Blairsville survivalist could win $500K on TV show

Blairsville resident Alan Kay loves solitude, so when he signed on to do a History survivalist show called "Alone," he knew he was qualified.

The concept is deceptively simple: The show dropped him and nine other men off in isolated spots on Vancouver Island in the Pacific Northwest. Rain, wind and chill predominated. Each man had to set up a shelter and fend for himself with minimal supplies. The man who lasted longest would pocket $500,000.

There was no time limit.

The show relied on the men to videotape themselves, so producers were beholden to footage they were given to create 10 compelling episodes. So far, so good. “Alone” is doing well, pulling in 1.9 million live viewers last week, the network’s fourth most popular show of the week. The season finale airs at 10 p.m. Thursday.

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

While Kay knows when he ultimately dropped out, he has no clue how long the other guy, 22-year-old Lincoln, Neb., man Sam Larson, stuck around.

Kay, who teaches survival classes on the side, came into the show knowing this was a 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 can be still and silent and I’m OK with it. Other personality types like to stay busy. That’s how they cope.”

He ate a lot of seaweed to sustain himself: “You get a lot of good fiber. There’s iodine and minerals for your body. I also ate quite a bit of limpets,” snails that cling to rocks.

Without a film crew, he had to set up shots himself, which he said took up precious mental and physical capacity but was a necessary evil for a TV show. “There were days I wish I didn’t have to mess with the camera,” he said.

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 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.”

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 to tap out.

At about the same time, Kay said to the cameras that he wasn’t quite ready to go home: “I guess I’m going to keep driving on until I can’t drive on. I’m not big into quitting.”

Kay said he has transitioned back to regular society relatively smoothly. He said he did have 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!”