'Agua, Agua'

The guy in the story basically survived 6 days without water and traveled up to 160 miles during that time. It's almost unbelievable. I thought that once you loose 4-6 kg of water due to sweat the body does not function any more due to the changed concentration of minerals in the cells.

Tendai "Marathon monks" in mount Hiei finish 1,000-day kaihōgyō with 9-day period without food, water, and sleep but they have to walk only 400m in those last 9-days. Only 46 men have finished.

If I remember correctly the 9-day period was shortened to something like 6 or 7 days, because too many of them died.

I used to know a lot of Hispanic immigrants in Chicago. One of them told me his story. It start with his mom sewing two hidden amounts of dollars into the lining of his pants. When the coyotes he'd hired dumped him and 12 others in the desert near the border they were surrounded within minutes by gunmen who put them on their knees. He said a gunman tore straight into his pants and found one of the bundles (but clearly wasn't expecting a second one and didn't find it). He said the gunmen were slashing everyone's water bottles. He begged his captor not to slash his, and him and one other person got lucky. All the bad dudes then left these people to their own fates.

He said he spent three days walking in the desert. They shared the little water they had, but it was gone after a day. Most of the people fell in the desert and didn't get up. At one point a woman with a baby fell and refused to get up. He went back to try and carry her but his two friends dragged him off and told him if he tried to save that woman and her baby that he would die with her. He says a day doesn't go by when he doesn't think about this woman.

On the third night Border Patrol found the three of them, and they all ran, getting split up. He said he spent the entire night hiding in some brush.

In the morning he found a backroad and started following it and a pickup pulled up to him with a Mexican family in it. They took him home, fed and watered him and asked him if he had any money. He gave them everything he had left ($180) and they put him back in the truck and drove him to Chicago and dropped him there with nothing and wished him good luck.

I think it's pretty stupid to challenge yourself in ways that are guaranteed to harm your body in some way, even if the harm is temporary.

While I did in the safety and chillness of my own apartment, I did a 10 day "dry" fast last year. As opposed to water fasting, with dry fasting you are not hungry AT ALL, but the thirst is something else. It's not unrelenting though, it can fade into the background if the air is humid enough and you refrain from talking too much, the mouth hydrates by itself.

During dry fasting the body gets H20 from lipolysis (this is called "metabolic" water), sort of like a camel (though camels have obviously a lot of specialization for this).

Anyway, thought it was a propos, so AMA if curious.

I wonder what would happen if we had a huge truck of fish, then loaded thousand of fish to one of those most dry areas in the world – IE without coyotes – layed out evenly. Would these make good good in few years?

edit: good food

Adjacent to this I highly recommend the nature writing of Craig Childs, which is somewhat akin in style to John McPhee with a dash of the more lyrical side of Edward Abbey: http://www.houseofrain.com/

http://www.houseofrain.com/bookdetail.cfm?id=1183863164364 for example, the epigraph of which burned into my memory:

> There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst and drowning.

The title immediately reminded me of this story from 2018: https://globalnews.ca/news/4318789/one-year-old-boy-immigrat...

> The 1-year-old boy in a green button-up shirt drank milk from a bottle, played with a small purple ball that lit up when it hit the ground and occasionally asked for “agua.”

> Then it was the child’s turn for his court appearance before a Phoenix immigration judge, who could hardly contain his unease with the situation during the portion of the hearing where he asks immigrant defendants whether they understand the proceedings.

> “I’m embarrassed to ask it, because I don’t know who you would explain it to, unless you think that a 1-year-old could learn immigration law,” Judge John W. Richardson told the lawyer representing the 1-year-old boy.

> The boy is one of hundreds of children who need to be reunited with their parents after being separated at the border, many of them split from mothers and fathers as a result of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance policy.” The separations have become an embarrassment to the administration as stories of crying children separated from mothers and kept apart for weeks on end dominated the news in recent weeks.

> Critics have also seized on the nation’s immigration court system that requires children — some still in diapers — to have appearances before judges and go through deportation proceedings while separated from their parents. Such children don’t have a right to a court-appointed attorney, and 90 percent of kids without a lawyer are returned to their home countries, according to Kids in Need of Defense, a group that provides legal representation.