If you were raised around parents who thought the television was the beginning of the end of the world, you probably have an inner voice that put limits on your consumption of the shows, movies and series that are offered up. Nowadays, surrounded by any number of clever devices mimicking the television, we are only a stone’s throw away from yet another simulcast, videocast or telecast. We offer up excuses, but a couple of minutes of something that catches our eye on the tube can quickly magnify into an entire afternoon.
Here at the Flounder residence, we reserve our screen time for an hour after dinner, around eight, when my wife and I converge in our basement, turn off our lovely world and turn on the TV. My wife calls this den our Honeymoon Suite. I call it the Den of Equality, but either way, one or the other of us is usually nodding off, bored with the choice we’ve made. And don’t say it’s because we are old and tired because that will ruin the entire Honeymoon atmosphere. Truth is, most of what’s on the boob tube is either too violent for or honestly, just more noise.
Like most couples who watch TV together, we are often suckered into some show that looked good on the trailer, but for some reason quickly turned into three kinds of awful we would just as soon forget. For example, we occasionally will pick a perfectly nice mystery, one that looks like it has a clever detective, some cool twists, and maybe a humorous angle. Five minutes in, the crime scene will show too much detail, and then the detective starts picking at someone’s bodywith his ball point pen. Why would a detective look inside a lethal wound with a ballpoint pen? Don’t they have anything more specialized, like disposable tweezers or tongs? That’s it, my wife and I say, we ain’t doing it. So, we begin switching to other options, filing past this show or that one, trying out best to agree on one that won’t give us nightmares.
And I don’t know what it is, but no matter how hard we try to find something we can both live with, somehow we always end up back on the same episode of the British Bake-Off. It’s the oddest thing, but suddenly there we are, right in there with the torts and pastries again. I swear, that show must have its own satellite orbiting earth because our TV goes right to it every time.How does that happen? Are we idiots? The same episode! It’s the one where the girl who looks slightly like Alice the housekeeper on the Brady Bunch has made a three-tiered Halloween cookie house out of something I never heard of called frangipane which caught fire when one of the judges tore off the chimney and ate it. I mean, it is fun to watch a couple of times, but not over and over again. Once you’ve seen a judge on a cooking show catch fire, you’re ready for something more substantial. So, off we go again, trekking through channels and aps, sort of cussing under our breaths, blaming each other for the other’s technical ineptitude, until one of us goes upstairs to refresh our yogurt.
Recently, however, I stumbled upon a show that has us sitting on the end of our honeymoon couch. I found season eleven of Alone, the Arctic Circle, and it’s a doosey. I know for many of you this is old news, you’ve already seen it, you’ve been Alone fans for years and so forth, but this season of Alone takes us on survival in one of the most remote and harsh environments in the world, vast areas of frigidness, eons of glacial seas where temperatures drop to fifty below zero, and daylight last only a few hours a day. As most of you know, when you agree to go out on one of these Alone expeditions, every part of your mental and physical prowess is called on to survive the extreme conditions. For the last contestant standing, there is a half-million-dollar prize waiting; for the rest, their quest is often filled with tedious days of isolation and homesickness that wears them down and eventually makes them give up and go home. It is at that point, when a contestant cannot go on any further that they reach for their walkie-talkie and “tap out.”
So far, as we watch this show, my wife and I have not been able to get through five minutes each night without hitting the pause button, and not because someone is picking through remnants of an animal carcass with a ball point pen. Truth is, we know we could not survive one day out there ourselves without having some life-threatening accident or mental breakdown. Full disclosure, we are the people you know that cannot find which end of a sleeping bag your feet go into. We are the couple that used 220 matches to light a Coleman stove, then drove to the nearest town for breakfast, so you can imagine anything more challenging on Alone would be just plain comical if we were there.
Still and all, we do have some skills. We are really good at sitting in our honeymoon suite in our pajamas watching one contestant after another dropped off by helicopter in the upper reaches of Canada, somewhere between Russia and the North Pole. That is about as far as it goes though, and if it were me being dropped off, I would immediately jump out and break both ankles at which point I would be the first contestant to ever tap out in less than five minutes.
Not these contestants. No-siree, Bob. They couldn’t wait to be dropped off in the middle of nowhere. When that happened, some of them actually did a little dance, a little skip-to-my-Lou, as if they’d already won the contest money! When I saw this I thought, settle down buddy, you’re frittering away calories here, calories you’re gonna wish you had later when all your squirrel meat is gone.
However, when one of the survivalists was dropped out of the helicopter, he immediately sunk four inches straight down into a muddy riverbank and got stuck. Right off the bat, he couldn’t move, but it didn’t seem to bother him one little bit.
“Oh, what do you know, ” he said looking down, “I’m stuck and look there…there are wolf tracks here, and looks like there were, let’s see, yup, that’s a pack of thirteen of ‘em. Wow, they are running too. Wait, wait, no, no, they turned around right there, about five feet from where I’m stuck.”
If that were me, I know I’d be on my walkie-talkie.
“Yes, hello. Is this the pilot?” I’d say, crying, “It is? Oh, thank the Good Lord. This is Jeff Blunder and…yes, I know you just dropped me off. Is anything wrong? Wrong? Well, yes, you could say so. I’m tapping out. Yes, I knew you just dropped me off. And can you get back here kinda fast? I’m hearing a lot of what sounds like howling wolves nearby.”
Of course, as my wife and I continued to watch, Alone got even more interesting. Mr. Stuck- in -the-Mud continued, “Well, would you lookey der I see some fresh grizzly tracks right der with dapack of der wolves, yes I do, and would yuz look at that there, she’s got her little baby cub withher.”
At which time I turned to my wife and said, “Oh happy day, isn’t that special. Mamma grizzly with her grizzly baby, along with the largest pack of wolves ever recorded in North America.”
And notice here how my attitude has changed. Where once I was in deep awe and respect of these outdoorsman, and now I’ve taken on a sarcastic tone, kind of too-bad-for -you Mr. Canada.
“I love this,” I tell my wife using my new-found tone, “this is so outdoorsy, so natural. If. Was there maybe I’d get a selfie with all the wolves and grizzlies as they rip me from limb to limb, and we could put that in our family album for the grandkids. Then they’d have some memories of me out there on the outer peninsula, like part of the stylish jacket I got at the Eddie Bauer Outlet Store.”
You might remember in past episodes I described how I got my head caught in a sink, fell over my grocery cart, and caught my hair on fire while going the bathroom. If I cannot get through a day without almost killing myself in a civilized setting doing normal activities, I know I wouldn’t last five minutes in a land that has never seen the footprints of another human.
Yet, it is strange what happens to you in your comfy pajamas under the security of a warm blanket and a back massager. I, who cannot open a pocketknife without a screwdriver, am making comments out loud, freely making cracks and giving my expert opinion about everything these participants are doing. Where once I held had the utmost respect for these guys, rather suddenly, I have become, over the course of exactly two episodes, an expert in outdoor survival.
“Oh, no, look at Mr. Canada,” I’ll say. “He’s out there fishing. What a big mistake! Why is he out fishing now? I would’ve built my shelter before getting that gill net in the river. And look at those storm clouds building in the west. Mr. Canada is gonna get hammered, and that fish net needs to be in deeper water.”
“Rookies,” my wife answers, sipping Tea from her Yeti, covered in an electric blanket, then sitting up: “Hey, I thought I heard something upstairs. Shhhh! Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” I reply.
“Did you hear a noise upstairs?”
“No,” I say, “It’s probably just the neighbor.”
“Did you lock all the doors before you came down?”
“Can’t remember,” I answer, but I’ll go upstairs and check.”
But really, I know I’m not coming back down to watch anymore of Alone. I’m pretty sure I heard a helicopter off in the distance, and I’m going to tap out.