ALONE in the WILD - Thanksgiving 2012

WHAT ARE YOU THANKFUL FOR?
      We may be thankful for our bountiful thanksgiving feasts, our fancy dinner plates and wine glasses, our cars, our jobs, our new clothes, etc. However, we may take for granted the most essential ingredients in our lives: our family and friends, the abundant food not only available to us on Thanksgiving Day but on every day, the warm clothes on our backs, and the roof over our heads.
      One Scottish television producer/director/camera operator and adventurer, Ed Wardle, came to realize what he is most thankful for in his life when he took on the project of trying to survive in the Canadian Yukon alone for three months in the summer of 2009.
      Ed took up this challenge by filming a documentary of his time Alone in the Wild, and the only contact he had with the outside world was through a radio to use during emergencies, and a one way phone which he used to post daily Twitter updates. Channel 4 and National Geographic processed and edited the films Ed made to compose the series, Alone in the Wild. The documentary can be found in full here.
      If I were to outline every day of Ed's journey I would take a bit away from its overall beauty, but below I will begin to describe Ed's isolation experience by laying out what he does during the first third of the series:

WHAT HAPPENED
Day 1

      Ed Wardle's goal is to survive completely alone for three months in far Northern Canada. This was always a dream for him, but it turned out to be more than he bargained for. He is left on the edge of Tin Cup Lake by floater plane, with a gun, some basic supplies, radio, watch, camera equipment, canoe, map ... and himself.
      July 3rd, 2009 begins his adventure, and the person who dropped him off via airplane is the last person he plans on seeing for three months. From the moment he is left behind, the experience is surreal and unbelievable. This is evident when Ed says "what the hell am I doing?" as he sits down to take in the situation, unsure of what to do next.
      Ed then pulls himself together and adjusts the cameras and puts it in the canoe before setting off down Stay Away Creek, for everything for now on during his journey will be filmed by him. It is beautiful weather to start an adventure, though it is rougher country than he had expected, with muddy swampy areas greeting him when he reaches the shores of Dog Pack Lake.

      The loneliness he feels will heighten this experience, and the decisions he will be making constantly effect his well-being and survival. He needs to find a suitable camping spot, where he will put his supplies and sleep.
      It is a hot Canadian summer evening, and mosquitoes attack him "while plagued with decisions". He puts up the hammock, then a sheet over it to complete his "new bedroom", and sets up a basic electric fence around the clearing to ward off bears.
      A twig cracks and grunts are heard from a distance --- possibly a moose?
      He goes fishing when hungry, and his hopeful there will be many fish in the lake. While fishing, he spots a beaver swimming by. Then he catches a grayling, and two other fish (possibly grayling, Ed does not specify), for his dinner. They taste great because Ed is hungry, yet he will need more than three fish a day or he will start loosing weight.
      It is scary at 1 in the morning, when Ed is heading to his hammock, because that is when bears are most active. He wants to be quiet, but has to make noise so he does not surprise the bear if he happens to come across one. His electric fence is reassuring once inside its perimeter, but Ed is unsure what happens when it runs out of batteries...

Day 2

      Ed Wardle wakes up to a squirrel outside his perimeter in a tree. He contemplates shooting it, because he can, but thinks it "doesn't seem right, somehow, to kill a little squirrel". So he doesn't kill it for breakfast, and instead spend the morning making a lean-to shelter nearby. While building, he confesses to half making it up, but hopefully it will be waterproof, and he is proud of his creation once it is finished.
      The mosquitoes are huge, plentiful, and hard to deal with.

Day 3

      Ed Wardle came out to the wilderness to see it he "could do it", to go back where we were designed by Mother Nature to live as human beings. He is surrounded by "spectacular scenery" as he goes for a swim in the lake, something he's always wanted to do, though the water is freezing. It is calm out, with hardly a breeze, while he goes canoeing.
      He is in possession of a radio tracking device, on which he has to press the "OK" button every morning by 10 am so the series producers know he is alright. If he fails to send the message, then a plane will fly over at around noon to see if he is fine.
      He sees a classic bald eagle, though he seems unsure of its classification when he refers to it as: "golden --- American --- bald eagle?"

Day 4

      Ed now needs to be careful going back to his food stash in the morning, because it could attract bears. He takes a log with rope attached to it, climbs a tree to ~ 20 feet up, and hoists his food sacks up to keep them out of reach of animals.

      He wants to do extraordinary things all the time, so his life is exciting, vital, and worthwhile. This --- besides the "boyhood dream" ideal --- is one of the main reasons why Ed Wardle has come to the unforgiving Yukon. Not quite the same thing as running a marathon, but it sure is thrilling.
      When a plane flies overhead, Ed gets emotional and sits down. He cries because "it's gone", which is upsetting. Ed thinks that it might have flown over to see if he was OK, but he wishes it had done something to acknowledge that he had been seen --- like waggle its wings or something. He will have to cope with being alone, yet it is heartbreaking being left behind.
      Later that evening, he sees a porcupine (though he is yet again unsure of its classification) up a tree, but does not know why a porcupine would be up a tree. He wonders about eating him, because he can, but he is "kinda cute", so Ed leaves him alone.
      "It is good night for me, and good night for Mr. Porcupine."

      Ed Wardle canoes to the other side of the lake at the end of week 1 to drop off the first lot of tapes. A plane will come by in the early morning hours to pick them up.
      Back near base, he cleans pots, swims in the lake, eats by the campfire, gazes at the scenery, and fishes knee deep along the bank.

Day 7

      This morning, Ed goes around the surrounding area and sets up four rabbit traps in various locations. When he was young and living on a farm in Scotland, Ed and his brother would hunt rabbits on the weekend and sell them to the local butcher for 10 pits or so. He does not enjoy or want to kill, but he recognizes that he must in order to find proper food.
      He tries not to be nervous about bears, but when walking along the side of an incline slope, he stops to listen for noises in the surrounding brush. Maybe it is nothing, but there could be something there. Later, he finds a big footprint pressed against the moss. If it is a bear print, then there is a pretty big bear lurking somewhere nearby.

Day 8

      He is hungry today, finding it difficult to move around. Ed has now come to the last hole in his belt from the loss of weight he has had to endure, because he is not getting enough food. He finds himself doing things again and again because he forgets what he was doing in the first place. Even in describing this experience to the camera on his shoulder, he repeats phrases already spoken.
      Ed visits his rabbit snares, but there are none caught --- not in a single one. Walking back to camp, Ed realizes his current predicament, saying he "definitely can't last three months like this..."

Day 9

      It started raining last night and it hasn't stopped, lasting all day. Ed Wardle waits the weather out.

Day 10

      Ed resorts to eating leaves and purple flowers. The plants with the purple flowers (which Ed found a few days ago, but is just eating them now) are known as Indian Potato, with the potato part in the earth, so Ed has to dig them up in order to acquire the nutritious part. There is a poisonous and nonpoisonous variety of the plant, and both live in the same regions and look nearly identical. The only different is the cap-like structure right before the petals: in the poisonous variety the cap is long and spiky (like eyelashes), while in the nonpoisonous variety the cap is bulbous and smooth. Since this is the only difference, Ed has to check each plant to make sure it is safe before eating it.

      Later on, Ed sees a moose trudging through the lake not too far away from where he stands among the trees. While he could get nearly a month of food from one moose (and at this moment is close enough to get a good shot at it), according to Canadian law, he is not allowed to hunt big game and so just watches it pass him by. Watching the beautiful creature, Ed thinks contemplating how he could eat him "seems a bit cruel, but everything here is about food".
      A porcupine scurrying up a nearby trunk scares the moose away --- Ed decides to kill the porcupine because he is hungry enough to do so. He shoots the porcupine, gets him, so it falls into the water. Ed picks it up out of the water, skins it and guts it. He says it is "like a big pig, really", and has to get into the butchering mentality so he can work fast enough before the flies can get in. Usually we are used to getting our food from supermarkets, and we miss the whole process beforehand. Ed Wardle makes a point that he does not enjoy doing this, but it is just something he has to do.
      Even while roasting it over the fire, he doesn't fancy eating it because it resembles a large rat and is so alien to him as a food source. Yet when he begins eating it, he says the liver is genuinely delicious and is definitely better than fish.
      Ed is worried the pile of guts left behind and then the smell of the roasting campfire will attract bears. So he says "hello, bear" into the darkness as he creeps through the forest to his camp. He is nervous on his walk, singing about his situation as he goes. Hopefully the electric fence will help him sleep as he rolls into his hammock.
      In the hammock and periodically glancing over his shoulder, Ed tells the camera in his lap a story someone told him before he came to the Yukon. When camping, two friends were sleeping in their sleeping bags when a bear lumbered by. The bear dragged one friend away by his sleeping bag to eat him, and because he was zipped up all the way in the sleeping bag he couldn't get out, so luckily his friend woke up and shot the bear, saving his friend.
      "I really wish I hadn't known that story, thanks."

Day 15

      Ed Wardles decides to "experiment" and move camp, trying to find other places with more food. Before moving everything, he journeys up the sides of the valley to see what energy it will take to leave. On those steep sides, rocks loosely fall and he nearly loses his footing.
      On his trek, Ed finds a pile of bear feces, and their relative freshness solidifies the bear's presence in those parts. Nearby, there is freshly dug up ground, but Ed does not know what all of it means. "I just don't know, I don't know enough."
     Ed sees something in the trees, and although he is too far away to tell exactly what it was, he is wide-eyed and alert. The bags under his eyes are profound as he throws a "hello" at the trees. He says "let's get out of here" and starts walking back down the slope and towards camp.
      Closer to the water, Ed looks behind him and says he sees a bear through the trees. Ed speeds up, wanting to run but knowing if he does so he may entice the bear to chase him, so he repeats "there's a bear, there's a bear" "don't run" and "it's ok" to try and stay calm. As he speed walks, he keeps glancing behind him, saying he caught a glimpse of a dark coated bear running the area he had just left.
      The hairs on the back of Ed's neck are standing up, and the video cuts to when he is alone in his hammock that night. With the green glow from the camera's night vision throwing the lines and scruffiness of Ed's face into relief, hearing him whisper "I keep hearing things" chills to the bone. The stillness of his features and his highly dilated pupils make this the most intense scene in the series.
      In the dead of night, Ed Wardle looks behind him from his suspended position, tucked into the folds of the hammock. Half of his mind thinks that everything will be fine, but the other half thinks he is "taking a big risk sleeping here like this". Ed thinks he should pack up his supplies and move camp somewhere else.

July 2009

      Ed --- thin, weak, weathered --- cries "this is hard" to the camera in the relentless Canadian midmorning air. He lacks concentration and wonders "what have I got myself into...".

Day 16

      Ed says he promised to film even if he had nothing to say, and he has had nothing to say for days now. It is as though everything has stopped and all that remains is silence. There is only silence in the heart of the Yukon. At a little bit after 49 minutes into Alone in the Wild, Ed reports that there are no animals and no fish in the valley. His leaving thoughts of wisdom ponder if without any stimulus, perhaps we just stop...

REMAINING QUESTIONS
      The second half of Alone in the Wild seems to go continuously from bad to worse to worser. One of the main life lessons that I walked away from this film with was that seemingly simple decisions such as: Where do I go next? Do I spend my time hunting rabbits, porcupines, or fishing? can be the difference between life and death. With his own decisions in mind, I wonder what Ed Wardle would do differently if he did this experience over again.
      In Alone in the Wild, Ed eats fish for a week before making rabbit snares and waits even longer before hunting porcupines. I wonder if the second time around he would instead search for alternative food sources earlier. Would he hunt more animals, such as porcupines, beavers, squirrels, etc.? Would he make the rabbit snares earlier and multiply their abundance and range so as to improve the likelihood of success? Would he fish every day, especially towards the beginning when there seems to be more fish around?

      Ed Wardle seems to know the bare minimum about the surrounding flora and fauna, and only is really sure of what specialists advised him of before embarking on his adventure in the first place. He fails to properly recognize the bald eagle when he sees it, does not seem to be positive of the porcupine at first, does not know what sort of habitat he should expect the salmon to be in, and does not know what the torn up earth means for the nearby bear activity. If Ed was to redo this whole experience, I wonder if he would do more studying on the local terrain before leaving. Would he research the most common flora and fauna? Where they are most likely found, and what they mean for his survival (such as bears being negative, fish and game being positive)?

      We may contemplate the answers to the questions above, but we will never know the true answers if Ed Wardle refuses to venture back into the stomach of Yukon, Canada. Which brings me to my next question:
      If given the chance to redeem his honor and attempt this wilderness survival challenge again, would Ed take it? I think not. If you have seen the series in its entirety, you will know that Ed nearly goes mad towards the end from the isolation. Throughout the 51 days he is in the wilderness, Ed faces joy, fear, and hunger, but it is the loneliness that ultimately consumes his fortitude and destroys his endurance.

      On a spinoff of the last question, I wonder if Ed would be willing to do it again if he could bring even just one or two other people with him. Since it was the loneliness and not the hunger that made him quit in the end, I wonder if having two or three people trying to survive in the wilderness would create a different overall tone of the series. This seems it would make it more of a survival guide/reality tv show instead of one man trying to live off the land by himself.

      After watching this and seeing how it effects Ed Wardle's mental state so much --- being cut off from the outside world as he starves ---, I wonder who would be willing to take his place. After seeing Alone in the Wild, who would be willing to accept such a challenge? Someone with more training in survival or of the surrounding Yukon during that time of the year? And if someone watched Alone in the Wild and then attempted the same challenge with the same criteria (same time span and time of year, same terrain, same supplies and safety protocol, etc.), would they learn from Ed's mistakes?

      Nonetheless, something positive has to be said about Ed's incompetence in completing aforementioned challenge. Since he is not professionally trained in the skill of prolonged, isolated survival, he lent the series a greater sense of realism. I honestly believe that a common person with a similar skill level as Ed's would experience similar triumphs and hardships as Ed did on his journey. Ed knows how to make a fire, fish, climb trees really high, and skin and gut animals in order to properly cook them. I know personally that I can only fish and climb trees well, so I would have to learn how to make a proper fire and how to butcher fresh game before being able to last even half as long as Ed did in the wild.
      When reading over some commentary on the series on www.channel4.com, I noticed that a few compared Ed Wardle to Bear Grylls, a British adventurer, writer and television presenter (best known for starring in the show Man vs. Wild). In Bear Grylls's show, he has a team of people doing the camera work, so he does not have to worry about the equipment nor about every being totally alone. Grylls also would receive medical attention a lot quicker than Wardle would, though in Grylls's show they tell him to put himself in more extreme positions than he would if he was making decisions on his own. However, I think the key difference between Alone in the Wild and Man vs. Wild is that Wardle was trying to live alone in the wild, whereas Grylls is dropped in the wilderness and then spends his time trying to find civilization ASAP.

      These next two questions are trivial, just details in the series that were never explained, so I will state them plainly. When Ed Wardle travels from Dog Pack Lake to Tincup Lake, he does not explain how the plane receives the remaining tape recordings. Does he leave them on the opposite end of the lake and then Tweet the production staff their coordinates? I do not know.
      Also, when Ed does travel, he goes up a mini-mountainside and down the other side before journeying alongside a river to get to the next lake. Why does Ed not just venture by canoe? Was there no river or smooth crossway connecting Dog Pack to Tincup? What happened to the canoe if Ed left it behind? Again, I do not know but would like to.

      This next one is more opinion than question, but when Ed decides for certain to leave Dog Pack Lake and trek to another one for better resources is the day after he sees the bear and "keep[s] hearing things". And so, is the fear of bears the real reason why Ed left camp, risking facing the unknown in order to search for a new campsite? If so, then what does this decision making process say about how fears can influence the behavior of people in life and death situations?

      I consider the breaking point of Ed Wardle's reserve to be around the time when he has enough courage or desire to open the envelope of his family and friend's pictures and letter. They did not improve his mental state, but seemed to simply remind him of the world he left behind. They reassured him of the love and care he would receive upon completion of the challenge, and so this might have pushed him over the edge into throwing in the towel so that he could see his loved ones again. How long would he have held out if he had not seen those glimpses of his old life? 'Til death?

FINAL IMPRESSIONS
      This is a fantastic series. Although it aired in 2009, it's message still resonates with every viewer. I can understand why they have not attempted another season, since they would have to find someone crazy enough to take Ed's place, or convince Ed to come back. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is even slightly interested in this sort of topic.
      I would love to read a psychological analysis on Ed Wardle's mental state and changes throughout the documentary. An anthropological study on how we have lived in the wilderness in history might also be aided by this film. In both fields, the isolation effects in particular could shed light on how being social animals has helped us cope with exposure in the wild, and to what extent we have become social over the centuries, that one man cannot survive more than 50 days in the wild without needing to see those he loved. If there is a similar show done with a few people working together (such as a more realistic version of Survivor), then that could lend intel on how people work together in survival situations and what sort of relationship dynamics grow under such conditions.
      There is so much that this documentary can teach us: how to become humble under the powers of Mother Nature, how to respect those who willingly place themselves under those pressures in order to study that lifestyle and educate us on what it is like, and how important the surrounding biosphere is to our daily survival.

Want to know more about Alone in the Wild? Check out Channel 4's webpage for the show: Alone in the Wild, where you can read articles, learn more about Ed's camp, the equipment he brought and the safety protocol adhered to during the program's duration.

disclaimer: all pictures (all featuring Ed Wardle in Alone in the Wild) were found by searching "ed wardle" in Google Images.