Tubers go astray, spend 3 days in the wilderness eating bark and ants to survive

**Christy Strawser** (0:00)
The day's biggest stories, the people behind the headlines, the conversations you won't hear anywhere else.
I'm Christy Strawser, you're listening to Audacy's On Deadline. We don't get a lot of happy endings and news, but it's summertime and you can get bad news from a billion other places. So let's kick things off with the story of two Michigan women and a nine-year-old boy who survived an unlikely adventure. The group was tubing on the Muskegon River, and when they didn't return and then it stretched into three days missing.
Most feared the worst, but they were found alive. They had resorted to eating tree bark and ants to survive during their three days in the wilderness. Here's the story told through the body cams of conservation officers who tracked them down in a remote, heavily wooded area.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:44)
Make some noise.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:47)
This all started on Tuesday night around 4 PM when these tubers had taken off from the Maple Island Boat launch.
But they didn't have a destination very clearly planned out. And one of their phones became wet and inoperable. They had floated downriver and then obviously became lost. Because they didn't have a float plan, they were not reported missing until the following day, with approximately a 24-hour lapse from when they had left. And it just became a giant operation of man tracking them down through the woods to locate them.

**David** (1:26)
Hey, let's stop.

**Christy Strawser** (1:27)
Hold on, hold on.

**Michael Garfield** (1:31)
There's a discie on that tree.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:33)
But what we saw was there was a path in the grass, and all of the grass was tipped over leading towards shore, which told us that they had crawled from that log jam to shore, and we could see the direction they went. And then we started finding footprints and broken branches.
And we were able to basically use the environment to kind of tell the difference in the story of where they had walked.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:53)
I was going to say, once we started tracking, we got into the marsh a short distance, and started calling out to see if we could get a response. And after a couple of call outs, we heard a response way back in the marsh, and we knew at that point there was a high probability at least one person, you know, that was who we were looking for, they were alive. The closer we got, we were able to determine there was a kid and a female responding. It wasn't until we got right up on the scene that we knew everybody was alive at that point. Oh my God.
Stop.

**Christy Strawser** (2:44)
Their phones were too waterlogged to be helpful, but in most unsafe situations, there's a tech that could have helped. Here's the latest in tech for back to school season from KRLD in Dallas.

**David** (2:58)
A lot of parents are spending and shelling out for new technology for their students. Michael Garfield. So Michael, what is the hottest piece of technology this year?

**Michael Garfield** (3:07)
This is something that we didn't have to worry about when we went to school. I grew up in Dallas ISD, and we had pens, papers, and zipper bags, but welcome to the 21st century.
You know, I could say this tongue-in-cheek, David, but a lot of students certainly go back to college. It's the app you may want. You may want to have something like a ChatGPT or an AI. Obviously, it's controversial when it comes to helping writing papers, but you know what, as an assistant, it can help in some aspects.

**Christy** (3:34)
Now, when we talk about the tech that they have available, and the apps or whatnot that they can even use on their phone, they're not going to be able to do that with this new cell phone van. So how important is other types of technology, perhaps tablets and laptops this year?

**Michael Garfield** (3:49)
No, you're right, Christy. The Texas ban right now, it's up to the different districts to actually say yes or no. You can use your phone. It's also the tablets, your smart watches. When it comes to, let's talk about college kids. If you're going into a dorm, you have to think dorms are relatively small, so you can use all-in-one devices. Get a laptop that's large enough to watch TV or video, your YouTube or whatever, that's number one. You want to think about a smart speaker, maybe an Amazon Echo Dot. They're relatively inexpensive, for like $50 or so. And I always recommend active noise cancelling headphones or earbuds, because odds are, you're going to be having a roommate, you just want to shut everything out, so you can listen to whatever, so you don't have to tune in to what your roommate is listening to.