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There's a really weird dynamic when you're trying to keep someone awake who desperately doesn't want to be awake. Like, even if it's for their own good, you feel like an asshole. Welcome back to what to Carry, what to Burn. I'm your host, Blair Braverman. I'm a writer, an adventurer and a dog sledder. Our story starts in 1976 in Oakland, California with a 28 year old woman named Lauren Elder, who wants so badly to make it as an artist, specifically a painter. Every spare minute she is working on her paintings. She lives in a storefront under a highway overpass with her boyfriend Jim, who's a veterinarian. And she is struggling to make ends meet. Like she's working a bunch of odd jobs. She was works at a halfway house. She does freelance graphic design. On this particular spring day, Jim's boss, whose name is Jay, has big plans. He's a recreational pilot and he's going to take a small plane and fly to Death Valley because he accidentally left his cat there during a camping trip and he wants to go pick up the cat again. The cat's name is Ferocious and a woman in the desert found Ferocious going through her trash. So Jay and his girlfriend are flying over the Sierra mountains to pick up the cat and they're bringing a cat crate, a cactus and just a bunch of beer as thank you gifts for the woman who found the cat. And Lauren is invited to come along. She really doesn't know either of them very well, but she wants to be able to see the landscape from above. She thinks it'll be inspiration for her art. So she packs a lunch and she goes to the little airport and meets them. And she's feeling kind of awkward, like she's been overthinking the whole thing. So she's dressed up a little too much. She's wearing these high heel boots and a long wool skirt. She feels like, ugh, I've signed on, but I'm just going to be a third wheel this whole day. Jay is a big guy. Like he's six foot something, redhead with a huge beard and he's a veterinarian now, but he used to run a ranch. He flies planes, he drives motorcycles, he sails sailboats. He's 36 years old, he's been divorced twice and he is always dating much younger women. His girlfriend's name is Jean. She's 20 and she's kind of quiet and shy and blonde and pretty. She really strikes Lauren as kind of a cool like California surfer girl. Lauren is still Feeling kind of awkward. But they get in the plane, they take off. It's a gorgeous day. The plane is a red and white Cessna 182, which, for a small plane, that's a pretty powerful one. Like, it can go fast, it can go pretty high. And as they're flying inland toward the Sierra Mountains, Lauren has her camera out, and she's just taking pictures of everything she wants to paint. There's salt flats they're flying over, which are these wide, shallow ponds for evaporating seawater. And because of algae, they turn these really vibrant colors like rust and yellow and green. She's just noticing every color in the sunlight. The farther inland they get, the more the landscape is getting, like, wrinkly beneath them, kind of pointed. It's rising up into foothills that in turn are rising up into the Sierra Nevada mountains. And it's such a bright blue sky day that the mountains themselves are casting these gorgeous shadows that are so clear and striking from above. They're flying close to the hills like it's spring and the snow is melting. They're seeing streams and waterfalls everywhere, just flowing out from the snow and crashing down over the rocks. And the rocks and the cliff faces are all the same color, granite. They're like a light gray, and they're sharp, almost knifelike. As the plane's getting closer to the mountains and higher up, the air inside is getting really cold, and Lauren is wishing she brought a coat or something. There's a line of mountains up ahead. It's rising up almost like this jagged fence. And Jay is shouting. He's explaining over the noise of the plane. He. He points out a little dip in the mountains, and he's saying, that's the pass we're going for. That's where we're going to fly over. And here's what's going to happen. It's going to get really bumpy, but just take a deep breath and going to be fine. And then when we get over the crest, all of a sudden, it's going to be like the ground falls away beneath us. The other side of the mountain just drops straight into the desert. And it's going to be spectacular. Get your camera ready. You are going to want to paint this view. They're flying toward the pass, and they're getting really close, just rising over the top of those peaks. And then something shifts and the plane jolts and it drops. And all of a sudden, all Lauren can see is this wall of rock coming straight toward them. In that split second, she somehow remembers the fact that Drunk people are more likely to survive car crashes because their bodies are limp. And she tries as hard as she can to just relax her limbs, to go as limp as she possibly can. And then there's a huge, deafening crunching sound. And then there's silence. The next thing Lauren's aware of is looking down at her leg, at her shin beneath her skirt, and she can see her own bone. There's a gash in her leg, and she can see her white bone inside it. And there's almost like this series of images in her brain and how she remembers these moments where she's looking at her leg and she sees the bone. And then the plane door opens, and Jay is there outside. And her camera starts rolling out the door, and she reaches for it, and Jay's saying, no, no, no, don't get the camera. And then she gets this flash of his face, which is covered in, like, a red crust, like a mask he's wearing. His head is bleeding, but time has passed and the blood has already dried. And these images are reaching her mind almost like a strobe light, like one image after another. These flashes, these glimpses of reality are getting longer. She starts to orient herself more, and she sees now that the plane has flown straight into the rock. It is almost burrowed into the granite just 15ft below the top of the pass. They're on this steep slope that's full of loose rocks. It's so steep that snow can't stick to it. It's just boulders and scree. And the rocks are sharp. They're not rounded like rocks on the beach or in a river. It's almost like they're shards of the mountain itself. There's broken glass all over the rocks. And somehow there's rocks in Lauren's mouth, too. Like, how did she get gravel inside her mouth? She starts spitting it out, and she realizes it's pieces of her own broken teeth. When she moves her body, it's not even like moving through water. It's like moving through Jello. There's this delay, like reality has sort of thickened around her. And there's a drip, drip, drip, sound of gasoline leaking out of the plane. Jay's voice is coming through this Jello. He's saying, we have to get Jean. And so they make their way to the other side of the plane. And Lauren has to be so careful on the rocks, so she doesn't just slip down the mountain. She's becoming more aware of pain, too. Like, her tongue hurts really badly. She must have really bitten down on it and there's something crunching in her forearm, like there's a bone moving around under her skin. Jean is on the other side of the plane. She's unconscious. And they, they open the door and unclip her belt and she sort of just slides down onto them. They're trying to catch her and they, they lower her down onto the rocks. Lauren sees that Jean's face is sort of broken open. And even though it's not what matters, she can't stop thinking like, oh, what's it going to look like when they stitch it back together? She's so pretty. She's going to have so many scars. But Jean is still completely unconscious. She's not aware of anything they're doing to her. And she's having these really jerky movements in her arms and legs and every time she moves, she slides further down the slope. So Jay and Lauren are trying to get her settled to put her somewhere safe. But there's nowhere flat at all. Everything is steep. Jay is the pilot, he knows the plane. He's responsible for this situation. So Lauren starts interrogating him and she, her voice is rising. She starts shouting questions. She's like, okay, what about this leaking gasoline? Like, is that, is that a danger? Could the plane blow up? And he's like, no, no it won't. He sounds almost lethargic. She's like, did you, did you file a flight plan? And he's like, no, no I didn't. Lauren's like, okay, but then who knows where we are? Who's gonna realize we're missing and then know where to look? Jay's like, I don't know, I don't know. Maybe I left a note for my kid. He has a 10 year old daughter. And he just starts hugging himself, just saying again and again, I did a dumb thing. I did a dumb thing. Presumably by not flying higher over the mountain. And this is not helpful. Gene's like, okay, okay Jay, like you need to go into the plane and radio for help. And I'm going to climb up to this ridge that's 15ft above us and see what's on the other side. Because she knows that the side of the mountain they're on is basically a lost cause. It is just wilderness that goes on and on and on. So she climbs her way up to the top of the crest and this gust of cold wind hits her and she sees that on the other side, the mountain does really just drop thousands of feet into a valley, what's called Owens Valley. They are at the very Far edge of the Sierras. And she thinks if she can get down into that valley, there will be people. The slope on this side is covered in snow and it's very steep. It's much too steep to walk down. But she thinks maybe she can sort of kick footholds into it and like climb down really slowly. She goes back to the plane to see if there are any supplies and she finds the lunch she packed. A peanut butter sandwich, a pocket knife, and her glasses, which are, which are bent and broken, but she can still wear them. She puts them on and instantly everything looks farther away. And she's like, oh, shoot, the distances are much further than I thought. And Jay is sort of dozing on the ground, like he's in and out. Jean is gone. She's disappeared. She's presumably slid down the mountain. And this makes Lauren really angry because she's like, it was Jay's job to watch her. That was his responsibility. She knows that even if she tried to slide down the mountain and find Jean, she wouldn't be able to do anything. She can't hoist her. And so her best bet to help all of them, she thinks, is climbing down the snow covered side of the mountain for help. She goes back over the crest of the mountain and the snow there is super crusty. So she starts like punching and kicking holes in it and using those holes to climb down almost like a ladder. And she's wearing a skirt, by the way, so this cold air is going right up her skirt. Now normally, actually long skirts can be warmer than pants because your legs are able to share warmth with each other. It's like mittens are a lot warmer than gloves. But in this situation, the skirt is not helpful. It just keeps blowing around. And with every step she's discovering more and more pieces of snow that are breaking off. It's just crumbling around her. She realizes very quickly that this is not going to work. The snow is way too crumbly. It's not stable enough to climb. So she climbs back up again and she goes back to the plane. She becomes more aware now of the cold. The sun is so bright, it's almost blinding. And the sky is huge and pale blue and arched around them. But even with the sun's warmth, it's still below freezing. It's maybe 30 degrees. Lauren thinks, okay, if we're stuck here waiting for help, the next step is going to be to keep warm. She's trying to get Jay engaged. She's like, Jay, we got to keep warm. What should we do? And he's just like not participating at all. She describes him later as being crumpled with self loathing. She's saying to him, look, I don't blame you. You made a mistake. You crashed a plane. Like, let's move on and try to stay alive now. But he won't snap out of it. So she's like, okay, I'm gonna have to do this myself. She starts looking for a way to make fire. And there's. There's no wood around. They are way above the tree line. But she has the brown bag from her lunch and there's a cigarette lighter in the plane. She catches the bag on fire and then she's looking for anything else flammable. She's like, could I burn the plane seats? But they're so well attached, she can't get them out of the plane. But then she remembers the dripping gasoline. She takes a beer can and she drinks it, which is the most well deserved beer ever. And she fills the can with gasoline that's dripping out of the plane and pours that on the fire to give it fuel. Jay is watching her do all this, and he's not just not helping, he's actively discouraging her. He's saying, why are you bothering to do that? Don't bother, just stop. Which is obviously incredibly annoying. And she doesn't know him well enough to know if this is what he's like or not. Like. Like people who are really hurt or sick can lose their normal personality because their mind is sort of eclipsed by what their body is going through. Almost like when someone's drowning and they're. They're going to pull other people under. It's not because they want to kill someone. It's just a function of the body in that kind of stress. And which is incredibly annoying to Lauren because she knows it's cold now, but when the sun sets, it is going to get colder fast. She keeps going back and forth between their little fire and the plane wreck, just going back and forth, filling can after can with gasoline. And every time she pours a can on the fire, she's able to get a few minutes of flames. As she's doing this, she's thinking about Jean and she's worried about Jean. And she realizes she knows so little about her. She asks Jay, why? What's Jean's last name? And Jay says, well, it was Knoller. It was Nolar. That past tense is just hanging between them. This realization that Jean is probably gone. When Lauren worked at the halfway house, someone there had taught classes in Tibetan meditation. And so she's learned a few mantras, and she starts repeating one now. It comes into her mind, and she repeats that again and again and again while she's filling these cans of gasoline and pouring them on the fire. And eventually, she kind of gets tired of that, and she moves on to folk songs. She recently went to a peace rally with Pete Seeger. And so she starts singing Kumbaya, which Jay does not like. He's like, oh, my gosh, could you please, could you just stop singing? But her singing has multiple purposes. She's keeping herself calm, but she's also trying to keep him awake because his eyes keep closing. And she's like, well, okay, if you don't want me to sing, then, like, talk to me. Let's talk. Why don't you tell me about your days on the ranch? And he's like, the last thing I want to talk about is my days on the ranch. She's like, okay, you don't have to talk to me, but you should stay awake. So I'm going to be singing, which is actually a situation I have found myself in, being deep in the wilderness with someone who's sort of in and out of consciousness and physically in trouble. There's a really weird dynamic when you're trying to keep someone awake who desperately doesn't want to be awake. Like, even if it's for their own good. You feel like an asshole this whole time, too. Lauren is going back and forth, back and forth, getting cans of gasoline. The smoke is swirling around them, and it's not normal campfire smoke. It's this, like, rancid chemical, like, sticking to their skin. It's also getting really dark now, and it is clear that at least today, no one is coming to save them. Lauren is in so much pain, and she's so tired herself, but she has this feeling that keeping the fire alive is like keeping them alive, which in a lot of ways is true. I think the degree to which fire equals life is something that we have really separated ourselves from in modern life because we've created other systems that meet the same needs. Like, we've created other systems of heat. We've created other systems of illumination. We have other ways to keep bugs and predators away. We have other flickering visuals. And I mean that literally. Like, the reason that shifting light, like TV and other screens, draws our eyes even when we're not interested in what's on tv, is because our brains orient toward fire. Like, it attracts us and it calms us at once. And when you remove those Other systems, whether you're camping or in a really extreme, terrible situation like this one, you realize that fire, this one thing, provides a lot of what human technology has been trying to create. It is a kind of shelter on top of everything else. And that instinct is what Lauren is now feeling so intensely. Why she is going back again and again and again for single beer cans of gasoline for hours into the night. Even as the wind is rising and it starts blowing the flames sideways, it keeps almost blowing them out. She said later it feels like she has spent her entire life feeding this flame. At one point, Lauren sits down to rest and her skirt sort of gets caught on a rock. So her bare skin is on the rock directly and it feels really good. She has this delayed processing. She's like, why does the rock feel good? Because it's warm. Because the fire has been going now for long enough that the rocks around it are warm, which is such an exciting realization. She starts shouting to Jay because she's realized now they can heat the rocks and use them for warmth too, like they can put rocks in their pockets. Lauren starts piling rocks up around the fire, just warming them all up. And the wind, meanwhile, is getting stronger and stronger. The fire keeps almost flickering out, and then there's a huge gust and a flicker and it's gone. She cannot get it started again. And now they really feel alone, Just the blackness of the sky sort of surrounding them with these million white stars. Lauren knows that without the fire now, the rocks are going to lose their heat. She thinks if she can put all the warm and hot rocks inside the plane, it'll create this kind of contained warmth that'll keep them warm for longer. It is nerve wracking to do because every time she puts something heavy in the plane, it shifts like it, it tips a little, but it seems mostly solid. So she keeps doing it. And she's feeling really proud of this solution. She's thinking, it's really smart. Later, trying to describe that burst of pride, she said, I had made optimum use of the possibilities presented. I had put the puzzle together in the time allotted. She's so proud. Once she's filled the plane with hot rocks, she basically starts bothering Jay to get up and go inside. She's hoping they can curl up together like spoon for warmth. But he gets in, in this really rigid position, like he's. He's splayed out, which does not make sense. She's trying to give him instructions. She's like, just, just put your hands inside your pockets. Just cover your head. She tells him to pull the collar of his shirt up over his face so he's breathing down into his shirt. By the way, you. You shouldn't do that because the moisture in your breath will make you colder over time. But it's true that in the immediate term, for just a couple minutes, it will warm you up. But Jay is not really following her instructions. He's sort of gesturing toward them. She's half watching him and she's also watching the sky. Just these million tiny flickering stars all around them. And the stars have been rotating this whole time. The hours are passing. She calculates that the sun probably set around 7:30 and it's now 3am so there's just a few more hours until dawn. She's reciting poetry to herself. Lines of poetry. And while she does this, the sky fills. Finally starts getting lighter, like it goes from black to this really deep charcoal gray. Suddenly Jay panics and he starts trying to fight his way out of the plane, like he's punching the metal. He's pounding the door with his hands and his feet. There is blood spraying from his fists and the plane starts shifting from the force of his movements. And Lauren can't stop him. She's trying to grab his arms and she's not strong enough. So she starts pummeling him in the back, just like punching him hard. She's trying to hurt him. She's trying to do anything to get his att so that he'll stop moving and calm down and they won't both go sliding down the slope. Finally he does calm down and she waits until he's been still for a moment. And then she reaches over to touch his arm. And it's hard. It's frozen. How long has his arm just been frozen solid? Has it been hours? And his face is bleeding again now and the. The blood is freezing too. She reaches over and touches his neck and there's no heartbeat. He's not breathing. It's like a flip switched and he just went from being alive to being dead. She said later she wasn't scared so much as surprised. He's curled up in the plane. Lauren has a vision of rescuers coming and finding him in exactly that position. He's not going to move again. And she realizes that if she just keeps staying there another day without fire, rescuers will be finding her dead body too. She does not have a chance of staying warm. She has to find a way down. When the sun comes up, she climbs back over the crest of the mountain, back to the snowy slope that she gave up on the day before. It is still impossibly steep, but she touches the snow. She's feeling it, and it's harder now. It froze more solid overnight. And there's this thick crust of ice on it, what's called punchy snow, because if you were to stand on it, you would stay solid for a moment and then you would punch right through. And she thinks maybe she can use that ice to her advantage. She can punch and kick into it to make handholds and footholds. It's an impossibly long climb, but what other choice does she have? She starts lowering herself down the slope, and she sees there's boulders sort of staggered throughout the snow. She thinks she can put out her arms and legs and, like, climb sideways like a spider, sort of zigzag between these rocks. She gets this weird sense of energy, like. Like she drank coffee almost, but it's like she's pulling energy from a source that she has never accessed before. And she's going step by step down, just punching through the ice again and again, even with her broken arm, lowering herself inches at a time. The light of the rising sun is hitting the snow and giving it this really beautiful golden glow. It's almost like the glow is rising from inside the mountain itself. And every hole she makes in the snow has this kind of blue light coming out of it. And as Lauren is lowering herself step by step in her high heeled boots, she's thinking about the colors. How would she paint them? What colors would she mix? Could she do it? Until finally she realizes that the slope is getting gentler. She's still in the middle of the snowfield. She's clinging to the side of the mountain, but the steepest part is over. So she can start, like, scooting on her butt, which is a little bit easier. As she's doing that, she's still watching the light and. And it's kind of moving over her. Like when she. She moves her fingers through the air, she notices that they're, like, leaving these sparkly auras, almost like she's moving a magic wand, but it's coming from her fingertips. It feels like it's kind of real and kind of not. Like she's halfway between being awake and being asleep. She's so concentrated on her hands and on the snow and on this weird light that she doesn't look up for a long time. And until she finally does and she looks to the side and sees a cabin like a ski chalet. And her heart just surges. She starts working her way sideways toward it. She's wondering, maybe someone's going to be home. Like if no one's home, does she break into it? Is that okay? Until she gets closer and she sees there's a man on the porch. There's a man in a white bathrobe. And Lauren starts yelling at him. She's hollering. She's like, I need help. Are you there? Can you help me? The man completely ignores her, but she just keeps coming toward him until she finally reaches the house. And she puts her hand on it. And there's something weird about it. It feels strange. It feels rougher than it looks. And in that moment, the whole scene morphs. And she's not touching a building anymore. She's touching a boulder. The chalet is gone. She had hallucinated it. And she's still completely alone on the mountain. Lauren is about halfway down the snowfield now, and she realizes she can't trust her eyes. She's having these visual hallucinations, so she can't believe anything's real unless she touches it with her skin. She keeps scooting downward, and she sees her boyfriend Jim, standing below her. She knows he's not real, but on some level, she lets herself believe it. He's standing just a few feet below her on the snow, and he's reaching his arms out and he's calling to her. But no matter how close she gets, he's always just gliding out of reach, like she can never actually reach him. And instead of fighting this, she just lets him guide her until finally she reaches the edge of the snow. Lauren is still really high on the mountain, but she thinks it's going to be way easier to move now. She's climbing over the rocks, and it's even a different kind of rock now. Like up on the peak, all the rocks were gray, but now she's farther down and the rocks are red. It feels really warm and earthy. She still can't move as fast as she wanted to, though, because A, high heels, and B, all the rocks are moving. Like she has to test every single one with her hand or foot before she puts her weight on it. She knows that if she takes one wrong step, if she twists her ankle, she'll. She'll probably die. That'll be too much. But she makes her way to an empty creek bed that's kind of sandy and that allows her to move a little bit quicker. And she is just looking with every step for any sign of trash. She is desperate for an empty can or a cigarette butt. Or a receipt, a candy wrapper. Just any sign that there have been people here. So far, there's no trash at all. But she is seeing more people. There's another man now, like a farm worker in a straw hat. And there's a young couple. And it's weird because she knows they're not real, but just in case, she has to call out to them. And she's sort of hollering and asking them for help and yelling. But apart from Jim, her boyfriend, who had been reaching toward her, none of the hallucinations respond. They all act like they can't hear her voice. Her brain is telling her it's so weird they're not responding. It's like I'm the one who doesn't exist. Even while her brain is doing all these strange things, she's still moving forward. There's a couple clumps of snow in the shade, and she's trying to, like, bite them and get some moisture that way. She sees a single tiny flower and. And she fixates on the idea that this flower is working so hard to grow here, to be here among all these rocks. And if she hadn't seen it, no one would ever know what it did. And she relates to that so much. She's like, will anyone ever know what I did? I've already done so much. But what if it's not enough? She's getting farther down, and now she's seeing sagebrush, which is this, like, silver green plant that's reaching upward. And it. At first there's just tiny little patches, and then they get bigger and bigger. The warmth of the sun is bringing out the smell of the sage. Lauren still hasn't eaten or slept, but it's like this energy is carrying her. And suddenly she comes to an edge, the top of a cliff. Just hundreds of feet of near vertical rock going straight down. Lauren starts to scream. She's partially just so angry, but she also thinks maybe anyone down there will be able to hear her. And it's the same kind of anger and frustration that keeps coming up for her. But this time she's also mad at herself. She's like, o, I should have known that if I kept going down, I would just hit a cliff eventually. Why did I think I'd be able to keep going down? What am I supposed to do, go back up? She gets down on her hands and knees and she crawls over to the edge of the cliff and puts her head over the edge. And as she's looking down, she realizes there's these narrow ledges along the wall like little rock outcroppings, 10 or 20ft apart. And she's like, okay, maybe I can try to climb down this vertical face and just make my way from one ledge to another. If she slips an inch, she'll die, but if she stays, she'll probably die, too. She takes off her boots and she stuffs her socks into them. So she's barefoot, and she throws them down to the first ledge, lies down on her stomach, and just sort of pours herself backward over the ledge, feet first, like, just trying to make tiny, tiny movement. She's done a little bit of rock climbing before, thank goodness, and so she knows a little bit about techniques. Every movement is so careful. Finally, she makes it down to the first ledge, which is. It's only like 10ft down, but it still feels like an achievement. She feels herself going into this weird mode, like her body and nature are just sort of working together. One of the ledges, when she gets to it, is much wider, and it has a really deep puddle in it. It's like three feet deep of water. Lauren is really warm now and sore, so she takes off her clothes and she crawls into the puddle to rest. And it feels so good, like she is so crusted in blood and sweat and soot and gravel and sand and gasoline. She has this moment of being on this rock face, bathing in this puddle, and feeling suddenly like it is the most beautiful place in the world. Everything is bad, but this specifically is so beautiful and feels so good. She still thinks the odds are high she'll die, but. But at least she's going to have had this moment of perfection. She notices some tracks in the dirt leading away from the pond. And she realizes she's not the first person to discover this place. There's a path that sort of curls out around the ledge, and she gets out and follows it and sees a house with a man there and starts calling to him. And this time he looks up and he waves at her. And then he dissolves. And the house dissolves. And this time she's really terrified by the hallucination because she realizes she has crept out onto an extra dangerous part of the cliff. The trail she saw was real. The footprints were real. They were made by bighorn sheep. And she realizes this time that her hallucinations are not benign. They could get her in trouble. They could guide her. Wrong. She keeps climbing downward, but this time she does not have the confidence that she had before. She's slipping. She slides a few times. Her fingers feel weak. She's feeling really uncoordinated in her body. And finally she makes it off the cliff and onto another slope. And she keeps walking downhill. But she does not even know what to move toward anymore, because she's surrounded by people who don't exist. There's crowds of people on the mountain with her. She's alone and surrounded at once. And her exhaustion is coming in waves. It is getting so hard to take every step. But at least she's getting into a valley now. There's more flowers around. There's monkshood, which are these purple flowers that kind of look like they're hanging their heads. There's these red paintbrush flowers that are as bright as fire. Finally, as she's walking through the flowers, she sees a sign and touches it. And it feels real. It says, california Bighorn Sheep Zoological Area. ENTRANCE PROHIBITED and by the sign, there's a green Volkswagen. Lauren touches the car, and she 100% expects it to be a rock. But it's smooth, and in the place she touched it, her fingers have left marks in the dust. It is real. And she has this simultaneous excitement and disappointment because she realizes there's so much dust on the car that no one's coming back for it today. It has been here a while, so she just keeps walking downhill. She passes a young couple who have a little baby. And there's a washing machine there and a pile of toys, and none of it is real. Or maybe it is. She doesn't know. She just keeps walking. She looks behind her at one point and. And she sees the whole mountain sweeping up toward the sky. And at the top, there's two planes circling the ledge. If she had stayed, maybe they would have rescued her. But also, maybe they're not real. She just doesn't know. It's already dusk. The day is ending. But she keeps walking. And finally, as it's getting darker, she sees lights in the distance. Maybe the lights are real, maybe they're not. But Lauren decides that they are. She decides to simply believe they're real and move toward them. She said that as she's doing this, she's really not having feelings. Like, she's not hopeful. She's not disappointed. She's not horrified. She's not happy, she's not sad. Nothing. She just sort of exists. It's this feeling of pure existence and this compulsion to keep walking. She follows a dirt path, which is maybe the one the car drove in on. And eventually it turns into a dirt road. And eventually that turns into a paved road. But she's still surrounded by visions. There's cats all around her and birds and shooting stars. She starts thinking, what is she going to do when she actually finds people? She doesn't have id, she doesn't have her wallet. She makes a plan in her head that she's going to find a 24 hour diner. And she thinks, okay, she's so disheveled they're not going to want her there, but maybe she can sneak in when the waitress isn't looking and just like sneak into a booth and then beg for a cup of tea. And if anyone asks, she's going to say she was in a car crash because if she said plane crash, they would just never believe her. She's walking down the road, it's dark. And finally she sees a motel and she's able to open the door and go inside. There's a man behind the desk and he looks at her and his eyes widen. She rings the bell on the counter and says as calmly as she possibly can, I'm very tired. I've just been in a plane crash. Can I rest here? She's really proud of herself that she was able to say the words calmly because that's what she was concentrating on doing. But the man looks at her and he has this weird expression on his face and he says, no, all the rooms are full. She asks, well, is there another hotel in town? Is there somewhere else I could go? He goes, yeah, if you just keep walking you'll reach another motel on the other end of town. So Lauren leaves and keeps walking. She's passing houses, a fire department, all the lights are off. Finally she sees another hotel and this one has a sign out front that says vacancy. She knocks on the door and an old man lets her in. And this time she's trying even harder to speak calmly. She says, excuse me, I would like a room. The man narrows his eyes and he goes, ma', am, I'm. I'm afraid we don't have one. She says, what about the vacancy? It says vacancy. And he goes, no, I'm. There is a vacancy, but I'm saving it for someone else. Lauren realizes he's afraid of her and she's trying to think of another solution. She's about to ask if she could make a phone call, and at that moment the door of the lobby opens. The man from the other hotel walks in with a police officer and points at Lauren and says, yes, officer, that's her. The sheriff comes over to her and he says, are you Lauren Elder? Let me help you, dear. Once she's in the hospital and she's getting care. Lauren is able to recover remarkably quickly. And she learns a lot while she's in there. She learns that the reason the hotel guys were afraid to help her is because the cult leader Charles Manson had been arrested and was held in jail nearby. And his female followers, the Manson women, had all been hanging around that town, so the guys just thought she was one of them. Lauren also learns that she had climbed down over 8,000 vertical feet and she had walked 20 miles without a trail in a single day. Now, 20 miles is always a long way, but if you don't have a trail, if you're in high heels, if you're climbing over rocks and boulders and moving scree and gravel and snow and you're going down cliffs, it should basically not be possible. Like, this is such a difficult achievement that it is almost illogical. She learns that Jean and Jay's bodies had both been found and that Jean had never had a chance. Even if she hadn't slid down because she had brain trauma from the accident. Jay might have been saved if they were rescued right away, but he had very severe internal bleeding, so he was probably in a ton of pain. And that also probably explained why his behavior was really counterproductive. Also, I gotta say, I don't know what happened to the cat that they were flying to pick up. Ferocious, but the rule of thumb in survival stories is that cats are always fine. So presumably Ferocious just became a desert cat and had a great life. As for Lauren, she kept going back to the mountains. A few months after the accident, she was already back there hiking. And later that year she did a 10 day backpacking trip in the Sierras. She felt so connected to that landscape. As she got older, she became a working artist. She later told the LA Times in 2006 that surviving as an artist for 30 years required far more fortitude than those two days, which I believe. Wilderness survival is not necessarily the hardest kind of survival. It's more like a metaphor that allows us to look at the human fight to stay alive head on. Lauren co wrote a book about the crash that came out two years later. It's called and I Alone Survived. But apart from that book, from what I found, she really didn't go on to talk about the crash much. She poured herself into her art and her work. She started doing theater and performance art and building environments like public gardens and playgrounds and parks that were all about connecting people and nature. Like, she would go to places that couldn't afford a playground and then build one out of living bamboo that would just sort of grow and change over time. She, like, made models of mountains that kids could pour water over to learn how water flows down landscapes. I think one of the most beautiful things about art is that we're able to use expression and metaphor to make sense of what we could never otherwise explain or understand. Because if there's something we can't speak, something we can't say, it will come out in other ways. Like it could come out through anger or destructive choices, or it can be released by sort of twisting itself out through art or stories that seem to be about one thing but are really also about something else. Why make an enormous mountain into a scale model that kids can touch and understand with their hands? For that matter, why make a podcast about survival stories? In 1993, she did make a play that involved a plane crash in which the only survivor is the pilot, and as he's leaving the wilderness, he encounters a series of figures who are asking him questions he can't answer and he doesn't want to hear. Something really interesting about this play is that the first scene, the crash itself, is held in the street outside the theater, and there's real flames, real fire and sparks coming out of the wreckage, as if the audience, as they gather around to look at it, are witnesses. And if they look too closely, they might catch on fire themselves. My sources for this episode include the book and I Alone Survived, which Lauren wrote with Shirley Strashinski and published in 1978 the website laurenelder.com which is Lauren's artist website that features a collection of her work, a review of Lauren Elder's work in Artforum by Maria Borges in 1993 and an LA Times story by Cecilia Rasmussen in 2006. I also used the National Transportation Safety Board report about the crash for this episode. Research, writing, narration and editing are by me, Blair Braverman. Audio, production and music are by Braver Brandon Chabell. As always, it's incredibly helpful if you leave a review or a rating for this podcast and help spread the word. And thank you so much for joining me around the fire. I will be back in two weeks with another true story. Take care. Of.