Look at Jeff and Hunter Leininger, father-and-son partners, laden with gear, laden with father-son issues, toiling grimly through the Tongass Forest in the first episode. On USA Network right now, you can find Race to Survive: Alaska, in which eight pairs of contestants huff and puff their way into some very hard-core Alaskan topography-six races over 100-plus miles, with no shelter provided. “It’s just a matter of one skill that I can’t control. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have the skills,” he reflected to his GoPro.
Shields, in contrast, Shields, my spirit-mirror. For those 87 days, Fowler was Kipling’s “man of infinite-resource-and-sagacity”: fishing, chopping wood, a marvel to behold as he managed his plummeting calories and husbanded his plummeting moods. This is the aspect of Alone, which has run for nine seasons, that made people love it with particular intensity during the pandemic. Fowler, a boatbuilder, kept himself busy, did not wallow. Alaska seems to be a perfect place for all of this to go down-the still-open, still-wild, burning-and-freezing American frontier.įor comparison, Zach Fowler-the modest prodigy of durability who won that season of Alone-lasted 87 days (and lost more than 70 pounds in the process). And sure enough, on only his third day out there, his third day in the storm and vacancy of his own aloneness, Shields “taps out.” He can’t take it anymore: He radios the producers. He looks momentarily holographic, like he might go fuzzy and vanish from the picture. He exhales, as if the weight of it is about to collapse his rib cage. Deposited on the cold shore of a fuming-with-bleakness lake in the Andean foothills, with only a couple of GoPros for company (that’s the hook of Alone: no camera crews the contestants film themselves), he spreads his arms, throws back his head, and, in an attempt at exultation, bellows, “PATAGONI-AAAAH!”- only to be almost visibly demolished, half a second later, by the ensuing unresponding immensity of silence and solitude.
Remember Jim Shields from Season 3 of Alone ? How passionately I relate to this guy.
It’s not Alaska that breaks you, or Mongolia, or northeastern Labrador-it’s the contents of your own head. And if, like me, you’ve watched 432 episodes of survival TV, the beloved subgenre that pits bare, forked man against the unrelenting wilderness, you’ve seen it happen over and over again. The mind, the mind-it can bear you sweetly along on pulses of transparent super-energy, or it can rear up and bite your face off. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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