Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [34]
“Studies have shown that it actually works,” John said.
He wasn’t joking. John wasn’t much for irony, I’d learned. Nor did he have more than the most tangential grasp of popular culture. Combined with my lack of knowledge about archaeology, rugby and mountaineering techniques, this rather limited our topics of conversation on the trail. At times, even the different dialects of American English and Australian English caused confusion. An hour or so out of camp, John paused and unslung his daypack.
“I’m going to take a wee break here,” he said. I plopped down next to him and cracked open a bottle of water, delighted that John was already feeling tired, too.
“Do you mind if I wee in privacy?” he said, reaching for his fly.
Desperate for something to talk about during our twelve or more hours spent each day in each other’s company—including three face-to-face meals—I flipped through my mental Rolodex for topics before hitting on the canon of adventure literature. But even here we seemed to speak two different languages. I’d read stacks of entertaining manversus-wild tales for my work; John read them like instruction manuals. My favorites were classics like Wind, Sand and Stars, a dreamy existential memoir of piloting an open-cockpit plane over deserts and mountains, written by the author of The Little Prince. John was partial to books such as The Long Walk, in which an escapee from a Soviet prison camp wanders from Siberia to India, scavenging food and facing down death as he crosses the Gobi Desert and the Himalayas.
“When I was driving across Africa, I was always calculating—time, water, diesel, daylight,” he told me at one snack break. “I knew that if something went wrong I had to fix it or I’d die. You always have to be ready for a survival situation. Always have your headlamp. Your poncho for shelter. A little bit of food and water.”
Sometimes, to keep the conversational ball rolling, I slipped into reporter mode and asked rhetorical follow-up questions. John tended to stop, plant his bamboo pole, turn to look at me and then pause for about fifteen seconds, as if my query was so inane that he couldn’t walk and formulate a response to it at the same time. Eventually, he’d say, “Actually . . . no.” Then he’d wait a few more uncomfortable seconds before answering.
“If you ran out of food, couldn’t you survive out here on edible plants?” I asked. I was fairly certain that I’d read something about this in one of the many “How to Survive Anything” stories I’d read. One thousand one, one thousand two . . .
“Actually . . . no. Survival is a matter of self-discipline, Mark. There was a girl in a plane crash a few years ago, in the Amazon. She had lived in the jungle with her family, so she knew—you always follow the water and you never eat anything. And if you have to eat something, put a little on your arm and wait a couple hours for a reaction. If nothing happens, put some on your lips. Only then can you try to eat a tiny bit.”
“What about drinking water?”
“I learned a little survival trick when I was mountain climbing with some Russians. If you have no clean water, take some dirty water and filter out all the bits with one of your socks. Leave the bottle out in the sun for six hours, and the UV rays will kill all the bugs. I’ve used that one a couple of times.”
Everywhere we walked in the mountains of Peru, we were surrounded by cold, running water—rivers and streams and springs and cascades. Almost none of it was safe to drink, thanks to the habit of livestock at all altitudes to use these picturesque sources as latrines. As we made the final climb to Valentin’s farm, I could feel some serious intestinal discomfort