![]() And sure enough, on only his third day out there, his third day in the storm and vacancy of his own aloneness, Shields “taps out.” He can’t take it anymore: He radios the producers. He looks momentarily holographic, like he might go fuzzy and vanish from the picture. He exhales, as if the weight of it is about to collapse his rib cage. Deposited on the cold shore of a fuming-with-bleakness lake in the Andean foothills, with only a couple of GoPros for company (that’s the hook of Alone: no camera crews the contestants film themselves), he spreads his arms, throws back his head, and, in an attempt at exultation, bellows, “PATAGONI-AAAAH!”- only to be almost visibly demolished, half a second later, by the ensuing unresponding immensity of silence and solitude. ![]() ![]() Remember Jim Shields from Season 3 of Alone ? How passionately I relate to this guy. It’s not Alaska that breaks you, or Mongolia, or northeastern Labrador-it’s the contents of your own head. ![]() And if, like me, you’ve watched 432 episodes of survival TV, the beloved subgenre that pits bare, forked man against the unrelenting wilderness, you’ve seen it happen over and over again. The mind, the mind-it can bear you sweetly along on pulses of transparent super-energy, or it can rear up and bite your face off. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. ![]()
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