The sun began to rise and Joelle heaved a sigh of relief. Although far from out of danger with the sun coming up over the horizon her situation suddenly felt much better than it had in the darkness.
After all she wasn’t really lost she’d had a bit of bad luck is all. She had set out from her hotel to meet up with an old friend and had barely driven out of town before realizing she had made a wrong turn.
She’d decided to turn around when the hunk of junk car she’d rented decided to lurch forward and stall. Unfortunately it had lurched at the edge of the narrow roadway while she was turning and it had gone sliding nose first into the ditch. She probably would have been able to back the car out of the ditch but it had refused to start up again.
She tried for nearly an hour before deciding to give up and walk back. She would have called a tow truck but ever since she’d arrived her phone had been acting erratically and now it didn’t even want to turn on. She’d only been driving for ten minutes anyways how far could she really have gone?
She could see the ridge which marked the edge of the valley the town sat in and it hadn’t looked all that far away even if maybe she’d been driving 15 or 20 minutes rather than 10 before turning back.
She’d started out fine, better than fine really. There had been a bunch of water bottles in the trunk and she had taken those as well as anything else that might be useful to her including the first aid kit. She’d even had her umbrella which she’d opened up to shade herself from the desert sun.
It hadn’t taken her long to realize how hard walking across the hot ground was going to be and several times she had turned back towards the car wondering if maybe she should just stay with it. Even if no one passed by accident she’d spoken with her friend on the phone just before leaving and her friend was bound to get people looking for her when she didn’t show up after a few hours.
Eventually she walked just a little bit too far to change her mind. Just as she’d decided that walking really had been the wrong choice the sun started going down and without it glinting off the roof of the car she couldn’t quite make out where it had been. She thought she saw it for a moment but without any footprints on the hard pan and each bit of brush and cactus looking exactly the same as the next she couldn’t be sure.
She could be sure where the ridge was though and so she decided to keep going.
As it had gotten darker she’d begun to stumble. What from a distance looked like a solid flat expanse was actually rather uneven sometimes even dropping off several feet at a time. After falling headlong off of one of these drops Joelle realized trying to walk in the dark wasn’t only useless but dangerous.
So she’d scooted back until she rested against the mini cliff she’d just fallen over and leant back determining that it would be best to stay put for the night. More tired from walking all day than she’d realized, she had pulled up the hood on her sweatshirt and fell asleep in just a few minutes.
