Maybe this is just in movies, but why do people crossing deserts never make an umbrella? I’ve seen many movies where people get stranded by a plane crash, car breakdown, or some other misfortune, yet they never make a makeshift umbrella of any kind . Umbrellas are light weight so there is not a huge amount of effort to carry one and they would keep the sun off. Even if it didn’t keep you much cooler, at least you wouldn’t burn. Even people who actually live in the desert don’t seem to use one of any kind. Is there a reason?
Thats a good question the first 40 years of my life an umbrella of some kind would have been the first thing I built. For some reason my tolerance for sun has gone way up and I wouldn’t be as concerned today if I knew I could find shade now and then. But if I had an all day walk ahead of me and temps were over 100 degrees I would give it high priority I think.
99.9% of people crossing deserts are doing so with a horse, camel, car or wagon. The remaining people will be carrying tools and water. Trying to carry an umbrella while riding or driving is impractical. Considering that an umbrella gives little additional protection that isn’t afforded by a hat or hood, it’s doubly impractical.
Those are movies. Anybody who survives a plane crash and tries to cross the desert has a very short life expectancy. Even if they do somehow make it, they will survive because they took tools and water with them and travelled at night. One of those things makes carrying an umbrella impossible, the other makes it unnecessary.
Modern, store bought, vinyl umbrellas are light weight. Any umbrella made out of sticks, clothing and duck tape such as you might fashion at the site of a plane crash, will be plenty heavy.
Even a store bought umbrella takes a lot of effort to carry if you are not walking on lawn or paved road on a calm day. Deserts are notoriously windy places, and are covered in sand, rocks, gullies etc. Trying to walk with one hand bound up with a fragile piece of equipment that needs to be kept facing in a specific direction while fighting the wind would be surprisingly tiring after a few hours.
That is equally true if you just make a hood out of the cloth that you used to make the umbrella.
People who are actually *living *in the desert and walking around there are *doing *something. Nobody is just taking a stroll through the desert. Carrying an umbrella while fighting, hunting, taking photographs etc. is even less practical than carrying an umbrella while driving.
Deserts aren’t special, they are just wilderness areas. People living in forests or mashes never used umbrellas either, for the same reasons. It’s not practical to have one hand bound up all the time. Umbrellas are a city fashion accessory designed, as much as anything, so your clothes don;t get wet and you can wear the latest revealing fashions without getting burned. A hood and coast accomplish the same tasks without the practical drawbacks, but they may not be fashionable.
People who actually live in the desert usually don’t need an umbrella, because they tend to dress something like this.
As far as movies go, there’s a very common myth that a person’s needs for survival go like this–
- Food
- Water
- Shelter
In reality, the order is flipped. Most people don’t realize that.
Not really. People who dress like that would be a minority.
Many people who live in the desert dress like this. Others dress like this.
But the vast majority of people who live in the desert dress like this and this.
Food sure. But I don’t think many people think that food is more important than water in a desert.
In a hot desert water is more important than shelter, insofar as sitting under a tree or the shade of a car will provide as much shelter as anything you are likely to build. But you need water or you will likely die of hyperthermia within hours, whether you have shelter or not.
Shelter and water are linked. No shelter means you need more water, but if you have water and no shelter at all you will survive for days and probably weeks. If you have shelter and no water at all you will not be functional after 24 hours and very likely dead. Given that shelter in a hot desert really just means shade, it’s really difficult not to have shelter.
Because its the air temperature that is cooking them ? the umbrella is not creating a body of cool air that moves with them. The mirage is showing this, the air near the ground is hotter than above, and gradient causes total internal reflection in that hot air… it reflects an image of the sky…
In a park or on safari, people use umbralla’s to help with shading their eyes, but in the desert, the sand and rocks are creating bright light from every direction and from a low angle that neither a hat nor umbrella shields …
Umbrella?
Why not a parasol instead.
You attempted to refute my point, but ended up substantiating it instead. In three out of your four examples, people are covered up for protection from the sun.
I tried this in Paris recently, and I was surprised how ineffective it was. I had a standard black folding umbrella.
When I put it up the black fabric seemed to heat up very quickly and radiate heat downwards. A hat with a good-size brim works better.
When I lived in the Mojave Desert people dressed like this or this.
In Summer I tended to wear Levi’s 501s or cut-off Levi’s 501s (it was the '70s), a loose-fitting short-sleeve shirt, and a boonie hat.
I also drank about a gallon of sun tea every day.
I think the most important thing to have for surviving the desert is a bus ticket back into town.
Food? Shelter? Water? Somebody read this and come up with an answer already:
US Army FM21-76 Survival Field Manual
http://www.armageddononline.org/uploads/FM21-76_SurvivalManual.pdf
This one their makeup might get fussed–two week ride in the Sahara on, not in, a bus, like a beehive obscuring the tree: asiantown.net
I’ve seen a LOT of people working outside in hot climates wearing large hats.
Wait, who said people in deserts don’t have umbrellas? People in the Sahel have a long history of using umbrellas. Umbrellas have been traditionally used in the Middle East, East Asia, India…I think you’ll find them in most places. They show up in any number of ancient artworks from various parts of the globe.
Of course, it was mostly royalty that use them. Probably because through most of history ordinary people were lucky to own a change of clothes, much less specialty items.
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Do you think there might’ve been a difference if your umbrella fabric was light-colored, or perhaps aluminized/reflective?
I can’t imagine an umbrella being very useful in a desert survival situation if you were carrying it around. A shelter works because it blocks the sun in one area for a prolonged period of time, preventing that area from heating up. If you’re walking around carrying an umbrella, it’s not going to do anything. The ground is hot, the air is hot, the umbrella is hard to carry. A nice hat helps keep sunburn away but doesn’t help with the heat. If you’re stuck in a desert you find a sheltered place to hole up during the day and do your traveling in the cool of the night, and if you can’t find water you’re toast, literally. People can die after only a few hours out there.
Photog and naturalist Laurence Parent has a great book called Death In Big Bend about the different ways people have managed to die in the desert there. Water water water, shelter is good but you still dehydrate rapidly because of low humidity. If I were stuck in the desert I’d build a big smokey fire, nobody is looking for you but they are always looking for fire.
OK, so you said that desert people don’t need an umbrella because they tend to dress like someone wearing robes.
Most desert people do not dress in robes. Most dress in standard western dress, often shorts and t-shirts. Nothing like robes and not exactly overdressed.
If your point was, as you claim, that people don’t need an umrella because they wear shirts and a t-short, well that’s just nonsense. Short and a T-Shirt do not in any way substitute for an umbrella.
Additionally, for 99% of human history people living in the desert wore, at most, loincloth, and often not even that. It wasn’t clothes that meant they didn’t need an umbrella.
So yeah, your point is thoroughly refuted, no matter how badly it was originally framed.
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A shelter works because it blocks the sun in one area for a prolonged period of time, preventing that area from heating up. If you’re walking around carrying an umbrella, it’s not going to do anything. The ground is hot, the air is hot, the umbrella is hard to carry. A nice hat helps keep sunburn away but doesn’t help with the heat.
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Umm, no. Just not true. When the air temperature is 45o, it’s hot in any shelter that’s isn’t underground or air conditioned. A shelter in warm weather doesn’t work to any great extent by keeping the air temperature down.
And a hat certainly does help with the heat. Radiant heat from the sun is usually the single biggest heat load that you are getting in the tropic in summer. Even in relatively cool temperatures it’s possible to become hypothermic if you are directly exposed to sunlight. In high temperatures it’s the literal difference between life an death.