A Fine and Pleasant Misery, page 3
Over the years I’ve been involved in several dozen panics, usually as a participant, sometimes simply as an observer. Most of my panics have been of a solitary nature, but on several occasions I have organized and led group panics, one of which involved twenty-some people. In that instance a utility company took advantage of the swath we cut through the forest and built a power line along it.
Back in the earlier days of my panicking I utilized what is known technically as the Full Bore Linear Panic (FBLP). This is where you run flat out in a straight line until the course of your panic is deflected by a large rock or tree, after which you get up and sprint off in the new direction. The FBLP is also popularly referred to as the ricochet or pinball panic or sometimes simply as “going bananas.” Once an FBLP is underway there is no stopping it. It gains momentum at every stride, and the participants get so caught up in it they forget the reason for holding it in the first place. They’ll panic right out of the woods, onto a road, down the road, through a town, and back into the woods, all the time picking up momentum. One time when we were kids my friend Retch and I panicked right through a logging crew and the loggers dropped what they were doing and ran along with us under the impression we were being pursued by something. When they found out all we were doing was panicking, they fell back, cursing, and returned to their work. This tendency of panic to feed upon itself gives it ever-increasing momentum and occasionally indigestion.
Although it will do absolutely no good, I must advise against undertaking a Full Bore Linear Panic unless, of course, one is equipped with a stout heart, a three-day supply of food, and a valid passport. Instead, I recommend the Stationary or Modified Panic. It offers the same therapeutic effect and subsides after a few minutes with none of the FBLP’s adverse side effects, such as making your life insurance company break out in a bad rash.
The Stationary Panic first came to my attention one time when a large but harmless snake slithered across a trail a couple of yards ahead of my wife. She made a high-pitched chittering sound and began jumping up and down and flailing the air with her arms. It was a most impressive performance, particularly since each jump was approximately a foot high and her backpack happened to be the one with the tent on it. The only adverse side effect to the Stationary Panic was that the lone witness to the spectacle could not help laughing every time he thought about it, a reaction quickly remedied, however, by his sleeping most of the night outside the tent in a driving rainstorm.
Although I immediately perceived the advantage of this form of panic, I could not imagine myself bouncing up and down, flailing my arms and chittering like an angry squirrel, particularly in front of the rough company with whom I usually find myself in a predicament requiring a panic. Thus it came about that I invented the Modified Stationary Panic, or MSP.
The key to the MSP is not to bounce up and down in a monotonous fashion but to vary the steps so that it appears to be a sort of folk dance. You can make up your own steps but I highly recommend throwing in a couple of Russian squat kicks. The chittering sound should be replaced by an Austrian drinking song, shouted out at the top of your voice. The MSP is particularly appropriate for group panics. There are few sights so inspiring as a group of lost hunters, arms entwined, dancing and singing for all they are worth as night closes in upon them.
Once you have established the fact that you are indeed lost and have performed the perfunctory Modified Panic, you should get started right away on the business of surviving. Many survival experts recommend that you first determine on which side of the trees the moss is growing. I’m not sure why this is, but I suppose it it because by the time you get hungry enough to eat moss you will want to know where to find it in a hurry.
If you think you may have to spend the night in the woods, you may wish to fashion some form of temporary shelter. For one night, a tree with good thick foliage will serve the purpose. Thick foliage will help keep the rain off, and reduces the chance of falling out of the tree.
After a day or two, it is probably a good idea to build a more permanent shelter, such as a lean-to. A very nice lean-to can be made out of large slabs of bark, pried from a dead cedar, pine or tamarack, and leaned against the trunk of an upright tree. If you have a tendency to walk in your sleep, the lean-to should not be more than fifteen feet from the ground. After a couple of weeks, it might be a good idea to add some simple furnishings and pictures.
Each day you are lost should be recorded by carving a notch on some handy surface. (This procedure should be skipped by anyone lost at sea in a rubber life raft.) I’ve known people lost only a few hours and already they had carved half a notch. The reason for the notches is that you may write a book on your experience and sell it to the movies. As is well known, a film about being lost is absolute zilch without an ever-increasing string of notches. The best film treatment of notches that I’ve seen was in a TV movie about a couple whose plane had crashed in the Yukon. They painted the notches on the plane’s fuselage with a set of oil paints. It was a great touch and added a lot of color to the drama. I for one never go out into the woods anymore without a set of oil paints, just in case I’m lucky enough to be lost long enough to interest a film producer.
Many survival experts are of the opinion that lost persons have little to fear from wild animals. I disagree. It is true that bear and cougar will almost always do their best to avoid contact with human beings, but how about squirrels and grouse? On several occasions the sound of a squirrel charging through dry leaves has inflicted partial paralysis on my upper ganglia, erasing from my consciousness the knowledge that one has nothing to fear from bear or cougar. Having a grouse blast off from under one’s feet can cause permanent damage to one’s psyche. The first-aid recommended for restoring vital bodily functions after such occurrences is simply to pound your chest several times with a large rock. On the other hand, if the jolt has been sufficient to lock your eyelids in an open position, it is best to leave them that way. This will prevent you from dozing off during the night and falling out of your tree.
The excitement of being lost wears off rather quickly, and after a few days boredom sets in. It is then that one may wish to turn to some of the proven techniques for getting one’s self found. Building a large smoky fire is always good. During fire season, this will almost always attract attention and it won’t be long before a team of smoke-jumpers will be parachuted in to put out the fire. They may be a little angry about having their poker game back at camp interrupted but can usually be persuaded to take you out of the woods with them anyway. (The term “survival tip,” by the way, originated from the practice of giving smoke-jumpers five dollars each for not leaving the fire-builder behind.) There is always the possibility that a bomber may just fly over and dump a load of fire retardant on you and your fire and you will have to turn to other measures.
Scooping water up in your hat and pouring it down a badger hole is good, if you are fortunate enough to have both a hat and a badger hole handy. Someone is bound to show up to ask you why you are doing such a fool thing. If this person isn’t afraid of associating with a madman, he will probably show you the way home.
Similarly, you can try your hand at catching some large fish. If you’re successful, three anglers will immediately emerge from the brush and ask you what bait you’re using. In case you don’t have a valid fishing license, one of the three will be a game warden who will place you under arrest as soon as he has caught his own limit. But at least you’ll be found.
When everything else fails and you are really desperate, you can always resort to taking off all your clothes. Even when lost, I’ve never known this technique to fail in attracting a large crowd of people, no matter how far back in the wilderness I happened to be. Here’s an example:
My friend Retch and I had been fishing a high mountain stream at least three miles from the nearest road.
We hadn’t seen a sign of human life all day. The fish had stopped biting and we were hot and sticky and decided to take a dip in a pool beneath a small waterfall.
We took off our clothes and dove into the water, the temperature of which instantly proved to be somewhere between damn cold and ice. As we popped to the surface, and started flailing wildly toward the ledge from which we had dived, approximately twelve members of a mushroom club rounded a bend in the trail and headed straight for us. I would like to be able to tell you that modesty forced us to remain submerged in that liquid ice until they had passed, their pleasant outing unblemished by nothing more lascivious than a patch of morel mushrooms. Unfortunately, that would not be the truth. The startling spectacle of two grown men lunging out of the water, snatching up their clothes and racing off through a thicket of devil’s club was at least mitigated by the fact that most of the ladies in the group apparently thought we were wearing blue leotards. I was also relieved that a particularly bad twelve-letter word had frozen on Retch’s lower lip and didn’t thaw out until we were in the car driving home.
Perhaps the most important thing to remember when lost is to accept the experience in a philosophical manner. Whenever I start becoming slightly confused over which is my elbow and which the way home and night is tightening its noose upon me in some primordial swamp, I never fail to recall the folksy wisdom spoken to me under similar circumstances by the old woodsman Rancid Crabtree. Rancid spat out his chaw of tobacco and in that comical, bug-eyed way of his said, “JUMPIN’ GOSH ALMIGHTY, WHERE IN HELL IS WE?!” Somehow those words always seem a fitting introduction to a lively folk dance and a rousing rendition of an Austrian drinking song.
Grogan’s War Surplus
MY OLD CAMPING BUDDY Retch, his eyes dreamy and wet with nostalgia, leaned forward and stirred the fire under our sizzling pan of trout with a stick. I could tell he was getting deep into his cups because that’s the only time he turns sloppily sentimental. Also, we were cooking on a propane camp stove.
“You know,” he said, “it seems like only yesterday that you and me was crouched in the mud in some Godforsaken place using our bayonets to roast a couple hunks of Spam over some canned heat.”
“Yeah, and heatin’ our water in a steel helmet,” I said, sinking suddenly into the morass of reminiscence. “And lyin’ awake night after night in a pup tent, listenin’ for the first sound of attack …”
“ … and half our gear riddled with bullet holes,” Retch put in, shaking a tear off the end of his mustache.
“Yep,” I said, “we really had some great campin’ when we were kids. It’s just too damn bad kids nowadays don’t have some of those old-time war surplus stores around to sell them their campin’ gear.”
Retch forked a small, crisp trout out of the pan and munched it down tail first. “Say, what was it that was always attackin’ us in those days?”
“I’m not sure what they were called,” I said, glancing out into the surrounding darkness, “but they were always big and hairy and had red eyes, and teeth the size of railroad spikes. I haven’t seen one of them since I was twelve years old.” I leaned over and stopped Retch from throwing a log on the fire. “Not when I was sober, anyway.”
“Say,” Retch said suddenly. “You remember ol’ Grogan’s War Surplus store?”
Did I remember Grogan’s War Surplus store! Why, the mere sound of that melodious name made my heart dance the Light Fantastic. Grogan’s War Surplus. Ah, how could I ever forget!
Immediately after World War II, Grogan had remodeled an old livery stable and feed store in the style now referred to in architectural textbooks as “war surplus modern,” a decor that attempts to emulate the aesthetic effects of a direct hit on an army ordnance depot.
The store front itself was elegantly festooned with gerry cans, yellow life rafts, landing nets, ammo boxes, and other assorted residue of recent history. On the lot behind the store, the plundered wreckage of a dozen or so military vehicles had been cleverly arranged in such a manner as to conceal what had once been an unsightly patch of wild flowers. But all the really precious stuff was kept inside the store itself, illuminated by a few naked light bulbs and the watchful eyes of Henry P. Grogan.
The great thing about Grogan’s War Surplus was not only did it sell every conceivable thing that might possibly be used for camping, but it was cheap. With a few dollars and a sharp eye for a bargain, you could go into Grogan’s and outfit yourself with at least the bare essentials for the routine overnight camping trip—a sleeping bag, pup tent, canteen, cook kit, entrenching shovel, paratrooper jump boots, leggings, packboard, packsack, web belt, ammo pouches, medic kit, machete, bayonet, steel helmet, fiber helmet liner, 45 automatic holster (empty), G.I. can opener, and the other basic necessities.
Then if you had any change left, you might pick up a few luxury items, things you had no idea what they might be used for but were reasonably sure you would think of something—ammo box, camouflage net, G.I. soap, parachute harness, and the like.
Naturally, you never took all of this gear with you on a simple overnight trip. Nine times out of ten you forgot the soap and probably the can opener, too.
Since one of the rules of backpacking requires that all nonessentials be omitted from the pack, we strained our imaginations to bring every last piece of beloved war surplus into the realm of our necessities.
Take the bayonet, for example. It was needed for cutting and spearing things. Frequently, it cut and speared things we didn’t want cut and speared, but this drawback was more than made up for by its otherwise benign service as a cooking spit, paring knife, or even use as a tent stake.
The machete was needed anytime you had to slash out your own trail. This necessity arose more often than a person who is not a kid with a machete might think. Sometimes you had to walk several miles out of your way in order for that particular necessity to arise but time was of no consequence when you were in search of necessity. Over the years we slashed out literally hundreds of trails through the wilderness. The longest of these was The Great Rocky Mountain Divide Trail. It was never used much by backpackers, but the mother of a friend of mine, who lived at the jumping-off point, later put up a post at each end of the trail and strung a clothesline between them. The other trails we built, of course, were not nearly so impressive as this one.
We had learned from war movies that steel helmets could be used for boiling things in. On hot summer days, we found out what—our heads. The helmets could also be used for pillows. If you went to sleep, your head would slip off the helmet and bonk on the ground. Bonking your boiled head on the ground kept you awake all night, which was one of the reasons for using a helmet for a pillow in the first place.
Filling up a .45 automatic holster was always a challenge, particularly since our parents had indicated they would just as soon we didn’t buy any .45 automatics. About the only thing you could do with the holster was stuff a sardine-cheese-pickle-onion sandwich in it to be quickdrawn anytime you got hungry. Actually, a 45 automatic probably would have been safer than some of our sandwiches.
You had to be a shrewd shopper not to get taken by Henry P. Grogan. We realized that some of the war surplus was brand-spanking-new. Other merchandise had obviously seen combat; it was cracked, tarnished, stained, ripped, riddled, rotten, rusty, and moldy. Frequently, Henry P. would try to pawn off some of the new stuff on us but we weren’t to be fooled. We held out for the authentic war surplus. Ah, you can’t imagine how old Henry P. would roll his eyes and gnash his teeth every time one of us kids outwitted him like that. He’d get very angry.
The real treasure, of course, was any item with a bullet hole in it. For a long time you practically never came across anything with a bullet hole in it, and then one day Larry Swartze found a canteen with what looked like an honest-to-goodness bullet hole drilled through it. Henry P. himself had to break up the fight to see who was going to get the perforated canteen. Immediately after that incident, all sorts of war surplus turned up with bullet holes in it, and we kept ourselves broke trying to buy it all. Then it occurred to us that maybe old Henry P. was going around at night with a hammer and large spike, counterfeiting bullet holes. The bottom subsequently dropped out of the bullet-hole market at Henry P’s.
Shrewd as I was, Henry P. managed to take even me a few times. One of the worst things he did was to sell me what he called “one of the down bags used by Arctic troops to keep them comfortable in 70-below weather.” The bags turned out to be a secret weapon of the War Department, designed to be dropped behind the lines in hopes that enemy troops would attempt to sleep in them and either freeze or break out in an itch that would occupy both hands scratching for the duration of the war. The stuffing consisted not of down but chicken feathers with, if the size of the lumps in the bag was any indication, several of the chickens still attached. But the worst feature of the bag was triggered by its getting even slightly wet. Any time it rained on one of our camping trips, I went home smelling like high tide at the local chicken and turkey farm.
Another time, Henry P. induced me to buy a two-man mountain tent, so called, I later discovered, because it was heavy as a mountain and took two men to set it up. The roof of the tent looked like it had been made out of dried batskin, and was impervious to everything but wind, rain, and heavy dew. A tubular air vent extended from each end of the tent, an effect which, combined with the batskin roof, gave it the appearance of a creature dropped in from outer space. It frequently gave us quite a start when we returned to camp late in the evening and glimpsed the pterodactylous wings of the roof flapping in the breeze and the vent tubes bobbing about. I remember one occasion when a brave kid named Kenny stood at a distance and threw rocks, trying to drive our tent out of camp.
