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.