Never Alone, page 8
The forest was as intimidating up close as it had been from the air. Flat and boggy, it was dominated by black spruce, a northern conifer that doesn’t mind wet feet. Thick sphagnum moss, shaggy green and velvety soft, covered everything. Besides the small, scattered bushes, very few other plants seemed able to grow up through the moss. A native of a dry, Mediterranean climate, with mountains and valleys and sweeping vistas, I felt suffocated by the closely clustered trunks and their nearly interwoven branches.
The first night a storm hit, and the tents shook and swayed like mad. They were all equipped with woodstoves, but the gusting winds blew the acrid conifer smoke right back down the chimneys. First one smoke alarm blared, then another. I ran out to help someone find the off button, and on my way back to the tent, looked up into the sky to see it pulsing with flickering columns of white light.
The northern lights!
These weren’t the jaw dropping colors I had experienced in the few months I had lived in northern Ontario over a decade ago, but they were the first aurora borealis I had seen since then, and they felt like a tender welcome from an old friend. The forest might not be welcoming me just yet, but the sky certainly was. You can do this thing, it told me.
Though the guy lines of the tents were thick with frost and the cold bit right through my long underwear, I stood out under the brilliant, fluctuating sky until my teeth began chattering.
18
The Best Send-Off Possible
My cold tolerance grew day by day as my California blood remembered what it was to live in cold climates, like I had back in my twenties.
Base camp was a mixture of camera training, going over rules and procedures, interviews, and filming practice, with free time interspersed here and there. It was also an opportunity to continue stuffing our faces, as these meals would be the last dependable calories we might be seeing for a long time. There was camaraderie amongst the group, folks inventing throwing games played with tent pegs, but there was also a subtle undercurrent of competition and big talk, and a very different vibe than the bonding one back at boot camp. For the most part I kept to myself, neither capable of nor interested in that kind of posturing. I am a small woman—five feet four in shoes—from California, with obvious tree-hugging tendencies. As I was also clearly trying and failing to hide my massive anxiety, I didn’t feel anyone was particularly intimidated by my survival prowess or looking at me as serious competition. That was fine by me. What they didn’t know was that, while nervous about the environment, my anxiety was less about the coming adventure than the fact that now we were in the wilderness. That meant it was too late to buy backup wardrobe items. I was totally committed to my homemade clothing—much of which, despite having passed the cursory inspection, wasn’t yet wearable.
I was content to be discounted as soft and underprepared, knowing that ego and false confidence are liabilities, while humility is an asset. My main concern was what I could accomplish in the next few days and how much sleep I would have to give up to manage it.
If I wasn’t out at the archery range during free time, I was in my tent stitching madly. I could sometimes hear others talking to their loved ones from inside their own tents. The wi-fi on my outdated phone was long since broken, so that wasn’t an option for me, and I wasn’t sure who I’d be calling even if I could. While others were making the most of their last days of phone access, preparing to be incommunicado, I already was, and quite comfortable with it. A supportive spouse or family back home was a strength, certainly, but as I listened to the conversations happening around me day after day, I knew that my comfort and familiarity with being alone was one of mine.
As the weather grew increasingly bad—wet, driving snow and hail that were deafening against the tent walls—more of our orientation activities took place in the group mess tent. Eventually, the pressure to finish my projects became greater than the pressure to save face and appear prepared, so I began bringing my knitting into the group tent. While we were being briefed on bear safety and how to use a tourniquet, I worked on the final sleeve of my cable-knit sweater.
“Jeez, Woniya, cutting it a little close there, aren’t you?” someone asked.
“Um, yeah, I guess so,” I answered aloud. Haha. You have no idea, I thought. This is just one of my many unfinished projects, but it’s the only one I can easily bring to the mess tent.
It was too crowded in there to bring the whole sweater in, so I brought in just the sleeve and knit the cables from memory. I managed to finish it just before our group photo shoot, sewed it hastily on, and then pulled the finished sweater and my buckskin pants on for the pictures. Apparently, the food cramming was working, as my pants were incredibly tight. I was giddy enough at having finally finished the sweater that I didn’t care. The hardest part of the shoot, next to my belt digging into my belly, was working hard to look rugged and tough, when a beaming smile or goofy antics come more naturally to me in photos. When I got back to my tent and took the sweater off, I saw that while functional enough, the second sleeve was at least a third wider and several inches longer than the first. Oops. I guess goofy took care of itself. I didn’t have time to reknit it; it would have to do.
In the last few days before launch, we had to finalize our ten items. I had brought twelve options, wanting to see the place before deciding for certain. Now I was wrestling with the last two choices. Hindsight, as they say, is twenty-twenty, and while it would end up having an enormous bearing on my adventure, there was no way for me to know in this moment what these choices would eventually mean to me.
I went with what made the most sense at the time. The trees, as I had suspected from my research back home, all appeared small enough not to need splitting. Okay, I thought. I know I’ll miss it, but I believe I can manage without the axe. Let’s think this whole parachute cord thing through, though. The weather was making me nervous, and the gusting winds had me seriously questioning going out without paracord. Would snare wire, fishing line, and sweater yarn be enough to lash together my shelter and secure my tarp against driving arctic winds and many feet of snow? The wind was already almost collapsing the tents here in base camp, and this was just September.
I pictured a tarp whipping in the wind, secured by a thin strand of brass. Wire doesn’t have the tensile strength of cordage—bend it back and forth a few times and snap! Friends from up north had told me it would be crazy to attempt northern survival without trapping wire, but they said the same thing about doing it without paracord, and I couldn’t bring both. Besides, most trappers use cable, not wire, and whatever the material, I was no trapper.
I talked over my thoughts with another participant. “Well,” they asked, “how much experience do you have trapping?”
“Actual hands-on experience? None,” I answered.
“And how many people have been successful trapping on Alone before now,” they followed.
“To the best of my knowledge, none.”
“Right. So how likely do you think you are to be the first one?”
It was a good point. Trapping was uncertain, but shelter building and driving winds were both givens. At the last possible moment, second guessing my sweater plan, I switched out my snare wire for parachute cord and left the wire behind.
The memory of a lot of orientation camp was a blur to me after launch, but the moment of that choice remained crystal clear, as I thought back on it soberly over the next weeks and months.
My pile of “good enough” clothing projects grew, but the pile of ones I wasn’t sure I could trust my survival to hadn’t yet disappeared. When the announcement came that a window of clear weather was coming and we would be launched in two or three days, I kicked into even higher gear. Keeping the woodstove in my wall tent stoked so my fingers would be warm enough to work, I stitched into the wee hours by headlamp.
The last day before launch was chilly and gray, but thankfully without precipitation. It was a big day. The local native people in that region are the Dene, and though it was a plane ride away, the show staff were bringing the chief of Lutselk’e, the closest village, out to meet with us. We all stood out near the runway to greet him.
I hadn’t been comfortable with the idea of entering native land without the blessing of its people and had hoped to contact them somehow, but it hadn’t been possible. I was utterly thrilled to hear that the show was bringing the local chief out to us.
When the stairs from the small plane were lowered onto the gravel runway, it wasn’t just the chief but almost twenty tribal members of Lutselk’e Dene, from elders to teenagers, who climbed out. After the group had been offered snacks and coffee, I poured myself a scalding cup and looked around to see a beautiful elder grandmother sitting on a straw bale by herself. The deep lines on her face spoke of a long relationship with the land and a lot of wisdom.
“May I join you?” I asked her. She gave me a big welcoming smile and beckoned me over. I don’t drink coffee, but it seemed right to share the sacrament with her, so I took a swig and asked her the question I’d been holding for all these months, since learning where the show would be taking place. As is so often the case with place names, my understanding was that the name Great Slave Lake was an unfortunate legacy of colonization and antipathy between neighboring peoples. The last thing I wanted to do was participate in that legacy. “How do I best address the lake in your language?” I asked.
“I don’t know how you’d spell it in English,” she told me. “But I think it would appreciate being called ‘Tu Nedhe’ or ‘Ku Nedhe.’”
Appropriately, the translation is “big water.”
After coffee and snacks, it was announced that a ceremonial fire had been started for us to make offerings and ask the blessings of the ancestors for our journey.
As I knelt down by the fire to the sound of rawhide drums, tears rolled down my cheeks. The warm reception we received, the blessings of these people, and the opportunity for sacred ceremony before departure was all I had hoped for. I felt profoundly welcomed and encouraged by the people of this place and the ancestors. It was the best send-off possible.
Before I was ready to see them go, the group packed onto the plane and headed back to Lutselk’e.
Later, I sat in my tent waiting for the staff to come and watch me do my final packing for launch. I could still taste the coffee on my tongue as my eyes played, yet again, over my pile of gear. It was absurdly large and bulky. I hadn’t finished the second buckskin mukluk; it was still just some scraps of leather wrapped around my felt liner. There were other incomplete pieces as well, but everything was more or less serviceable. It was hard to fathom all I had accomplished in these few frenetic, adrenaline-saturated weeks.
Along with the other gear and clothing, I had my uniquely modified Leatherman and saw; a beautiful quiver of home-tanned leather and fur; my homespun, handknit mittens and hat; my homemade fur hat; the insulated buckskin winter overalls; a homemade parka of fur and buckskin; the handmade leather boots with knee-high felt liners; and two monumental handknit sweaters.
They weren’t my best work, but they finally existed in the flesh and not only in my delirious, over-ambitious dreams.
I had achieved the near impossible and made it through an incredible emotional, mental, and physical trial to be standing here now, bags packed, goals achieved, and neither my health nor my mother’s health in peril. I had done it and was still on my feet and ready for adventure.
It was incredible to think that in the eyes of the world, my Alone journey was only starting tomorrow. They’d never know what an enormous success just making it to launch was for me. There might be hardship to come, but it would be of a wholly different nature. As far as I was concerned, the survival adventure that started in the morning was my reward for the tremendous effort of having made it through the summer.
Our bags packed and trundled off to the staff tent where we wouldn’t have access to them until the moment of launch, I felt a relaxation I hadn’t experienced in months. I was so unused to the spaciousness and lack of pressure that the rest of that evening felt utterly surreal. While my own anxiety was substantially diminished, the rest of the group’s was still building. To lighten the mood and send us off well, we had a steak dinner and entertainment, in the form of the casting staff sharing their “most likely” list. So this is what they’d been giggling over until late the night before…
Ray: “Most likely to find psychoactive substances out there and eat them.”
Donny: “Most likely to find a cave and sleep in it for the whole adventure.”
And of course, Woniya: “Most likely to make amazing things…Most of them are almost done…”
I laughed along with the rest, the truth undeniable. As usual, I’d been far more transparent than I realized. For all I knew, a tent wall silhouette of me sewing and knitting furiously had been the evening entertainment for the late nighters in the camp this whole time.
Merriment over, we were ushered off to bed to get all the sleep we could before our predawn breakfast and launch preparations.
As we settled in for our last night of relative comfort, Ray walked up and down the aisle between the tents and read us poetry about bravely meeting the adventures to come. Nothing left to knit or sew, I drifted off for my first and last full night of sleep at orientation base camp.
Me nose-to-nose with the second bobcat, shortly before skinning and eating her.
My mother’s crushed leg, two days after her surgery, complete with Frankenstein staples.
My mother, looking as chipper as ever after her ordeal with the ladder.
Sweater number one in the photo I submitted for Alone approval, August 2018. Cable knit with homespun yarn of wool and alpaca fibers, folded to make it less obvious it has only one sleeve.
My housemate’s daughter, Emma, helping me dye the yarn for “the world’s biggest sweater.”
The “world’s biggest sweater” still in progress, as it was for countless weeks of my Alone preparations.
My handmade leather boots with felted wool and buffalo fur liners.
Part two
Living on Beauty
19
Launch!
I wake to the sound of scuffling in the tents all around me and dash from the warm sleeping bag to my clothes. It’s still hours before sunrise and the icy air bites right through my woolen long johns as I fumble around in the dark tent.
Breakfast is festive, everyone jovial as we help ourselves to our last real meal in who knows how long. The occasional sideways glances and forced laughs reveal the tension and nervousness behind the chipper façades. Breakfast sticks in my throat, which is dry with a combination of nerves and excitement. I take a big swig of tea and work it down.
After as many pancakes and sausage links as I can stomach, I take my place in line for our official prelaunch weigh in. I tip the scales at just under 150 pounds—pretty substantial for me and my small frame. I’ve managed to put on 22 pounds since spring, probably a handful of them here at base camp.
The producers and survival staff come out to shake our hands and see us off, and we load up our gear and head out to the far end of the runway.
We’ll be launched one at a time via helicopter. After that, we are on our own. Entirely. After over a week in our tight-packed little tent village, listening to one another snore, it’s hard to imagine.
Cameramen dot the runway. The name of the first to launch is called. We line up to wish her well, our hugs awkward in our puffy parkas, all of which are tighter than when we arrived.
Forty minutes later, we’re all relaxing against our stuffed backpacks, taking every opportunity to savor comfort and conserve calories, when I hear the thrumming of the returning helicopter and look up. The producer is walking toward me.
“Okay, Woniya,” he says. “This time it’s you.”
It’s actually here!
The rotors are deafening, and the wind they kick up stings my cheeks as I heave my bags into the weathered side basket of the helicopter, but I’m buzzing with so much adrenaline I hardly notice. I refused to be launched wearing anything else, but my buckskin pants are now so tight that I can barely get my leg raised for the big step into the cockpit. I take the ladder with a knee, stuck until I get a push from behind and a hand up from the pilot. I feel like a whale sewn into a leather corset, but the embarrassment is lost in the hilarity of it—I just hope no one is filming this.
In less than a minute I’m strapped in with a headset over my ears, heading off to my new home, over a thousand miles north of anywhere I’ve ever been.
I don’t remember when I’ve ever felt so alive. I’m like a child in my big headset, unsure how to use it. We soar into the air, banking away from the runway. The straps of the safety belt cut into my chest as I strain against them for a wider view.
The vastness of the lake and the emptiness of the wilderness are staggering. Not just enormous, but impossibly complex. Dotted with islands, large and small, and cut into tiny bays by innumerable fingers of rocky cliffs, they make me think of the fjords of Norway. The lake’s surface is every shade of blue, gray, and green—incredibly shallow here, deep and black there. Over and over I wonder if I’m actually seeing the far shore, then we rise higher and I realize it’s only another large inlet.
There’s a cameraman sitting next to me, and I know I’m supposed to engage the camera somehow—say something or look dynamic and daring for the viewers—but I’m transfixed and don’t want to miss a second by looking anywhere but out the window. It isn’t just that it’s beautiful—these moments are vital. They’re my one chance to get a larger perspective on this place before I’m dropped into it to fend for myself.
