survival
To make a totally non-Halloween related post, yesterday I finished reading another absolutely amazing survival story. It made a bit of an impression on me, so I decided to write something about it:
This book is about an ill fated expedition that launched in 1914, in a bid to become the first ever to cross the continent of Antarctica, but instead got stuck permanently in the ice just miles from their landing point. Like touching the void, the story of how these people escaped only works because it is non-fiction. If a novel or movie came out with a plot like this, no one would take it seriously because there is just "no way" anyone could endure something like that.
The adventure itself is just great. I mean, how can you expect people to react when a couple of lost, malnourished seamen with no equipment or training go out and break mountaineering records because they have to climb over supposedly impassable terrain to survive. But I also like the look into the psyche of survivors during some of their long periods of idleness. For example, after months of eating nothing but meat and blubber from seals, penguins, and an occasional sea lion, the men recorded in their diaries the food that they most fantasized about eating when they got home.
"We want to be overfed ... very grossly overfed on nothing but porridge and sugar, black currant and apple pudding and cream, cake, milk, eggs, jam, honey, and bread and butter till we burst, and we'll shoot the man who offers us meat."
And amazingly, what ration did they most fear running out of? Tobacco! Such is the power of addiction (or perhaps some other dementia) that when their supplies were finally exhausted, they began smoking anything they could get their hands on. Despite the intense cold that led to frostbite, some of them started removing and smoking insulation from their boots.
I also enjoyed reading about the expedition's physicist. At one point he wrote about how easily the crew could convince itself that things were finally about to improve when they got sufficiency desperate, and how it reminded him of physicists with the theory of relativity. I guess Einstein still had some more convincing to do back then!
If I had to take a lesson away from all this, I guess it would be that people like Shackleton prove that you can accomplish almost anything if you want it badly enough. We may think we are frail, but we are some amazingly resilient creatures. I find that very inspirational. Whatever difficulties we may face, there is no need to fret about them, because we are almost always capable of dealing with them. We just have to get off our asses and fix things.
This book is about an ill fated expedition that launched in 1914, in a bid to become the first ever to cross the continent of Antarctica, but instead got stuck permanently in the ice just miles from their landing point. Like touching the void, the story of how these people escaped only works because it is non-fiction. If a novel or movie came out with a plot like this, no one would take it seriously because there is just "no way" anyone could endure something like that.
The adventure itself is just great. I mean, how can you expect people to react when a couple of lost, malnourished seamen with no equipment or training go out and break mountaineering records because they have to climb over supposedly impassable terrain to survive. But I also like the look into the psyche of survivors during some of their long periods of idleness. For example, after months of eating nothing but meat and blubber from seals, penguins, and an occasional sea lion, the men recorded in their diaries the food that they most fantasized about eating when they got home.
"We want to be overfed ... very grossly overfed on nothing but porridge and sugar, black currant and apple pudding and cream, cake, milk, eggs, jam, honey, and bread and butter till we burst, and we'll shoot the man who offers us meat."
And amazingly, what ration did they most fear running out of? Tobacco! Such is the power of addiction (or perhaps some other dementia) that when their supplies were finally exhausted, they began smoking anything they could get their hands on. Despite the intense cold that led to frostbite, some of them started removing and smoking insulation from their boots.
I also enjoyed reading about the expedition's physicist. At one point he wrote about how easily the crew could convince itself that things were finally about to improve when they got sufficiency desperate, and how it reminded him of physicists with the theory of relativity. I guess Einstein still had some more convincing to do back then!
If I had to take a lesson away from all this, I guess it would be that people like Shackleton prove that you can accomplish almost anything if you want it badly enough. We may think we are frail, but we are some amazingly resilient creatures. I find that very inspirational. Whatever difficulties we may face, there is no need to fret about them, because we are almost always capable of dealing with them. We just have to get off our asses and fix things.