Team One: Tracker (thermal blanket, flashlight), Rancher (metal cup), Biology (protein bars), and Banker (matches).
Team Two: Zoo (fire starter), Engineer (fishing kit), Waitress (filled water bottles), and Asian Chick (box of chocolate bars).
Team Three: Air Force (dried cabbage), Black Doctor (iodine pills), Cheerleader Boy (heavy-duty trash bags), and Exorcist (dowsing rod).
It’s too much information; few watching will be able to remember who has what. The host doesn’t even try. He’s tired, anxious for a break. “Great,” he says. “Your home base for tonight is this field. You can build your camps here, or in the woods nearby—your choice. I will see you all at first light for your first Team Challenge.” He nods gravely, then intones, “Make camp.”
As the three groups disperse, the drone buzzes the field. Everyone but Tracker looks up. Exorcist winks and swings his dowsing rod over his shoulder. Tracker leads his team to the north end of the field. Zoo takes the west and Air Force the east. Black Doctor notices his leader’s limp and asks to see his ankle. “A sprain,” he announces, and he sets off to scavenge a crutch. Of the actual process of building camp, little is shown. Tracker and Air Force know what they’re doing, and their teams’ camps come together quickly as they assign roles.
Zoo is less accustomed to being a leader. Her first command is a question: “What do you guys think—” but no one is listening. Waitress is complaining about being cold; Asian Chick berates her, “You should have worn a shirt.” Engineer is investigating his fishing kit: a kite handle wrapped with line instead of string. Its contours don’t fit his hand; it’s sized for a child. Three hooks, two weights, two little clips called swivels that Engineer doesn’t yet understand. Zoo watches as he unspools a stretch of line and tests its strength. Her question hangs, unfinished and unanswered.
Tracker’s team has a fire within TV seconds, which is about twenty real-time minutes. Air Force’s team has a shelter moments later, after a commercial break, and Cheerleader Boy is flabbergasted to learn that his garbage bags are key to waterproofing the shallow lean-to.
Zoo tries a new approach. She crouches next to Engineer. “Why don’t you test that out at the river?” she asks. “See if you can get it to work?” Engineer looks at his leader’s entreating smile and sees his own excitement reflected in it. Zoo turns to the others. “I’ve got the fire starter,” she says, “so I’ll take care of that. Why don’t you two work on a shelter?” Asian Chick waves away Waitress, saying, “I got this.” Prodded to action, she reveals an expanded identity: Asian Carpenter Chick. Skilled at woodworking, she assembles their shelter with confidence. Though the structure lacks nails and none of its components were measured, it projects sturdiness. More than that, it projects beauty, for the human brain is adapted to see beauty in symmetry. Even the off-site producer, who is so sour his sense of beauty has shriveled like a dehydrated lemon, will recognize that the slender, symmetrical lean-to has a certain bucolic appeal. Identity contracts, sloughing off one defining feature for another, and Carpenter Chick joins the cast.
For dinner, Tracker distributes one of Biology’s protein bars to each of his team members. Biology doesn’t appear to mind, and in this case appearance reflects reality. The bars are indeed gluten-free, but they contain sucralose, which turns her stomach. She eats one only because a turned stomach is marginally better than an empty one. Tracker leaves Rancher in charge of finishing their shelter and then jogs off, fading into the woods like a specter. A very fast specter; the cameraman cannot keep up. Recording devices mounted on trees every hundred feet catch snippets of his carving and setting a series of small deadfall traps. Tracker hopes to catch breakfast overnight. He too dislikes the protein bars; he thinks they taste of industrialization.
At the river Engineer ties a hook to the line, and baits it with a worm he finds under a rock. The worm is quickly tossed and lost. Engineer takes a sinker and one of the clips out of his pocket, cuts off the hook, ties in the swivel. Attaches both hook and sinker. It doesn’t look right to him, the weight and hook together like that, but he tries it.
Well after their shelter is built and the sun beginning to set, Zoo finds him at the riverside, still trying, adjusting. There’s several feet of line between the swivel and hook now. “Wow,” she says. “You actually turned that into something you can fish with.”
Engineer feels a swell of pride. His knuckles are scraped raw from the too-tight handle. “I think the next variable to adjust is the bait.”
“Good idea. Tomorrow, though, or we’ll never find our way back to camp.”
Their team settles for a child’s dream dinner: all the chocolate they can stomach, and then some.
To the east, Air Force rehydrates and shares his cabbage, and then limps into the woods with the help of a walking stick to set some deadfalls, something he hasn’t done since basic. Black Doctor follows to learn how it’s done. “If we had the fishing line we could set snares,” Air Force tells him. “Next time,” Black Doctor answers. Air Force’s traps won’t work, but their construction is not fruitless; our first alliance is forming.
Night drifts over the campsites. All are exhausted to varying degrees, but Waitress is the most exhausted. She’s been shivering for hours, even with her thin Lycra jacket zipped over her sports bra. She curls by the fire, not comfortable enough with her teammates to share body heat. “It’s warmer in here,” says Zoo, wrapped in her fleece jacket. Waitress shakes her head. A cameraman watches her, recording her discomfort and wishing he could lend her his much-warmer coat. When Waitress shifts her back to the fire, he nearly calls out a warning about her hair, but she tugs it over her shoulder without prompting. Waitress is unsettled. She wishes the cameraman would either say something or leave. She knows she should talk, not to him, but to her teammates or at least to herself, but she’s too cold, too tired. The night deepens. The cameraman’s shift ends. He retreats to the production team’s much more elaborate camp at a second field a quarter mile south. There they have tents and grills. Coolers stuffed with meat and milk and beer. Mosquito netting. The cameramen assigned to the other two teams also retire. Mounted cameras are left to watch the contestants.
These cameras don’t care that Waitress is cold, or that Air Force’s ankle is throbbing. They record Rancher crawling from his shelter to take a piss, and Waitress’s endless shivering, but they miss more than they record. They miss Banker offering Biology his puffy jacket as a pillow, and his face relaxing into relief at her polite refusal. They miss Zoo, Engineer, and Carpenter Chick exchanging their backgrounds in bedtime-story whispers. They miss Exorcist’s lips framing an honest prayer as he lies tucked into the corner of his team’s lean-to.
Mostly, they record dying flames.
5.