Survivalists, take note. The most practical shelter for surviving in a post-apocalyptic landscape is the "portable igloo," according to Alain Saury, author of "Back to the Wild: A Practical Manual for Uncivilized Times."
I recently read Saury's book, all 474 pages recently translated from French into English, because the publisher, Feral House, asked me to review it and I was intrigued. Saury was a French actor, filmmaker, poet and songwriter. I can't think of a résumé less likely to include an instruction manual on how to survive "any rapacious disaster to the modern world."
Case in point: Saury's portable igloo is a piece of Styrofoam that looks like an inverted cereal bowl -- made by mixing the two components of Styrofoam and pouring the viscous liquid over a large boulder or homemade frame -- with a hole in the middle for one's head. He suggests lashing the igloo to your frame pack with your head extruding for walking about. When it's time to bed down, you "place it on the ground and use your hat," which looks like a pith helmet in the diagram, "to seal the opening at the top."
The igloo's rim is about seven feet in diameter. Its impracticality should be obvious to anyone who has ever taken a hike. The igloo would impede movement and, being only three inches thick, would quickly crumble into ragged chunks. A stiff breeze would roll its testudineous bearer like a tumbleweed.
The portable igloo may be the kookiest recommendation in Saury's book. But it's in good company.
My wife pulled the book out of its packaging on the way home and leafed through a few pages. She immediately started giggling. "Listen to this," she said. "The recovery of our defecation is very useful and it is natural."
Lost in translation
I admit that I find French writers a fascinating bunch. I can't read French, so everything I've read has been translated into English. I'm not sure if something is lost in translation or if French authors are inherently different from the rest of us. Those I've read frequently quote poems, lapse into philosophical musings and veer sharply into digressions that are a far cry from the purported subject matter. I've yet to read a French book, fiction or nonfiction, that gets right to the point.
Saury is firmly entrenched in that tradition. His survival manual is sprinkled with poems, all magnificently impractical despite the title of the book. He's rarely able to introduce a subject without proffering a definition, which is typically uncalled for. Does the reader need to know that "Walking is a physical exertion in which all parts of the body are in motion, the arms serving as a counterbalance to the legs"?
The book is divided into subjects like predicting the weather, building a fire, getting your bearings, preserving and cooking foods, planting, caring for livestock, and essential crafts, like sewing and knitting.
Each of these topics staggers under a grotesque bundle of digressions. In the chapter called Understanding Time and Weather, Saury gives us the diameters of the sun, moon and planets and the altitudes of various cloud formations. He tells us that chickens cluck around 10:30 at night. Frankly, the entire 34-page chapter is useless for any practical purpose.
Many of Saury's declarations are laughable. Attempting to illustrate the value of local names on topographic maps, he concludes that "domestic animals can be found in place names like Cow Creek, Colorado."
Assassinating animals, your brothers
I eventually realized why the book is such a pitiful excuse for a survival manual. Although hyped as a comprehensive guide to surviving prolonged catastrophes, the book is primarily a vehicle for dispensing Saury's philosophy of living now, especially his hope to turn us all into vegetarians. Or worse.
How else to explain the section on blowing glass. Or the five pages devoted to deep breathing exercises, the two pages to singing Gregorian chants and the eight-page paean to the color spectrum. I fear that Saury's going to give even poets a bad name.
Saury has a unique perspective on food. The introduction claims he created "psycho-dietetics," which "considers all vibrations to be nutritional." On several occasions he broaches the idea that humans should slow down our metabolism, partly by eating less food, to achieve "a state of near-hibernation."
Eskimos, he believes, have already achieved this goal. "In order to happily face the rigors" of winter they "pile up around a fire, only opening one eye and their mouths from time to time in order to chew some bites of food." Unlike hibernating bears -- which don't urinate or defecate in their winter dens – Saury claims that Eskimos allow their "natural needs" to "flow without their moving, through openings for this purpose."
Saury advocates eating "live" foods, not dead foods like chickens or deer. He recommends plucking only one leaf from each salad plant. "This causes an injury, of course, but it will live its full lifespan and provide the seeds you need for future nourishment." Raising chickens? Eat their eggs if you must, but please allow the hens to die of old age.
While acknowledging that an outright emergency might necessitate killing and eating a bird or mammal – hence his chapter on hunting – he can't resist adding to a brief discussion of firearm calibers the rebuke "when assassinating animals, your brothers."
Saury's reverence for our avian and mammalian "brothers" doesn't seem to extend to animals who cannot blink, like fish, frogs or invertebrates. His section on fishing, including what to use as bait and how to impale it on a hook, never lapsed into a lecture on the sanctity of life. Leave it to a Frenchman not to feel the pain of a frog.
Better to die than to kill?
There might be some useful nuggets in Saury's book. But it's not easy to know when you've uncovered one. Any subject I'm familiar with, like hunting, contained so many errors or was so abbreviated or muddled it wouldn't provide much help to a neophyte.
His formula for surviving in a post-apocalyptic world was also suspect from the beginning. Addressing how to defend oneself in a world "teeming with bandits" he wrote, "For a sage, it is always better to die than kill," although he acknowledged you might want to prevent "the other from becoming a killer."
This is what transpires when a survivalist manifesto is written by a proponent of nonviolence and animal rights. The beliefs that violence should be avoided at all costs and that other animals have many or all of the same rights as people are civilized concepts that certainly won't survive an apocalypse.
Rick Sinnott is a former Alaska Department of Fish and Game wildlife biologist. The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News..