- Before I wrote Thirst, my neighborhood was hit by a derecho-a line of severe thunderstorms-that pushed through in a white haze so complete I couldn't see the houses on the other side of my living room window. Power lines were snapped, and when the skies cleared, they dripped flame down onto the street. There was no electricity for a week, the traffic lights were out, and the grocery stores all closed.
- I wrote most of the book while taking long walks along the Rachel Carson Greenway. Rachel Carson is an environmentalist hero of mine, and after my wife and I moved into our home, I explored the streets until I found an entrance to the woods. It was a trail that followed a branch of the Anacostia River, and I walked it almost daily, following the seasons, for the four years I lived there.
- The earliest draft of Thirst was lost after my house was burgled and my laptop stolen. The house was turned upside down, but because we keep so little of value, the computer-an old one-was the only real loss, but what a loss for me! I had to start again, which I guess was fine. I got a second draft.
- When I was nineteen years old, I hiked the Appalachian Trail during what was the worst drought in fifty years on the East Coast of the U.S. The trail runs from Georgia to Maine, about 2,000 miles, and many of the streams where, ordinarily, hikers would refill their canteens, were dry. We hiked long days without water, our packs weighing about forty-five pounds. Most likely, we would have had to give up our journey if not for "trail angels"… that is, townspeople who filled big plastic jugs with water and left them at trail-crossings. Some left cans of soda, too. Some left beer.
- The only time before that hike that I'd felt the effects of dehydration was on a hot grassy field in West Virginia practicing for an American flag-football tournament. I was fourteen, and I remember the colors of things around me seemed to slow down. That was the first and only time I've fainted.
- Many so-called "thru-hikers" on the Appalachian Trail bring paperbacks to read, and tear off blocks of pages-fifty or sixty at a time-to leave in shelters along the trail. They do this for two reasons: 1) hikers behind them are able to read those earlier chapters and then catch up to the next ones, and 2) a slimmer book means carrying less weight up and over a mountain.
- I re-read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in just such a manner, and two summers later took a canoe down the Mississippi River, two-thousands miles from Lake Itasca in Minnesota to New Orleans, Louisiana.
- Before I left on that trip, my girlfriend at the time, who'd grown up not far from that river, told me to be careful of two things: 1) that I not get river water anywhere on my body… it was so polluted it would eat my skin like acid, and 2) catfish on the Mississippi were so big and vicious that fishermen had sliced them open to reveal human arms in their stomachs.
- The beginning of that canoe trip marked the end of that relationship.
- I'm actually no survivalist. During that storm that knocked the power out for a week, my wife and I drove to stay with my parents.
OUT NOW: Thirst by Benjamin Warner, published by Bloomsbury at £12.99
Thirst