YOU NEVER KNOW

I’ve been fixating on the History Channel series “Alone” lately, while compulsively knitting a cabled sweater for my kids. I feel that if I stay ahead of both of these tasks, I’ll be able to survive in an igloo of my own fashioning when it comes to that, which it will, and so will my kids survive, because wool (tweed). Though the hard part will definitely be where we have to whack the fish on the head while we try to convincingly say “thank you” to the thing we’re killing.

Part of the fun of watching participants (who can choose to be rescued at any time) gut it out, sometimes to the brink of actual death by starvation, is watching myself react: I have a clear enjoyment of the sensibility that leads a person to grow a mullet, for example (shouldn’t a 53-year-old drywaller with a very thick mullet really be the type to stick it out in Patagonia?). I also root for anyone with quiet authority, like the two participants I’ve seen who had ready opinions of mountain lions (one was I don’t have to worry about a puma I can see & the one I can’t see is going to kill me before I know what’s happening anyway, and the other was Dammit I should have run after it and treed it and then I could have gone to get my bow while it was up.)

Take also what I voted against: the parents of young children (those always end up permanently choked up in front of their campfires by month two and NO BLAME THERE, just discernment as far as the betting table goes); the doofuses (they always chop themselves up with an axe somehow); the vocally confident contestants with deeply held philosophies; and spunky young women (YES I KNOW I KNOW. WE WILL GET TO THIS).