So, there’s a man crawling through the desert.

So, there’s a man crawling through the desert.

He’d decided to try his SUV in a little bit of cross-country travel, had
great fun zooming over the badlands and through the sand, got lost, hit a
big rock, and then he couldn’t get it started again. There were no cell
phone towers anywhere near, so his cell phone was useless. He had no family,
his parents had died a few years before in an auto accident, and his few
friends had no idea he was out here.

He stayed with the car for a day or so, but his one bottle of water ran out
and he was getting thirsty. He thought maybe he knew the direction back, now
that he’d paid attention to the sun and thought he’d figured out which way
was north, so he decided to start walking. He figured he only had to go
about 30 miles or so and he’d be back to the small town he’d gotten gas in
last.

He thinks about walking at night to avoid the heat and sun, but based upon
how dark it actually was the night before, and given that he has no
flashlight, he’s afraid that he’ll break a leg or step on a rattlesnake. So,
he puts on some sun block, puts the rest in his pocket for reapplication
later, brings an umbrella he’d had in the back of the SUV with him to give
him a little shade, pours the windshield wiper fluid into his water bottle
in case he gets that desperate, brings his pocket knife in case he finds a
cactus that looks like it might have water in it, and heads out in the
direction he thinks is right.

He walks for the entire day. By the end of the day he’s really thirsty. He’s
been sweating all day, and his lips are starting to crack. He’s reapplied
the sunblock twice, and tried to stay under the umbrella, but he still feels
sunburned. The windshield wiper fluid sloshing in the bottle in his pocket
is really getting tempting now. He knows that it’s mainly water and some
ethanol and coloring, but he also knows that they add some kind of poison to
it to keep people from drinking it. He wonders what the poison is, and
whether the poison would be worse than dying of thirst.

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