Alone
One afternoon in the spring of 2022, my husband shooed our cat off the chair in my study, sat down, and said he had something to tell me. He had just completed an application to be on the reality show Alone.
My husband had watched Alone for years, as his fantasy, he told me the first time we sat down for drinks, twenty-two years before this, was to live off the land, preferably in a cabin in remote Alaska. “I’ve already done that,” I said. I had an annoying habit of interrupting people’s stories or chains of thought with my own stories. The truer statement would be, I tried to do that. Though not in Alaska. Not in anyplace frigid or difficult, but in the Marquesas, in the South Pacific, beautiful warm islands with nothing that can eat you, if you disregard their history of cannibalism. Except that the people already living there didn’t want you to be there, pretending to live off the land, their land, eating fruit from the trees they owned and harvesting their wild pigs and fresh-water shrimp. After a month we left the Marquesas for the more welcoming islands of New Zealand, for grocery stores and rooms in cheap hostels.
Alone is a program in which ten contestants are dropped off by themselves in the wilderness with the goal of surviving longer than any of the others. There are bears. There are accidents with axes and knives. Sometimes their structures, their huts of logs and branches, catch fire. The week after my husband filled out an online application, people from the program contacted him. He was interviewed on the phone for an hour and encouraged. The next step, they explained, was for him to camp out in the wilderness, in a location of his choice, and film himself making a shelter and cooking something he’d caught for dinner, talking through all his actions just as he would if he were actually on the show.
My husband took this encouragement as confirmation. He interpreted their enthusiasm as meaning that he just needed to prove himself worthy of them, through this video. That’s the kind of person he is, trusting, and trustworthy. And obsessed. To prepare, he studied all nine seasons of Alone, all the mistakes, all the genius hacks. He learned the edible plants in locations likely to be chosen. He tried to gain weight. Every morning he hiked up a small mountain. Every week his father, a wildlife biologist in Alaska, called with more tips. My contribution was scheduling a dental exam, his first check-up of the Covid years. Though we both knew that if a tooth went bad in the wilderness, he’d just pull it. He would never give up, or in Alone lingo, “tap out.”
I’m used to my husband, a documentary filmmaker, disappearing. I’m even used to him disappearing to spend time with bears, filming grizzlies at McNeil River in Alaska or polar bears in Manitoba. But now I found myself thinking of Grizzly Man, a film my husband has watched many times. In the climactic scene, Timothy Treadwell’s luck as a bear whisperer finally fails and a bear breaks through his tent and eats him and his girlfriend, which Treadwell recorded and Werner Herzog, the director, listened to on tape but wouldn’t let us, the viewers of his film, be witness to, because of the horror, the horror. Now I picture myself as Herzog, listening to the tape of my husband’s final moments, which would be filmed and recorded, as everything the Alone contestants do is captured on multiple camera angles, narrated by the contestants as they try to survive. I imagine the bear sniffing him through the walls of his hut, coming closer, cracking the dry branches placed around the hut, his alarm system, so my husband knows right away that the creature outside is big, and he tells us this, his voice is excited, he half-whispers to the camera recording in the dark: “Listen … it’s a bear!” And I hear in his voice that he thinks the bear will pass him by, already stuffed full of salmon. As the bears at McNeil River did. But it’s almost time to hibernate. And she’s pregnant. She’s double hungry.
Herzog listened to the full attack. He kept the tape going, past the screams of Treadwell and his girlfriend to the cracks of their bones breaking. In the film we see Herzog with his headphones, turned away from us. Herzog kept going because he couldn’t stop himself. He wanted this experience, for its novelty and its horror. But I am not Herzog. Perhaps I’m too afraid this could actually happen. In the past few months, while hunting in the desert, my husband has come across a mother bear with two tiny cubs, passing by him only yards away, so that he could see the strands of her long reddish fur lit by the afternoon sun. Before that, more distantly, he saw a mountain lion with two half-grown kittens. And there was the time he was camping and woke in the night to pee and startled two rattlesnakes sleeping under his tent. Of course these attacks, if they came, would not be recorded. I wouldn’t, like Herzog, be a witness.
For his audition tape, my husband camped in the desert outside Tucson and filmed himself building a deadfall trap from agave stalks and flat heavy stones. With this trap, he caught a packrat. He skinned the packrat and covered it with a paste of chiltepin peppers, barrel cactus fruit, and juniper berries. Then he roasted it over a fire he started by a process involving yucca stalks and mesquite and rabbit fur tinder. He ate the packrat with relish, tearing off its small legs to nibble the bones, holding the meat close to the camera and peeling off shreds to demonstrate how tender it was, how delicious.
If my husband ran the Alone franchise, he’d make it an Olympics of survival. But the producers of Alone don’t want a season that lasts for years. They turned him down. My husband had convinced himself and many of our friends and family that he was about to do this thing. Nothing in him had prepared for a rejection. Maybe that’s one of the tricks to actually making it that far: creating a mental state of total conviction.
Texts poured in saying how unfair this was. He’d been cheated. He would have won! And they meant it. None of our friends could imagine that this wasn’t true. A few mentioned the money, the half million dollars that went to the season’s survivor. But most of them (or so it seemed to me) felt deprived of a connection, of being able to brag that their friend / neighbor / brother-in-law was a reality tv star.
I wore a sympathetic expression, as though mirroring my husband’s disappointment, but I wasn’t disappointed. I was relieved. More than relieved. Was I happy that he was rejected, after so much effort? Was I happy that my husband wasn’t, after all, going to be sent away to some unknown location for some unknown number of months, with minimal equipment and minimal appropriate clothing, to struggle every day to find enough to eat, to stay warm enough or cool enough, to stay healthy, to stay safe? Was I happy that he had failed, when he deserved to succeed?
Yes. Yes, I was.