Surviving the Extremes: A Doctor's Journey to the Limits of Human Endurance (43 page)

CAN A HUMAN BEING WITH A BROKEN LEG
, lying alone in the Martian desert, ever hope to see Earth again? What are his chances?

First he must drag himself back into the space capsule. Although he’s wearing a bulky space suit, he should be able to manage it; gravity on Mars is much less than on Earth. His bones, weightless for months, will be brittle; the break would most likely require the delicate surgery of open reduction and internal fixation to place plates and screws directly on the bone—and run the risk of further splintering it. It would be a difficult case for the doctor, even assuming that, despite his bizarre behavior, he’s still functional. If he’s not, his crewmates could obtain advice from doctors on Earth. The round-trip delay between each question and answer, however, could be as long as forty minutes—and for the astronaut doing the surgery, this would be his first case. Perhaps the robotic surgeon could do the operation, but the technology is finicky and has never been tried in these conditions.

The advice you receive might well be to amputate your leg. As barbaric as it sounds, it’s a much simpler operation. Even if the novice surgeon or the robot somehow manages to get the job done, tight confinement increases your risk of infection, and decreased gravity would most likely delay your healing. The broken leg could instigate an overwhelming infection such as gangrene or pneumonia, or induce a blood clot due to your prolonged immobility. You might recover, but the scenario might also end with you waiting to die, draining
the resources of an expedition that would be better off if you died quickly.

Pitting the human body against the planet Mars would seem to be a pitiful mismatch, but throughout this book we’ve seen, and in my personal experience I’ve witnessed, many seemingly hopeless contests between humans and hostile surroundings in which the human has prevailed. Given roughly the same intensity of environmental attack, why do some people survive where so many others perish? What factors added up to survival for Antonio and Hermanigildo in the Amazon; Steve Callahan, the Robertsons, and the Baileys on the high seas; Mauro Prosperi and Pablo Valencia in the desert; Bernie Chowdhury underwater; and Beck Weathers on Mount Everest? What would lead that crippled astronaut to live or die? I have observed four additive forces at work in the struggle for survival, three of them obvious as they are being applied, the fourth and most powerful one evident only by its effect.

The first factor is knowledge. Antonio’s understanding of the jungle and Steve Callahan’s mastery of sailing provide the ultimate proof that knowledge is power. Both held within them the wisdom of those who went before—whether tribal elders or veteran sailors—to which they added their own lifetimes of experience. The tools of their survival were in their brains.

The second factor is conditioning. Mauro Prosperi, lacking any desert teaching, survived in an extreme environment because his body was prepared. Rigorous training had created a body capable of responding to stress with peak performance. The gradual introduction of that body to the desert gave it the time to reach its full potential. Likewise, Anatoli Boukreev outperformed everyone else during the rescue attempt on Everest. Because he was a superb athlete who had been climbing without supplemental oxygen, his body was maximally adapted to the brutal environment. Contrast the situations of Prosperi and Boukreev with that of the shipwrecked sailors who were suddenly and unexpectedly tossed out of their comfortable boats into the sea.

The third factor is luck. Everyone needed at least some good fortune, but these determined survivors were able to reduce the amount of luck they needed and increase their time to find it. The only one
who was especially lucky was Hermanigildo, who managed to find a fully equipped hand surgeon in the middle of the jungle.

All the survivors had some combination of these three ingredients, but none of them would have lived through their ordeals if they didn’t also have the fourth: the will to survive. Sometimes, will alone seems enough to get you through—as it was for a seventeen-year-old girl with little jungle experience and no forewarning who was literally dropped into the Amazon in a miniskirt.

Julianne Kufka, the daughter of German zoologists, was flying to her parents’ research station to spend Christmas 1971 with them in the Peruvian Amazon when her plane exploded. She awoke in a kapok tree, still belted into her seat. The jungle canopy had cushioned her 10,000-foot fall, but there was no sign of her mother, who had been sitting next to her, or of any other passengers. Search planes buzzed overhead, but Julianne couldn’t see them through the dense foliage—and they couldn’t see her. She would have to depend on herself to get out alive. “I tried to block out as many fears as I could,” Julianne later said, “so I could concentrate on getting through the undergrowth.”

Setting off in her purple knit miniskirt and carrying her macramé purse, the teenager soon stumbled across a stream and followed it downhill, hoping it would lead to a river. Rivers are the Indians’ roads through the jungle, and along a road she might find a traveler. She drank clear water from fast-flowing streams and waterfalls and ate only some candy she had in her purse. She slept sitting up, hunched forward over her folded knees, afraid that animals would be attracted to her body heat and the scent of blood from her insect bites.

Mosquitos attacked her relentlessly. Some carried eggs on their bodies, laid there by botflies. The fly’s eggs penetrate human skin through the mosquito bite and quickly develop into larva worms. The bite serves as an airhole through which the worm pokes out its head to breathe. If the sores are covered with body fluid and the worm’s head is submerged, its respiration will produce air bubbles. “I could actually feel them crawling and feeding on tissue and fat,” Julianne recounted. “My whole body was alive with parasites.”

Julianne removed a ring from her finger, shaped it into a hook, and used it to extract the inch-long worms. She twisted out thirty-three of them. There were more she couldn’t reach.

She kept up her strength by thinking of her father, resolving that he would not be left alone. “He’s not going to lose his daughter,” she told herself. “I will stay alive.”

After nine days, Julianne was found by an Indian hunting along the river she had been following with such determination. Her will—not her skills, her adaptations, or her luck—had kept her alive.

A miniskirted teenager is not generally the image that comes to mind when we think of a hardened survivor. Yet the will to prevail must exist in all of us, for we are all descendants of survivors. In societies where life has gotten comfortable, the will to survive remains latent. It is perfectly possible now to cruise through life without ever taking a survival test. Ensconced in social services, public health and safety laws, and police protection, we may never be seriously threatened by hunger, exposure, disease, or attack. Even when somebody does encounter a survival test, the standard for passing has often been lowered. Dealing with extreme cold might mean nothing more than returning to the ski lodge. A desert wanderer might be able to end his ordeal with a call from his cell phone. The idea of a survival test becomes a mockery when failure means nothing more than getting dropped from contention on a TV show.

One of the few settings where the ability to survive is still critically analyzed and tested is in the training of military commandos, such as Navy SEALs. Though candidates have already been preselected for strength, stamina, and intelligence, the program completion rate is only about 50 percent. Instructors say the successful candidates tend to be the quieter ones who possess the inner strength to keep their bodies and minds functioning beyond exhaustion. One Navy SEAL instructor told me that at the end of “Hell Week,” a grueling final exam of physical and mental exercises with very little sleep in between, the sailors are allowed to collapse on the beach. He then says to them, “Okay, everyone up for a ten-mile run.” There’s no run, but it tests to see who has the spirit to go on. The ones who stagger to their feet are accepted as SEALs.

Of the 6 billion people in the world today, very few are commandos. The population expanded exponentially once humans organized into civilizations. Without that development, our numbers would most likely still be less than one billion. Probably at least five out of six people alive today depend on society’s support and protection for their existence. To realize how dependent we are on civilization, consider this: in a wilderness setting, losing your eyeglasses might well be fatal. Any slight disability, any inherited or acquired disease, would quickly eliminate you from the competition. Who among us are the ones who could make it on our own?

With natural selection so disengaged, the predisposition to prevail becomes randomized and obscured in the population. Some people will retain it, others will not. One who did retain it is Aron Ralston, a twenty-seven-year-old mechanical engineer who set out in the spring of 2003 on a day hike through a remote canyon in Utah. Trying to slip through a 3-foot-wide slot between rock walls, he pushed against the side of a boulder—it shifted, pinning his hand underneath it. He was trapped, but he didn’t panic. “It took some big thinking to calm myself down,” Ralston recalled. He coolly tried all his options: he waited, but he hadn’t told anyone where he was going and he didn’t have that most modern tool of survival, a cell phone; he tried to chip away at the rock with his utility knife; he tried to lift the boulder, using his climbing rope to rig a series of pulleys. The 800-pound stone wouldn’t budge.

Nighttime temperatures dropped into the 30s, and by the third day he was out of food and water. He said he went through periods of depression, but “the majority of the time I was focused on pursuing one of the options.” By the fifth day, he realized that his only chance for survival was to exercise his last option—amputate his arm. Though his pocketknife was far too dull to cut through bone, by levering his arm he was able to snap both his forearm bones above the wrist. Then he applied a tourniquet—and cut his arm off. It took about an hour. He said his strength to endure the pain came from a higher power. “There was a greater presence than just me in that canyon.”

Even after he had amputated his arm, Ralston still had to rappel off a 60-foot cliff and walk 6 miles down the canyon before he was
spotted by hikers and rescued by a search helicopter. At the point of rescue, he was only a mile from his pickup truck. He almost could have driven himself to the hospital.

Testing the capacity for survival doesn’t necessarily require being placed in harsh surroundings. All of us, whether living at an extreme or protected by an advanced society, are surrounded by emotional and mental, if not physical, obstacles. We spend most of our lives on the near side of those barriers, even as we long to surmount them. We take the easy way out, arguing, often with much validity, that to do so is safer or more practical. If, however, we gather the will to cross over the obstacle, to confront the emotion or solve the problem, we gain strength from it. Telling the truth, making the sacrifice, doing the job though there won’t be any recognition for it—these are mental exercises that strengthen will as much as physical exercise strengthens muscle. Such efforts actually form nerve connections in the brain that make it easier to overcome an obstacle the next time. Moreover, if we persist in the face of adversity, we often get a “second wind,” much as an endurance runner does when he refuses to quit. The unexpected energy can carry us much farther than we ever thought possible and allow us to triumph over seemingly insurmountable odds.

I’ve witnessed the powerful effect of will, and the lack of it, not just in extreme settings but in hospitals and homes, where life-and-death struggles are just as real: the terminally ill mother who survived months longer than expected because she wanted to see her daughter’s wedding; conversely, the elderly but seemingly healthy husband who died shortly after his wife’s death because he couldn’t live without her. Whether a girl who survives a plane crash can also survive the jungle will be determined by her ability to call forth whatever mental strength she’s developed in her civilized life.

Willpower does seem easier to summon in harsh environments, where the terms of the struggle are brutally clear and there’s no room for dependence on others. The winning strategy for survivors would seem to be a contradiction: they’re able to focus narrowly and sharply on the demands of their environment while at the same time maintaining their focus on a goal that transcends their circumstances and gives them a larger reason to survive. For Marilyn Bailey, it was to
build a new life with her husband; for Lynn Robertson, a religious conviction that her mission was to “get the boys to land.” Bernie Chowdhury and Beck Weathers triumphed by vividly recalling their families; Andrew Hughes was driven to the limit in an attempt to save his. The motivation is not always for a higher purpose—Pablo Valencia derived his strength by imagining the pleasure he would have knifing the partner who betrayed him.