Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Somewhere ... Sometime ... Somebody

I can make no apology when I say that folks ought to develop and hone a kit mentality.

I have my assorted reasons.

On one end of the reason-scale are the unplanned situations and circumstances that can and do arise along the course of life. Somewhere … sometime … somebody … is going to encounter life/health threatening circumstances. It might be any one of us that the search and rescue team is trying to find and get to. Thinking through the long list of possible scenarios and doing some planning and preparation ahead of time can and does save lives. It might be our own or those of our loved ones we are saving.

On the other side of the scale are the many back-to-basics possibilities to get out and enjoy being surrounded by nature where we are groomed and caressed by its terms of engagement … away from the deafening din and growing piles of debris created by society and its myriad social aspects. We learn to understand and partner with nature. We begin to view, respect, and appreciate nature as an ally.

It is this side of the scale that I consider most important. The more groomed we are on this side of the scale the better prepared we are for the possibilities that may arise on the other side of the scale.

It is not difficult to put together a good usable kit to get started. Putting one together from scratch will involve some expense but putting one together does not have to break the bank. I do not recommend scrimping too tightly though. Cheap is not always a bargain. Cheap is all too often just that … cheap. Cheap will let you down a lot sooner than something with some quality to it and it often does just that when you least need it to. Cheap can also make you work harder at simple woodcraft tasks. Expensive, on the other hand, can be merely just another bag of status wielding conversation pieces. I think it is important for people to discover their balance between these two extreme ends.

I have already talked about The Basic Kit and its contents back in April so there is no good reason for being redundant here where kit contents are concerned. I do think it is important to continue to emphasize the necessity of developing and honing a kit mentality. A kit mentality needs to be an everyday affair that we are engaged in. It is simply that important. Think about it. All of life’s necessities … shelter, fire, water, and food … revolve around the basic kit and the personal capability to utilize its contents on any given day in any given set of circumstances.

It is important to know how to effectively use the items in the kit. It is more important … perhaps even paramount … to have a good working knowledge of the environment that surrounds us.

I consider myself fortunate to have lived in three countries on two continents and in several climatological regions of this country. Each climatological environment has its own particular demands and hardships. Each climatological environment also has its natural offerings and rewards for those that know how to identify and utilize the available resources.

Here is where the real schooling begins to take place and I readily admit, for all I know, I have about a bucket of knowledge in comparison to the amount that is in the well waiting for me to haul it out. What Horace Kephart said is true. “In the school of the woods there is no graduation day.”

Woodcraft or bushcraft or whatever you choose to call it is a lifelong school. There is something new, several something’s in fact, that can be learned every day if we are curious and attentive … if we are willing to take the time and invest the effort to dip our bucket into the well.

Acquiring knowledge in the real school is a long course aggravated by the fact that the more advanced and technological housed societies become, the more domesticated and urbanized societies become, the less these societies honestly know about how to live on their own and how to identify and utilize the life sustaining resources provided by nature. For most modernites, if it does not come from the store or the restaurant … it does not come. I know this first hand. I too lived a big part of my life as a supply chain dependent and still do the convenient easy thing where the supply chain is concerned for convenience sake. We all do and we all will as long as we live in or near the settlements.

Given the necessity to forage wild edibles and to hunt or catch, kill, and process wild animals, fish, and birds for food, most modern Western Civilization residents would go hungry in the short term and starve to death in the long term. A hard course in deprivation and starvation is honestly avoidable. Nature abounds with what we need and can have if we take the time to accumulate the knowledge, experimentally familiarize ourselves with her bounty, and develop the skills necessary to utilize the bounty nature has to offer. Will we give up the grocery store as long as its shelves are stocked? Probably not. I have not anyway.

What if things take a really bad turn? What if we discover ourselves in a dire long term situation that cancels out the likelihood of rescue or being provisioned? It is just me, or just you, or just us along with our kits and the knowledge we have taken the time to accumulate?

I do not have a personal frame of reference for this scenario. I have never crashed in a plane on the side of a snow covered mountain. I have never been shipwrecked and marooned on a deserted island. I have never broken down off road in the desert. At least not yet. If I venture there is the possibility.

I have been through a good many hurricanes and had a couple close calls with tornadoes. I have bivouacked in the Army and camped as a civilian in some miserable conditions. I have a lot of personal reference points but I have never been in this sort of dire long term situation and hope that I never personally add them to my frame of reference.

Hopefully … none of us will. 

Sadly … somewhere, sometime, somebody will.

Borrowing the words of John “Lofty” Wiseman …

“You can have all the knowledge and kit in the world but without the will to live you can still perish.”

Wiseman is one of the respected “experts” on the subject of survival. He spent 26 years of his life as a professional soldier and served with the British Army Special Air Service before becoming the survival instructor to the Special Air Service. I have a lot of respect for someone with those credentials.

He makes this statement in his introduction …

“Survival is a mental exercise.

After the excitement of the incident and the rush of adrenalin has settled it takes great mental resolve to carry on. What keeps us going is the basic instinct, which is best referred to as the will to live.

This is the firm foundation that we build all of our training on and try to nourish and increase.

It is easy to see how physically fit we are but very difficult to know how mentally fit we are.

This basic instinct is getting weaker as we get more civilized so it is important to practice our skills, and be prepared for any eventuality.”[1]

Practice all you can.

Learn all you can.

Experience all you can.


[PHOTO] Wiseman’s Pyramid of Learning



[1] John “Lofty” Wiseman, SAS Survival Handbook, How to Survive in the Wild, in Any Climate, on Land or at Sea © 2004 by HarperCollinsPublishers. Copyright terms respected.

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