Futility Closet - 054-Escape From Stalag Luft III

Episode Date: April 20, 2015

In 1943 three men came up with an ingenious plan to escape from the seemingly escape-proof Stalag Luft III prison camp in Germany. In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll learn about their clever deception, which made them briefly famous around the world. We'll also hear about the chaotic annual tradition of Moving Day in several North American cities and puzzle over how a severely injured hiker beats his wife back to their RV. Sources for our feature on the escape from Stalag Luft III: Eric Williams, The Wooden Horse, 1949. The Wooden Horse, British Lion Film Corporation, 1950. Oliver Philpot, Stolen Journey, 1952. Here's the movie: It became the third most popular film at the British box office in 1950. The book's success led Williams to write The Tunnel, a prequel that described his and Michael Codner's earlier escape from the Oflag XXI-B camp in Poland. Sources for listener mail: Ian Austen, "When a City Is on the Move, With Mattresses and Dishwashers in Tow," New York Times, July 1, 2013. Localwiki, Davis, Calif., "Moving Day" (accessed April 16, 2015). Samara Kalk Derby, "Happy Holiday or Horror Story? Moving Day Hits UW," Wisconsin State Journal, Aug. 15, 2011. City of Madison Streets & Recycling, "August Moving Days" (accessed April 16, 2015). This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener David White and his daughter Katherine. This episode is sponsored by our patrons and by The Great Courses -- go to http://www.thegreatcourses.com/closet to order from eight of their best-selling courses at up to 80 percent off the original price. You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- on our Patreon page you can pledge any amount per episode, and all contributions are greatly appreciated. You can change or cancel your pledge at any time, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation via the Donate button in the sidebar of the Futility Closet website. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. And you can finally follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to Futility Closet, a celebration of the quirky and the curious, the thought-provoking and the simply amusing. This is the audio companion to the website that catalogs more than 8,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art. You can find us online at futilitycloset.com. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to episode 54. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1943, three Allied pilots came up with an ingenious plan to escape from the seemingly escape-proof Stalag Luft 3 prison camp in Germany. In today's show, we'll describe their clever deception, which made them briefly famous around the world. We'll also learn

about the chaotic annual tradition of moving day in several North American cities, and puzzle over how a severely injured hiker beats his wife back to their RV. Our podcast is supported primarily by our magnificent patrons, who are the main reason we are able to keep making this show. If you would like to join them, check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or look for the link in our show notes. Every pledge is appreciated, and if you pledge at least a dollar an episode, you get access to our activity feed, where you can read behind the scenes comments, listen to outtakes, including some extralateral thinking puzzles, and find out where Sasha, our show mascot, has been hanging out lately.

Thanks so much to everyone who has been supporting Futility Closet. So much to everyone who has been supporting Futility Closet. This is the story of an escape from a German POW camp in 1943 by three RAF pilots, three British prisoners of war in a German camp called Stalag Luft 3. Two of them were named Eric Williams and Michael Codner, and they wound up in Stalag Luft 3 because they had already escaped from another camp by tolling out of it, a camp in Poland. That's where they met and became friends. So they were sent to Stalag Luft 3, which was designed to be almost escape-proof for a number of reasons. One is that just the design of it, if you picture it, it's a group of

huts basically in the middle surrounded by a fence, but it, it's a group of huts, basically, in the middle, surrounded by a fence. But there's a big margin between the huts and the fence. You'd have to dig a tunnel. If you wanted to start it from your hut, you'd have to dig a tunnel about 300 feet, which would take about six months in order to get all the way under the fence. That's one reason. That's one reason. Another is that the whole setup is built on bright yellow sand with a covering of sort of gray sand, so that would really betray any sign of digging. And also, on top of that, the Germans used seismographs to listen for the sounds of tunneling. So the whole thing seems like a total non-starter. You just couldn't hope to get out of this place. It seems like the only way to get out at all is by tunneling, but everything is set up to prevent you from doing that. A number of prisoners had tried doing it in any case, but

none had succeeded. The tunnels were discovered, or they had just had to just give up because it was just so much work to try to dig a tunnel of that length. So as I say, Williams and Codner had already escaped from one camp by tunneling and were set on doing it from this one again, but it just took some thinking. And one day they were walking through this yard and just talking about it, and I thought, it seems like what you need to get out of here is to start your tunnel much closer to the fence. But that would mean starting it out in the yard, which is like a billiard table.

It's just this featureless exercise yard. And every inch of it is in full view of the guards. So if you started digging, it would be immediately clear what you were doing. And even if you started that much closer to the fence, it would still take months to complete a tunnel that was long enough to get all the way out from the camp. So it just seemed like there was no way to proceed. But C codner had remembered at an earlier camp he'd been at uh there'd been one escape attempt that seemed promising a group of the men a large group of them had met in the evenings to play an accordion and to sing songs and if they found that if they got the group large enough that the men at the center could begin to dig a hole out of the side of the guards clever and actually got he says uh the hole deep enough about the length of your arm

and then covered it up with boards and then carefully covered the hole with this surface sand. But that's as far as they got because one of the guards is walking past it and broke through the boards and broke his leg, which gave away the whole game. And then that whole plot was now known to the Germans. So they couldn't try that, but it got the idea into his head that there are ways if you could disguise the entrance to the hole it wasn't impossible to at least get a tunnel started and so what williams and codner came up with was to cover the hole that they planned to dig with a vaulting horse which is a piece of gymnastics equipment, basically.

I guess very roughly it's the size of a desk or a card table, something like that. And if you use it legitimately for a gymnastic, what you do is just run at it and vault over it as a form of exercise. But they thought if they could build one of these things whose sides were covered by sheets of plywood, they could keep it ostensibly in one of the huts to keep it out of the weather. But if the inside was hollow, then they could hide a man inside it before they carried it out to exercise with it in the yard. If they always put it down at the same spot in the yard,

that man who was inside could be quietly digging a tunnel while these other men were vaulting over it. And then when he was done, he could carefully hide all the signs of his labor, and they could carefully pick up the horse again with him inside it and carry him back inside the hut. And if they did that over and over for weeks and months,

he could be digging a tunnel starting much closer to the fence with hopefully the Germans not being any the wiser. So they set out to do this. There was what's called an escape committee that the British had set up for the whole camp just to coordinate all the various attempts that were being come up with to devise escapes. And they thought it was a far-fetched plan,

but they agreed to give them permission to at least start by building the horse. Didn't seem to be any harm in that. They put together the horse using stolen bits of wood from the camp and sort of faced it with plywood taken from parcels that had been sent by the Canadian Red Cross, just sending them Red Cross goods. Those boxes had been saved, and so they could scavenge the plywood from that. And so they put together

this horse with a hollow interior and chose a spot about 62 feet from the nearest, from the wire fence they would have to get over. So they figured the total, if they started from that point and none of this was discovered, the total length of the tunnel they'd have to dig was 110 feet, which is much less than the 300 they would have had to have dug from one of the huts. So this is all promising so far, but they've got to actually pull off the whole plan. And they need the prison guards to accept that they would be using this vaulting horse, right? What I like about this whole story is, apart from the ingenuity of the whole vaulting horse idea, is that there was no room for error. They had to think

of everything that could possibly go wrong before it happened. To begin with, they just started carrying this horse out into the yard and vaulting over it legitimately without any beginning, you know, without any digging at all, just to get the Germans used to the idea. Even when they were building the horse, they had sort of talked it up casually to the German guards,

just talking about this English... Oh, so it wasn't like a surprise to the German guards. Okay. No, no, no. So they... So the German guards knew they were building this horse. Yes. Okay. And the Germans thought they were nuts to begin with. They just talked up this English craze for exercise, and, you know,

it seemed so innocent that they just let them do it. And for the first few days, they were just doing nothing but vaulting over it. In fact, one of the men pretended to be such a bad vaulter that at one point he stumbled into the horse and actually knocked it over in such a way that the German guards could see up into the interior of it, see that it was empty and there was nothing untoward about this. German guards could see up into the interior of it, see that it was empty and there was nothing untoward about this, and that the ground underneath it was just sand and that it looked like it was all perfectly innocent. So that night, they brought the vaulting horse back into the hut and carefully, unobtrusively placed some bits of black cotton on it so they could see if it was disturbed. And it appears the next morning that the Germans had come in and inspected it but found nothing amiss. It didn't seem like there could be any harm in letting the men vault over a horse. So they just kept going. And at that point, it was clear that they could start digging.

So the way this worked was, on a given day, the men would carry the vaulting horse out of the hut, down a couple steps, and over to the same spot near the fence every day. Before they did that, one of these men would hide up inside the hollow horse. He was given a box and a blanket, and they would screw 12 hooks into the roof of the horse. I'll explain that later. Yeah, I was going to say 12 hooks. The man then carefully just holds on to the horse, which'll explain that later. Yeah, I was going to say, 12 hooks. They carry the man. The man then carefully just holds on to the

horse, which has no floor. It's all just hollow. And tries not to let his feet dangle. They carry him down the steps and over to the spot in the yard and put it down. And the men begin vaulting over it. And they knock on the horse to give the hidden man the signal that it's okay to start digging. What he does is take this gray

surface sand and carefully place it into the box, then digs down a ways and takes out this bright yellow, what they called under sand, and just shovels that onto the blanket, and then begins digging. They had to dig a shaft down and then sort of turn and make a beeline, a tunnel that went straight toward the fence. Do you know what they were using for digging?

Did they have any kind of implements? Not really, and it was very unpleasant. Yeah. They had sort of a metal basin that they would scrape it. It was sand, which made it easier to dig through, but it also meant that the danger of falls, there were a few cases when a little bit of it would fall down because it's not like digging through earth, but they could make faster progress that way. Anyway, the first thing they did was build sort of a trap door just a little bit down from the surface where they would place three boards um just to give it a sort of a really firm surface if anyone walked on it right uh and then would just start digging they'd collect the sand in

bags that had been made of the bottoms of trouser legs that had been uh donated by various soldiers so they dig until they had 12 of these bags put together and then tie those off and suspend them from the hooks they had put into the roof of the vaulting horse. Oh, that's the hooks. And then he'd climb back up out of the shaft, put these three boards in place, put a few sandbags on there,

took the yellow sand from the blanket and put that on top of the sandbags and then carefully poured the gray surface stand from his box on the very top and kind of smoothed it out so there wouldn't be any footprints. So there was no sign that any work had been done at all. And when he was done with all this, it took a couple hours, he would knock quietly on the horse so that the man who was sort of superintending all this vaulting from the outside would know that he was ready, and he'd sort of cling to the inside of the horse,

and they'd lift up the whole thing and carry him back into the hut. Once it was in the hut, they would unscrew these hooks and dispose of the sand however they could. They put some of it up in the roof, some of it down under the hut. They'd put some in the latrines. I mean, however you could get rid of 12 bags of sand every day, they found a way to do that, and the Germans never discovered it. As I say, what I like about this is the forethought they had to give in to everything. For instance, if rain was forecast, they couldn't do any digging because if there were a sudden downpour, it takes the guy in the hole about 10 or 20 minutes just to undo everything and get ready to go. And to give him cover, the men would have to keep vaulting for 20 minutes in the pouring rain, which would just give away the whole game.

So when rain was forecast, they would carry the thing out and just vault over it, but they wouldn't do anything. But see, that's what I mean. They had to think of that in advance. And it all seemed to be working very well. In fact, I'll interrupt myself here to say, working very well. In fact, I'll interrupt myself here to say, Eric Williams, when he finally did escape, wrote a book when he got back to Britain in 1949 called The Wooden Horse, which is ostensibly a novelization of all this, but all he really did was change the names and tell it from

the third person. So it's really mostly just a nonfiction account, a very clear account of exactly how all this worked. The book became a bestseller and was turned into a movie in 1950 called The Wooden Horse, for which Williams wrote the screenplay. And there too, it's ostensibly a drama, but mostly it's just a very clear depiction of how all this worked, because audiences were really curious, having heard the story about what all this looked like. And in the film, they show at one point, a German officer actually walks over the surface of the hole, but this trap door with the three boards was so firm that even that wouldn't give away the fact that there was anything under there. So it was all succeeding,

and they were successful in dispersing the sand, but it got harder and harder as they went along. You couldn't put up air holes in the tunnel because the Germans had dogs and there was a chance that Germans would see you digging a little air hole for yourself. This was in summertime in 1943, so it was very hot and close to work. And by the time they got about 40 feet, remember the whole tunnel is going to have to be

110, when they got to about a third of that, everyone was exhausted. Because the further the tunnel was extended, the more time you spent in just wriggling out to the end of it in order to continue the work and having to reel back with your sand. And it was just going more and more slowly. And it seemed like they wouldn't be able to finish it. It was just too much work. So they adjusted the plan a little bit. They recruited a third man, a Canadian RAF pilot named Oliver Philpott, to stand at the horse and supervise the vaulting.

And both of these men then, so they now had two men coming out to work on the tunnel at a time. Oh, they could fit two guys. Wow. Eventually they'll fit three, which is kind of amazing at the end. But now there's two. So Williams and Cotner both got into the horse and they'd be carried out and would go down. And now at this time you've got two men. So one can be out at the end at the face extending the tunnel and they would send his sand back in a metal basin with a string to the other one at the shaft who would bag it up so they

could make a lot more progress this way and they they did it in sort of shifts now so there'd be uh they would do 36 bags of sand at a time. And then on the next three cycles, they would take them out in groups of 12. So basically they could just make more progress with two men than they could with one. And that seemed to be working very well. And just in time, as it happens, because they were running out of time, their plan was when they finally did break out, that they would escape Germany by rail, posing as workers, French workmen. And the only railway timetable they had ended in October. So they had to have this whole project done by the end of October

or they wouldn't be able to ride the rails. They wouldn't know where they were going. And they came very close indeed. It was October 29th by the time they finished the thing. So they only had a couple days left. Happily, October 29th, there was no moon, so it was a good night to break out. The way the final escape worked,

Oliver Philpott and Codner were carried in the horse out there. Codner had, they'd come up with these sort of fake workman's clothing so they could pass through Germany without looking obtrusive. And over that, they had some red cross underclothing that they had dyed black so they could hopefully not be visible

to the German guards as they were actually escaping through the forest. And Codner actually spent all day in the tunnel continuing the last bit of the digging. Philpott left after the normal vaulting session then. And then a British officer stood in for Codner at the roll call that evening so he wouldn't be missed. And then this is the one time when three of them were carried out together. Philpott, Williams, and a New Zealander named McKay all were carried out for the evening vaulting session. And Philpott and Williams went into the tunnel,

and McKay had to be there to seal it up after them one last time. And so the three of them then finished the tunnel and emerged, according to the plan, out beyond the wire at about 6 p.m. and ran out through the forest successfully. The Germans didn't detect them. They had agreed that Philpott would travel separately. He had been a businessman in the margarine industry before the war and so spoke German and could pass by a different route. They were aiming for Sweden, which was neutral during the war, but they went by different routes. And I sort of gather reading between the lines that they didn't all get along so well,

so they weren't terribly unhappy that Philpott traveled on his own. Codner and Williams, Codner spoke some French, so they went by a different route. But basically, the three of them all wound up in neutral Sweden and then were repatriated back to Britain. And those are the only three who have ever escaped from the east compound at Stalag Luft 3. There was another escape a few years later, which was made famous in the film The Great Escape, which has Steve McQueen in it. But that was from the same camp, just a different compound in the same camp. And that was somewhat heavily fictionalized. For instance, it starred Steve McQueen, but there were no Americans involved in that escape.

So it's, I think, less interesting because there's more fiction involved in that telling of the story. If you're like me, you may be wondering what happened back at the camp when the Germans discovered the escape. And the short answer is, I don't know. The book is told from William's point of view, and so once he's left the camp, you don't know what's going on there. But in the film, there's a brief sort of comical scene where the commander of the camp is explaining the penalties that will be imposed. Basically, the three men who have escaped show up missing at roll call, and so the Germans know something's going on. And after a search, eventually they'll discover the tunnel.

And the penalties are, I think, laughably small and consequential. The weekly hot shower will be stopped. Access to the camp theater will be denied. All sport will be forbidden, and all forms of gymnastic apparatus will be denied. And there's some good-natured booing from the man as he tells him this. The scene is played for comedy, and so I don't know if it's accurate that that's all that happened. Yeah, because it would be a real downer in the movie to say that the men left behind were all severely mistreated because of this. But I sort of, this is just me inferring this, I think the penalties couldn't have been very strong

because obviously once the tunnel was discovered, it would become clear that the men who had been vaulting over it had been in on the plan. Right. So the men wouldn't have agreed to vault if they had expected there to be some really dire penalty. That's just my inference. I will say, I should make it clear,

this is a POW camp and it's before D-Day. It's not a concentration camp. So it was actually life there wasn't all that bad to begin with. If you look at the movie, the men spend most of their time smoking pipes and playing chess and listening to Beethoven. And Williams actually says in the film that his biggest complaint about the camp is that it's just boring to be there. That's one reason they dug out of it. So life there wasn't too bad to begin with, and so it's easier to believe that the penalties wouldn't be too bad. Maybe they were just denied going to the theater.

Anyway, I just think the whole thing's a great story, just both for the ingenuity of the plan and the great forethought and care with which they carried it out. As I say, the book is a good account if you want to know more about this, and the movie also shows you what all this looks like, which is helpful. And I find that the movie is actually, in its entirety, someone has put it up on YouTube, so I'll include a link to that in the show notes. I've always been interested in learning, and I find I learn best when I can choose a topic that genuinely interests me, and I can pursue it in my own way.

That's why I was glad The Great Courses wanted to be a sponsor of our show. I used to listen to their courses before they even signed up with us. The Great Courses are engaging audio and video lectures taught by top professors and experts, and they're available in a whole variety of media. You can listen to them on CDs, watch them on DVDs, or through downloading or their app. So you can learn something new however it works best for you, at home, on your commute, or while you're working out. We're currently watching their lecture series, The World Was Never the Same, Events That Changed History.

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That's thegreatcourses.com slash closet, or see the link in our show notes. In episode 52, Greg described how for centuries May 1st was moving day in New York. Most leases expired on that day, and so many tenants were all trying to move at the same time, creating quite a lot of chaos and turmoil. Several listeners wrote in to let us know that other locations still have a similar Moving Day. A few listeners told us that July 1st is Moving Day in Montreal, and actually all of Quebec. Dave Johnston sent in a link to a New York Times article from July 1st, 2013 on Moving Day in Montreal, which explains that most residential leases there begin on July 1st, and because

renting is much more popular than owning, July 1st has basically become Moving Day for much of Montreal's population. By the city's own estimates, about 115,000 of Montreal's residents relocate every July. The Wikipedia page on Quebec's moving day states that according to a government-owned public utility, more than 700,000 Quebec households moved in 2009. That's a lot. That's a lot. Quebec's moving day tradition began with the French colonial government when landlords were forbidden from evicting tenant farmers before the winter snows had melted, and moving day was eventually set into law for May 1st. In 1973, Quebec changed the date to July 1st so as not to

disrupt the school year for children and to coincide with a national holiday so that workers wouldn't have to lose a day of work. Currently, it's more a tradition than a law, as the 1973 law repealed the requirement that leases had to have a fixed 12-month term. But in actuality, most of them still do. So there actually was like a reason behind this. I mean, with the New York one, we were all thinking there was there, you know, what might be... There must have been. Yeah. So I mean, so I actually was able to dig up a reason for this one. Jean-Philippe Warren, a sociologist at Concordia University, says the factors behind

moving day are more complex than just stubbornness. He says that while Quebec's renters move far more often than most Canadians, they generally don't leave their neighborhoods. Some might only move from one side of the street to the other, and it's just more convenient to make all the apartment swaps on the same day. Warren said they are constantly on the move, but they don't go anywhere. But regardless of how far they do or don't go, in Montreal, there are many challenges for movers, including the many narrow streets in the city. And also, most staircases are on the outside of buildings with cramped and winding steps that are open to the wind and rain. Unlike apartments in the rest of Canada, the ones in Montreal rarely come with kitchen appliances, so movers have to bring their own,

which I guess would mean you'd be lugging refrigerators and stoves up cramped and winding steps in the rain. Wow. Moving and truck rental companies double or triple their rates on moving day and still can't meet the demand, which has been prompting novel solutions in Montreal, such as bicycle-powered trailers, just to try to make it all work. Everyone who wrote in about Quebec's moving day noted that July 1st is the national holiday of Canada Day.

And I mentioned some other reasons that this date was chosen for moving day, but some still see a more political significance in it. Marie Claire, who lives in Toronto, wrote to say, as a Francophone living outside of Quebec and therefore curiously able to see and hear both sides of the English-French duality of our country, I've always interpreted the fact that the city imposes this chaos on Canada Day as a not-so-subtle pushback to the historically Anglophone ruling class. The Quebecois, after all, have their own provincial holiday, St. Jean-Baptiste, on June 24, that is of far greater significance to them than the Canadian national holiday that everyone just looks upon as a day off work. In addition to Quebec's moving day,

we learned from our listeners about moving day still in practice in the United States. Dana Gerber Margie wrote in to say, I just listened to the podcast about New York Moving Day and can tell you firsthand a little bit what it's like. Madison, Wisconsin doesn't have the millions of residents that New York City had when Moving Day was May 1st, but we do have a pretty awful time of it around August 15th. I also don't know why it started, but generally all downtown leases end on August 14th and begin August 15th. I also don't know why it started, but generally all downtown leases end on August 14th and begin August 15th, leaving mostly students, recent grads, young professionals

without a place to stay for a night. August 15th is also affectionately known as Hippie Christmas, and the people who don't have to move drive around downtown looking for furniture. Last year, I got two beautiful new chairs. Dana explains that since the leases end on noon at August 14th and the new ones don't start until noon on August 15th, that leaves renters without a place to stay or store their belongings for an entire day. Everyone is moving. Everyone is moving. It's supposedly done this way to give landlords the

time to clean or paint or make repairs, but Dana says that the landlords don't actually do any of these things unless you specifically complain about something, so there isn't really a point to it. Dana got caught up in this chaos herself in 2013, when she also discovered that some of the big truck rental companies won't let you keep a truck for longer than eight hours, despite the fact that you can't move your things into your new place for 24 hours. Dana says of the whole thing, it's madness. Harley Brown wrote in and said, reminds me of a similar practice still performed by most renters in the California town of Davis. Many good things are found in dumpsters of Davis during these last

days of summer. Harley sent a link to a local wiki on Davis that says that moving day in Davis is August 31st, when nearly every lease in the town expires, and about half the students move each year. Even worse than Madison's situation, in Davis, many of the new leases might not start for four or five days later. I know, so that leaves most of them with no place to live for four or five days later. I know, so that leaves most of them with no place to live for four or five days. Yeah. Similar to what Dana noted, the wiki states, to dumpster divers, of course,

it's like Christmas. August 30th is moving day eve. As one diver put it, that's when Santa Claus comes around and fills the dumpsters with candy. Apartment complexes all put giant dumpsters in their parking lots so that moving renters can get rid of the things they don't want to have to move. But apparently there are also usually a lot

of items just left on sidewalks and on lawns. And they actually, I mean, they can get in the streets and get in everybody's way, but it's also a great opportunity to score a lot of free goodies. Every year. The wiki has a list of the types of things you can usually find discarded on moving day including food and beer but gives the advice that these latter items should be closely examined and only kept if they're sealed and safe looking good advice and also the more general advice beware of sticky things or things with questionable stains i'm seriously hoping that this advice is meant rather facetiously and the students of Davis don't actually need such pointers, but maybe they do. The wiki has a list of some of the specific finds made by various people on previous moving days in Davis, and that

has included several working TVs, a washing machine, a coin-operated gumball machine, a Trek mountain bike, which was apparently a big score, a case of microwave popcorn, lots of furniture and books, and 100 restaurant spoons. No explanation given. I'm sure there has to be a story behind that. 100 restaurant spoons. So thanks so much to everyone who wrote in about moving day to us. And if you have any questions or comments for us,

please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com. This week, Greg's going to be trying to solve a lateral thinking puzzle as I give him a puzzling scenario, and he has to try to puzzle it out using only yes or no questions. Are you ready? The nice thing about these is there's no way to prepare. So yes, I'm as ready as I'm ever going to be. Ready as you're going to get. Okay. David White sent in this week's puzzle. Okay. David said, I give all the podcast lateral thinking puzzles to my family at dinner and sometimes the solutions they come up with are so hysterical and or inventive that they're almost better solutions than the real one

so this is the puzzle that david sent us um that was based on a really creative solution to another puzzle that was given by his 10 year old daughter katherine um katherine came up with such a good solution that they decided they had to create a puzzle just to use it. So this is that puzzle. Okay. A husband and wife take their RV on a camping trip and start out one morning on a day-long hike. A few hours into the hike, however, the man falls and severely injures his leg, making it almost impossible for him to walk. He decides to sit and wait while his wife returns to the campsite to get help. The wife hikes back and arrives at her RV several hours later. She opens the door and steps inside only to discover her husband already there, lying in the bed, dead. What happened? Yes, everybody has to die in

lateral thinking puzzles. It's very sad. This is great. No matter what happens from here on, this is already a classic puzzle. All right. I have to ask, did this really happen? No, they invented it, remember? These are all human beings? They're all human beings. Is the specific location important? It must be.

Yes. Okay. So this happened at some, I mean, like the geographic. Sure. Okay. All right. Are the kids involved? I mean, could this have happened with just the two of them, if it was just a man and his wife? There were no kids. Oh.

You're confusing David's kids. So it was just two people. It was just a husband and a wife. They both go hiking together. Yes. They hike for some distance. Yes. He injures himself in some way that immobilizes him.

Making it almost impossible for him to walk. He severely injures his leg. Okay. Okay, I'll come back to that. She hikes back by the same route that they came. Yes. And gets back to the RV. There's only one RVv involved yes there's

no other people involved no other people involved just two people yes okay so it seems like the thing to jump on would be how he got back can we say then that from the wherever he was the location where he injured himself yes which made it almost impossible for him to walk. Right. He got somehow from there back to the RV. Okay. Or his body did. Yes. Alive or dead. Yes.

Did he walk back? No. Did he get back under his own, I don't want to say power, but he found a way to get back to the RV? That's not correct. Well, that's not how you're phrasing it. That's not correct. All right.

He got back to the RV. Did the RV ever move? No. Well, that's not how you're phrasing it. That's not correct. All right. He got back to the RV. Did the RV ever move? No. Good question. Okay. I keep jumping around. That's the difference between you and me is I jump all over the place. Oh, I jump around too.

We said geography is important. So this is a specific actual relocation where this... No, not a specific real location. Not like the Grand Canyon or something? Correct. But the geography is important. So this is a specific actual real location where this... No, not a specific real location. Not like the Grand Canyon or something. Correct. But the geography is important. Okay. Meaning, do you have a particular place in the real world

where you're thinking this happened? No. So you're saying like it's in the desert or in the mountains or near the sea? Something like that, yes. That's what's important. Okay. Well, is it something like that, like the topography, like mountains versus ocean? Yes.

Is it in the mountains? Yes. Oh, that was easy. Some mountain somewhere. Do I need to be more specific than that? No, you don't need to be more specific than that. Oh, did he fall? Yes.

Okay, so they're in the mountains. Yes. They park their RV. The RV doesn't move from? Yes. Okay. So they're in the mountains. Yes. They park their RV. The RV doesn't move from that point. Right. They hike up into the mountains. Right. He injures himself at the top of some cliff or something.

Right. And I'm not there yet. So she got to hike. To get safely back to the RV, she's got to hike laboriously back down the mountain. Right. But he doesn't do that right he falls into the rv like through the roof into the bed yes that's that's basically it that's basically i haven't figured out though how he is there more to it than that like specifically there is but it's not i

mean you've got really the gist of it what they have is that um uh that he was sitting near an overlook waiting for help but but a torrential rainstorm blew in and he tried to move himself into an area, a more sheltered area, but his injured leg buckled under him, throwing him off balance. So he plummets over the edge of the cliff until he crashed through the roof of his own RV into his own bed. And David said, this is a morbid story, even by my standards. I will have to keep an eye on my daughter.

So thanks so much to Catherine and David. And if you have a puzzle you'd like to send us, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. That wraps up another episode for us. If you're looking for more Futility Closet, you can check out our books on Amazon. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook. Or visit the website at futilitycloset.com, where you can sample over 8,000 fascinating tidbits.

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