracking. He told me that around dawn, according to tracks he’d seen, a doe and a yearling had passed my tent. And I was too busy pitying myself to even notice.

  “Watch my feet,” he instructed the class. “I’m going to raise my right arm. Now I’m going to touch my nose. I’m going to lower my hand four inches. Now I’m going to breathe.”

  With each movement, his feet raised or compressed slightly on the ground. And as they did, I realized that footprints convey a lot more information than just shoe size and direction of travel. Every movement people make affects their posture, balance, and weight distribution, which changes the pressure they put on the ground and alters their footprint.

  “I will never invade a student’s right to privacy.” His voice became strident again and his blood pressure seemed to rise, indicating he was switching from teacher to preacher mode. “But some things are red flags. I can pick out breast cancer from a track. I can pick up pregnancy within eleven days—sometimes less. So if I tell you to go to a specialist, please go see a specialist.”

  Whether his claims were genuine or not, he was truly a freak of nature. The way some people are born to be singers or painters, he was born to be a tracker. Over the course of several lectures, he taught us more than seven hundred different pressure releases made by the interaction between a foot or paw and the earth, how to recognize different animals by their prints, how to track on solid surfaces like rocks and wooden floors, and how to find lost people.

  Fact: When lost, individuals g
enerally circle in the direction of their dominant hand. And though they may think they’re traveling in a straight line, they’re usually circling within the same square-mile area.

  After his final tracking lecture, Brown led us into the woods. “I want you to see what’s gone on underneath your nose for the last half hour,” he yelled at us. “Aliens did not land overnight. Mother Nature does not get goose pimples. If it’s a dent in the ground, by God, something made it.”

  Every few yards, he stopped walking, laid down a popsicle stick, and announced what had happened at that spot earlier—“Here’s where a coyote got into a scuffle with a rabbit,” “Here’s where a shrew peered into a hole,” “Here’s where a squirrel stopped eating an acorn.”

  And sure enough, when I got down on my hands and knees and squinted, there was the evidence, glaring at me in prints with the exact pressure releases Brown had just taught us. Some tracks were in dirt, others were on pine needles, and a few were on moss, a log, even a leaf. As Brown had promised, the ground, which was just a monotonous layer of dirt and debris before, was now a library full of stories to be read.

  He instructed me to crouch next to the front right paw-print of a tiny mouselike shrew and study it. It was a small, shallow, shell-like dent in front of a thumb-sized hole in the ground. Once my eyes adjusted to the world of the very small, I was able to see the print in detail—even the thin ridges between each toe and the little black dots where each claw had touched the ground. I could tell where the shrew was heading, how fast it was going, and what it was doing. Eventually, I felt I knew the personality of the animal itself. When I stood up after staring at the ground for a good forty-five minutes, I was able to spot the print even at a distance. It was like learning a new way of seeing.

  By this point, the turnaround that had begun in the sweat lodge was complete. I was paying close attention to the lectures, enjoying the outdoors, and looking forward to curling up in my sleeping bag at night—in warm clothes, of course, and minus the plastic bottle. With no phone to run to when I was bored or uncomfortable, I started talking to other students and catching up on survival techniques from the lectures I’d resisted.