History's 'Alone' 500K winner could be Blairsville's Alan Kay

There was no time limit.

The show relied on the men to videotape themselves, so producers were beholden to the footage they were given to turn into a compelling 10 episodes. So far, so good. "Alone" is doing well on History, pulling in 1.9 million live viewers last week, the network's fourth most popular show of the week. The season finale airs this Thursday at 10.

Kay, a 40-year-old survivalist who took a one-year leave of absence from his Board of Corrections job to take part in "Alone," is one of two men left standing after nine episodes and 43 days in the wilderness.

While Kay knows when he tapped out, he has no clue how the other guy, 22-year-old Lincoln, Neb. man Sam Larson did.

Kay, who teaches survival classes on the side, came into the show knowing that this was marathon, not a sprint. "My approach was to do what was required and no more," Kay said in a phone interview earlier this week. "I look at survival as a bank account. You should never expend more than you have."

He said he would spend days in his tent doing as little as possible just to stay warm and save calories. While watching how the other men dealt with the elements, he said he remained nonjudgmental.

"I can be still and silent and I'm okay with it," Kay said, noting he was an only child growing up. "Other personality types like to stay busy. That's how they cope."

He embraced what the producers gave him: "We were going in at the worst time possible and that made the challenge all the more real."

To Kay, survival is 90 percent mental, 1o percent physical. He had to use a lot of physical energy the first 72 hours setting up a shelter, ensuring himself a steady source of water and figuring out his surroundings. "I think I did good for the environment," he said. "It might have been fun to try different things but I wasn't there for fun. I tried to keep it practical. Some people tried to be too grandiose with their shelter. You just need something cozy so you can maintain body heat and protect yourself from the elements."

He ate a lot of seaweed to sustain himself. "You get a lot of good fiber. There's iodine and minerals for your body,' he said. "I also ate quite a bit of limpets," snails that cling to rocks. He only ate what he knew was edible: "I don't take many chances with food."

Without a film crew, he had to set up shots himself, which he said took up a lot of precious mental and physical exertion but was a necessary evil since this is a TV show. "There were days I wish I didn't have to mess with the camera," he said.

He also knew much of what he filmed was often pretty boring. "I prepare tinder and kindling for fire. After I filmed that a dozen times, there was nothing more to cover."

Kay said there was some level of irony that he was living an incredibly basic life on Vancouver Island while messing with a video camera, which "kept me tethered to the modern world." And this is a guy who doesn't own a TV, doesn't text and still owns a flip phone.

Dreary isn't even a fair adjective for what the "Alone" participants had to deal with. He said he saw the sun exactly twice while he was there. "I don't even know if I saw the whole thing!" he said.

He never got dry and it got steadily colder last fall. But he said he didn't mind the chilly environs. At the same time, he said he spent a lot of time in his tent to avoid the wind and getting wet unnecessarily. "Being moderately damp was as good as it would get," he said.

He said he spent a lot of time in his brain, conjuring up memories, songs, poetry. "I looked at nature and analyzed how interconnected it all is. Deep philosophical thoughts. You think on a totally different level."

Kay was impressively resourceful. On day 43, he pulled in two dogfish from a gill net. "Not too shabby," he said on the show. "Not too shabby at all."

In last week's episode, two more guys quit. The third-to-last man Mitch Mitchell left because he was worried about his mom, who had terminal brain cancer. "I don't even know why I'm here," he said, thinking less about the money and more about the time he wasn't spending with his mother. On day 43, in the middle of the night, Mitchell called the SAT phone set up for that specific reason and was escorted via canoe back to the real world.

At about the same time, Kay said to the cameras that he wasn't quite ready to go home: "I guess what I'm waiting on is to hit a wall, to just come to a point either physically, mentally whatever, when I'm done. I guess I'm going to keep driving on until I can't drive on. I'm not big into quitting."

Larson, his remaining rival, said he was "sick of it. You're sick of the rain pounding on your shelter." But he said he wasn't quitting yet either.

Kay said he transitioned back to regular society relatively smoothly. And what did he eat first? Peanut butter, using a chocolate bar as the spoon. Oddly, he said he had trouble sleeping in the cabin they gave him that first night back to civilization. "I had become so accustomed to total silence and sounds that were mellow and natural. Electric hums and ambient light bugged me," he said. "I had dropped to such a low gear, this was like sensory overload!"

If he gets $500,000, he said he'll probably pay off a lot of debt. Otherwise, he isn't sure.

And would he do something like this again? Of course. "I've always done things that people think are crazy," he said. "I'll go in a zero degree night and build a shelter just to test my ability to do that. I've always tried to push my personal limits."

TV PREVIEW

"Alone" season finale, 10 p.m. Thursday, History