That time I was stuck in a desert for a week

The car battery may be a humble, uncomplicated piece of technology; a long-known bit of acid and base bolted together, but it demands our respect. Everyone talks a big game until they turn those keys to the sound of inadequate electric whimpering under the hood; then we are all equally powerless before our Maker. Some people have been stuck in grocery parking lots, others at the mall, others on vacation.

I was stuck at home for a week last year, but "home" is a desert, with little help. Make the jump and I'll elaborate on the story.

When I obtained the van I've lovingly dubbed the Perseus IV (fourth vehicle I've ever owned, shaped vaguely like a toy spacecraft I once had as a kid that I called that), the batteries hadn't been changed in a year. That was in August 2019. A year later, by the summer of 2020, it was noticeably weaker than a car battery should be. I had to jump it on slighter and slighter pretexts.

Jumping a car when you have a solar panel electric system is annoying, but not terribly difficult. Unwire the solar system's battery, set it near the dead battery, run jumper cables to it like any other car battery. If it won't start immediately, then after a minute of letting a charge trickle through the dead system, it will. Then put your jumper cables away, put your solar battery away (and rewire it), and you're literally good to go. The annoyance is in unwiring and rewiring the solar system, but it's just a bunch of clipper cables in tight spaces.

That worked just fine for me until the solar system was destroyed in that windstorm. After that, I figured I'd just try to be a better steward of the car battery, running it unpowered less often between starts. (If you're trying to do research in a van parked near wifi during a hot summer day, you'll find that running some kind of fan is absolutely necessary.) The wages of that was trading alcohol to strangers in gratitude for jumps at the truck stop.

Finally I had a warning that I heeded, when the battery died at home. I walked three miles to the Patanes, my nearest neighbors and April's parents, to request a jump. It was during the California wildfires, and they were having trouble breathing, so they said in a few hours. I was grateful, and walked three miles back home to clear the road so they'd be able to drive alongside me. They did, they helped, and after that I swore I was going to get a jumper set so I wouldn't be caught out like this again. I didn't have the spare hundred and fifty dollars to buy a new battery, but I did have the spare fifty dollars to buy a jumper set.

A jumper set is basically a tiny lithium-ion battery with jumper cables attached. It charges from a USB cable like any phone stuff, and is primarily meant to jump a vehicle. Mine can also charge USB devices, and has a flashlight attached. Although I have devices I prefer for those purposes because I want to keep the jumper charged at all times, redundancy is always useful.

With this jumper set, I didn't have to worry about the battery dying. I could always jump the van if necessary, and then just run it long enough to recharge the jumper battery to all four blue lights. I did this more often than one would think, as I would run my van battery as close to the edge as I could in the truck stop to charge my devices. The whole reason I was there in the first place was the internet, and dead devices defeated the utility of being there. When I had the solar system, it wasn't much of a problem, because the solar system had all the energy I needed in most cases.

Heretofore, this had mostly been a problem at the truck stop, except for the one time I needed a jump from the Patanes. But then I parked it at home, left my phone charging on the van battery while I went to work building the house, and when I came back to start the van to recharge the battery, it wouldn't turn over. Not terribly unusual, I just went for the jumper, but then the jumper failed to turn it, and promptly died to boot.

Middle of the desert. Can't start the van. Jumper died. Is the van battery finally hecked up beyond repair?

I couldn't know that yet, not without trying to jump the van again. But I had a dead van battery, a dead jumper battery, and no real urge to go bother the Patanes again over the same dumb thing. I knew I always could, which turned the situation from life-threatening to merely extremely annoying. But with my various tiny solar-powered gadgets, I had the theoretical capability to recharge the jumper battery on my own right where I was.

My solar flashlight was set out on the dashboard during the day, plugged into the jumper battery to trickle charge while I worked. I would furiously crank my trusty radio and then set it up in the sunlight and have the radio playing on its lowest setting while I worked, much quieter than I'd normally listen, just to save electricity. Five minutes of cranking corresponded to roughly an hour of music, but it was easily renewable energy in a way that my phone simply wasn't. Without my comparatively energy-guzzling phone, I couldn't read e-books or watch downloaded videos like I normally would, so I cracked open the books in the mini-library I'd brought with me at night instead, using the flashlight feature on my solar/crank radio to read by if I hadn't saved some electricity in the solar flashlight that day. I started and finished a biography of Cleopatra VII (the one you've heard of) that way.

At night, when the sun didn't shine, I would sometimes just crank the radio as hard as I could for fifteen minutes at a time and then plug it into the jumper battery to charge. I also drained my laptop of its entire charge by turning it on, plugging in the jumper battery, and doing nothing until the laptop died. I also busted out some candles I'd brought with me, and literally read by candlelight so that the energy I cranked could go towards the jumper battery instead. I had also bought a trickle charger solar cell that I plugged into the mostly-redundant solar battery, and that charged a little bit, until the cheap glue job holding it together came apart and the trickle charger became nigh useless (I'll see if it can be repaired when I visit my handyman friend in the Panhandle).

The van battery had died on a Sunday, and around Thursday, I saw a third blue light flash on the jumper battery. I haven't worked so hard for a charge indicator ever before in my life. I had read the jumper manual and knew that the jumper had to be charged at least 50% to possibly work. I wasn't sure I wanted to try if it wasn't fully charged, but I reasoned that I'd be there another several weeks if I charged it that much, and if I tried and the jumper battery drained out again, I'd still be there another several weeks anyway trying again. So I popped the hood, attached the jumper, ran the van electronics for half a minute to pull some charge through the van battery, and turned the ignition.

By the power of the sun, by the power of my cranking, and by no small amount of luck, the ignition turned. The dead van roared back to life, and life was sweet in a way similar to that of a castaway just found by a passing ship. I charged all my devices and didn't turn off the engine until every last drop of spare energy my devices could hold was held. And the next day, I drove to town just to make sure I still could.

Energy poverty is a real thing, and even the poorest Americans don't think about it very much. But it's what can happen when you're living off-grid and everything breaks. And even when that happened, I wasn't truly devoid of all electricity; it just became in very short supply, and I had to ration and carefully consider my use of it. I wasn't short of anything else while I was in this predicament; I didn't run out of food, toilet paper, clean clothes, etc. I knew if nothing else, I could always go bother the Patanes again. It wasn't the disaster it could have been, say, if I'd been out in the middle of nowhere panning for gold and this struck. I'm almost kinda happy that it happened the exact way it did; it was excellent practice for the potential of such a day, and drove home the importance of a resilient off-grid electrical system to me. I've since gotten another solar flashlight, more solar panels, and I'm about to get a household wind turbine system and another battery storage system on my way back to Nevada next month. Nature was teaching me a lesson, and I intend to not need it repeated to me.