My friend Barbara once went on a day hike in Henry Cowell State Park, up Felton way. By the time darkness fell, she and her friend were so lost they couldn't even find the trail. Around midnight, they decided to quit stumbling around and lie down until daybreak. It was January. They were wearing shorts. It was cold.

I was jealous.

Jealous because Barbara had a real honest to goodness wilderness survival adventure, while I was just reading in bed with a cup of tea. She got to tell an exciting story. She got chilled, scraped, hungry, bruised, and, a few days later, a vicious case of poison oak. During that same time, I burned my lip a little on the tea. No comparison.

I was probably reading one of my wilderness survival books at the time, studying for the day that I might have to survive by my wits. It's an ongoing interest. It's like armchair travel, but travel that has gone horribly awry.

I've always fallen for the romanticism of survival situations. As a Boy Scout, I learned a lot about first aid and making shelters and so forth. Always prepared, I took a Swiss army knife to school. I loved stories like Shackleton and Robinson Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson. Anything that made people carve a life for themselves out of raw materials. On television I watched Grizzly Adams, Lost in Space, and Gilligan's Island.

Strangely, the show "Survivor" left me cold. There's no real peril when you know that if worse comes to worst, you can always eat the camera crew.

What really convinced me that life was fraught with peril was Drama in Real Life, a regular feature in the Reader's Digest magazines that littered my childhood home. They were accounts of some regular Joe's story, but creatively embellished to the point of farce. Joe didn't just sprain an ankle, Joe "felt the tendons stretch, and then tear, his foot cramping uncontrollably in his now worthless shoe."

Typical stories involved escaping burning buildings, getting stuck in caves, and best of all, finding a way out of the woods.

Lately, one of my favorite books is "Survival Skills of Native California," by Paul D. Campbell. It describes how various groups would find shelter, food, and water before the Europeans came and made them wear pants. So when I heard about "Ohlone Day" last month at Henry Cowell, I knew I had to go.

Staff and volunteers from the Natural History Museum were on hand to help demonstrate a number of handy skills, like using an atlatl, a sort of hand-held catapult used to fling a spear. It's not easy, but one apparently gifted ten year old boy stepped up and fired a spear right into the snout of a paper pig target, invoking shrieks from two little girls who followed him around for the rest of the day.

There were also demonstrations of grinding and cooking acorns, drilling holes in things to make jewelry, weaving reeds into fans, and making arrowheads.

Me, I just wanted to learn how to skin squirrels and start fires. I was out of luck on the squirrel part, but the fire making demonstration caught my eye.

There's a certain thrill you get from starting a fire by twirling the point of a stick against a piece of board, but I'll never feel it. I got a little curl of smoke going once, but it was put out by the shower of sweat dripping off my brow.

I got to thinking, what about suburban survival? If there was a major catastrophe that cut Santa Cruz off from outside food, what would we do when the canned food ran out? Eat the raccoons?

As it turns out, we could. I was having dinner at my friend Sabrina's house when she showed me her 1974 edition of the perennial favorite Joy of Cooking, which tells us how.

"Opossum: If possible, trap opossum and feed it for ten days on milk and cereals before killing." After simmering, "Test frequently by plucking at the hair. When it pulls out easily, remove."

"But this is chicken, right?" I asked, looking at my plate.

The book says gray squirrels are preferred over red ones, which are considered "gamey." There's a series of cute "how to skin a squirrel" drawings like you might see embroidered on an oven mitt or apron.

Recipes for raccoon, rabbit, bear, beaver, woodchuck, muskrat, venison, quail, duck and pigeon all imply that we could hold out if worse came to worse.

Part of survival training is learning to avoid survival situations in the first place. I've done well there. In reality, I may well be a suburbified creampuff who wouldn't last a day in the wild. Still, I'm comforted to know I'd do well on the written test.