National Geographic ADVENTURE

Deep Survival with Laurence Gonzales Lightning Victim Likely Saved By Wet Clothing

In the News: Doctors are amazed that a Minnesota man survived being struck by lighning last Friday while trying to save his outdoor furniture. Though the bolt zapped the metal button on his baseball cap and and the steel tips of his work boots, his wet clothing may have prevented the jolt from traveling through his body.

Analysis: This is a classic case of failure to 1) be mindfully aware of your surroundings and 2) do a risk-reward loop.

Mindfully aware: I am about to go out in a lightning storm. Bad idea in any case. But an even worse idea while wearing metal. Time to reconsider.

Risk-reward loop: Question: What do I stand to gain? Answer: Dry furniture or perhaps a gazebo that isn't bent up by wind. Question: What do I stand to lose? Answer: My life. Seems like a clear choice.

Deep Survival By Laurence Gonzales#4 The Dangers of the Vacation Mindset

The unconscious conclusion we draw is that our little corner of the world is safe. Our culture of plenty keeps us permanently in a vacation state of mind.

Text by Contributing Editor Laurence Gonzales, author of the book Deep Survival
Illustration by Dan Page

Last summer I traveled to the Outer Banks in North Carolina. The house I rented was on the dunes above the beach, and I could sit and write and listen to the surf thundering beneath my window as the constant wind blew the tops off the waves. Out on the deck I’d watch the pelicans, big and prehistoric-looking, wheel around their circuit from south to north and back again. In the angled light of afternoon, pods of dolphins leapt and dove, and children played in the waves while I fretted about rip currents carrying them out to sea.

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Deep Survival By Laurence Gonzales#3 Emotional Connections

Text by Contributing Editor Laurence Gonzales, author of the book Deep Survival

I once worked on an assignment for this magazine with a photographer named Mark Gamba. Mark was an avid steep creek boater. He and I were knocking around on an Army base in Oregon, watching helicopters take off and land, when he told me a story about getting caught in a strainer. A strainer is a tree that’s fallen across a river, creating a network of branches that can trap paddlers. Once someone is sucked into the branches, it’s a pretty dodgy business to get out. Mark was pinned, and each time he managed to pull himself up, he caught a breath and was sucked under again. The endgame was obvious: The exertion would eventually exhaust him. Then he’d drown.
I asked what he did next.

“I thought of my son,” he said. “I wanted to see him again.” And with one last surge of adrenaline, he vaulted up and over the log.

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Illustration by Dan Page

Deep Survival: Brain Vs. Gadget

On a solo backpacking trip this winter, reader Nate Freund was stranded high on California's Ontario Peak during a snowstorm. Read his story, then see Deep Survival author Laurence Gonzales's analysis of the situation.

Submitted by Reader Nate Freund
After reading your article "Folk Wisdom" in National Geographic ADVENTURE [April 2008], I was inspired to write to the author whose concepts played a critical role in my survival.

On January 22, 2008, I set out for a solo backpacking trip to summit Ontario Peak of the Cucamonga Wilderness. I was rescued by Search and Rescue forces from the San Bernardino Mountains after a U.S. Air Force satellite detected my distress signal from my Personal Locator Beacon. It was the first successful rescue of this kind in California--one initiated from a legitimate activation of a personal EPIRP carried by a recreational hiker.

I had spent months staring into the snow-capped mountain range from the Claremont roads as I drove to school everyday. My third attempt to summit this season began on a clear Sunday morning. After hiking a mile above the city, I set up camp on top of Big Horn Peak. I woke up the next morning to see clouds covered everything below me.

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Deep Survival: #2 Folk Wisdom

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

One of the most respected psychologists of our time is Steven Pinker, a professor at Harvard and the author of numerous books on human behavior and evolutionary biology. Pinker says that our brains contain a “baloney-generator” that offers up explanations of our behavior. Often those explanations have nothing to do with reality. They’re simply the stories we tell ourselves that help us get around in the world. “The conscious mind,” he says, “is a spin doctor.”

Joseph LeDoux, an author and neuroscientist at New York University, demonstrated that “people normally do all sorts of things for reasons they are not consciously aware of . . .” and that “[o]ne of the main jobs of consciousness is to keep our life tied together into a coherent story.” LeDoux and Pinker confirm a long line of research going back to William James concerning how well we can know ourselves and how that knowledge—or lack of it—influences the decisions we make. The results aren’t encouraging. “If the human mind is a formal logic machine,” LeDoux adds, “it is a pretty poor one.”

Research in neuroscience confirms that we turn experience into stories—simple narratives about what we’re doing and why—and then use those stories to explain our past behavior and to shape what we do in the future. The most useful stories have emotional impact. And emotions, scientists have learned, are immensely important in helping us to act. Because we are human and have language, we not only generate our own stories, we also acquire them from others through legends, books, movies, and songs. Sometimes, if we are paying attention, we even acquire them from school. When our narratives reflect the world as it really is, we do well. When they don’t, we find ourselves in trouble.
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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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