Ol' Tolky Is Proven Right Again
His assertion that calamities and malfeasances take time to tell, and engage the reader no end, versus pleasant times that frankly bore people, is expounded herewith by BOOJUM! Which is a long-winded way of saying that I'm back on 'How To Not Die's 'Everything Zombie Movies Get Wrong About Surviving' and I'm going to roll Headings 6 and 7 together, as they are closely linked.
Okay, I'm returning to edit this intro to the Intro as there isn't really an Intro, for what you see in front of you is a whole blog. Art!
On an associated theme, I just finished watching Season One of 'Paradise', a title of immense irony. We are told of the approach and execution of the apocalypse in flashbacks, and how the 25,000 survivors live. I may come back to this.
ANYWAY on with the headings.
LIVING IN THE WOODS WITH NO SKILLS
As 'How To Not Die' has it, a rag-tag group of survivors, fleeing the urban hellscape overrun by the living dead - they don't make this explicit so I've added that in for context - come across a clearing in the woods and assume they can live off the land. Cut to a scene where they are happily roasting game over an open fire. Art!
HTND boldly states that half the people reading this heading would be dead within a week, were they ever placed in such a situation. Why so? Well, according to EXACTLY NO SOURCES WHATSOEVER between 70 - 80% of the plant-life "depending on the region" - a very big proviso - are either toxic or inedible. Really? Hmmm.
Trust me, I did a bit of digging here. I don't know where they get their statistics from, as asking Google reveals there is no official tally of toxic or inedible South Canadian plants in percentages; there are up to 700 species that are definitely poisonous and will kill or cripple incautious Hom. Sap. whom dine on them. Art!
That still leaves about 40,000 other plant species which may be only slightly toxic or without any nutritional content. Globally, the statistic is that about one-third of all plant life is inimical to human consumption, a very long way short of 70% or 80%. Naughty HTND! Egging the pudding, to use a relevant metaphor.
They also overstate the risks to 'Unskilled Amateurs', hereafter UA, as being between 25 - 50% risk of suffering toxic poisoning from plants. That contradicts their own earlier statement about the 70 - 80% inedibility, which implies a 20- 30% chance of poisoning or a waste of time. Neglectful HTND! Art?
Lords And Ladies berries
They describe potential symptoms of plant poisoning, including vomiting, nerve damage and organ failure. This invokes what Conrad would call 'latency', that is, how long the symptoms take to develop, which they state occur within 30 minutes to 6 hours. However - my my that word again! - they neglect to mention that multiple toxic plants, such as the LAL above, taste so disgustingly awful that you'd spit out the first mouthful you took.
ANYWAY they then move on to shelter and temperatures. The UA face death from exposure in 3 - 5 days, without reference to which season we're talking about, presumably not high summer. Or even high summer if we switch locale to This Sceptred Isle. If temperatures get below zero then death from hypothermia can arrive from one to three hours from onset to exposure. Art!
As proof that they're generalising wildly, here's a 'Winter Severity' map of South Canada. Winter in Nebraska would be baaaaad; winter in Florida would be barely noticeable. So! we shall anticipate that they're talking about the blue areas on the map above. Once more WHERE ARE THE SOURCES! HTND asserts that the UA would take between four to six hours to construct a shelter, and so might well be dead before it got finished. A trained shelter-builder - one pauses to ask where they got such training in the middle of Chicago? - can do it in between 45 to 90 minutes. Art!
The fetching and canny 'Wildbeare' showing how to construct a single-person basha. Despite her Youtube moniker she lives in the UK, and thus does not have to worry about <ahem> wild bears, a topic HTND avoids altogether. Conrad thus states that the UA had better have at least one can of bear spray with them, plus a shotgun or two for defence against packs of wolves, or feral dogs, or for hunting game.
For this heading they end with two statistics: death from starvation may take from three weeks to two months. Death from dehydration will arrive in three to five days; presumably quicker in the hotter regions of South Canada. So, does this forest clearing have access to sources of water, barring rainfall?
IGNORING BASIC WATER SANITATION
In films, asserts HTND, survivors regularly drink from streams and pools they come across, with absolutely no consequences. In what we call 'real life' this behaviour can have extremely serious consequences, such as dysentery, cholera or cryptosporidium. Plus death. Just thought I'd throw that in there. Art!
'Flavour Trip' cooking a meal alongside a stream. Note that they don't use the river water as anything but a backdrop, as they aren't stupid. Plus it has a greenish cast to it that would put off any but the most desperate. Art!
Rather oddly, the single instance HTND uses is from 1854 and the Broad Street cholera epidemic that killed 127 people in three days. Evidence that necking nasty water will, indeed, do you in, and in quick order too. One supposes that they needed to use an outbreak this old because modern sanitation, plumbing and water treatment have rendered cholera almost unheard of in South Canada - 20 cases per year from a population of 330 million. A drop in the bucket, to use an apt metaphor. Art!
Cholera is treated by using Oral Rehydration mixtures, which require - you may be ahead of me here - water. Potable water, not that green stuff flowing behind Amii and Jimi.
The solution - do you see wh O you do - to this problem of potability is to boil your stream or pool water before drinking it, for all of 60 seconds, which kills off 99% of any microorganisms lurking in it. Of course - obviously! - that requires making a fire and have a cooking utensil to put the water into. Otherwise, HTND recommends 8 drops of bleach per gallon of water, which I checked and is valid, although it might not kill off cryptosporidium. Art!
Another item that HTND completely ignore, so Your Humble Scribe has added it in. You can dose water in the wild and be able to drink it within 30 minutes, which is a lot easier than boiling a bucket over a fire on an improvised tripod, and far lighter than a dozen bottles weighing a stone total. Art!
That's a point HTND makes as well. TWD never shows what they call 'water discipline', despite being set in a region of South Canada that is - hang on let me dig - set in Georgia, where heat, humidity and standing water all breed scads of water-borne diseases. Boiling a pot of water over a campfire might not be riveting enough for the audience, perhaps?
Being hydrated also loops back to the first heading we covered, where HTND emphasised the importance of drinking enough water to be able to function effectively physically.
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