Tubie vs. Wild

It is my fondest hope that one day Grace will cherish these musings from her father and be able to pass them down to her therapist ("See, doc? It really is my parents' fault!!"). You see, not all of them are about tube feeding. Some posts concern the most important questions in life. For example, if you're on a plane that goes down in the Siberian wilderness and only you and one other person survives, who would you want that person to be?

Back when I had cable, I used to watch that Man vs. Wild show on the Discovery Channel. In case you haven't seen it, they drop an ex-British SAS guy into various environments to see if he can survive with no food/water/shelter for a few days. The dude's name is Bear Grylls, which makes me giggle because I think of Wolf Blitzer interviewing Bear Grylls and possibly Tiger Woods, and how can anyone take Wolf Blitzer seriously? His name is W-O-L-F B-L-I-T-Z-E-R. 

Bear (you're welcome, ladies)

Bear (you're welcome, bear enthusiasts)

Wolf (you're welcome)

Anyway, Bear (the person, not the animal) demonstrates how he would go about finding water in the Australian outback or the Sahara, or shelter in the arctic or the tropics, or avoid being eaten by bears (the animal this time) in Canada. I lost interest in the show after it was revealed that Bear spent most of his nights in 5-star resorts, because if I'm going to sit on my ass and watch a guy nearly freeze to death in Patagonia it better be legit, am I right?!?

Every time I watched the show, I would think, What if that were me? How long would I last in the Amazon jungle? Could I jump in a frozen lake just to show people why you shouldn't jump in frozen lakes? Based on my resume, I think you'd want me on your team if your plane goes down. Let's ignore the fact that I'm a tubie for the sake of argument because if my plane goes down in the middle of nowhere right now, it better include a few crates of formula or a Blendtec and a generator. I'm an Eagle Scout so I ought to have loads of camping and outdoor skills. Plus, I went through survival training in Colorado and in eastern Washington. The survival school in Washington included time spent in a mock POW camp. So ideally I could get you through "enhanced interrogation" by terrorists, plan and execute your escape, then allow you to comfortably live off the land while we await rescue.

However, as with many of my other qualities, the reality of Brian Liebenow is much more disappointing than you'd imagine. I've forgotten the vast majority of what I learned in the Boy Scouts, although I have retained the knowledge that Pop Tarts make an excellent meal at any time of day. I remember being able to start a fire using just two matches. Now I'd be lucky to get one going with two lighters and a bottle of lighter fluid. I remember knowing how to tie more than twenty different types of knots. Now, I have a hard time tying my shoes. I got more than twenty merit badges on everything from sailing to basket weaving (really, they had a basket weaving merit badge), but do I remember any of the many skills I learned? No. In fact, Betsy can attest that I know nothing about sailing and she'd be better off in the open ocean with nothing but a life preserver than being alone with me on a sail boat (maybe I'll share that story some other time).

Let me digress for a moment and share one of my favorite metaphors: the island of penguins. Imagine a small island filled, from one side to the other, with penguins. Nothing but penguins, standing around, looking at each other and chirping contentedly. Now imagine that island is your brain and those penguins are thoughts. You see, much like that island, the space in your brain is finite. It can only hold a certain amount of thoughts. When the island is filled to capacity with penguins, every time a new penguin is added, an old penguin falls off and is lost forever. In the same way, every time my brain adds a new thought, old thoughts are forced out.

As the iceberg melts, the penguins fall off. This is like dementia.

So, the knowledge I learned in the Boy Scouts used to frolic gaily about my island with room to spare when I was a know-nothing teenager. Since then, however, my Boy Scout penguins have been replaced by more important penguins from all my time in college and my time sitting in front of the TV watching quality shows like Man vs. Wild.

Therefore, you shouldn't pick me for your deserted island or zombie apocalypse team because of my Eagle Scout rank. But what about all that survival training I got while in the military? Between my freshman and sophomore years at the Academy, I went through a three week program called CST, Combat Survival Training. During the survival portion of the course, we learned how to identify edible plants in the wild; how to consume insects; and how to set snares for small forest animals as a potential source of protein. But, do I remember any of the plants that are safe to eat? Not really. Just the other day, I had a whole mouthful of poison ivy thinking it was lettuce. Just kidding! I actually thought it was marijuana and that is a "high" I won't soon forget. Nothing like what I experienced eating all those poppies in Afghanistan. Why don't they grow more of those here in Tennessee? Seriously, I NEED THOSE FLOWERS!!!!

Mmmmm...Arugula...that's what it is, right?

Also as part of the training, we practiced beating defenseless bunnies to death with clubs, skinning and gutting the cute critters, then making rabbit stew while we played with the corpses of the adorable animals to the amusement of our fellow survivors. Sorry PETA, but it was either the rabbits or us. Maybe you've forgotten about the vicious monsters in this award winning documentary: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XcxKIJTb3Hg. Yeah, and we didn't have any holy hand grenades either. Just two hands, our wits and each other. And knives. We all had knives. And opposable thumbs. And there's a size difference. Otherwise, we were evenly matched.

During the next portion of our training, we split into teams of three and each team had to navigate from one checkpoint to another in a certain amount of time, all while evading "enemy" capture. So, we had to travel at night, with no flashlights. In heavily wooded, rolling terrain. Fun, right? For my team, picture a smaller, slightly wimpier version of me. His name was Kevin. The other member of our trio was a larger, slightly tougher version of my sister. I don't know her name because I was too afraid to ask. We began our trek in the early evening, while there was still some light in the day. I had the brilliant idea that while it was still light, we should try to get as far as we could toward the next checkpoint without bothering to mask our movements because surely our "enemy" wouldn't be in position or prepared for our lightning speed. Within an hour, we were easily discovered by upperclassmen who were roving around the brush looking for idiotic teams to fall in their laps. As punishment, they put us in a truck and drove us a few extra miles from our next checkpoint. This instantly lowered morale on our fledgling team and significantly lowered Kevin' and Scary_Tough_Girl's assessment of my decision making ability.

I mostly wore pink. Is that why I kept getting caught?

Over the course of three nights of evading enemy capture, we were discovered three more times (this may have been a school record). On one memorable occasion, we were creeping across a field in pitch blackness--FYI, when I say "creeping" I mean Scary_Tough_Girl was creeping while Kevin and I were thrashing noisily like injured bears (the animals, not the person)--when floodlights suddenly blinded us from about 100 feet away. No, Not again!!! Kevin and Scary_Tough_Girl put their hands up, resigned to the fact that we'd been captured, for the umpteenth time. Not me though. I immediately went down in a crouch, hugging my knees in an attempt to look like the surrounding foliage. As the lights came closer, I used my Jedi mind powers to try to confuse the "enemy." I am a tree stump. I am a tree stump. I am a tree stump. Alas, the force was not strong that day. I saw a pair of boots stop right in front of me and a voice said, "What the hell are you doing?!?" By this point, the upperclassmen were through with trucking us farther from our checkpoints. Instead, I think they tried to get us closer because we were such a lost cause. By the end of our three night ordeal, I was dragging 100 yards behind my teammates, wearily putting one foot in front of the other and dreaming of Pizza Hut stuffed-crust pizza (I'd had little to eat other than rabbit stew and poison ivy and stuffed-crust pizza had just been introduced that summer. I was intrigued). Meanwhile, Kevin was complaining loudly of blisters while crashing through the woods, not caring about recapture, and Scary_Tough_Girl was looking at both of us with a mixture of disgust and revulsion.

So, do you want me as your survival partner now, in the event you get stranded in the Himalayas? I don't think so, unless you're confidant in your own abilities and you look at me as a potential food source.