Trial by fire at Santa Cruz survival camp

They say it’s possible to light a fire by rubbing two sticks together, if one of them is a match.

There were, unfortunately, no matches the other day, deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains. A dozen people were trying to start fires by rubbing sticks. Each one had paid $125 to learn how to do it. It’s part of an all-day class on how to survive being lost in the wilderness. There is plenty of wilderness in the Santa Cruz Mountains to get lost in, and plenty of sticks in the wilderness for lost people to rub.

For 13 years, the Adventure Out company has been running a day-long class on how to survive being lost in the wilderness. Survival classes are big business these days, and the curriculum never varies. Fire, shelter, water, food. Those constitute the Big Four for any lost soul interested in not dropping dead. Fire, being the flashiest, gets most of the attention.

“Do exactly what I do,’ said the teacher, survival expert Jack Harrison, and then he grabbed a couple of sticks and started a fire in about a minute. Harrison has started hundreds of fires by rubbing sticks. Maybe thousands. Nothing to it. Lighting fires is what the human species does, along with using language and making tools and playing the harmonica.

Fifteen of us wannabe stick rubbers had gathered at a Boy Scout camp outside Boulder Creek for Harrison’s all-day class. The survival school rents out the scout camp when the Boy Scouts are off earning merit badges someplace else.

First, said Harrison, you whittle each end of a short stick to a point. Then you tie a cord, or your shoelace, to another stick and wrap it around the pointed stick. You pull it back and forth to make the pointed stick spin against a notch in a block of wood. After the friction creates a small glowing coal — something like the tip of a cigarette — you transfer the coal to a bundle of shredded fiber, blow on it and the thing bursts into flame. Then the rescue helicopter comes and you’re back in civilization instead of all-day survival class.

The Chronicle started whittling, with a Swiss Army knife. Harrison smiled, politely. A Swiss Army knife is a cute little thing, with its tiny blade and its fold-up geegaws. It turns out to be less than useful, survival-wise. A Swiss Army knife is the mark of someone who believes the wilderness to be a happy place full of chipmunks and songbirds and unopened wine bottles.

“I see you’ve got a corkscrew,” Harrison said, inspecting the Chronicle’s Swiss Army knife and smiling. “That will come in mighty handy.”

Harrison had brought along a few proper knives — the hefty, Rambo kind — to lend out to us Swiss Army newbies. But even after the whittling, the Chronicle’s two sticks refused to ignite. The spinning stick kept slipping out of position, the shoelace kept unwrapping, the pointed end kept wobbling.

What the Chronicle needed was a crumpled-up Chronicle. Also a cigarette lighter. And to lose the sticks. Finally, after no end of coaching from Harrison and no end of sweat from the student, the Chronicle got the thing to ignite.

Even though the fire started, rescue was not forthcoming. Instead, it was time to build a crude hut out of dead pine needles and sticks.

It’s called a debris hut. Building a fire, apparently, is not enough to stave off death. You must also construct a hut out of sticks, Three Little Pigs-style, and crawl inside. Harrison showed how to do it. One big stick is the backbone, some forked sticks are the supports and lesser sticks are the joists. Then you grab every dead pine needle and dead leaf in the vicinity and toss them on, until the thing looks like a pile of what you load into the green bin on garbage day.

One student said she had an important question to ask, and the question involved the location of the nearest lavatory. Harrison said the wilderness is no place to be particular. He waved expansively to the left and right.

“Feel free to use the bushes,” he said, and that was the last question that this particular student asked all day.

The Chronicle got down to the business of building his hut. After tossing on to it seemingly every available pine needle within three counties, this reporter crawled in. Harrison came by to inspect. Yes, there were plenty of dead needles and leaves but, alas, not enough. The Chronicle might or might not survive in its debris hut, because of the gaps in the debris. The Chronicle needed to immerse itself in more trash, junk, detritus and waste material. There were too many holes in the Chronicle’s coverage of junk.

Fortunately, a student gathering dead needles and leaves has plenty of time to chat with his fellow dead leaf gatherers. There were 15 students, all of them reasonably sure that, for various reasons, wilderness survival skills would be useful things to have.

“My kids think I’m crazy to do this,” said Deborah Pilger, an operating room nurse from Sunnyvale, “but I think the world will end some day, for sure. We’re going downhill fast.”

Sara and Craig Smith, from Carmel Valley, brought their 10-year-old son, Duke. Sara, a den mother in Duke’s Cub Scout pack, said the Scouts were short on survival skills and she wanted Duke to learn to build a fire with sticks before it was too late.

“As humans, we’re so hooked on the easy way of doing things,” she said. “We may never need to start a fire with sticks, but if you can do it, it builds confidence.”

It could all be academic without food and water. Fortunately, wilderness food is plentiful, Harrison said, because of all the bugs. Ants, especially, but also worms and termites. You just grab a handful of ants if you get hungry. It’s safer than killing a squirrel or other small animal, which could carry disease Ants, termites and worms are safe as can be, Harrison said. So dig in.

“Never eat slugs and snails,” said Harrison. “They carry parasites.”

As for water, it’s only safe to drink if you boil it first. Animals do into creek water the same thing that fish do into the ocean. So hollow out a big piece of tree bark, collect some water in it and then drop in a superheated rock from the fire, until the water bubbles for a spell.

That assumes you got the fire started with your two sticks, the teacher acknowledged. If not, then you might have already died from exposure and need not worry about such details as water purity.

Harrison dropped a hot rock into his tree bark cup full of filthy water and said it was now safe to drink, in case any of us were thirsty. No one was, so class was dismissed, although not before Harrison made a plug for the next class in the survival series — an overnight intensive in which you actually sleep in the debris huts you construct and eat bugs, too.

That class costs $195. But nobody signed up for it. There was only so much surviving you could do, and the students had already survived one go-round of survival. Now it was time to head down the road to celebrate all that surviving inside one of those woodsy Highway 9 taverns that also prepare beverages on the rocks.

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com

If you go

Adventure Out’s wilderness skills and survival classes are offered in Santa Cruz and Marin counties. Prices start at $125. For a schedule, visit www.adventureout.com. (800) 509-3954.