Stroud - Beyond Survivorman

I was at the peak of my career as a documentary filmmaker. I had one of the highest-rated documentary shows on TV. I was getting out of a marriage that was no longer working. I was seeing substantial income for the first time in my life, and I was traveling the world. But two demons combined to make me feel completely lost. The first one was the oppressive thought that I would no longer be with my children a hundred percent of their lives. The second demon made the first one all the more unbearable: I no longer felt I had a deep spiritual connection to the earth. As I lay on the pebble beach on the ocean coast somewhere in Alaska, I couldnt find solace or comfort in the rocks, the trees, the water, the wind, or the cloudsthe very elements Id had a connection with for the previous 15 years of my life. The beauty and the magnificence of the natural world that surrounded me had always sustained me. But it sustained me no more.

I was Survivorman. My entire career was based on surviving in the wilderness and that should mean connecting with the wilderness. I wondered, If anyone could become one with the wilderness it should be me, shouldnt it? But I had lost it. My time in the wilderness had become a business. It had become a means to an end, when once it was the only end. The wilderness had become a location to create my work, when once it was the work itself. It had become a place of struggle and sometimes suffering, when once it was a place to find relief and rejuvenation. It was becoming my prison, when once it was my freedom.

I began to want that freedom back.

Les looks like Sting with a degree in edible plants. Thats how a journalist described me many years before Survivorman, when I was at the peak of my guiding days in Temagami, in northeastern Ontario. A few years before that time, I had walked away from a career in music and televisionand my attempts to become a rock star. I was in my late 20s, fit, tanned, and rich in wilderness skills and bush sense. Everything about me had to do with nature and adventure. During every canoe trip, somewhere along the way, I would lie back on a sun-warmed rock and fall asleep looking up at the clouds that danced across the blue sky. In those moments I was a kid again. Nothing else mattered. Not world issues. Not financial issues. Not family issues. Not even romance. (Okay, that always mattered.) Time in the wilderness was a glorious escape from all things domestic, mundane, and tedious. It was a long way from all things big and important to the rest of the world. I could exist completely unaffected by whatever was happening out there. I was here. Here in the beautiful nature that nurtured my soul. Here where some kind of positive energy force filled me constantly and never brought me down. It was 24/7 nirvana. And it gave me a permanent smile.

Hours would pass as I lay quietly by a lake or river, and then I would turn to one side and kiss that sun-warmed rock beneath me. It was my way of saying thank you. In a similar way, before I would cut down trees to make a survival shelter, I would say thank you to the energy that was about to give of itself to me. When, on any given adventure, I gazed at the glorious splendor that is the natural world, I would say thank you. Thank you to whom or what? I dont really know: God, maybe; Mother Earth, perhaps; the universe itself? I dont know. I knew just that offering gratitude was important because I was truly lucky and blessed to be given all these experiences.