Coming Through Alive

THE ART OF SURVIVAL by Cord Christian Troebst. 312 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

"In the winter of 1956-57, a New Yorker and his wife driving along a highway got stuck in a snowstorm. They found shelter in an ice-cold disused builders' shed on the side of the road.

The man tried to light a fire in the stove with his sodden matches, but did not succeed. When all his matches were spent, he and his wife wrapped themselves in their coats and some old rags they found there, and lay down to die."

They acted stupidly. Why did neither one of them think of using the gasoline or the cigarette lighter from the car to get a fire going? Yet millions of people nowadays, claims Author Cord Christian Troebst (Conquest of the Sea) would have behaved just as ineffectually. In this brisk compendium, Author Troebst recounts a number of harrowing adventure stories and gives some ingenious advice on the art of survival.

Larvae & Butterflies. Much that is known about the art has been learned from people who just had to survive and did. Necessity, in other words, is the mother of preservation. During the second World War, for example, a British paratrooper, downed in the desert and separated from his buddies, slogged 200 miles through the sand, quenching his thirst exclusively from the radiators of abandoned Jeeps, tanks and trucks. And an American serviceman lived for 22 days in the jungles of Burma on insects, grasshoppers, larvae, butterflies.

Only recently has the art of survival been studied scientifically. In 1952, to prove that properly trained men could endure the most extreme conditions, French Physician Alain Bombard set out from France to cross the Atlantic in a 15-ft. dinghy--without once tapping his sealed crate of emergency supplies. He caught dolphins and birds and ate them raw, endured three rainless weeks by drinking juices he pressed from fish, dew scraped up from the deck, and a daily pint of sea water. In the course of his 65-day voyage, Bombard lost 55 Ibs., suffered from diarrhea, a rash that covered his body, and pockets of pus under his fingernails. But he survived.

Since the Korean War, survival technique has become a standard part of U.S. military training. Some basic techniques for survival in the desert: drink water whenever you are thirsty, no matter how large or small your water supply is (if it runs out, it runs out; your ultimate endurance is not ensured by rationing it); rest in the shade through the heat of the day, travel only by night; keep your clothes on to minimize loss of body moisture through sweating; devise some sort of distress signal to attract attention from the air.

Wax Crayons & Glue. The records show that a healthy man can survive ten days without water (in cool climates), several weeks without solid food (in warm ones), 243 hours without sleep. He can endure air temperatures of 212DEG (for about an hour), water temperatures of 41DEG (for about half an hour).

Yet, says Author Troebst, in the event of catastrophe, nothing is so important for survival as native wit and will. He recalls the case of Ralph Flores and Helen Klaben, who ingeniously contrived to survive for 50 days without food in freezing winter weather after their plane crashed in Canada. Even more ingenious were Viryl and Laura Scott, who in 1959 set off with their six children on an excursion into the Grand Canyon, foolishly turned off the main road onto a little-used sidetrack. There the car broke down. They were 50 miles from the nearest town, and the temperature was 124DEG. With something like a genius for self-preservation, the Scotts drank the water from their car radiator, cut up blankets to make an S O S sign, dipped a tire in engine oil to serve as a signal fire, dismounted the car mirror to flash distress signals at passing planes, set out their hubcaps to catch the morning dew. They smeared lipstick on sunburn blisters and swollen lips, discovered some wax crayons and a pot of glue (made from milk products) among their luggage and fed them to the children. They cooled their faces with urine-soaked clothes, and buried themselves neck-deep in sand to escape the scorching air. They had just abandoned hope when a rescue party arrived.

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