People love watching survivor style reality T.V.
I’m no exception – especially since my homie was on one of the shows last year.
But – considering many explorers and all around bad asses have actually been in these real-life do or die situation sans camera crews – why not build a storyline out of that? Have a mix of divas and hardasses surviving for a few weeks, following in the footsteps of people who actually did it to stay alive?
For example, the Mauro Prosperi (extreme athlete) adventure would comprise a 156 mile marathon that culminates in a giant sandstorm, followed by 9 days of aimless desert wandering. (That’s far more than 127 hours! Move over, Ralston – oh. He can’t. cuzza the, ya know, arm boulder thing). But wait! There’s more. During that time, you get to rip off a bat head and chug-a-lug its blood with a side (obviously) your own urine. A fun factoid about this story is that – after his rescue – Prosperi did this same run again later. And you wanna know what happened? He stopped when he stubbed his toe. Some might say it’s because he’d learned a lesson in nature-reverence, but I know better: a stubbed toe just might hurt worse than cutting off your own arm to escape desert death.
For the Coolidge Winesett competition, you won’t just be “drinking your own piss” to stay alive. You’ll be living in Dante’s Infernal Outhouse before Bear finally shows up in a postman costume. They say the mail must come through and the mailman definitely delivered 75 year old WWII vet Coolidge from what he described as three days in “the bible’s hell” – the bottom of his own outhouse. So, here’s your challenge: you and your rival will each go into an outhouse which will subsequently collapse. From there on out, you have to fair this fetid fecal grave bog imbued with snakes, spider, rats, and maggots nomming on you. Enjoy!
Or – if you think it’ll be the easier excursion – why not relive the trip of 17-year-old girl… by doing the Juliane Koepcke trek? Julieane’s journey will comprise a plane disintegrating in mid-air, your seat rocketing into the Peruvian rain forest, after which you’ll have to head toward a waiting motorboat – a trip by foot for eleven days. During your ambulatory jungle holiday, you’ll be nursing a broken collarbone and wounds – and upon your arrival to the motorboat, you’ll win the grand prize of having to pour gasoline on that open seeping wound to extract the maggots which have burrowed their way in. Should you start to lose hope, just remember you’re being a pussy and that a little girl literally did better than you are. And then she lived on to become a biologist. And librarian.
So, man up.
As you’re whorfing down Chipotle, do ever stop and wonder what it’d be like to run naked in the forest with Blackfoot Native Americans hunting you down? Me too! Maybe one day we can both find out on the “John Colter/Lewis and Clark” race! This one is fun because it’s like a triathlon without water. Or a bike. So… not a triathlon at all. But it does have three legs to it. So, first you’ll be captured by Blackfeet and his crew and stripped down to your birthday suit which may imminently double as a deathday suit. Next, you’ll be told to outrun them (so they can try to hunt you). Between the flying formation of arrows targeted at your cranium, you’ll hafta find cover and try to lose them. And, for the final leg, you get to wander for 11 days till you locate a trader station. Wait – what’s with this 11 days figure? Is that how long it takes to find civilization from Anywhere, Earth? Except Castaway Island?
“Run, Colter! Run!”
So – who’s with me? Why not ingrain history into reality T.V.? Currently, 50 out of 60 minutes on these shows is repeated footage or long drawn out camera focus on dramatic emoting and commercial. And five is that actual “OMG I hope he doesn’t fall, even though I know he doesn’t, ‘cause he’s live Tweeting and Facebooking with me right now!”
(I feel like I’m missing five minutes there in my math. #blameitonaliens)
Why lose touch with that OMG feeling as people? Why not infuse a little history to that excitement to remember “this is where we were as humanity blah-bety-blah years ago”? People are more likely to learn if you excite something in them first. It’s high time we exhume historic explorers and have ’em take their manifest destiny mentality into the realm reality T.V. conquering.
