Incredible survival story
I have a new YouTube vice: binge-watching old programs of “I Shouldn’t Be Alive,” a show that aired from 2006 to 2012 and featured survival story re-enactments.
All the stories are true, and they’re narrated by the actual people who experienced them, plus re-enactments with actors playing their parts. One particularly interesting thing about the show is that there is no suspense about whether the person makes it. After all, there’s the title. And the person is sitting right there, intermittently narrating the tale. But the suspense is enormous anyway, and it focuses on the fact that the scenarios really do not seem survivable. So the viewer – at least, this particular viewer – is hooked right to the end, thinking “How does it happen? How on earth does this person make it?”
Another fascination for me is the exploration of the mental states of people facing extremely harrowing conditions. For the most part these are quite ordinary people, and yet their behavior under tremendous physical and mental stress features impressive strength. Often, though that strength is preceded by remarkable stupidity in making decisions that lead to the risk. And then, either combined with the stupidity (or let’s just call it bad judgment) that is sometimes present, there’s tremendous bad luck that makes it even worse. And at the very end, there’s either incredible good luck or incredible ability to figure out a way of escape, or both.
Here’s one video in the show that doesn’t seem to feature any bad decisions on the part of the survivor. It’s fairly typical of the genre otherwise, though (although the video’s title is not wholly accurate):
Everybody has a YouTube vice. In my case it is cars, guns, and aeroplanes and the manufacturing processes used to make them. WWII era fighting ship videos come in close.
Must have been all those “Victory at Sea” episodes I saw as a child. I can still remember sitting on the carpet looking up at the B&W TV.
Sometimes I feel an almost childish glee watching old Chrysler or Ford engineering sales or promotional manufacturing films. The Chrysler Airflow for example, or Ford power-train innovations. I didn’t know these films existed. They were made and shown way before I was born.
” Oh look! They are using a Bullard Manutrol. Those are Pines tube benders!!! There’s a Pratt & Whitney jig borer, and a set of Jo blocks!” LOL
Car rebuilds and restorations are awesome too.
The oldest films of cityscapes and life and interesting. Paris or New York back in 1896 or whatever.
Who needs TV? Why pay someone you don’t like, to offensively serve you shit on a plate that you never wanted?
Oh yeah, physics, cosmology, Medieval history …. on and on
Not many things cause my levels of anxiety to rise, but these kinds of stories/shows are one of them. I’m normally a very calm guy, but dang it if these shows don’t cause me to get nervous!
Daniel Ortiz:
Well, I’m already WAY too anxious to do something like skydiving. So I find the videos fascinating. Maybe they already match my level of anxiety about the activity?
DNW:
I also like those old street scenes. But the other videos you mention wouldn’t be my particular addiction. I especially like the series mentioned in this post, and I watch a lot of dance videos of course, as well as music videos and makeover videos. I also like to watch “Supernanny,” which is a show that features a woman who bills herself as a nanny/helper and who goes to people’s home to help them deal with out-of-control or otherwise-troubled children. Basically, whatever she calls herself, she’s actually a family therapist. And a good one.
Neo,
There is another show like this called ‘I Survived’ which told stories of people who survived various situations from crime to natural disasters to accidents.
Those who wish to cut to the chase on this 48 minute episode, read here:
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-plane-crash-survivor-recalls-tragedy-2005jun25-story.html
Being lost at sea alone is pretty high up on my list of undesirable experiences. There was a couple who went missing on the Coral Sea. There was a move made about it, “Open Water.” Didn’t watch it.
If you’re willing to sit through a 2-hour show, there’s also a series called “In An Instant,” which ran for three seasons between 2015 and 2017. You can see the episodes on YouTube. The “instant” refers to sudden crises that range from being held hostage in a library or a hospital maternity ward to being attacked by an abusive ex to being caught in a bridge collapse. What I found interesting about these survival stories is that very few of them concern previous bad decisions on the part of the people caught up in the crisis– which adds to the tension about the outcome, as not everyone in a given episode survives.
My guilty YouTube pleasures? Military history videos, including those that deal with the Thirty Years’ War and the Civil War as well as World Wars I and II. Other faves: baseball videos (but of course! only 4 more days until Spring Training!); PBS NOVA and American Experience episodes; symphony orchestra or marching band videos; and the French-language cat videos on the Parole de chat channel. With apologies to Neo, makeovers don’t interest me at all, but she has persuaded me to look up and watch dance videos, as there is a wealth of them on YouTube.
I like to watch Youtubes showing old interviews or music. Lately Dick Cavett Show interviews. I was surprised to read once that Cavett was often enormously depressed at the time and believed he was doing a terrible job on stage:
I was unable to watch a show I did with Laurence Olivier while I was virtually blinded with depression. I told Marlon Brando I could never watch it, knowing I’d look dead, slow, and stupid. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Watch it.” I made myself watch. I looked fine. My eyes were bright and the silences I recalled were gone.
https://time.com/3106170/robin-williams-dead-dick-cavett-suicide-depression/
FWIW here’s the Cavett-Olivier interview. Cavett does look fine, though his face is a bit shiny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdCz6WU4ikw
I will tread water for however days are necessary. I just don’t know.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=DDjnjtGB7x8&feature=emb_logo
Meet my drill instructor. Then there was my dad. The sainted USCG Senior Chief. I can probably tread water for a year. You think I’m going to quit?
Who when they were brutalizing me they were doing it for my own good. And I knew it.
Now if you go through my school be prepared.
I am not quitter. But I don’t want to make anyone let on to thinking I’m a bad #@@.
I have been associated with bad #$$es. SEALs. EOD divers. Green Berets.
But the group who impressed me the most were the rescue swimmers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJm7LTECBX4
They will bring you back alive.
If it involves pulling you out of the water before you drown…
https://www.govserv.org/US/Jacksonville/412634528909050/U.S.-Navy-Surface-Rescue-Swimmer-School-Jacksonville
…we will train just about anybody.
Drowning men can’t afford to be picky.
There were two things that horrified me about going into the naval service. Only one of which I thought I might live through. Being trapped in a ship when it turns turtle and drowning. Or being burned alive.
You would think, maybe, being surrounded by all that sea water the last thing you need to be afraid of is fire.
https://www.amazon.com/Americas-First-Clash-Iran-1987-88/dp/1935149369
The “Stark Incident.”
neo on February 7, 2020 at 5:19 pm said:
… I also like to watch “Supernanny,” which is a show that features a woman who bills herself as a nanny/helper and who goes to people’s home to help them deal with out-of-control or otherwise-troubled children. Basically, whatever she calls herself, she’s actually a family therapist. And a good one.
* * *
I watched a couple of episodes of that show with one of my daughters-in-law, and pointed out that I could have given those parents the same advice for free, but then they wouldn’t have listened.
The SuperNanny really is good, though.
huxley on February 7, 2020 at 7:17 pm said:
FWIW here’s the Cavett-Olivier interview. Cavett does look fine, though his face is a bit shiny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdCz6WU4ikw
* * *
In Olivier’s film of Hamlet, he uses the now-famous pause in the first line of his soliloquy: “To be….or not to be, that is the question.”
My theater director in college had worked in tv and on/off Broadway, and had a fund of back-stage stories, some of which sounded true, and some of which may have been apocryphal, but all of which were entertaining.
During a stage production one night, Olivier delivered the line with that pause for the first time, and exited to thunderous applause. Someone in the wings complimented him, and asked, “How did you come to think of that marvelous interpretation tonight?” Olivier replied, “Tonight….I forgot the line.”
Here’s the scene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiWf4I6bOcA
After I wrote that anecdote, I thought: wouldn’t it be funny if Olivier mentions that event in the interview? He didn’t, but he & his actress wife Joan Plowright do talk about how he experiments with characters and readings, from about 8:00 to 9:00 minutes; beginning to “play great moments” at 15:45 (where once they were just part of the performance); trying out vocal sounds to get a scream right; and using both feminine and masculine qualities to create a rounded human character.
It was nice to watch an interviewer who asked civil, thoughtful, well-researched questions, sometimes challenging but not provoking, and then got out of the way of the answers.
Like Griffin my wife and I watched the “I Survived” episodes on the old Biography channel. I found them again on one of the Roku channels, perhaps The Roku Channel.
The most appalling and riveting thing for me were the many women who had survived rape and attempted murder. Many had to play dead for their attacker to stop stabbing them, and they did stop.
The Homicide Hunter: Joe Kenda (homicide detective reality show) just aired their final episode, and it was not what I was expecting. Excellent true crime stories. A few of the final season episodes feature a young Joe Kenda learning from his mentor Lou Smit. Lou Smit was genuinely a super detective having closed over 800 homicide cases, if memory serves.
I like the “hand-on” videos: small shop woodworking, tool restoration, machining things. There are also some very good history ones– I especially like the ones on the “military hardware” and its development. I have to ask DNW if he has seen the one where Ford built a factory that built B-24 bombers at the rate of rolling one off the line every 55 minutes. There is a lot to be learned out there, or put another way, a lot of rabbit holes go down…
My favorite is the wheelwright in Montana who built the reproduction of the 20-mule team Borax wagons, Dave Engels. A modern day look at a centuries old craft.
All of it a welcome relief from the day to day BS of today’s world.
It was nice to watch an interviewer who asked civil, thoughtful, well-researched questions, sometimes challenging but not provoking, and then got out of the way of the answers.
AesopFan: That was Dick Cavett at his best. He even made Bobby Fischer seem cuddly. Of course, Cavett is a liberal idiot today.
Your comment reminded me of a Janis Joplin bio which said she would go off into the woods and practice her signature soul-piercing screams to find out what worked. There was a New Wave singer from the late 70s I quite liked, Lene Lovich, whose start included screaming for horror movies.
–Lene Lovich, “I Think We’re Alone Now” (Tommy James & the Shondells cover)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJRGdQSvwjU
As it happens I’m midway through the Hamlet chapter in “Ulysses,” so I started watching Kenneth Brannagh’s “Hamlet” with Olivier’s “Hamlet” cued up on my hard disk for afterward. Maybe I’m watching in the wrong order.
Steve57, Amen to your comments on the rescue swimmers. Of all the heroes you can imagine, I can’t think of any more fearless than those who jump, alone, into an angry ocean to help those in distress.
I once thought that such a path would appeal to my older, river rat, grand son. Instead he is a long time water water rafting guide; but, he has gone into fearsome water on more than one occasion to rescue a client.
The USN used to teach drown proofing, including minimal effort treading, in flight training, and probably in other programs as well. There are techniques that you can use to survive for extended periods–if the sea is not too angry. There are stories of sailors who survived for unbelievably long times. We were required to demonstrate proficiency in a swimming pools, dressed in a bathing suit. I would not want to test the theories in the real world.
AesopSpouse and I work with Boy Scouts, and one of the surprising things we learned during lifeguard training is that the swimmer in distress is NOT the one thrashing about and drawing attention, but the quiet one who is just silently sinking.
There are “open” mysteries like Columbo as well as “closed” mysteries like Sherlock Holmes.
Knowing whodunnit, it turns out, is not an obstacle to a good story if you can’t imagine how any detective could figure it out. So too here, I suspect.
The USN used to teach drown proofing, including minimal effort treading, in flight training, and probably in other programs as well.
Steve57, Oldflyer: How effective is drownproofing? I learned it in my twenties when I passed certification as a lifeguard. I’ve wondered.
Drownproofing, as I learned it, involved floating upright barely above the water line with full lungs, exhaling, sinking, then briefly kicking to reach the surface, taking a breath again and holding. Lather, rinse, repeat. The key is minimal effort.
Happily I never had the need to test it.
“Here’s one video in the show that doesn’t seem to feature any bad decisions on the part of the survivor.”-NEO
I protest..Anyone who wants to jump out of airplanes is in fact making bad decisions. The luck came in that his bad decision happened to be correct as this plane WAS crashing.
As for my guilty you tube pleasure. A series that ran for a few years called “WHY WOULD YOU EAT THAT”. Its basic take is to look at foods from around the world considered local delicacies. Add in some history, some humor. And then watching production crew members trying it out. And while they try to take foods from every culture. Far eastern and Nordic cultures seem to have developed some truly odd foods.
The drownproofing is pretty effective. At least I haven’t drowned yet. I could tread water for hours. And, no doubt what you’re thinking of, as long as I kept my lungs full of air I would keep afloat.
https://www.public.navy.mil/netc/centers/cnatt/nascweb/survival/survival_ocs.aspx
If any of you have kids who want to learn how not to drown I can teach that. You can look at the minimal Navy requirements and think, “That doesn’t look hard.” And it’s not. But we trained days just to make the grade. It’s like boxing.
Three 3 minute rounds doesn’t sound like much. Until you try it.
I am, btw, a lousy boxer.
I too have never had to employ drownproofing in extremis. The best form of drownproofing, I found, when I served, is you fight the ship to win. If you keep your ship alive you don’t end up in the water.
Problem solved.
But I never had to fight the ship. We, the United States of America, have sea supremacy. We are the thousand pound gorilla wherever we sail. So nobody challenges us.
That warms the cockles of my heart. And I didn’t even know I had cockles, although I suspected I had a heart.
Huxley, the method you describe is exactly what we were taught. As I said, it works great in a pool. Not so sure about the ocean, where with any turbulence you were just as likely to get a big gulp of sea water whenever you raised your head to get air
.
We were also taught, as I am sure you were, to make a rudimentary flotation device out of our trousers. I think that some of the sailors I mentioned as survivors used that technique. Of course the irony of my training was that if I went into the ocean I would be wearing boots, and a heavy flame resistant flight suit, among other weighty accouterments–but, hopefully, a functioning flotation device as well.
The most fantastic survival story is that of Donald Trump. He survived everything that the corrupocrates, jour-no-listees and deep state threw at him for the past 3+ years.
No other candidate/president could have survived that. He did and came out stronger.
P.S. If you want a great survival story, consider those who survived the sinking of the cruiser Indianapolis, treading shark infested waters for days — so long that their skin would come off when they were lifted from the water.
I don’t believe you can use the word “best” when talking about survival at sea stories.
All the stories are about really truly miserable experiences.
Yes, when I practiced drownproofing it was in a pool or relatively sheltered water. In a pool I can tread water for hours even in a flight suit and boots.
I don’t know how long I would last in the open ocean. Minutes, maybe, if I was lucky.
The ocean is always trying to kill you.
I want to make sure I am very clear.
The ocean scares me. I am worried I might come across as something of a b** **s. I’m not. Nothing near.
If you are smart the ocean terrifies you too.
We were also taught, as I am sure you were, to make a rudimentary flotation device out of our trousers. I think that some of the sailors I mentioned as survivors used that technique
Oldflyer: I seem to recall the Hardy Boys using that technique once when they got marooned far out at sea.
No, really.
If you are smart the ocean terrifies you too.
Steve57: Indeed.
One time while surfing mere five-foot waves, I got pulled down and held down much longer than I expected. My the air tasted sweet when I reached the surface!
That was in San Francisco. Because of the Bay there are a lot of weird rip currents. SF beaches have signs warning of the risk. People, especially small children, can get pulled out to sea in only a few feet of water.
https://www.inside-guide-to-san-francisco-tourism.com/beaches-in-san-francisco.html
It’s not a new technique
So it’s good to know that, you know, it doesn’t always work.
I mean, NOTHING always works.
I didn’t mean that.