12/24/02: Being Prepared
I like having plans for things that won’t ever happen. So I’m all ready for the plane crash that will deposit me in the middle of the Canadian wilderness and force me to live off the land. Tons of things could prevent me from just walking back to civilization – I mean, I’ll be totally lost. Plus maybe I’ll have a broken leg. So I’ll have to stay out there, in the wilderness, maybe for two years.
Good luck, though, because I’ll have that great set of tools that every person travels with – including that big axe– and I’ll manage to make a fabulous cabin. With a chimney. Maybe I’ll find some clay deposits to make the bricks out of. I’m not sure on that point.
I’ll be okay for food, though. I know that you can eat acorns if you soak them in water for two days, so I can make acorn flour. I can catch fish, too – fish traps in waterfalls, automatic ice-fisherman things– I even know how to catch a fish with my bare hands. Theoretically. I can smoke bees out of hives for honey, and tap maple trees for syrup. I’ll catch, and raise, wild grouse, and eat their eggs. I’ve read my dad’s army field survival manual. I know how to build a smoke pit to preserve meat.
It will be very peaceful, out there by the lake – I just assume there will be a lake – and I will have an oddly civilized life. I can make acorn muffins, from my acorn flour and grouse eggs, and sweeten them with honey, and spread berry jam on them. Sure, the winters will be murder, but I’ll happen to have some complicated textbooks with me, and a guitar, so I can study, and write beautiful songs, and just in general live this totally uncomplicated life. Maybe I’ll make friends with a wolf. That seems like a good idea.
While I’m gone everyone will think I’m dead, but, thankfully, no one will go through my private stuff, or throw anything away, because they won’t want to give up on me until a body is found. I’m not so concerned on this point.
After two years, I’ll finally stumble back to the world. Maybe a lost hiker will find one of my paths – the ones I have cut, exploring my woods, finding acorn trees and berry bushes – and take the path to my cabin, which is humorously called “Key Fargo.” Maybe I’ll devise some elaborate method of finding my way back to the world, perhaps involving measurements taken from a tall tree, and trigonometry. I’ll knock on someone’s door and say, “I’m sorry to bother you, but you are the first person I’ve seen in two years,” then faint heroically on their front step.
I’ll be briefly famous, just long enough to get to meet Jon Stewart and Conan O’Brien, and perhaps Chris Martin and/or Colin Ferrill. I’ll write a lovely novel about my experience, in my bittersweetly-comical voice. It will make me a million dollars, which I can invest. My $50,000 a year in interest will go a long way in Greece.
I know what you’re thinking, but look, it never hurts to be prepared, okay?