On 2005-05-04 10:18:00, Anonymous wrote:
"That's really sad T, but it sounds like you would have done well in a program, afterall you didn't need shoes or much food and water!"
Heh. Well, first, I would have taken my shoes with me, of course.
Second, finding water is easy, and if you take a tiny bottle filled with bleach along, your water will taste awful, but the only sickness you'll have to worry about is giardia.
Third, a whole lot of the plants you see are edible--you just have to know which ones (I did), and you can *temporarily* go without food for a fair while. Something I didn't know at the time, but do now, is how easy it is to set snares (made from just what you find) for small game. Squirrels are incredibly curious, so easy to trap.
Most of the times people have starved in history, everyone around them had already eaten up those easy food sources, and the hard ones, too. Modern people walk past loads of perfectly edible food everyday without recognizing it as food.
Not saying I would have wanted to live like that for an extended period. Just saying it would have been enough for me to leave home and walk to a major city. You can make about twenty miles a day and still have time to fill your water bottles, forage, and make a rudimentary lean-to for the night.
The difference between that and a program is having some goon or goons standing over you trying to muck with your head while you're doing it *or* stuffing rocks in your pack.
And, of course, hiking in places with limited water (where I grew up, it was pretty wet) it would be *much* harder to do that if you even could. Which would *also*--wet or dry area--be made worse by some goon standing over you and not letting you refill your water bags from available water sources even if you *had* water purification tabs that would also kill giardia (let alone simple chlorine bleach).
Idiot goons who play god with a hiker's water (or electrolytes) are deadly dangerous.
Solo survival hiking is also deadly dangerous. I'd have to have been in fear of my life to have even considered trying it.
But for better or worse, not many people have my personality type. One of the benefits of being something of a loner is you can make and stick to your own decisions without a lot of social support---or in the face of a lot of social opposition. It has its drawbacks, too, but that's one of the benefits.
But no, I would have died in a program. In my teens I was severely mentally ill, undiagnosed, and untreated--and often a hair's-breadth away from suicide. It's just luck I survived at all. Being alone in the woods wouldn't have bothered me--I spent half my time out there anyway and found it soothing. Being in a program would have pushed me over the edge inside a week--and you can't stop someone who's truly intent on suicide (short of, among other things, pulling all their teeth).
But there are kids all over the country who run every year and make it to a major city and never go home---so obviously there are other ways of doing it successfully than the one I would have chosen.
Timoclea
