On the first official day of my survivalism training, I realized a crucial error: I forgot to pack a spoon. I was mortified. I’d made sure to bring two knives, UV-blocking shirts, saltwater wading boots and paracord, but I had no utensil to eat with. In a low-key voice that I hope masked my embarrassment, I casually mentioned this oversight to my teacher, Amós Rodríguez.
“Oh, that’s OK,” he replied cheerfully. “You can make one!” Rodríguez sprinted a few feet into the jungle, climbed a tree and bounced on a few branches to identify a limb that could be sacrificed for my purposes. Finding one, he broke it in half and tossed a segment at my feet. Our woodworking session would become my first lesson in the field. He called it the ABC’s of survival: Always Be Craftin’.
He showed me a few simple techniques, and we sat down on overturned buckets to work. The sound of our knives scraping against bark was meditative. After about 15 minutes, Rodríguez had whittled his rough, splintered branch into an elegant instrument. He fished a coal from the fire and set it in the middle of the slender oval end that he’d produced, smoldering out the bowl of the spoon. It looked like something you would pay $45 for at an antiques market. My creation looked more like a drawing of a spoon, by a child who had never used one before. “Maybe,” Rodríguez observed politely, “you can use it like … a … chopstick?” It had more in common with a shovel, and because it was too big to fit in my mouth, that’s how I used it — bullying food until it reluctantly boarded the chunky head of the tool and then flinging it toward my face. That it barely worked didn’t matter: The ability to improvise, to create something out of nothing, was exhilarating in itself.
Our 10-day survival intensive took place in Chetumal Bay, Mexico, and consisted of a series of skill-learning workshops — first at a small lodge and then in the field, out on a strip of land in the middle of the water. I arrived with a mix of despair and determination, tired of the alarming news notifications about everything: wildfires, school shootings, disastrous federal decisions, food recalls, extreme weather events. The constant doomerism online and the deteriorating social infrastructure offline — it all had put me into a kind of spiritual ketosis. Brushing up on my survival skills felt like one potential answer.
The word “prepper” usually brings to mind a bearded white man in head-to-toe Realtree camo, anticipating the next civil war while hunkered in a bunker, surrounded by automatic weapons, pallets of Dude Wipes and dehydrated meals. But over the last few years, the idea has drifted in from the margins: People with all sorts of ideological backgrounds are making plans for confronting an uncertain future.
I’ve seen the shift in my own social circles. Friends and acquaintances are securing large plots of land, getting gun licenses and training in CPR and the National Acupuncture Detoxification Association protocol, a regimen developed to help people recover from addiction. One woman I know relocated her family from Boston to New Zealand, telling me that she wanted to live in a place that was nonexistent on a geopolitical axis of influence — “a beautiful place,” she said, “to ride out the end of the world.” Late last year, a book called “A Navy Seal’s Bug-In Guide” was in heavy rotation on TikTok’s e-commerce platform; over the holidays, I spotted it at my mother’s house and flipped through its pages. One offered tips for explaining away your ownership of large quantities of canned goods: “My wife/husband just got into couponing.”
Today, a third of all Americans say they spend some part of their household budget on prepping. An analysis of FEMA data recently suggested that around 20 million Americans identify as “preppers.” About 7 percent of all households, roughly double the number from 2017, are “actively working on self-reliance.” Fear is now big business: They call it the Doom Boom. There are disaster consultancies, dozens of prep schools, guides and podcasts and YouTube channels where you can learn how to build a shelter from forest debris or tan a hide. A “timeshare” in a survivalist fortress (where you can vacation until the apocalypse comes) can be had for $20,000. If you’re ultrawealthy, you can make your own preparations: Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, has been stockpiling guns, gold, antibiotics, batteries, water and gas masks and says he has “a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.” Mark Zuckerberg and Rick Ross are among the tycoons and celebrities who are building multimillion-dollar compounds — the kinds with indoor pools, wellness centers and underground escape tunnels that double as go-kart tracks.
My own awakening to prepping came in 2012, after Hurricane Sandy hit New York City. The weeks that followed were marked by extended power outages, flooded subways and fuel shortages. I volunteered with a group taking supplies and water to Red Hook residents who were stranded at the tops of housing projects. On Halloween night, two days after the storm hit, a friend and I crossed the bridge into a powerless, eerily silent Lower Manhattan, where people were cooking over fires and congregating in candlelit bars. It was enough to prompt me to sign up for a workshop where a former firefighter in paramilitary gear taught me the basics of building a bug-out bag and how to escape the city by foot.
In the years since, I’ve taken self-defense classes, sewing classes, fermentation classes. I’ve trained in bystander intervention strategies and participated in mutual aid. I learned to sail, not only because I love being on the water but in case I ever needed to escape by sea. My mother, who kept a generous garden to supplement our pantry, taught me basic growing, composting and preservation techniques. I brushed up on my herbalism and learned about septic systems, carpentry and electric wiring. But even after years of study, basic skills eluded me: I had no idea how to make fire, find food and water, build shelter. I spend most of my time in New York, where nearly all the amenities of modern life are accessible on a nearby corner or through an app. I’m still scarred from a camping trip around a decade ago, when a group of Bushwick queers piled into a rental car and drove a few hours upstate to a campground alongside a sparkling lake. We misjudged the early-spring temperatures and had to share a single sleeping bag while raccoons invaded our food supply.
As I researched further training options, I came across a line in the description of Rodríguez’s Mexico course that caught my eye. “We will also put a great deal of emphasis,” he wrote, “on the philosophy and psychology of survival, which is what makes or breaks a person in a survival situation.” I wanted the tools to survive, but I also had the feeling that survival would involve acclimating to a new way of orienting myself in the world. Rodríguez seemed to understand that. He had been a fierce contender on a reality show called “Alone,” which drops contestants off in remote northern wilderness, challenging them to confront extreme cold, starvation and predators. Rodríguez didn’t win, but he also didn’t unravel as quickly as some others did, even after wolves surrounded his camp or, later, when his shelter caught fire. “Nature isn’t out to get you,” he would tell me later. “It’s just happening around you. We have separated ourselves from it so much that it has become a monster.”
A year later, after our schedules finally aligned for a training, Rodríguez sent me a gear list. I went to REI a few days later, which happened to be the day after Christmas. Shoppers swarmed discounted racks of neoprene clothing and vacuum-sealed packages of dehydrated coconut curry and crème brûlée. I was amazed by the sheer volume of equipment: twinkly solar-powered lights, GPS watches, portable power stations, endless snack options, luxury cots, folding kayaks and down bootees. None of the store employees could believe that the gear I needed was for me; somehow I didn’t figure into their postapocalyptic imagination.
There is a blurry line between outdoorsy hobbies and the extreme training I was preparing for. But looking around, I realized that for many people, especially in this country, survival is a lifestyle category. Everything was shockingly expensive, and I needed so much of it. It seemed to present an American paradox: You can learn to live, as long as you can afford it.
In January, Rodríguez and I met up in Tulum, Mexico, to start our training. Southern California was just beginning to burn, and the incomprehensible devastation added a heightened sense of urgency to our work. In person, Rodríguez had a brilliant smile — it flashed starbursts of lines around his eyes — and the kind of purposeful yet boundless energy that people who wear toe shoes always seem to possess. His topknot bounced happily in time with his steps.
We loaded our gear into a rental car and drove four hours south, passing jaguar-crossing signs when we turned deeper inland. Each time we saw roadkill, Rodríguez craned his neck out the window to try to identify the species. We arrived at a small seaside fly-fishing lodge in the village Xcalak, where Rodríguez had organized a packed itinerary of workshops on shelter, fire, tracking, fishing and hunting.
The next morning, after a breakfast of scrambled eggs and fresh avocado, we settled around a large wooden table on the outdoor patio, from which we could see palm trees and the placid cerulean bowl of the bay. Rodríguez began with what he said was the most important lesson of survival: understanding the body’s psychological response to threats. “Whether your car breaks down in the middle of winter or the apocalypse hits, that is a survival situation,” he said, “and your stress response dictates what happens next, which is not always a good thing.” Once you can acknowledge and recognize the signs — racing thoughts, pounding heart, rapid breathing — you can ask yourself: Am I thinking and acting rationally?
The next step, he said, is to do some controlled breathing to start calming the central nervous system. We sat for a few moments, inhaling and exhaling. At one point, we walked around the courtyard to practice awareness of our surroundings. He demonstrated walking slowly, body hunched low so as not to alert predators, while scanning the ground for food and kindling, as well as the sky for bird chatter or sudden flight, which can indicate threats like predators or shifts in weather. The goal, Rodríguez said, was to keep your “bubble of awareness bigger than your bubble of disturbance.”
All this seemed a lot simpler than the high-tech prepping of the Doom Boom. The movies condition us to imagine survival as a response to a singular, calamitous event: a pandemic virus, a zombie invasion, a plane crash, aliens, government collapse. But it’s more realistic to imagine that we are already living in the midst of a slowly unfurling cataclysm whose effects we encounter in succession, like the waves of an ocean. Picture it this way, and there is a kind of quiet steadiness to the work of survivalism; it is not so different from the ordinary work of living.
I’d always been drawn to the gamification of survival, particularly through the O.G. reality show “Survivor.” I was pulled in by its grueling immunity challenges and injurious candy-colored obstacle courses, yes — but also by its “social game,” the subtle manipulation among players as they built alliances. Part of the entertainment was imagining yourself in each situation, wondering how you would fare sleeping outside, negotiating for rice, vying for leverage. (I became convinced, like so many others watching with snacks from their couches, that I could dominate the elements and the gameplay.) When friends pointed me toward “Alone,” I was skeptical; I imagined people sleeping inside animal carcasses and drinking their own urine. But the contestants on “Alone” talked about living in harmony with the land and the gratitude that comes from depending on it. Unlike on “Survivor,” which mostly uses its location as a gorgeous natural backdrop, they seemed humbled before nature, with all its menace and awe. They were interested in self-reliance without salivating at the prospect of Armageddon or civil disorder. I wanted to be like that: ready to adapt to a chaotic future, rather than fetishizing the chaos itself.
On “Alone,” Rodríguez often spoke about growing up in El Salvador during the brutal war between the U.S.-backed government and leftist guerrillas. Robberies at gunpoint or knife point were common, as were raids and arrests. His mother was held by the military, enduring sexual assault and torture, and then imprisoned for a year. After her release, the family wrote to churches to see if any would sponsor Rodríguez’s studies abroad. He was accepted into Manchester College in Indiana, where he studied fine art, starting in 2000. He began camping in the Midwestern countryside, taking fewer and fewer items each time. After college, he started learning skills like archery and hunting. He occasionally shared his exploits on social media, and in 2019 he was recruited by scouts for “Alone,” who had come across a Facebook photo of him with a deer he killed using a bow he made. During his season on the show, he built a cozy shelter with a trench to pull cold air out of his sleeping area; he heated stones at night to warm his bed; he caught fish in a net and smoked it to build out his food store.
In Mexico, he described to me the sacred order of survival — the things you need to stay alive. Most people think of shelter as the priority, but his philosophy was to always prioritize fire, including knowing several ways to make it. “You might need food,” he said, “but if you don’t make it out of the elements and stay warm. … ” He trailed off, spreading his hands in the empty air as if demonstrating the evaporation of life’s essence. “Fire will keep you warm, cook your food, clean your water and keep you safe.”
I decided to try making fire by friction. We gathered up coconut fibers and pressed them into little bird’s nests with our hands. I got on the ground, picked up his bow drill (which he made) with its deer-hide string (which he dried) and fitted it with a soft spindle made of cedar. The goal was to use the bow to move the spindle on a flat board with enough speed and pressure that it created a kind of charcoal, ignited and formed a small ember. At first I found the bow impossible to move, but eventually, when it did, it wobbled crazily on its axis. Rodríguez clamped his hand over mine to steady it. “High speed for 20 seconds,” he commanded. Sweat poured off my face, and I gasped with exertion. But sure enough, a tiny tendril of fragrant smoke was born. I stopped to catch my breath before scooping it onto my nest of kindling. I lifted it up, as Rodríguez had instructed, and let the breeze feed the spark. I felt like Neo in “The Matrix” when he opens his eyes and says, “I know kung fu.” It was a goddamn miracle.
Rodríguez had hired a boat captain to ferry us south and then northwest, toward an archipelago in a marine reserve on the border with Belize. It was time to practice the skills I’d spent the last few days acquiring. I’d learned how to make a “throw stick” to knock out a squirrel or a rabbit. I’d practiced making snares out of stainless-steel wire to trap small game. (It seemed easy enough, but each time Rodríguez examined my work, he had me start over.) We’d discussed making a compass from a leaf, a needle and a magnet; we’d talked about how to open a coconut without tools. We’d spent hours handlining — fishing by hand, with only a loose line and a hook — which Rodríguez demonstrated could be done with a traditional, colorful fishing lure or, in a pinch, a piece of bone and a worm.
We loaded our gear onto a panga, a small wooden boat, and motored off into the blue. Rodríguez and the captain were fully covered, wearing long sleeves, hats and buffs so that only their polarized sunglasses were exposed. After months of winter in New York, I was greedy for vitamin D, so I wore a sleeveless shirt, but out on the water, I quickly understood that this was a miscalculation. The idyllic environment was revealing its harsher edges: The sunbeams had musculature; the saltwater, refreshing at first, began to dry out my face. As society fell away, it was easy to imagine we were in an actual emergency, fleeing something disastrous, looking for shelter.
The world dissolved into an endless palette of blues: the powdered cornflower of the midday sky, the aquamarine and teal of the waves made milky with churned-up sand and salt, the indigo of the orbs that indicated an underground freshwater cenote. It was hypnotic. This planet should be renamed Water, I thought. Eventually we began to see land — dense green foliage broken up by minuscule slivers of sandy white. We piloted around for a few hours, assessing locations. One place had enough beach to sleep on but too much greenery, which could conceal tarantulas and other venomous things. Another spot had too much sea grass. Coconut trees could mean food, fat, water and fuel, if they had ripe fruit. Holes in the coral lining the shore might mean fish, or even the spiny-shelled Caribbean lobster. After a few hours, we found an island that seemed suitable, with ample coconut trees and wide pockets of sand.
Ramón, the captain, navigated the boat as close as he could to shore, and we jumped into knee-high water to begin unloading our backpacks and gear. We quickly set up shelters — basic hammocks with bug nets — while Ramón moored the boat. Bright yellow finches flitted above our heads. Needle fish flung themselves out of the water. As we cleared away fallen palm fronds, we uncovered coils of fat black scorpions napping in their folds. We then set about surveying the land, as we’d practiced. Rodríguez identified some chechén trees, which have an effect similar to poison ivy, and pointed out trampled paths that indicated the movement of raccoons or deer. We could always hunt iguanas, he said, and we identified some trees where they might like to sun. We’d brought jugs of water to be safe, but we also taped two bottles together, mouth to mouth — one empty, one full of seawater — and set them at an angle in the sun to distill.
After we were settled, I collected myself and did a body scan. I desperately wanted to lie down, but it was too hot to climb into my hammock. Rodríguez, energetic as ever, proposed an impromptu crash course in emergency wilderness medicine. He opened his canvas organizer and took me through his wares, which were organized by tiers of injury. Tier 1: scrapes, bug bites and burns, easily treated with bandages and ointments. Tier 2: lacerations and wounds, which might need suturing. Tier 3: incapacitation. He pulled out an endotracheal tube and demonstrated how, if he were unconscious and struggling to breathe, I would tilt his head back, clear his airway and insert the plastic device. I nodded along, taking notes. Inside, I started to panic. Rodríguez noticed my expression and apologized for scaring me. Our closest help was a marine base that was as much as two hours away by boat. The reality of our remoteness set in.
The next morning, we headed out to find food. This would become our primary preoccupation for the next four days. Rodríguez talked a lot about survival math — being mindful not to expend more energy than you would consume. We might spend four hours fishing only to get enough food for each of us to have a few bites. I stopped anticipating meals because I knew there weren’t any. Intellectually, I had prepared for this, but I did not — could not — fully grasp how hard it would be, how many hours we would spend in search of sustenance. The land was abundant with it, but animals are smarter than people think. They were not easily fooled by our traps and lines.
We practiced sight fishing — looking for light ripples on the surface that indicate activity below. (Rodríguez called it “nervous water.”) Ramón slowly maneuvered the boat around, allowing us to cast our lines into shady pockets of water. The heat ballooned around us. I peered over the edge of the boat and considered jumping in for a cooling dip, carnivorous fish and crocodiles be damned. Just then, a large shadow passed our prow: a pair of enormous stingrays in their silent underwater flight, poison-laced tails lashing behind them. That first day was lucky — we caught two medium-size fish, then traveled to a reef where we dove for queen conch, which were in season. The haul felt glorious. Each time we retrieved something, the three of us cheered. The prospect of food in our bellies eased the aches in my muscles, the joints straining in my back.
At the same time, I began to see the impact of our presence on the island. The beach was mostly made of soft, mudlike silt, and the holes from our footprints hardened, leaving constant reminders of our doings. I could see the detritus of our meals, our empty water bottles, our clothing drying in the breeze. Early one morning, I slid out of my hammock and quietly padded down to the beach to relieve myself. The sky hummed with predawn gold. Unwittingly, I stumbled into a cloud of dragonflies, doing their drowsy air-bender dance beneath the fading glow of constellations. They fled, disrupted. I was bereft.
The good fortunes of our first day turned out to be an anomaly. One day, we kayaked to a lagoon, spending five hours traveling as many miles, and came back with only one quarter-pound fish for the three of us. I grimly set about making snares for iguanas; Rodríguez woke up early the next morning to look for deer.
Nothing was working. I had strung my hammock closest to the water — and, unfortunately, the crocodiles — which also meant that I had an unobstructed view of the moon rising each night and woke up to the miracle of the sun. My gratitude for that helped me accept the harder parts of the trip: the scarce food, the exhaustion, the mosquito bites, the saltburn on my cheeks.
One afternoon, we looked over and saw an iguana sunning on a branch. It had already evaded my snare three or four times, nudging it aside — with amusement, I imagined — as it entered and exited a hole in the tree trunk. Now we were watching it waddle into the sunlight. Rodríguez grabbed his bow and handed me a shovel. We crouched low to the ground and inched our way forward. Earlier in the day, a smudge of charcoal appeared on the horizon, and by midday it was darkening the island; the trees whipped through the air so hard that they sounded as if they were screaming. Ramón raised his hands to the sky in worry, yelling in Spanish. I couldn’t follow the rapid sentences, but his urgency was clear: If we didn’t leave soon, we might not be able to. But we also needed to eat, if only to have enough energy to load the boat and shove it out from the shallow water.
Rodríguez pressed on. Heart pounding, I followed his lead. All week, he had told tales of hunting iguana as a teenager, and how delicious it tasted fried in coconut oil, and the consommé his grandmother made from the carcass. We hadn’t eaten any protein in 24 hours. Rodríguez loaded the bow. We asked forgiveness.
We advanced on the animal and attacked. What happened next feels as though it belongs to that time and to those who were there. But after the act was completed, we retreated to separate parts of the beach to make private offerings of thanks. Rodríguez then skinned and cleaned the animal while I watched, and he instructed me to bring him handfuls of salt to preserve the skin. We would make it into matching bracelets, to honor the cost of our lives on others. We lit the fire to cook the meat. I was too nauseated to enjoy it. I was still reconciling our brutality against the animal as a fair trade for my needs. But the truth was that every second of my existence cost something precious, at the expense of something else equally precious. The difference is that in my modern city life, it’s usually concealed from view.
As the three of us picked at the meal — Rodríguez with the most enthusiasm — the weather cleared up, almost mystically. It was time to go back to the lodge.
Three days later, I was home: back in Brooklyn with my full freezer of farmers’-market meats, my matcha whisk and my deep-soaking bathtub. The experience stayed coiled inside me. As I walked through the frozen parks of the city, I felt more attuned to my environment. I noticed when birds were startled into flight, animal prints left on snow. One night at home, I heard a strange noise in the back of the apartment. I hadn’t stopped wearing my knives — I had come to love my new familiarity with them and their reassuring weight against my hips — so I unsheathed one quickly, creeping through rooms. The noise turned out to be the sizzle of salt and water bubbling in a cast iron pan that was being cleaned. But I felt calm, quick, practiced, steady. Ready. Less afraid of the unknown.
One afternoon back in Xcalak, after a lecture on projectiles, Rodríguez and I were fatigued by the cloying heat of the day. We decided to take a walk. As we meandered, he pointed out edible plants like honeysuckles and almonds, pieces of trash that could be repurposed, trees with papery bark that might indicate underground veins of water. One of the first steps of surviving in a new place, he told me, was getting to know your neighbors, familiarizing yourself with the plants and the animals and the land. He identified an agave succulent and cut a tentacle free. “Great for repairing clothes or a tent, anything,” he told me as he slammed the piece against a tree trunk to release the fibers inside.
That day in town, there was a quinceañera for the youngest daughter of a local couple Rodríguez often worked with. Guests gathered under a red canopy with curtains of twinkling lights, and rose decorations covered every free surface. Fat bottles of soda and plates of tacos were passed around. We sat, shimmying to the music. As minutes and then hours ticked by, I wondered what I was doing there, how it was related to our lessons. Rodríguez told me that the first time he traveled to Xcalak was 20 years ago. The tiny fishing village was mentioned on the last page of his Lonely Planet guide, and on a whim he caught a bus to check it out. The birthday girl’s father was a man he met on that very first visit. Rodríguez pointed out other people in town he had come to know over the years.
All week, Rodríguez reiterated his lessons on community — the plants, trees and animals, but, most important, people. Crash-landing on a beach, as we did, was the least likely scenario. Figuring out how to work with friends and strangers wasn’t just more realistic; it was inevitable. Whom to trust, whom to build community with, whom not to — these were the factors most likely to determine whether you could make it through the end of days.
The world “apocalypse” is born of the Greek apokálypsis, meaning revelation, or hidden knowledge. The etymology suggests a divinely ordered retribution, a punitive conclusion, a Judgment Day when all will be revealed. It carries the idea that some mighty righteousness will organize our madness and impose justice on all the awful things we witness that seem to have no earthly consequences. As I left the island, I thought about how there are a million apocalypses already happening around us all the time: genocides, extinctions, floods, fires, deportations, homelessness, the denial of medical care to trans people. And then there are the ones that are harder to see: forever chemicals, cancers, illness inside our own bodies. The meaning of surviving is rapidly changing, all the time. Every day is an apocalypse to someone.
I still have all my gear, and even a few dehydrated meals, safely stashed in a closet in my apartment. But the survival strategy that lives deepest in my bones came from learning how to surrender to the terrifying unpredictability of life. Doomerism can be seductive: It allows for the security of a foregone conclusion, and beneath its faith that the end is inevitable lies a subtle note of satisfaction. Even by taking Rodríguez’s workshop I was trying to manage my dread, rather than experience and accept it. But the unmediated future doesn’t work that way: It’s not ours to know, or to try to control.
I thought about an artist from Los Angeles I spoke with a few weeks after my trip, who told me that part of her wildfire response was to learn Indigenous fire ecology, to negotiate the tense peace between the life we hope to preserve and the future we are creating. So much of what we think of as “prepping” is about readying for the sudden end of the world as we know it — amassing food and gear in bunkers so we can continue to live, unaffected, in a bubble, even if the rest of the world burns around us. The survival I came to know on this trip was about something completely different. It was, above all, about letting yourself be affected by the changing world around you. Not just riding it out, but adapting, molting. Not succumbing to the luxury of despair, but keeping a foothold in possibility. Not blocking the world out, but letting it in.
J Wortham is a staff writer for the magazine.
The post My 10-Day Crash Course on Surviving the Apocalypse appeared first on New York Times.
