Collection 5: "Deep Survival" by Laurence Gonzales

A dozen other passengers survived the midair disintegration of Juliane’s plane, and their attitude, and hence their behavior and fate, were quite different from hers.

The next day, she deduced that even the helicopters and airplanes she could hear wouldn’t be able to see her through the jungle canopy.

It was another important moment: She didn’t spend time bemoaning her fate.

The knottiest mystery of survival is how one unequipped, ill-prepared seventeen-year-old girl gets out alive and a dozen adults in similar circumstances, better equipped, do not.

Conversely, searchers are always amazed to find people who have died while in possession of everything they needed to survive.

He swaggered across the fueling ramp toward us wearing an 18-inch Panamanian machete on his belt, a big, macho-looking guy with twelve years of military experience, including a stint with the Marines.

We’d learn to find water or distill it from the air.

Byron Kerns turned out to be soft-spoken, polite, cheerfully earnest, and gentle to a fault.

That demeanor, once learned under penalty of death, is carried through the rest of your life. Kerns also had that quiet, dark, and private humor.

Apathy is a typical reaction to any sort of disaster, and if you’re exhausted in a field of snow at sundown in the mountains, you’re pretty much about to witness the simple disaster of nature separating you permanently from everything you know and love in this world.

That apathy can rapidly lead to complete psychological deterioration.

Then you sit down and hypothermia sets in, which produces more apathy, a more profound psychological deterioration, and ultimately, death.

Then you sit down and hypothermia sets in, which produces more apathy, a more profound psychological deterioration, and ultimately, death.

You’re depleted and wide open to fatigue.

A survival situation is a ticking clock: You have only so much stored energy (and water), and every time you exert yourself, you’re using it up.

But after ten or so floors, he encountered people who were succumbing to fatigue and smoke. The people, all of whom would die, were just giving up and falling asleep.

They survive because they use cognition to organize, say, for a hunt, and to make things, even as cognition inhibits their animalness, including strength.

That’s why, when cognition is turned off, people are amazed by their own strength: because cognition continuously inhibits it.

That is the whole secret to cognition: It is a mechanism for modulating emotional (physical) responses.

Like being lost, survival is a transformation; being a leader can ensure that, when you reach the final stage of that metamorphosis, it is with an attitude of commitment, not resignation.