Laurence Gonzales is a bestselling author and an editor for National Geographic Adventure magazine. His father was a fighter pilot in World War II and was the sole survivor when the B-17 he was flying was shot down in Germany. Hearing his father’s harrowing story sparked a fascination in young Laurence: the mysteries of survival—who lives, who dies, and why. In his book, Deep Survival, he examines perilous situations, the sometimes inexplicable decisions people made that contributed to their deaths, and what he sees as the common traits of the survivors.
Who survives is hard to predict. Interestingly, one of the demographics with the highest survival rates is children six and under. Gonzales says small children often survive “in the same conditions better than experienced hunters, better than physically fit hikers, better than former members of the military or skilled sailors. And yet one of the groups with the poorest survival rates is children seven to twelve. Clearly those youngest children have a deep secret that trumps knowledge and experience.”
From the prologue:
It’s easy to imagine that wilderness survival would involve equipment, training, and experience. It turns out that, at the moment of truth, those might be good things to have but they aren’t decisive. Those of us who go into the wilderness or seek our thrills in contact with the forces of nature soon learn, in fact, that experience, training, and modern equipment can betray you. The maddening thing for someone with a Western scientific turn of mind is that it’s not what’s in your pack that separates the quick from the dead. It’s not even what’s in your mind. Corny as it sounds, it’s what’s in your heart.