Dual Survival — “Eating Dust”

First a reminder that there is another new episode of Dual Survival on this evening. Usual time: 9:00 EDT. Tonight’s episode is entitled “Hippo Island”. Here’s the official description:

The hosts use waterlogged binoculars and a dying GPS to escape the hippo-infested marshland of Botswana’s Okavango Delta

Now, on to “Eating Dust”.

This episode takes place on the salt flats of Baja, Mexico, and eases into the adjacent mountains. Some of the locations they go to for episodes often don’t look like too much fun. This actually looked to me like a fairly fun place to be (well, aside from the possibility of dying of thirst).

One of the first things I noticed was the way Cody was walking across the salt flats. Usually, we see him doing a rather careful toe-to-heel (or at least mid-foot) step. Here, he was just striding along, heel-to-toe. Why the difference? Well, usually he is bushwhacking through some pretty hostile territory and needs to be carefully what he steps on. The mid-foot placement is good for that: it puts the weight down more slowly and gives you a chance to feel what you are stepping on before putting full weight on it. But across the salt flats, there’s just nothing, so he reverted to the old heel-to-toe. I find myself doing much the same, but not to the same extreme as Cody. When I am on a trail I’m pretty much heel-to-toe, but when bushwhacking I find I convert to something much closer to toe-to-heel, depending on the terrain and my familiarity with it.

For some reason this episode made me wonder just how much of the show is staged. I don’t mean staged as in fake, but carefully planned in advance. If you are in a desert, you show specific desert survival skills, even if not needed in that particular situation.

For instance, I really don’t think Cody needed to piss on his bandana. Yes, in a true, critical desert situation, that is a useful technique to know. But Dave didn’t have his head pissed on, and he did just fine. I also found in interesting that they just happened to do their desert nighttime hike during a full moon. I bet they planned the date of this episode pretty carefully.

Another example was fire-building. In each episode, they don’t necessarily use the technique that might be easiest, but the technique that is more possible in that particular environment. As before, a bow drill probably would have worked just fine. We had Cody showing up how to make twine (for the bad-ass snare he made that caught a rabbit), so they could make the bow drill. Instead, we had Dave using his urine in a bag to make a lens. Cool technique, and great to have demonstrated, but probably not the best solution when easier options were available.

However, it wouldn’t work in too many other environments. You really need that sort of hot, dry-air atmosphere for it to work (and, quite frankly, I was rather surprised it worked at all). Since he used urine for the liquid to form the lens, he was getting a lot of scattering of the light, and thus was focusing less on the magic spot. The folds in the plastic also would have increased scattering. One thing I might have tried differently was using a thinner shape for the liquid instead of a sphere (more or less). Again, less liquid to pass through and less scattering and absorption. Nonetheless, Dave got it to work, which was rather impressive.

Finally, I must point out some of the times when Cody’s bare feet came in quite handy. A minor one was to notice how it used them in ways that shod people just don’t. When he was pointing out the flood zone, he just pointed with his foot. This is not something shod people do — it just doesn’t occur to them. But when one is barefoot it comes naturally. He did this a few times.

But the more impressive (but unsurprising to those who regularly go barefoot) was his using his feet to help find water. If you go barefoot a lot you know just how much you can feel of the different surfaces you walk on. So it was not surprise that Cody could feel that he was walking on slightly damp sand, and could use that to know where to dig to find water. It just comes naturally.

Overall, quite an enjoyable episode.