I want to know how long it took Furiosa to figure out that her home was just on the other side of the mountains from the Citadel, less than twenty-four hours’ drive away. It seems clear in this scene that she’s bullshitting confidence a little. She doesn’t know precisely where it is–if she did, she’d recognize that the dead bog is exactly where the Green Place should be. But she knows which direction to drive, and that it’s not terribly far to go. And in fact she does lead them right to the place where her home used to be.
Imagine young Furiosa in the back of the slavers’ truck, unable to see where they’re going or just too scared and in shock to keep good track of time and direction, being driven for days and days and days around the mountains, or maybe on a circuitous route through different trading posts/raiding opportunities. She gets to the Citadel and assumes she must be thousands of kilometers from home; she was in that truck for so many days and nothing looks familiar here.
Maybe it clicks on a scouting run, that the mountains she can see are her mountains, the same ones that shelter the Green Place from the worst of the storms and give birth to the trickle of underground water that feeds their oasis. She’s never seen them from this side, but now that she really looks, she’s certain they are the same. Which means that home is right there, RIGHT FRIGGIN THERE, if only she can figure out how to get to the other side.
Now imagine Furiosa driving east through the night and into the next day, the Fool and the girls and the surprisingly useful War Boy sleeping through the midday heat, thinking it must be here, it must be. Maybe beyond the next dune, or the next…. Seeing the strange metal tower that her Mothers told her used to carry electricity and feeling a wave of relief, because she definitely knows that; she must have just confused the eastern border of their territory with the western one; it’s been a long time after all. The Green Place must be just beyond those dunes, just a little further away than she remembered, waiting for them…
