Caitlin Van Mol 0:01 Announcer, this episode contains discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, you can talk to someone at the suicide and crisis lifeline by calling 988,

David 0:15 I didn't have a plan. I didn't have a path to getting out. I didn't have what she needed. She needed like, this is what we're gonna do here. This is what we're gonna do next, and then we get out that that's not something that I could give her.

Caitlin Van Mol 0:30 David Boyer grew up in North Carolina, but after graduating high school, he wanted to spread his wings. Pun intended.

David 0:39 Went to a school in Florida. Embry Riddle University was training to be a pilot, but that's where I met crystal, and we just kind of hit it off and started dating. And we dated for about three years through the early parts of college, and then we both wanted to pursue different paths. So she started to want to work with big animals, so she went off to Spokane, Washington to study animal handling there. And I didn't want to be a pilot, so I followed her out there. But then she got an opportunity to go to South Africa. So she was gone for nine months, and we kind of lost a little bit of contact. It just sort of never gelled back together when she returned. So we just sort of never got back together. But both of us seemed to want that, but they

Caitlin Van Mol 1:37 had always talked about going to the Amazon rainforest together, so

David 1:41 she was in her dorm room one day and had been studying for hours, and I ended up going over to her room and kind of trying to distract her from studying. So we were just kind of sitting around, and we kind of played a little quick game of all right, we're gonna name, make a list of five places you'd want to go in the world. And then we turned our papers over, and both of us had number one, the Amazon. And I was like, wow, that is, like, not a coincidence, like, that's, that's some kind of, like, fate telling us that we need to go.

Caitlin Van Mol 2:17 The pair had always found comfort in the outdoors when Crystal

David 2:21 and I were together in Florida, and she was battling depression, I started to battle depression too. I'm not sure if it was just like because I'm around her and she's sad, or if there was and also, I was not enjoying playing soccer in college, I wasn't enjoying flying planes like there, I just wasn't happy with my path that I was on. But we started to take little weekend day trips and do things like canoe or hike in Florida, and it quickly like taught me that those things were my source of happiness, and that further, like pushed the plan to go to the Amazon I figured, oh, if getting away from Daytona Beach for a few hours into this like, semi remote area of Florida has these positive effects to My happiness, going as far away from people and civilization as possible must have like the biggest effects. So

Caitlin Van Mol 3:27 David started saving for the trip. He got a job at Blockbuster, and kept putting money aside for them both to go on their dream trip, and even though they weren't together at the time.

David 3:39 So the Amazon was, in my mind, was a potential for us to spend quality time together and rekindle our relationship

Caitlin Van Mol 3:49 in 2002 they finally had saved enough to go down to Brazil. David found a hostel that was within budget in the middle of the rain forest. There was no formal booking process. They just had to go to a shop in a town and ask for a ride. So after two planes and a river boat,

David 4:10 but we get to Maui's and have to find this shop, Casa Quina, is what the shop's name was. And we go to talk to the owner, speaking none of Portuguese, and he speaks zero English. And it was kind of a frustrating, like, hour of of conversation where we were trying to tell him that we needed a boat to the hostel. And he understood that, but I didn't understand that he knew that. And he eventually gets frustrated. He's like, basically, like, I know I've got a boat. It's coming at four o'clock today, but I didn't understand any of that. So we it was kind of a little bit of a frustrating few hours trying to arrange that. Yeah, but once it got worked out and we'd take this the speed boat, between mile west, it's like an hour. Long boat ride from there to the youth hostel, and that was like the first time where we were really just kind of taking a deep breath and seeing the surroundings. It wasn't like being on the Amazon River, where we had taken the river boat, where the river is super wide and the jungle is just this thing off in the distance on the horizon, basically like we were immersed in it on this boat ride, and birds were just flying across and like we just looked at each other, like we've we've made it. Little

Caitlin Van Mol 5:34 did they know their immersion into the rainforest would go beyond their wildest dreams or nightmares. This is live to tell the podcast where I talk to some of the bravest people who have been through the most horrifying things and lived to tell the tale. I'm Caitlin Van Mol.

David 6:01 The boat just kind of pulls up to the shore of the where the hostel is, and Nile comes walking down kind of the hillside and says hello in English. And we're like, oh, she speaks English. This is, this is going to be it's the first person we've met that speaks English. This is going to be great.

Caitlin Van Mol 6:19 Nyla was the owner of the hostel. Crystal got settled in, while David and an Australian also staying there, went for a hike, but they didn't go that far. So the second day, Crystal and David were looking forward to exploring further. The trail they were going on was the white Trail, which had some white trail markers along the way, but not as many as they would have liked. David and Crystal wanted to go to the end of the trail and back that morning, they were told the trail ended at a river. The trail is

David 6:55 just really cutting through some little tiny palms and like, it's really narrow, and the branches will close in over it all the time. So whenever people walk on it with a machete, they just kind of whack on the branches that are growing over it. But it's a difficult trail to follow, as we found out. I figured it would take about three hours. It was about an hour or so that the guy from Australia and I had hiked the previous day. So we figured we'd go another 30 minutes or so past there probably had a backpack that I filled with a few different snacks. We had two fruit roll up bars that we put into as a like a gallon size Ziploc bag. We packed two fruit roll ups, two granola bars, two cereal bars and a package of crackers, and then I had a 64 ounce now gene bottle of water and crystal. Had just a plastic bottle of water. We had a camera and a few rolls of film. I wore the same clothes that I wore the previous day I had left in my pockets, a couple of things that I'm not sure I would have brought otherwise, a little tiny pocket knife. My watch was in my my pants pocket, and then on, like the wrist band, was a tiny little compass. That's pretty much our inventory.

Caitlin Van Mol 8:23 So they set out for their three hour hike. The rainforest

David 8:27 just came alive. Like everywhere we looked, there were things that we had never seen before. We came across a spot that there were like three bats hanging on a trunk of a tree, and we stopped and took pictures, and were just amazed by like being so they didn't fly away because it was daytime. We were just like staring at them and all these amazing things. And we just got wrapped up in the moment. And sometimes we're walking without even thinking. There's also some larger animals in the Amazon, tapir and deer. There are deer, yeah, they have tiny little they're like, maybe half the size of our deer here in North Carolina. But the the wildlife and anywhere establishes their own walking paths. So there were lots of places where we believe we were on a trail, and then we see other trails that kind of intersect with that and and knowing that the hostel has this trail has no branches past, like the very beginning part, like it should be one trail, we were like, Oh, wow, there's an animal path. Oh, there's another animal path. And we kind of believed we're still on the human trail. And so we continued on for a little while, and came up to where a tree had fallen down across what we thought was the trail, and I climbed like through the branches and over the trunk of the tree, looking to the other side, and I didn't see anything on the other side. I was like, That's so crazy that. Trail is very clear on one side, and then this tree is there, and there's nothing. And so crystal crawls through, and she's like, Yeah, I don't, I don't know where the trail is over here. And I said, Okay, well, we got, we got tons of time here at the hostel. Let's, let's head back for today. It was an amazing hike. So we turned around and started walking back, and it just seemed like the trail we had come up was different walking in the opposite direction, and it seemed like the animal paths that intersected with it became more and more frequent, or they looked clearer than the trail that we were on, and we started to kind of talk about a little bit. We're like, man, what? I don't not real sure if we're even on the trail anymore. We just kind of dead ended in a wall of jungle around us, and knew at that point we had strayed off the trail and needed to come up with a plan for how to get back. The first kind of thoughts were, we just need to keep walking in the direction that we've been going. But

Caitlin Van Mol 11:11 when all you can see is trees with no markers or landmarks, this is harder than it sounds.

David 11:18 There's no way of telling which way you're actually walking is, if you turned around in a circle, it would be hard to figure out which way you were actually walking the moment before, right? So we were like, Oh, I don't, I don't really know which direction we came up. I was like, well, we got a compass. We can, we can use this to direct ourselves. So then the next question is, Which direction is the hostel

Caitlin Van Mol 11:43 Nile, the hostel owner, had drawn them a rudimentary trail map before they set out that morning. They had assumed the map she drew was oriented north, so the path looked like it was going northeast, but they

David 11:57 orient themselves based on rivers. I made the assumption that our best guess is that the trail goes off to the north, and to get back, we should walk south. So

Caitlin Van Mol 12:08 using David's watch compass, south they went.

David 12:12 We left the hostel right around 10 in the morning or so, and then turned around sometime around noon, so when it gets to be about three or four in the afternoon, and we've walked double the amount of time and didn't seem anywhere different than where we had started. Then there was like, talk of, okay, so what if we chose the wrong direction? What if South wasn't the way back to the hostel, or what if we just kind of veered slightly to the east or slightly to the west and missed it? We figured we've got about an hour or two of daylight. The Amazon's right on the equator. So 6am sunrise, 6pm sunset every day, and we get to the point where it's like all right, we're not gonna be able to walk in the dark in here. That's good. That's not safe. We're gonna need to set up camp. We're gonna need to wait out the night, and we'll be fine in the morning. We're just gonna wake up and keep walking, and we'll probably be back by breakfast. It's gonna be all right. There wasn't really a lot of like, true panic in us at that point. Picked a spot that looked on the ground and didn't see ants everywhere. We didn't see things crawling around, or like, all right, I guess this is our spot for the night, and we sat down with no intentions of sleeping. We really just, we're gonna wait out the night and talk and battle the mosquitoes. And

Caitlin Van Mol 13:46 yeah, tell me about the mosquitoes.

David 13:48 They are the biggest issue at night, and at night, we're also not able to see anything. We had no light source with us, so we're just in complete darkness. And then when you take away your eyesight, certainly the sense of hearing is heightened, and it just seems like there's this loud buzzing, almost like a helicopter, loud buzzing of just constant mosquito wings flapping around your face. And then you mix that in with the non stop bites that you're getting, and then the weird bites that would get you in places that are uncomfortable, like your eyelids or your ears or your lip. How

Caitlin Van Mol 14:38 itchy do you get when you get mosquito bites, I get like I scratch the wounds open,

David 14:44 yeah. Crystal was that same way. So we had insect repellent that we used up that first night. But when light came up then a second day, Crystal said, Will you look at my back like my. But it's just It hurts so much she lifted up her shirt and her claw marks are just like all over her back from where she was scratching. There you just go through cycles where you got an itch on your arm, got an itch on the other arm, you got an itch on your neck, itch on your back legs, itching like just always scratching.

Caitlin Van Mol 15:21 So the next day, you get up and it's more walking around. What do you guys talking? Do you guys like chat at all? Or are you just focused on walking

David 15:33 in the beginning, we we, we both really had a positive outlook, so we joked around some, but it was also navigating through a dense forest. It's not like you're walking side by side and holding hands and just kind of like strolling around your your one person has to be in the lead. You're ducking and crawling through areas and trying to avoid plants that have thorns, and every plant has thorns in the Amazon, and you're just getting scratched up.

Caitlin Van Mol 16:07 But a bigger problem was about to arise by

David 16:11 about 10am on that second day, Crystal drank the last of her water, and my water, I think we shared throughout the night that that previous night, so we ran out of water the that second morning, right about the same time that it started to get super hot, when she told me that she was out of water, that was kind of the first moment where we thought, we're kind of in a little bit of trouble here. It's not just like we got lost and we have to find our way out. We're now facing bigger issues, probably than that. We're going to die today if we don't have water. First,

Caitlin Van Mol 16:53 they tried to make a rock filter using crystals plastic water bottle,

David 16:57 we came across a two foot wide section of a puddle that looked like black water, and I scooped up some and watched as it came down through my little rock filter, and it looked the exact same. There was chunks of little leaves and grass or whatever else debris in there. I was like, yeah, that didn't do anything. So I asked crystal if she had an idea, and she said, Well, we need something that'll filter better. And she decided that her sports bra was an option to try out. And it certainly changed. It tracked all of the big debris and changed the color of the water from this like blackish to like a light brown water. David

Caitlin Van Mol 17:47 took a few small sips to test it out, and it seemed fine enough,

David 17:53 so we filled the entire Nalgene bottle with that water and took some pretty big drinks of it. But after that, for your first time, we actually never used her sports bra to filter water again. We just scooped and drank from whatever sources we found. Then every time we came to a water source, we would just drink a little bit. We said, We never want to, like, chug and chug and chug from any one place, if that's gonna get us sick, then that could kill us. We are worried that, like if we drank something bad, we would probably know it pretty quickly. After

Caitlin Van Mol 18:28 walking a full day, they still hadn't come across any markers or signs that humans might be close by, so they settled in for another night in the jungle, second and third day, like as it's going on, what is the mood and sort of, what kind of hope do you have at that point

David 18:50 at night that was really a chance for us to kind of accept that we're there together and that we needed each other To get through it, and it's particularly the second night when we were tired and dehydrated we wanted to build a shelter. So we start to come up with a plan for building a teepee. And Crystal was particularly tired and didn't really want to wander very far away from each other. It was kind of scary to be separated and not be able to see each other. So we kind of made a deal where I would go off and collect little branches of palms and bring them back to her, and she would lay them out on the teepee and it. It was a really, like a bonding time. She eventually made a deal, like, for every branch you bring, I'll give you a kiss when we get out. I was like, Oh, sweet. I'll bank out some of those. And we didn't have, like a romance. Then in that moment, that wasn't really a thought. Lot of ours,

Caitlin Van Mol 20:02 but it's like lingering in the back. Yeah.

David 20:04 I mean, we did not have a great second night. I was just getting attacked by biting things, and I ended up kind of crawling out of the TV for most of the night because I didn't want to bother crystal. She actually slept a little bit on that second night. I don't know how, but she did. But

Caitlin Van Mol 20:22 even with the lack of sleep, they still kept it together. So

David 20:26 we had a really, I think, positive outlook, despite the kind of trouble we had gotten ourself into. We never had a single argument during the entire time. There was never like, Oh, this is your fault, or you're doing this wrong. It's really just kind of making the plan of how what to do next. But the biggest advantage of youth is like you can, you can really struggle through a lot of things. We were both really fit people. So we were walking for somewhere between 10 and 12 hours every day. We eventually were hydrating, not not keeping up with the loss of water, but hydrated enough that we weren't breaking down from that. So our feet were already starting to bother us some. We had been walking through water. Our boots were soaking wet and our socks were wet, so our feet started to blister really pretty early in the experience, and that ends up being the biggest physical challenge of the whole experience.

Caitlin Van Mol 21:37 We'll be right back the Yeah, they had gone through the snacks they brought on the first day, and they weren't able to get food.

David 21:48 We didn't have a way of hunting. We certainly aren't hunters ourselves, and probably were more morally opposed to killing something else than letting ourselves die. We probably would have accepted that there are fruits in the rain forest, but those are 150 feet up in the canopy, and if they fall to the the forest floor, it's it's mere minutes before they are food for the things on the forest floor. So we didn't forage. We didn't find anything. We made a rule, actually, early on, that we weren't allowed to talk about food because we didn't have food. We just focused on water and our hopes of trying to get out so we get through that that day, and as we're walking on the third day, start talking about, if we don't get out today, what are we going to do tonight? And it didn't rain at all on the second night. So we figured maybe we don't need to make a shelter like that. Let's try to come up with a plan for the mosquitoes. And so we kind of noticed that when we maybe walked through a section that had a bunch of mud, if mud had splashed up on our arm or something, that we didn't seem to get bites in that spot. So we kind of like found a spot that was up on the top of a small hill with a creek down on the bottom, like a one foot wide little drainage Creek, and decided that we would start making trips down there to fill up our Ziploc bag full of mud and bring it up and start making a pile of mud that we could put on our skin.

Caitlin Van Mol 23:32 So they ended up digging a trench to lie in and completely cover their bodies in mud.

David 23:38 And as nightfall came, we laid down in the our trench and only left tiny little spots for our eyes and our our nose and mouth to breathe,

Caitlin Van Mol 23:50 but they didn't really get to see if their plan would give them some relief, because

David 23:56 the tropical storm comes through and the it just opens up into this downpour. And we're at first kind of hoping, oh, this is maybe just a little thing that's going to move through maybe some of the rains that come through like that. It'll rain really hard for five minutes, and then it'll be gone. So we've tried kind of just laying still. We said, oh, we'll just put the mud back on us after the rain stops. But it didn't stop. We just got out of the hole that we had made and slid back to the trunk of a tree nearby, and she sat in between me my legs, and I wrapped around her and and it just it kept up through the entire night, even through a couple of hours of the morning. It was a constant heavy downpour. And the leaves of the trees there, a lot of them are really large, broad leaves, and it's almost like a metal roof on a shed when they're getting hit with rain. It's just like this, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, and just turns into this loud, chaotic 12 hours of darkness being in this storm, and it just seemed to go on forever, and we were cold and shivering and frustrated. I think my mind almost like shut down it. In the very beginning I was very frustrated and probably saying nasty thoughts about weather and things like that in my own head. But eventually it was like I can't focus on anything except for the shaking of my body right now,

Caitlin Van Mol 25:40 this unrelenting storm was when the positivity they had up to this point started to crack. How did it feel when the storm was over? There's

David 25:51 kind of like a magical time when storms finish, and there's like this, this foggy haze left over through the forest. And honestly, it was, it was super beautiful, like I was so conflicted because Crystal was saying, I can't do another night like that, that I'm done, that I'm not putting up with that. It was a breaking point for for Crystal, she she was crying. I didn't have ways of comforting her through that. Really just tried to hold her and told her, we're gonna make it. And I had had the same almost thoughts of how frustrating and terrible that night was, and then you just look around and you're in this just magical and beautiful place. And so I tried to kind of change the thought pattern a little bit. And I was like, and we came here to see places like this. We came here to experience things like this. The sun's up now. We've got 12 hours of daylight now, but it didn't really have a big effect on Crystal's mindset. She She was really struggling. She started to really quiet down a lot on that that fourth morning, particularly that morning were we stopped and found like a log to rest on for a minute, and she started to cry. And I was just like, I get it. I know. I know this sucks. We got to stay positive. We got we got to we're gonna get through this. It's we're gonna make it. I don't know how we're gonna make it, but we're gonna make it. And she's like, I can't, I can't do another night out here. So that's when I half jokingly said, Well, then why don't we just, why don't you just stop right now? Like, why don't we just get the knife and kill ourselves and be done with it. Like, don't think I was trying to be serious about the comment. I was more like, we don't have any other choice. Like, that's not an option. But it sort of stuck in her and said, gave her that as an option. So now our options were two options. It's, we either keep walking or we're, we're gonna die. It really was pretty much for the rest of the time that was probably constantly in her head of if I want to stop it right now, I have, I have an option.

Caitlin Van Mol 28:33 How did that make you feel

David 28:37 that that was really hard, it so I needed her in this also. I don't I don't imagine what it would be like alone out there. I had strong feelings for her. I couldn't imagine a moment where I allowed it to happen to where she would kill herself, and then I would have to make some choice of my life is over also, or abandoning her, like every time she would talk about not wanting to keep going, I had to come up with something different. So using her, her mom, was a pretty common thing. She had a strong relationship with her. Oh, you gotta your mom is not gonna do well if you don't push yourself right here and get out of here like you, you need to do this for your mom or even something silly. We had pet ferrets at the time, and they were staying with my parents in North Carolina while we were traveling, I was like, You got to do this for Dorian. Like Dorian needs us. Can you imagine how sad Dorian is going to be if we don't come back? As

Caitlin Van Mol 29:51 they continued walking that fourth day, amongst all the sounds of the rainforest, David heard something different,

David 29:58 but there was. Moment where I was 100% sure I heard the sound of an engine and assumed it was from a boat. Couldn't really tell which direction it was coming from, but I felt pretty confident I heard it in one particular direction, and I told crystal. I was like, I'm going, we're getting out of here. Try to, try to keep up with me. And I took off sprinting, running and jumping over things and having branches slap me in the face like running through and eventually crashed my shin into a log and fell down, and then crystal kind of caught up to me, and I'm just sitting there trying to listen as carefully as I could, and I heard nothing at that point, how

Caitlin Van Mol 30:41 damaging is that to your mental state?

David 30:46 That was the first kind of moment where feeling like something was taken from me felt literally like somebody had ripped something away from me, like my confidence or my my hope was just kind of taken away in that moment. His

Caitlin Van Mol 31:02 hope had declined, but it wasn't completely gone. And after spending a fourth night lost, they both knew they needed to lift the mood for

David 31:13 a lot of the fifth day, maybe while walking, we were able to just talk about random stuff. She wanted me to just talk about anything so that she didn't think about what we were going through. So she's like, can you explain microeconomics to me? I'm like, that's going to be really boring. She's like, I know. Please do it. We would try to remember jokes from Saturday Night Live, or things like deep thoughts by Jack Handy was something that she really loved, and she could remember maybe 10 or 12 of those. So we would try to laugh a little bit. So it wasn't she wasn't always like in this constant state of, I can't do this, or I'm frustrated, she was super strong. It just that when those lows hit, they hit hard. And surprisingly, I guess she was very vocal about how she was feeling. I'm almost grateful of that, rather than her bottling it up and maybe taking it on herself, because I wasn't always super strong, like I would break down while talking, especially if we talked about anything remotely serious, like family or friends that we weren't going to be able to see again. I struggled through moments like that. I wasn't always this strong person guiding her through whatever she was going through. She had to be that for me also,

Caitlin Van Mol 32:37 as they were walking through the same terrain, around the same trees and the same bugs were biting them. They stumbled into something a little different,

David 32:47 pretty early in the afternoon, probably like two or three at one point that I was leading, I sort of like found a wall of plants and crawled through it, and on the other side was, like, these shrubs that are maybe 1012, feet tall at most, and they're spaced out on the ground. It's just all this white, gray sand with very little plants there. And it was the first thing that we saw that was different than anything else we had seen while we were out there. So we walk around, we start kind of making a perimeter around that area and hoping that maybe this was connected to a river. But after maybe an hour, eventually I was like, I don't think this leads anywhere. This must just be some kind of like pocket in the forest. And I decided we got to keep going, we're gonna go back into the into the forest and leave this area. Like, probably five minutes goes by and crystals, like, I, I don't want to be in the jungle right now. I don't know why we left that place, don't you? Don't you want to sleep in the sand there. We weren't getting bit by bugs there, like there was a lot of positives to the spot that we had been. So I agreed. Said, Okay, let's, let's turn around and head back there and we'll, we'll set up there. We walked around and found kind of the most open area. Looked around on the sand to make sure there wasn't anything there, and it was so different than sleeping in the jungle. We're super far away from any light pollution. So once it got dark, there was like a quarter moon and the Milky Way was just visible everywhere. It was like the most stars I had ever seen in my life. It was, it was just like this fantastic place. It was super cold, though, because there's no like tree canopy to like trap in the radiation from leaving. But we took our shoes off and kind of buried our feet in the sand and kind of laid right next to each other and cuddled. Up and looked at the stars for a few minutes and said, All right, I think, I think we can go to sleep. I think we're gonna be able to sleep tonight. And we did, like the only night that I got any sleep. But also had heard in the middle of the night, again, maybe not heard, but thought I heard an engine throughout a lot of the night, so

Caitlin Van Mol 35:24 they at least had something to walk towards instead of just aimlessly around the jungle. But the sound very well could have been a hallucination or something else. So it didn't fully give them the hope they needed.

David 35:38 We had a pretty good night. There's no reason why we couldn't have kind of gotten into a more positive mindset.

Caitlin Van Mol 35:46 Well, I think there are a lot of reasons. Yeah,

David 35:49 fair enough. I think Crystal's struggles with her feet made me fear what that day was going to be like, more than anything that we weren't going to be able to move fast, maybe at all. By the time we were getting moving, Crystal was trying to put on her socks, and her feet are just ripped to shreds. And she was trying to put her socks on her socks are just like, covered in blood and still wet too. And I just looked at on them like, Oh, this is this is not good. She had blisters everywhere that that her boot touched the bone of her ankle, the back of the heel, but the worst was the bottoms of her feet. By the fifth day, some of those blisters had started to pop open, and we're just oozing pus out. And there wasn't, like, any spot on the bottom of her foot that was still in good enough shape that she could kind of shift her weight to so every time we walked, it was just putting pressure on these popped open blisters, and I know it was super painful. And as the sixth day kind of got started, and we leave this sandy Mesa that we had found and slept in. We were moving at such a slow pace. We we probably covered on that day more like half of a mile in eight hours. We just we could only go 10 yards, and crystal would sit down and just be in obvious physical pain

Caitlin Van Mol 37:26 if they couldn't keep walking. The odds of them being found under the canopy of their rainforest were almost zero.

David 37:35 And when we got to the point where walking wasn't happening, that is where I started to get a little bit more fearful about the possibilities of getting out. I struggle with the the idea of what I would have actually done when it It came to a point of crystal gives up and needs the knife or like I don't I. I've loved her so much. I can't imagine sitting and watching her do this. It. It was a real possibility that we were in a make a pact, that we were going to kill ourselves and end it. And it's a real possibility that I would have done that, that I can 100% commit to, that it like, it's hard in retrospect, to accept that that is as a possibility, because I feel like, in retrospect, I would have just tried to carry her or something, like I would have just kept finding ways to keep moving. But when we were moving such small distances and getting essentially nowhere and had no food, had not found a water source, actually, on the sixth day after getting started in the morning, I was starting to really fear for that day of what, where it was leading. I hoped the daytimes were our, our chance it was like this, ticking down of time also, as the morning is wearing on and like we we've barely gone anywhere, and we're halfway through our day already. How are we getting out of here if we can't keep going

Caitlin Van Mol 39:23 next time on live to tell

David 39:26 if this was going to be the end that I at least wanted to get clean, let's find some water. We'll sit down together and we'll do this. So I was like, that's a search plane. People are out there care. They're looking for us, and the door opens. It's like eight men all armed with guns.

Caitlin Van Mol 39:50 This is live to tell. I'm Caitlin Van Mol you can follow the show on Instagram and Tiktok at live to tell podcast. Podcast. If you enjoy today's episode, please rate, review and subscribe. It really helps the show. I'll see you in two weeks. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai