Ye Olde West in the movies, and Water.
Wondered about this when I was a kid...
The rough and tough gunslinger or cowboy, after riding who knows how far, comes into some dusty skeleton of a town on the frontier, walks into the saloon, and has some whiskey. Has all kinds of mis-adventures out in the frontier, exposed to the elements, with just a blanket and only one or two boyscout style canteens of water - which were probably just dipped into a river to refill. And this movie character often seems to have all his strength and wits about him, despite probable dehydration and over-exposure to the elements.
I just didn't think, even as a kid, that I'd only want a few shots of whiskey everytime I stopped in some dusty town, and almost no water. Of course, we know that this is "just the movies."
In a primitive or quasi-primitive survival situation, I tell people that shelter, all things being equal, can be the most important and immediate. But I can never help giving a speech about water as if it were the most important - just to make them really understand. The reason for this is because the issue of water is compounded so much: You lose brain and body function fast, so that your efforts to do anything else, including getting the water that you don't have yet, is greatly undermined; You cannot eat without drinkable water - to do so is like drinking ocean water; You cannot just gather water and sling it over your shoulder or under your arm - there are no trees which grow big jugs for practical volumes of water, before even making it drinkable; No matter whatever else you do each day, you need to also produce practical volumes of drinkable water every day - so you better have some method established by which you can do this without it taking all of your daylight hours so you can do other things, and you really shouldn't skip a single day without drinkable water.
I don't even like the 3-3-3 thing when it comes to water. I instead like to say "at the end of your second day without water, you are already headed for actual death. (Because this includes the fact that by that time, your efforts to get water are severely handicapped mentally and physically) Do some yard work for a single hour, under the sun, in the middle of summer. Then remain outside for the rest of the day, and all that night, and all the next day. Don't go indoors. Have no chair or bed. Don't drink a single swallow of water.
This usually makes people understand the reality...the truth derived from the experience, versus what they hear about or see on T.V. from a distance.
