Homeless in Vancouver: Putting survival tools in context

A week ago I traded a little baggie of marijuana that I found in a Dumpster to another homeless binner for $3 worth of future considerations and immediate possession of a novel trinket that he’d found.

It was a braided-cord bracelet with a side-release buckle that ingeniously incorporated a piece of ferro rod (artificial flint), a metal striker (for sparking tinder), and a little whistle, to alert bears (or rescuers) to your presence, I guessed.

A two-trick wilderness survival kit in the easy-to-carry form of a bracelet. Neat, I thought.

Later on I found out that it had a few more features along with a really interesting back story that illustrated the blurring distinction between brand name originals and copies.

At first blush though, it was clear that the bracelet was clever and useful but only in the context of wilderness survival.

With survival tools as with so many things, context is everything, meaning that this survival bracelet, carefully designed for the wilderness, was worse than useless to me as a homeless person living in the city.

Possibly the integral whistle could be put to some use to draw attention but the bracelet’s main function of lighting fires would likely just get me arrested.

The key to urban survival tools

So, you may ask, what do I think constitutes real survival tools in a city?

In the wilderness, all the ingredients of survival are out in the open but a person needs to put them together from scratch. In the city, it’s quite different; everything is pre-mixed and packaged but locked away out of reach. Therefore, many urban survival tools tend to be keys of one sort or another.

Aside from actual Dumpster lock keys, two especially useful urban survival tools that come to mind and that I keep handy, are a can opener—in my case a military type P-38 can opener, or its larger cousin the P-52—and a handle for an outdoor water tap or spigot.

The latter is an exemplary urban survival tool, especially now. We’re coming to the part of the year when such a tap handle could potentially save a street person’s life.

Water, water everywhere but…

Consider a binner who’s homeless, or just poorer-than-poor, and who finds themselves short of, or entirely without, water on a hot summer’s day while roaming the heat-shimmering alleys of a Metro Vancouver neighbourhood.

Consider also that heat stroke can come over a person quite quickly, especially if they don’t drink a lot of water and are somewhat dehydrated to begin with—this can certainly be the case if they are chronic alcoholics or heroin addicts.

What can our homeless person do to quench their thirst?

They may be very far from a water fountain or a public washroom and there’s no guarantee anymore that restaurants will serve water to people who present as homeless—the McDonald’s restaurant just off South Granville Street on West Broadway Avenue will actually charge them a quarter for the paper cup.

But there is actually water everywhere in a neighbourhood back alley. Each apartment building is fitted with an outdoor water tap for attaching a garden hose to.

However, for the parched and thirsty homeless person, there may not be a drop to drink because a great many of the apartment buildings in Vancouver’s neighbourhoods remove the handles from their outdoor water taps.

Which is why several homeless people I know carry water tap handles.

Fortunately for me, drinking copious quantities of coffee (as I do) doesn’t really dehydrate a person but all the cycling I do certainly does. So I always carry a water bottle and I carry a water tap handle.

I use the handle when necessary, to top up my water bottle if I run out and sometimes to wash my hands in an alley and for instance, I used it last week so that I could rinse out some some glass milk bottles that I found a block from a store where I could cash them in.

Without trying to absolve myself of a Tank Girl willingness to filch water, I will say that I try not to use building water taps indiscriminately. I mostly fill up on water at restaurants. When I use a tap, I do so carefully and make sure that it’s firmly shut off and not dripping when I’m done.

Of course, not all of Vancouver’s homeless chose to collect returnable beverage containers or other discarded valuables out of the garbage in the back alleys; many prefer to panhandle and their survival tools tend to take a much simpler form.

The ultimate urban survival tool: a homeless money card

People who tend towards dedicated panhandling will consider their own poor-looking demeanor to be one of their most important survival tools, along with a high-traffic street corner and some props, in the form of a roughly hand-lettered cardboard sign bearing a brief, heart-tugging exhortation, as well as a paper cup.

These are all the tools that they feel they need to survive in the big city.

In order to thrive however, they may want a cellphone so that they can call the dope man when the panhandling permits.

Each to their own.

Natural selection and the survival of the fittest bracelet

Back to the fire-striker survival bracelet. It may have been out of its element in the big city but it was still very cool and I wanted to know more about it.

The first thing that a search on the Internet told me was that the braided cord wasn’t supposed to be for show. It should have unraveled to provide about 2.7 metres of high-strength “paracord”, which could be used for pulling or binding or peeled to get at interwoven strands of jute (for kindling) and coiled nylon fishing line.

A fishing hook, I read, may also have been embedded in the braided cord and a remaining feature that I missed was that the serrated edge of the steel flint striker was designed to serve as handy saw blade (reaching there a bit, folks).

I say “should” and “may” because the bracelet I bartered off my friend appears to be a no-name knockoff of a Kodiak survival bracelet made by a company called Survival Element and successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter in 2013.

The Kodiak, appears to have been the first survival product to pair a firestarter/whistle buckle with a braided bracelet of jute/fishing line paracord as well as include a fishing hook embedded in the braided paracord bracelet.

My knockoff appears to faithfully duplicate all the Kodiak’s functionality sans the fish hook.

Interestingly, the Kodiak may itself have been a bit of a knockoff. In 2013 one survivalist blogger bluntly accused Survival Element of copying and combining the earlier inventions of two other survivalist companies.

One of the companies, Sgt. Knots, claims that its 550 paracord (which dates to 2012) was the first to include both jute and fishing line. And the other, Wazoo Survival Gear, claims to have patented the firestarter/whistle buckle combination as the Firestorm buckle, also in 2012.

However, less than three years later, priority no longer matters much: the USD$24.99 Kodiak bracelet has been slammed in the marketplace by a flood of knockoff firestarter-slash-paracord bracelets, some of which can be had for as little as $6 on eCommerce channels such as Ebay and Amazon.com.

Some innovate, others just wait and copy

People have accurately called China the “workshop of the world” after the nickname given to England in the 19th century.

But Chinese manufacturers also collectively act as a high-capacity photocopier, able to instantly churn out copies of whatever. And ecommerce channels such as Ebay and Amazon.com are the out tray of this giant photocopier.

But complaints of Chinese copies and knockoffs leverage an outdated conceit popular half a century ago, of unscrupulous, low-quality Asian copies of high-quality products made in Western countries.

Under globalization, however, Western countries have willingly scrapped much of their own manufacturing capacity in favour of outsourcing to Asian countries, particularly China.

Now it’s Chinese and other Asian manufacturers that often make both the expensive brand-name originals as well as the less expensive knock-offs.

For example, some Chinese companies are making low-cost iPhone knock-offs (look-alike shells running iOS-styled Android guts) while other Chinese companies, namely Foxconn, are making the actual, high-priced original iPhones.

And Foxcon only assembles the iPhone from parts, which come from many different manufacturers, including Samsung, Apple’s main smartphone competitor.

Globalization means it’s all the same under the hood

Over the years, Samsung has supplied screens, CPUs, and many other components for the iPhone. In 2011 the Economist did a teardown and found that Samsung parts accounted for 26 percent of the component cost of an iPhone.

This fact helps to illustrate an ongoing change being wrought by globalization; that increasingly consumer goods, clothing and electronics to be sure, are all no-name products made from largely the same mix of interchangeable, globally sourced components.

This is an over simplification, I know, that ignores the value of product design but the fact is that it’s getting harder and harder to tell the qualitative difference between a lot of the originals and their “cheap” copies, especially when the copies perform as good as the brand-name originals at a fifth of the cost—like the $29 “original” survival bracelet and its all-but identical $5 knockoff.

In a case like that, where most of all their components appear to be identical, it looks like the biggest difference between the brand-name product and its much less expensive copy is only the very expensive logo on the brand name product.