27 Days in the Desert: One Sophomore's Harrowing Tale After Being Lost in Principal Stevens’s Newsletter for Nearly a Month

When LHS sophomore Craig Simmons opened his school email and saw an update from the main office, he clicked the link, expecting to find a harmless, single-paragraph message. What Simmons didn’t know was that it would be 27 days before he emerged, dehydrated and exhausted, from a newsletter so vast it seemed to defy the laws of physics itself.

Simmons was in search of information about the upcoming COVID-19 testing rolled out by LHS. But rather than arrive directly at the source of the information, he found himself staring at bookmarked link after bookmarked link.

“There were all these linked resources in a giant table of contents,” Simmons said when I spoke with him about the ordeal. “I thought, okay, I can still navigate through it all and find my way back to the end. But at one point, I got turned around and just lost my sense of direction. There was a long version, a short version, it said to read both—” 

At this point, Simmons took a shuddering breath from his hospital bed, where he is still being held for observation. 

“Soon, I was stumbling through pages and tabs, completely lost. Some of the links led to bookmarks, but some opened up new documents…there was just no consistent way to navigate.”

Within hours, Simmons grew dehydrated and delirious. He wondered whether this might be the end. Thankfully, almost four weeks after the harrowing crucible began, he summoned his last reserves of strength to click the “close tab” button and returned to civilization.

Simmons is expected to make a full recovery, and is overjoyed to be with his family. “If you do decide to go in, use the buddy system,” he recommends. “If you can carry extra food and water, and maybe one of those GPS trackers, you have a shot at making it out alive.”

by IAN CARSON