Water.

Now that the glorious seven-day weekend is drawing to a close, it's time to turn my teacher-mind toward maps.

I found a map for today's topic, but it had no key. 

How utterly useless, and still somehow poetically Jakob Dylan-ish! 

No map for you, readers. 

If there was a map, it would have been for water use. 

I returned to what Diane Raines describes in Water Wars as a "water-sucking desert nightmare" a week and a day ago. Every day since, I have averaged 96 oz of H2O. It's not sustainable. Once school starts, I will be accountable to a very strict schedule for when I can use the facilities. A first-hour prep makes this an even more glaring problem. In addition, it can't be good for the bathtub ring (image available on 'Location...' post).

Because the place where I'm currently living is what I consider to be an untenable walking distance from the lake, especially if I don't have enough water to get me there (and let's be honest kids, 64 oz. wasn't enough to get me the 1.5 miles up to Mary Jane falls, so...), water is the thing I worry about the MOST in the event of a major catastrophe. 

Water is important. So, while I was gathering provisions and passed the September issue of Backpacker magazine with the teaser, "Dying of Thirst! How to find water anywhere," on the cover, I just had to buy it.

APPARENTLY, a Backpacker staff writer who calls himself Drop Dead Ted field-tested various methods of conjuring water. I had never heard of these methods. Maybe you haven't, either. I'll pass them along. 

The first method Ted discusses is self-explanatory: dew harvesting. He says, "sopping up dew yielded the most water for the least effort." Done! Except...oh, wait. Mojave Desert. Right. 

Method #2 is a solar still, whereby you still need a "motley source of moist earth (darn!)" in which to bury your bottle, which after about 4.5 hours the sun will condense into 1/4 cup of water. Even if I had access to moist earth, 1/4 cup of water = 2 oz. 

Method #3:  Transpiration bag. This way consists of tying a plastic bag around the branch of a tree (wait, branch of...what?), waiting 4.5 hours and then drinking your 3 teaspoons of water out of the corner of your Ziplock. 

Two other gems from this one-page text-and-graphic:

- Keep your clothes on and 

- Do NOT drink your pee. 

But, because hope springs eternal in the human breast (thank you, Alexander Pope), I refuse to believe that I will simply lay down and die a dehydrated death. 

Plan B: Hope that disaster strikes at SCHOOL. Use whatever gas remains in my car to drive to Valley of Fire and jump into Mouse's Tank. It's a pretty good plan, if I do say so myself. Mostly hidden from predators (excepting snakes and scorpions) and such. 

What's your "plan B?"

A basic tenet of preparedness is to have physical, not just digital copies, of the reading material that you will need to build your life anew. So...do I recommend that you run out and get Backpacker's September issue? Nah. Mostly the magazine is ads and product reviews.

Pardon me while I attempt to navigate the synaptic pathways back into teacherspeak: you won't need recall for the information in this article. Recognition will suffice. You'll see a tree (a what?), and because you are in survival mode, your brain will whisper, "plastic bag." Like Tai Chi with the automaticity &tc. 

That "nah" answer changes, however, as most answers do, if you're a geography teacher. 

Page 55 features a map called Chart of Death: Animal Attacks, which is going under my document camera here in just a few short days. If you want one, let me know.