Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

by Laurence Gonzales

The farther one goes The less one knows. —Tao Te Ching

In a true survival situation, you are by definition looking death in the face, and if you can’t find something droll and even something wondrous and inspiring in it, you are already in a world of hurt.

Al Siebert, a psychologist and author of The Survivor Personality, writes that survivors “laugh at threats…playing and laughing go together. Playing keeps the person in contact with what is happening around [him].” To deal with reality you must first recognize it as such.

we all make powerful models of the future. The world we imagine seems as real as the ones we’ve experienced. We suffuse the model with the emotional values of past realities. And in the thrall of that vision (call it “the plan,” writ large), we go forth and take action. If things don’t go according to the plan, revising such a robust model may be difficult. In an environment that has high objective hazards, the longer it takes to dislodge the imagined world in favor of the real one, the greater the risk. In nature, adaptation is important; the plan is not. It’s a Zen thing. We must plan. But we must be able to let go of the plan, too.

Joseph LeDoux concluded that, “people normally do all sorts of things for reasons that they are not consciously aware of…and that one of the main jobs of consciousness is to keep our life tied together into a coherent story, a self-concept.” In other words, everyone is the hero in his own movie. So it should come as no surprise that, in many cases, basic survival mechanisms, which have been hardwired into us and sculpted by experience, turn out to be not only the most powerful motivators of behavior but to operate at their peak efficiency out of reach of the conscious decision-making powers, which makes it easy for reason to be overwhelmed. Once an emotional reaction is underway, we can be swept away by an irresistible impulse to act. But there are many ways of revising the script and adapting in hazardous situations. Training is one of them.

Last, there is the fact that descending is technically more difficult than ascending. During the climb up, your foot is planted before your body weight is shifted. The opposite is true on descent, and it’s less stable. Descent, like the act of walking, is a controlled fall.

People routinely fail to realize that an accident not happening is no guarantee that it won’t happen. As Scott Sagan puts it in The Limits of Safety, “things that have never happened before happen all the time.” Unfortunately, as Perrow comments, “It is normal for us to die, but we only do it once.” Which is too bad, for it might be the ultimate learning experience.

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,” said Zen master Shunryu Suzuki. “In the expert’s mind there are few.”

Without the effort of struggle, a person is done for. Just as James Stockdale recommends “a course of familiarization with pain,” and Mark Morey observed that children without knowledge of predators don’t do as well in survival school, so people who have not had to struggle in their lives are at risk.

In the stages of dying, the last step is acceptance. In survival, it is total commitment. Every survivor I spoke with said that there was a moment of revelation in which he was suddenly seized by the certainty that he would live.

Ultimately, it is the struggle that keeps one alive. What seems a paradox is simply the act of living: Never stop struggling. Life itself is a paradox, gathering order out of the chaos of matter and energy. When the struggle ceases, we die. Scientists have long observed the seeming mystery: You can will yourself to die.

He saw that to lose everything at the edge of such a glorious eternity is far sweeter than to win by plodding through a cautious, painless, and featureless life. And that, of course, is why people undertake adventures such as solo voyages of the Atlantic to begin with. The true survivor isn’t someone with nothing to lose. He has something precious to lose. But at the same time, he’s willing to bet it all on himself. And it makes what he has that much richer. Days stolen are always sweeter than days given.

Al Siebert, in his book The Survivor Personality, writes that “The best survivors spend almost no time, especially in emergencies, getting upset about what has been lost, or feeling distressed about things going badly…. For this reason they don’t usually take themselves too seriously and are therefore hard to threaten.”

Those who gain experience while retaining firm hold on a beginner’s state of mind become long-term survivors. In flying, we constantly go back and retrain to remind ourselves that Newton’s laws don’t get suspended just because we’ve become so goddamned studly. That’s hard to remember when you feel like all you have to do is find a phone booth, get that cape on, and leap out the nearest window. We have a saying: “There are old pilots and bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.” That’s true in all hazardous pursuits.

When in doubt, bail out. This is a tough one. You’ve paid for airfare. You’ve waited all year for this trip. You’ve bought all your equipment. It’s hard to admit that things aren’t going to go your way. At times like that, it’s good to ask yourself if it’s worth dying for. Of course, some people need to get close to death, to take the really big risk. (Or as a friend of mine who is a Chicago cop once told me, “Some people just want to die in a hail of police gunfire.”)

Survivors know, whether they are conscious of it or not, that to live at all is to fly upside down (640 people died in 1999 while choking on food; 320 drowned in the bath tub). You’re already flying upside down. You might as well turn on the smoke and have some fun. Then when a different sort of challenge presents itself, you can face it with the same equanimity.