Call of the Wild

The enduring appeal of watching human beings attempt to master the Alaskan backcountry

- James Parker

Overheard in the men's bathroom of a movie theater in Boston, after a screening of Creed III:

"That movie basically just makes me want to get in shape." 
"It makes me want to get in shape mentally."
"Huh?"
"Bro, that movie was all about mental stuff.
You didn't get that?"

The mental stuff. That's where it's at. 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. 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. It's not Alaska that breaks you, or Mongolia, or northeastern Labrador-it's the contents of your own head.

Remember Jim Shields from Season 3 of Alone? How passionately I relate to this guy. 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. He exhales, as if the weight of it is about to collapse his rib cage. He looks momentarily holographic, like he might go fuzzy and vanish from the picture. 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. His Alone time is over.