A Life Wasted

Navigating by Direct T.V.

I cleared the small town of Lincoln without any trouble and drove deep into the country. I had never been in this area and had only a general idea about the layout of western Illinois, nor did I have any type of map, so I was driving in the blind. My only real thought was to keep going west. I picked west because I am from the east. I knew the east coast so well that I could drive anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the United States without a map. I assumed the feds knew this. Since my family and everyone I knew was on the east coast I figured it was a good bet that they would expect me to drive east. So I drove west. Into an area I didn't know.

Holding a western heading after all the turns I'd made was proving to be a problem. The sky had the same low cloud overcast it had had since the night of my escape so I couldn't see the sun, or even enough light to know where the sun was in the sky. Without the sun for a reference it was impossible to establish a natural reference of direction in this open country. After I crossed the Illinois River the roads were no longer straight and I found that I could no longer tell which way was west. At this point I stopped on a country road and forced myself to stand beside the truck. Now that I had sat for a period of time the simple act of standing hurt a great deal. So much that I didn't think I could walk. So I stood there using the truck for support. The truck's registration paper was the only paper in the truck so I rolled it up like a telescope and used it to look at the clouds. It was a trick I had read about but never used. Looking at the clouds through the rolled up paper I should have been able to locate the sun by finding the brightest spot. But the clouds were so thick I couldn't see any difference. I had no idea where the sun was so I had no idea which way was west.

I looked around, looking for some other directional reference. In the distance I spotted a lone farm house. In that causal glance I found my answer. I couldn't help but smile at the simplicity of the solution. On the side of the house was a satellite dish receiver. There is no cable in the country, so if you wanted to watch TV you needed a satellite dish. Because I'd recently installed one at our home, I knew that the dish had to be pointed at a satellite along the equator. So it had to be pointed south. That dish was pointed across the road I'd been driving on, so the road I was on went east to west. I'd been driving west. Easy peasy. As I drove I constantly looked for the satellite dish on the houses I passed. Most had one. In this way I navigated west without any concerns about getting turned around.

I was pretty proud of myself. I was more and more convinced I was going to get away and that I wasn't going to die from exposure to the cold. As I drove I ate the trail mix I'd stolen from Wal-Mart and drank all the water I had. I'd need more water soon, and a map, but for now I was rolling down a country road with two full tanks of gas and feeling pretty good about things.