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]
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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