Two stories - one personal, one that I read in - yes, a book. <img src="images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

I got interested in survival (and actually, this was when I found ETS, I think) when I got roped into giving a talk on "Wilderness Survival" for a group of fellow pilots. As part of the talk, I showed them a copy of John Wiseman's "SAS Survival Guide" and recommended that every pilot should keep a copy of this book in his or her shirt pocket when flying. One smart-aleck said, yeah, if all else fails you can tear the pages out of it and start a fire with it. Another pilot, ex-military, who was sitting at the front of the class and paying close attention to my talk, immediately stood up, turned around, and said in a very clear voice, "NO! You burn your logbook before you burn your survival manual!"

The other example, though, is from Larry Dean Olsen's "Outdoor Survival Skills" (2nd Ed.) He tells the story of how he read about how his own book (1st Ed.) had saved the lives of two teenagers who got lost in a snowstorm (in the Southwest, I believe - Colorado or New Mexico?) They had tried and tried, unsuccessfully, to light a fire.

Eventually, they were down to their last two matches when one of them remembered that his mother had given him a copy of Olsen's book before he left on the trip.

(I can picture the conversation, can't you? <img src="images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" /> "Oh, mom, I don't need that, we're not going to get lost." "YOU PUT THAT IN YOUR BACKPACK OR YOU'RE NOT SETTING FOOT OUT THAT DOOR, YOUNG MAN!")

Anyway, in the last rays of the dying sun, he sat and read the section on starting a fire until he was sure he understood it, then he tore some pages out of the book (literally), used that as the basis for his teepee fire, and with their second last match, started the fire that kept them alive through the night.

So yes, people should have far more reverence for books than they do. (You can't stick the Internet in your shirt pocket, and you can't read a Palm Pilot without batteries.) But as Olsen's story also points out, books shouldn't be so sacred that you forget they're a ready source of paper, WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS!