3 minute read
Hollywood survival myths can kill
BY ALLEN MACARTNEY
HOLLYWOOD loves wilderness survival movies where a star clashes with nature and wins. The Revenant is just the latest in a long string of box office successes like Castaway, Star Wars, Life of Pi, The Grey.
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But just because a movie star survives a fictional (or “based on a real story”) wilderness ordeal on the screen doesn’t mean anyone else could in real life. Some of these movies have episodes which make you think the script writers haven’t left Los Angeles pavement for decades, and know little or nothing about real wilderness. Let’s look at some of Hollywood’s survival myths that can kill you – all in a single recent movie.
MYTH #1 | WET IS OK
In this scene, the hero splashes around in an icy river in winter desperately stuffing raw fish into his mouth. He hasn’t eaten for maybe a week. The unspoken message: without food you’re going to die in the wilderness. But humans can go weeks without food. It might be very uncomfortable, but you’re hungry, not dead. However, being wet and exposed to cold winter wind can
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kill within an hour. That was the real danger for our hero, but you wouldn’t know it from the movie. Hyperthermia is deadly in summer too if you get wet and are exposed to wind.
MYTH #2 | IT’S EASY TO STAY WARM
The scene shows the hero sitting on a thin blanket on the ground, beside a campfire but exposed to a strong cold wind. Only tiny flickering flames provided heat, but the hero appears warm and snug. Impossible: without shelter, no one will survive very long, let alone be comfortable. Sitting on cold ground is a fast track to hypothermia, even in spring or fall. You need thick insulating layers under your butt. If you have no shelter, build a big fire about two metres from a rock wall or stone face and then sit between the rock wall and the fire so the heat will reflect back on you. This doubles the fire’s warmth-giving potential.
MYTH #3: | MENACING WILD ANIMALS
Wolves and bears are perennial bad guys in movies – a constant threat to anyone in the woods. The facts are completely different. Wild animals generally avoid humans in the wild because they fear us. Humans are at the very top of the food chain; they aren’t. Simple. But fearing wild animals can make you do dangerous things, like running through the forest and risking sprains or broken bones. Injuries like that drastically increase your chances of not surviving a crisis in the woods.
MYTH #4 | LIGHTING A FIRE
In this scene the hero has to start a fire with flint and steel. Two gentle taps and, voila, his spark drops onto unprepared kindling and miraculously bursts into flame. In real life it’s much more complicated and takes careful preparation of your fire bundle – the prepared “nest” of kindling the spark falls into. A spark dropping from flint and steel burns at about 3,000 degrees F but only for about half a second. Before it will ignite anything, it has to fall directly onto dry, prepared kindling with the consistency of cotton or shredded dry leaves. Then you must coax the ember into flame. It takes practice, so do the practising at home – a fun and safe way to develop a skill.
MYTH #5 | WARM ANIMAL CARCASS
Crawling into a carcass in a blizzard to stay warm is a popular Hollywood scene but it’s a sketchy survival technique at best. If it’s your horse, you’re better off keeping it alive as an escape tool. If it’s a moose (rarely seen in the woods and almost certainly not when you need one) you still have to kill it, then clean out its insides before climbing in. And within 30 minutes you’ll be soaking wet. Wet means cold. Besides, how long will a carcass stay warm in a blizzard?
Looking for a useful Hollywood survival flick? Try Castaway. The Tom Hanks character lives on a desert ed island for four years before rescue. Emphasizing ingenuity and adapting to survive, this movie gives real insight into practical survival skills.
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