Deep Survival #1: Gut Instincts

By Contributing Editor Laurence Gonzales, author of the book Deep Survival

(Editor's Note: This is the first Deep Survival column by award-winning writer Laurence Gonzales. Send in your survival stories and questions in the comment area below and Gonzales will give his feedback.)























FATALLY FALSE POSITIVES
On December 6, 1988, Todd Frankiewicz was on Tincan Mountain in Alaska, making his comeback as a top-notch skier. The previous summer, a serious auto accident had left him hospitalized, and after months of rehabilitation, he felt ready. The day before, he had gone to city hall for a license to marry his girlfriend of nine years, Jenny Zimmerman.

That weekend the Anchorage Daily News ran headlines warning of avalanches. But Frankiewicz had skied Turnagain Pass before and took reasonable precautions, first discussing the danger with Zimmerman and then calling Doug Fesler, a friend and one of the top avalanche experts in the area. As Fesler’s wife, Jill Fredston, wrote in Snowstruck: In the Grip of Avalanches, “Todd asked careful, intelligent questions.” Significantly, “he’d never before phoned us at home to ask for a personal update.” Fesler told him to “avoid steep north-facing slopes like the plague.”
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Comments

[nothing but the truth]

My recent letter to your editor:

I read Laurence Gonzales’s recent article “Fatally False Positives” with great interest. The human drama of Todd Frankiewicz’s life and death was gripping. I didn’t even mind Gonzales’ human psychological opinion’s despite the fact that Adventure Magazine failed to provide any proof in the article or endnotes that Gonzales has any expertise to offer such opinions.

I didn’t mind that is, until I read this passage: “Because we are a species of ape, we behave according to what rewards us. Moreover, we have a strong motivation to recover from failure in order to regain status”. Considering that Gonzales cited no authority for these bold assertions, I must conclude they are his opinions.

Adventure Magazine should not be providing opinions from unqualified individuals on a topic as important as “Deep Survival……Living Smart”. What is even worse, is that Gonzales’s opinions are wrong.

Human beings are not a “species of ape”. In the context of life and death survival decisions for our “out door adventurer class“, I would hazard to guess that more humans have died because of this ill conceived notion than any other single cause. If one believes that they are nothing more than a descendant of apes, why not risk death? What is there to live for other than thrills?

Anatoly Flew, once considered the world’s leading intellectual atheist, recently disavowed atheism and the attendant “Darwinian evolutionary model”. Flew correctly concluded that the complexity of life, revealed in the new understanding of DNA, was to great to have occurred by happenstance as Darwinists must conclude. If Gonzales is so far behind the learning curve that he doesn’t know this, he should immediately desist from offering life and death advice to the gullible.

As well, as anyone who has ever parented for more than a decade can attest, humans learn more from their failures than from rewards. The very fact that Gonzales uses Frankiewicz’s death to try and shape another human’s behavior, belies the logical fallacy in his own argument.

Finally, our strong motivation to recover from failure isn’t to regain status, it is to survive. At least, that is my opinion. Which by the way, is apparently just as scientifically valid as Gonzales’s.

I enjoy reading your magazine. I hope that you would stick to providing stories of grand adventures. Leave the psycho babble to the magazines that employ experts in the field. Life is to precious to presume to offer advice that is based merely on someone’s educated, (or in this case), uneducated guess on the workings of the mind and human behavior.

____________________________________________
If you do have expertise in psychology, please enlighten your readers.

Brian Goettl

[Georgia & Mark S.]

I so loved the Fatally False Positive article. It brought us back three years ago when, on our annual ski vacation, we not only lost our son but I became a paraplegic. Our customary snow tubing on a small hill outside our condo turned deadly when someone made a suggestion to all hook up together and go down the hill. My husband had "the feeling" and voiced his reservation but, as your article pointed out, the usual and familiar and the proding of friends can hide dangers that lie outside our hearts' and minds' good sense. Everything came together, on what had been years' of perfectly safe fun, and tragedy happened. If only we had listened to that fatally false positive....

[Mary Anne Potts]

Hi Lori, thanks for your comment. Can you tell us more about the gut feeling you had? Where were and how could you have responded to it differently?

[Lori Rafferty]

Having a bad feeling— that gut premonition— is definitely something worth paying attention to. I once had that experience, and ignored it, and almost paid for it dearly in a slow & painful starvation/lack of H20 situation on a de-masted sailboat adrift in the south pacific (long story...). I vowed afterwards that if I ever experienced a similar "feeling", I would immediately bail on whatever adventure/task was at hand. So far, no had to do but I trust my gut.