Getting towed.
When my low slung rented car got bogged down in that remote part of the Barrens for two days 6 or 8 years ago (appropriately enough near Lost Lane), and I finally hiked out 8 miles through the Air Force bombing range ("All persons are forbidden to enter!!!") in the rain, and a cop finally pulled in by me and told me they had picked up someone trying to call out on their cell phone (me) but couldn't make anything out because cell phone service was virtually nonexistent in there, except for very intermittent one second bursts when I climbed a hill. He called a tow truck which finally arrived where I was sitting wet and cold and hungry by the closed gas station I had hiked to.
I was afraid that the tow truck guy would balk at entering the woods where I came out because it was the bombing range and had more of those big Entry Forbidden! signs on it, but he barreled right in, and in fact went so fast that I totally lost track of the neat little arrows I had scraped in the sand at every turn on my exit route, so now we were totally lost, or rather my rented car was totally lost, except for one thing, I had saved the coordinates on my Garmin II GPS. But more problems - the double A batteries in my GPS were almost dead. I had hoped to buy some more at the store I hiked to after I left the woods whose sign I saw in the distance, but it turned out to be out of business,only a big sign, and the tow truck driver had no batteries. I did have a cigarette lighter adapter but the cig. lighter in the tow truck was broken.
Meanwhile the tow truck dude was barreling through the woods, trying to follow the arrow on my GPS - an earlier version with no roads or maps - and we kept running into dead ends and roads that narrowed out so bad that tree limbs were crashing into the truck, knocking the mirrors and wiper blades around, so hard that I was afraid they would break his windshield. And I was afraid that any minute he would say, OK, enough of this, the hell with this, I'm outa here!
The tree cover in there was so thick that the car wouldn't even have been visible from the air - and the rental car agreement does have some fine print about not being allowed to drive off paved roads...
Anyway, with my GPS batteries on their last leg we finally came upon the car, buried so deep in the sand,over its axles, so that I had been unable to dig it out at all or get it to move more than a few inches after digging for two days and one cold night with the only digging tool I had with me, a big seashell. I was also afraid that with my arm extended way under the car trying to dig, the car might settle down and trap my arm, and then what? I didn't see any sign that anyone had even been on that stretch of road for many many years.
Anyway, all's well that ends well. The tow truck dude followed me out to make sure I didn't get bogged down again. How much do I owe you, asked I. Ah, $50 should cover it, said he. He was a good guy. Only thing is a week or two later I got a call from his boss who said, Look, he spent hours in there and beat up the truck besides. He didn't charge you enough. He asked for another 50, and I thought he was right, so that made it $100.
Here's where I was stuck:
N 39 45.317
W 74 26.544
