Eight Words

​When I'm in the mood to stir up a little trouble, I present my students with a scenario that goes something like this: “You are comfortably asleep in a Leer jet flying high above the Canadian wilderness. Onboard are a pilot, a co-pilot, and yourself. All is good. Until the aircraft crashes brutally in the forest. When you come to, you instinctively check yourself for injuries. There are none. Slowly you crawl past two severed heads and exit the damaged aircraft. About the time your feet hit the ground, the front section of the plane erupts in fire. Tell me. Tell me now. What are you going to do?" Please take out your notepad and start writing your answer. You have ten minutes.”

Without delay, each student starts writing like their writing hand is on fire. Sentence after sentence. At the ten-minute mark most are still writing. Two ask for more time.

“Time’s up!” I announce. “Please hand me your papers.”

“Mr. Kerns are you going to grade them?” a lady asks. “You know, give each of us a score like an A or a B.”

“No, ma’am,” I politely answer. “It’s gonna be pass or fail.”

I laboriously read every submission and announced the results: “All of you failed.”

I immediately sensed the students were not happy. The lady who asked about the grading? Wow was she ever giving me the stink eye. All were expressing their disproval one way or another and it took me an eternity to calm ‘em down.

“Each of you should have written only eight words.” They stared at me like I was crazy. “How in the Sam Hill do you know what you would have done?” I asked, waving my arms all around my head. “You aren’t even there! You aren’t in Canada! You haven’t been in a horrible and deadly aircraft crash! You aren’t smelling bodies burning! You’re here! In the state of Georgia!”

An older lady held up her hand. “What are the eight words, Byron?”

“I do not know, I was not there." The lady and the others suddenly stopped looking at me like I was crazy. They got it. They understood.

The reality is you’ll never know for certain what your will to survive will be until you are smack-dab in the middle of a wilderness survival situation. Will you panic? Will you give up? Will your attitude be positive? Will you help yourself and others? Your will to survive, no matter the overwhelming obstacles, is your desire to live.

Never have I forgot the day I went with Dad to Benny’s Barbershop. We were waiting to get our haircuts and I was reading a magazine. The article was about a logger who accidentally sawed off his leg with a chainsaw, from the knee down. Then, the guy went and crawled two miles through some woods for help. That’s when I got my first inkling of a person’s will to survive. Since then, I’ve read hundreds of stories about people and their will to survive. On the flip side, I’ve read plenty of stories about folks who have received some of the best survival training money can buy and still gave up and died during a survival situation. Go figure.

Back in 2003, a fella got his arm trapped by a large boulder in a Utah canyon. After being trapped several days with very little water, the man escaped by breaking his trapped arm and amputating it with a knife. He then hiked seven miles to safety. The media got wind of the man’s survival story and it wasn’t long before my phone started ringing. Reporters were phoning from all over the world asking, “What would you have done Byron under those circumstances?”

The callers were friendly and sweet as pie. But only at the first part of each call. Looking back, maybe them reporters were trying to butter me up. Well, anyways, you should have heard their responses after they went and asked, “What would you have done Byron?” and I answered with “I don’t know, I wasn’t there.” Wow! Each of them turned into a birdbrain that wanted to bite my head off. Shucks, one reporter from New York City angrily exclaimed, “How dare you waste my time, you f***ing hillbilly!” That’s what she said, right before disconnecting. My feelings were crushed, but only for a second. Thank goodness for the will to survive.

---