Out of the Woods (22 page)

The pond was across Noah Wood Road from Harriet's house. I had done it: I had not arrived the way I intended, but I had arrived. I am not sure I have ever been as satisfied with something I had done, at least not in this quiet, proud, and private way.

 

T
he next time I walked the Harriet Line, I was almost nonchalant. The taste of success from the first outing still lingered, and I was so sure of myself that I brought the compass more as an accessory—this is what all the cool outdoor types are wearing—than for guidance.

Two hours later I stumbled down a steep hill and into an empty chicken coop in the backyard of a home I didn't know existed in a part of the woods I'd never seen before, convinced I had walked over at least a half-dozen ridges and was probably in New Hampshire. In fact, I was about a quarter of a mile up Noah Wood Road from the Goodwins', a fact I wouldn't discover for another hour, since, not recognizing the road for Noah Wood, I walked back into the woods in the opposite direction.

Most of the people who are reported lost in the woods are hunters, according to search-and-rescue groups. Mostly that's because hunters spend more time in the woods than any other group, but there's another reason as well, and that's arrogance, say some members of the search-and-rescue teams that go out looking for them. They think they know the woods better than anyone and pay more attention to the deer they're following than to where they're going. Arrogance, according to Marty, was the reason most people get lost.

I'm not sure one successful walk had ratcheted me all the way up to arrogant in the spectrum of folly, but it sure did make me full of myself, as my grandmother would say, convinced I knew what I was doing despite very little evidence to support that notion. Besides, my sense of where Harriet's house ought to be was still fighting the evidence of both map and compass and, the evidence seemed to say, winning.

I had started out at the old maple tree at the side of the road, just to the left of Castle Dismal, a landmark I would remember. This time, I wasn't content to merely get to Harriet's house; I wanted to get there by following one bearing, one single point on the compass, which, if followed without deviating, would put me at the Goodwins' front door.

My plan was to use point-to-point navigation. The idea is simple: you head toward the farthest object you can see that lies along your route of travel, and when you get there, you pick out the next farthest thing, until your destination is in sight. It's like a game of leapfrog.

Point-to-point navigation works best in open spaces, with clearly defined markers. In the Australian outback, for example, early explorers used the mounds of the compass termites that grow asymmetrically along a north-south axis as their point-to-point markers, just as the Inuits steer by the consistent direction of the sastrugi, the snow ridges, and the Bedouin by the sand dunes. But in the woods, it's more difficult—the line of sight is much shorter. Since there is no obvious mountain or cleft in the horizon to aim for, you pick out an object that distinguishes itself along your direction of travel, which in a thickly forested area can be only a few yards away—a distinctive tree, or boulder. Once you get to it, you pick another on the same directional bearing.

What I found out on that excursion was how important it was to distrust your instincts as a matter of self-protection, because it is so easy to deceive yourself: a compass, for instance, is only as reliable as the hand that holds it. And if that hand is attached to a brain still welded to its own idea of which way to go, it can turn into more of a Ouija board than a reliable indicator. My hand, I noticed, did not stay true when I took a bearing; it veered just a little to the right, taking me with it, leading me downhill. Or a vagrant thought would draw my attention away from a necessary landmark—there were an infinite number of ways, I learned, to lead myself astray.

A wary attitude would have been old hat to a Jane Austen heroine—they knew a thing or two about the tricks played by mind and heart in the Age of Reason. But it was new to me: the vaguely New Age self-help books I'd been consuming like brownies straight from the oven told me to always trust my instinct. What I had been learning over the last few odd, solitary years, however, was that it took a long time to distinguish the small, clear, quiet voice you heard in the soul's silence from the fickle winds of immediate desire—for comfort, for love, for the blunting of anxiety or fear. In that way, my instincts lied; they always had.

I was learning to mistrust those instincts as I was beginning to mistrust the voices from the past whispering just under the radar, retelling the old stories, recalling the old sins, determining my actions or justifying them. They were all familiar companions now, the harsh judgmental voices, the detritus of childhood so well embedded in most of us that we mistake their censure—and their flattery—for the truth. But I was seeing now how often they had sidetracked me, like the unconscious bend of the hand that held the compass.

Those walks along the Harriet Line, learning how to bushwhack, were like a bucket of clear cold water thrown on all that muzzy thinking, forcing me to check myself, to pay attention, to trust logic and calculation and what I could see in front of me.

 

S
till, I made mistakes, a lot of mistakes, on my daily attempts on the Harriet Line, ending up near or behind or in front of Harriet's house (or more often, the chicken coop, which I never aimed for but which always seemed to appear of its own accord). Finally I brought in reinforcements in the form of Hunter Melville, a former Life Scout and current troop leader of Boy Scout Troop No. 20, among his many other accomplishments.

I had met Hunter, his wife, Jessica, and their dog, Laddie, in the aftermath of the havoc caused by Hurricane Irene a few months before. Hunter and Jess had lived in Vermont most of their adult lives. Jess had been a nurse and Hunter had worked at a local ski resort until he morphed into one of those fabled creatures I'd read about but didn't really believe existed: a dot-com millionaire. He and an old high school buddy had come up with an idea for an online vacation home rental service, and he was worth about a zillion dollars according to local report.

Hunter now divided his near boundless energy among a dozen different causes that ranged from Libertarianism to the local historical society. In his spare time, he said, he liked to bushwhack. I told him about my own attempts, and he offered to walk the Harriet Line with me and to see where I was going wrong.

It was a spanking bright Saturday in November, and a crisp wind fluttered the loosening leaves. Hunter and Laddie showed up wearing bright orange bandannas around their necks in deference to the hunters—it was deer season. He also pulled out an accessory I hadn't expected—a handheld GPS. But that's cheating, I protested. Hunter just laughed. For him, the gadget was a toy, not a crutch. It was like a nuclear physicist using a calculator—it's not as if he didn't know the stuff already.

We started out on the same bearing I had been using—at my request, Hunter temporarily stowed his gadget and relied on the map and compass to make his own calculations. I was thrilled that he came up with the same bearing, even though we ended up at the very same chicken coop that was beginning to haunt my dreams. The problem, it turned out once Hunter took some readings on the GPS, was that my estimates of where my house and Harriet's were located had been just enough off to put us higher up the hill than we should have been.

We screwed up, I said. No we didn't, Hunter said. You arrived more or less where you wanted to be, he said. What's wrong with that?

I thought about it. There was nothing wrong with that. Hunter's easygoing attitude underscored how I was turning my efforts to get oriented into the same fire-and-brimstone religion I applied to any goal in my life, defining success too narrowly, finding failure everywhere, and assuming eternal damnation was the consequence of landing on the wrong side of the razor's edge that separated one from the other.

The return trip led to more discoveries. For Hunter, any hike was a lesson—in history, geology, economics, depending on what he was looking at. From him, I began to learn how to read the landscape. A cleft between two hills, for instance, indicated a watershed; what lay between them was probably a stream or a river, and if the hills were big enough and the waterway between them was wide enough, then a road had probably been built there as well. Roadways followed waterways as surely as deer trails had led to footpaths worn by Native American hunters, which in turn were widened by the colonial settlers who followed them. If you were lost, Hunter said, the shape of the land itself could lead you to safety. On the way back through the woods, he didn't even need the compass to figure out where we were—he had been noting the angle of the ridge we were traversing and its relationship to the one behind my house.

He pointed to a subtle notch in the hills far ahead, and the dip in the tree line ahead of us that mirrored its shape. Your house is probably there, he said. He had remembered that there was a stream behind my house and hills rising steeply on either side—the dip we were looking at was where the stream cut through. We followed the slight depression in the tree line, heading toward its lowest point, and before long we stepped around a stand of young pines to see directly in front of us, on the other side of the road, my house.

We mystify what we don't understand. After Hunter left, I stood outside and looked around at the woods in which I had walked so often. For the first time, I saw them not as a frightening maze from which only constant vigilance could deliver me, but as a text that needed to be read on its own terms.

I built up the fire and looked at the topo map. Now I could identify some of the features Hunter had pointed out, and the information the map had contained all along sprang to life. Outside, as the day darkened, the woods retreated back into their old atavistic spookiness. Which was reassuring; Hunter had given me a key to the mystery without the mystery itself vanishing. The clues were there if you knew where to look, but their message was easily misunderstood if you weren't careful to observe accurately, to see what was really there and not what, however unconsciously, you wanted or feared to see. Like most things worth knowing, finding your way in the woods depended on equal parts curiosity, skepticism, and the knowledge that comes only from a willingness to make mistakes. You had to be able, in other words, to see the forest from the trees.

I thought about Hunter's insouciance as well, his confidence that the world around him made sense, his ability to enjoy himself while getting something mostly right, if not perfectly so. A lot of that had to do with his superior knowledge of map and compass, and the hours racked up putting them to use, but there was another lesson to be learned here as well: lighten up.

Except for my bushwhacking attempts to reach Harriet's house, I still walked the old familiar bridle trails, the ones that took me through the woods safely and met up with roads whose names I knew. But one morning, as I was walking past Therese Fullerton's pond, a stray shaft of sunlight illuminated a glade deep in the woods. I had noticed this spot before but had never explored it, too worried about getting lost. Now, armed with my compass and an attempt at Hunter's nonchalance, I took a bearing and went off to investigate.

It was a scruffy patch of woods, thicketed by dead pines with twisted trunks and strangely tinted birches, splashed green and gray and gold with lichen and age and shadows. I kept going until I found that patch of sunlight I'd glimpsed from the path, a small clearing carpeted in a brilliant green moss. It would be cool in summer; the boughs of the trees inclined inward and in full leaf would make a thick canopy for the spot. In winter, it would provide a bit of protection from the wind. I lay down on the spongy ground cover and looked up at clouds tangled in branches and the tigerish gleam of the yellow birch bark, while Henry poked at a hollowed tree and then ran like hell when something poked back. What is it I lack? the writer and monk Thomas Merton would ask himself, when doubt or desire tugged at his peace of mind. I lack nothing, he wrote, was the answer that always came back. I thought I understood; as long as there were moments like this in the world, it was enough.

When I stood up again, and looked around, I couldn't find the spot where I had entered—the little clearing was roughly circular, and the trees, which had seemed so distinctive as I passed them, now looked like all the others. Normally this would have been the dear-God-what-have-I-done moment, but this time I knew, because I had checked my compass, that the trail lay due east.

I called Henry and headed more or less in that direction, zigzagging a bit whenever something caught my attention. I was beginning to understand how you could both wander in the way I loved, enjoying the brash orange of a tiny wildflower growing in a patch of icy mud, and yet keep your bearings. Knowing that you could find your way back took away from the adrenaline rush of complete disorientation, but it diminished the terror as well, and that was a trade-off I could live with.

I found my way back to the road, though I had made a few mistakes—I hadn't paid proper attention to landmarks and I hadn't taken note of the terrain, whether it was rising or falling, steep or level. And I didn't end up at the exact spot where I left the path. But that was okay. We never go back to where we began, and we probably wouldn't want to.

I kept walking and came to a crooked little side trail I'd never noticed before. It was late and I was cold and tired, but still I wandered down the path, curious to see what lay around the bend. Why does the path ahead beckon so irresistibly that you follow it even when you know you should turn back? Is it only the crooked paths, when you can't see what happens next and you need to find out, as you do in a story? Or is it any road you haven't taken or don't remember?