survival

Human beings spend a lot of time just surviving. There’s little time for anything else. We have three basic needs: warmth, shelter, and food, and we spend the majority of our day meeting them. In this way, we haven’t come much further than Cro-Magon man. We like to think so, but we haven’t. I make this observation because sometimes I look around Merlin and think this camper is like a cave and Joost and I are cavemen.

Our day is very similar to the next. Like the caveman, every morning we have to roll up our furs, store them away, and turn the bed into a dinette set. We have a multi-use living space. Then we go to the watering hole to bathe. This is crucial. You want to be near a good watering hole and it often determines the success or failure of a new cave site. Does the waterfall have good pressure? Is it a steady stream or do you have to keep pushing an annoying button? Is the water warm enough? A bad watering hole can force a family to find a new cave. Whenever you see photos of cavepeople, they look smudged and grubby. That’s the result of a bad watering hole and the same image I often see reflected in my mirror.

Once bathed, we put on the same clothes we wore the day before – and the day before that and the day before that. Cave people didn’t have big wardrobes. There’s no place to put them and they have to be hauled from place to place. If the weather looks dry, we’ll wash our pelts and hang them in the sun to dry. Unfortunately, the weather often changes and we wear damp clothes.

Then we forage. Just like cavepeople, we have to spend a majority of our day sustaining our bodies. Here in France, you have to walk into town to get bread before around 12:00. After that there’s no bread available for an unpredictable number of hours. The boulangerie is not a secure food source. Your first foraging site may have been cleared out by other animals and so you have to range farther to find another one. Later in the day we make another trek for more substantial fare to Super U or Auchan. These are rich hunting grounds and we can spend hours selecting the choicest morsels. However storage and food preservation are a problem in a cave so we can’t gather too much.

Fire was essential to the caveman for cooking food and providing warmth. It is also unstable and requires diligent care. There were select members of the tribe in charge of the fire. Whenever we leave our cave, I have to shut off the gas canister. I don’t know why, but we think the gas will spontaneously explode if we are away. We don’t take any chances. Our survival is at stake.

At night we pack away the dining area, make a bed again, unwind the duvets, bar the cave door and sleep. It’s a restless sleep most nights. There are frightening movements and sounds on a campground.

The next day we get up and do the same thing all over again. It’s a struggle of the fittest and we are like the lowliest creature in our struggle to survive.

Life hangs in the balance. Yet don’t forget. Caveman not only survived, he triumphed over the beasts of the earth. In the cave paintings in Lascaux and other places he made the most exquisite paintings. Bison, deer, bears and other creatures were rendered with skill, grace and vitality. They are a record of an individual’s experience. They are a testament to the human spirit. Caveman took his charcoal in hand to proclaim man’s superior intellect and cry to the skies, “I am not an animal!”

In other words, he wrote a blog.