Day 24: Tough decisions
Few photos for a tough day. It started well with a lot of energy and intent to walk as much as possible to shorten the distance from Big Bear, but by mid-morning something had cracked: Fabio got sick after breakfast, for no apparent reason – we blamed it on a Snickers but it made little sense. Within a few hours, around the time we wanted to take a lunch break, Sarah also got sick, and much worse than Fabio. The most obvious idea begins to take hold: contaminated water, although none of us ever drank without first filtering it. But filters can become defective, or we can be inattentive during the operation – it’s easy for a filter to leak a little dirty water that goes into the clean bottle. While Sarah is bent over with vomiting every twenty minutes, Fabio and I test our filters, and everything seems okay.
We try to list all the possible causes, and it becomes clear that we have to make a choice without wasting much time; these are those situations in which, especially in the wilderness, one must have the courage to review or cancel one's plans because the outcomes could be dire. A road leading to Big Bear passes about seven hundred meters from a water point that we had passed a kilometer and a half before. With a lot of effort, we manage to go back – it took us three times as long as the outward journey. While Fabio, who in the meantime is feeling better, stays with Sarah at the water point, I reach the road in the hope of finding someone to stop and help us. After about ten minutes of unsuccessful hitchhiking, a black truck stops, and two men returning from work ask me if I need help: I had tried to attract the attention of the cars by putting two backpacks by the side of the road, hoping that they would understand that I was not looking for a ride into town out of laziness.
The man driving is immediately kind and helpful and convinces the slightly reluctant partner to clear the rear seats of their working tools. I tell him that my two friends are seven hundred meters down the road, and he decides to drive the truck down to the water point.
We arrive at Big Bear after 5pm, all three of us amazed at how gratuitously kind the people we have met have been. After a shower, we start wondering if anyone else in the group we were walking with got sick, and we barely have time to return from the supermarket with a hundred dollars worth of food (mostly fruits and vegetables), when I start feeling unwell. Within an hour, it’s evident that I have developed a pretty high fever, although I don't have the same symptoms as the other two. I drink a hot herbal tea, and the only place I can manage to be is lying on the couch in my sleeping bag, despite it being at least twenty degrees inside the house. I don't take anything for the fever – if the body causes it, there must be a reason – and I fall asleep within a few minutes.
