HH: When we met in Alabama, I had no idea of the extent of the book, or of the journey you were on at that time.  What inspired you to undertake this project?
Sheridan: The most basic thing. I had a child, a son. With that came a seriously heightened sense of responsibility. I’m pretty handy for a New York or LA guy, but compared to most outdoorsman, compared to most Field & Stream readers, I just didn’t know how to do a lot of very basic things. I wanted to learn the nuts and bolts of survival, and when you open that Pandora’s Box, there’s really no end to it.

HH: What skills did you think you needed when you started out?
Sheridan:  I wasn’t sure. I had something left over from my childhood- the small town I grew up in Massachusetts, all the people were massacred by Indians back in Colonial days. That history was very much a part of my growing up, imagining that, knowing that it happened right there where we played and lived, that idea of ‘what was it like?’ or ‘what would I have done?’ 

Now, we all see the coverage on television, war footage, the tsunami, 9/11, all those real events. You hear the talk of “bombed back into the stone age” and you can look at the films of Afghanistan, or some other place, and see that can literally be true, that it happens to people. 

And then there all the silly fears, too, alien invasion, zombie apocalypse, that don’t always seem so silly. I have insomnia, and I have nightmares, and I thought that getting the knowledge to deal with those kinds of situations, to take care of my family, would alleviate some of the grimness. This book is my story. It’s not about how wide you should build your winter shelter, or how many pounds of beans you’ll need- I trained with people who can tell you that- this is the overstory, how to shoot, how to hunt, how to build  a shelter or a trap.

HH: The book seems to be coming out at just the right time. There is so much talk of collapse, of apocalypse; it’s almost part of the national consciousness. Why do you think that is?
Sheridan: It’s nothing new. We’ve always had these fears. Fear of death, of destruction. Apocalyptic prophecy is constant throughout human history, in human consciousness, in every culture I know of.  I do notice in studying this that the more oppressed a people feels, the more they seem to believe in Armageddon prophecies. Right now I think that we have a lot of people doing things that are so difficult, with a lot of drudgery in jobs and commutes and paying the bills.  When the world as we know it ends, all those things are done. It’s just you and your rifle and your backpack, fighting, evading, maybe saving some beautiful woman from the bad guys. All the drudgery is swept away.

HH: That’s the fantasy version, anyway.
Sheridan: Yes. And what I found out was so completely different than that. Real survival is so slow. Hours of painstaking work, most of it boring. This was one of the most powerful experiences of all for me. When I was training primitive skills with John McPherson in Kansas, it was normal to spend an entire day accomplishing one task. I’ve never been patient. I’m a rusher. And rushing to make a fire with a bow drill means failure.  If your bow drill sucks because you didn’t make it right, if your fire bundle sucks, that fire is never going to happen. You freeze. And hunting? Well, that seal is not coming through that ice when you want it to. And if you don’t wait, you die. If you are impatient, you die. What a thing to learn!

Fiber for cordage. Meat. Fire. It’s as simple as that. Or as complex. The basics of self sufficiency. The basics of life. A tighter relationship to the world that provides them. That’s what I found.