Out of the Woods

by Lynn Darling

  My bearing took me straight to the mantelpiece, just as my map reckoned it would, and there were the three ceramic candlesticks, a delicate blue scrolling hand painted on a bone white background, that my oldest friend had given me nearly fifteen years before, and I thought of our buoyant bumpy friendship. Next to them stood a blue pumpkin-shaped enameled box I’d taken from my mother’s house when we dismantled her life, and next to it the photograph of my mother that had become such a touchstone, and this time I saw in its hesitant, fearful smile traces of my daughter, and of me. Another calculation took me by the same process to a framed map hanging on the wall, of the small town in New Hampshire where my father grew up, and I ran my finger along the outline of the lake where we once stayed for two shining weeks and the small cemetery where his father and brothers lay, all veterans of one war or another. A few degrees north took me to the ugly green La-Z-Boy recliner, and I thought about those first few days in the new and empty home and the way my footsteps echoed.

  I had the hang of it now, but I didn’t stop. I explored the room as if I had never seen it before, as if it had taken years to get there (which, in a way, it had), by camel, riverboat, and brigantine (which it most definitely did not). I was in an old world made suddenly new, mapping a small room holding a long life, the dusty bric-a-brac transformed into waypoints, crossroads, and signposts, pointing a way forward, revealing the way back. That is what direction is, after all, a way of seeing, really seeing, what has been there all along.

  Now it was time to practice in the real world. I needed a destination, both familiar and unfamiliar, one that I knew how to reach by road, but not through the woods. It had to have boundaries, so that no matter how off course I was, I would eventually arrive at a recognizable border—assuming, that is, that I walked a straight line as dictated by the compass, rather than walking around in circles, which would be my first instinct. There was really only one choice, the one I thought about every time Henry and I trudged down one road and then up another to visit Harriet and Dean, the one Chip Kendall had first told me about—the route through the woods from my house to theirs.

  I looked at my topo map. Harriet’s house lay almost due south of mine, a short distance away, and that distance was reassuringly bounded by my road, Noah Wood, the creek behind her, and another trail on the other side of the ridge. I oriented the map on the dining room table and looked for the small black square that would be the exact position of Harriet’s house. It didn’t exist—like my own, the house hadn’t been built when the map was drawn. No matter, I would estimate. I made a black dot, drew a connecting line from my house to hers, and laid down the compass: the Harriet Line, I called it. I noted the bearing—160 degrees, SSE—on a piece of scrap paper.

  A little while later I had gathered the compass, the hiking sticks, and the dog and walked a short ways down the road, looking for an opening in the stone wall across the way. Then I scrambled across a muddy ditch and into the woods, took out my compass, and looked for the piece of paper on which I had written the bearing. It was back on the dining room table. No matter, I thought, I remembered it.

  By this point I had committed about five major sins against the sacrament of land navigation. I didn’t really know where I had begun—the starting point was a guess based on a map that was itself outdated—the direction in which I traveled was a memory of one of several routes I had calculated while peering at the map on the dining room table, and my attempts to keep to a consistent bearing were laughable: it was only after about thirty minutes that I realized that the proximity of my metal hiking poles to the compass was wreaking havoc on the bearings I was getting. I hadn’t estimated the distance between the two houses and had never figured out what my average pace was. All of which meant that my attempt to get to Harriet’s house might have been construed by a navigational expert, or for that matter, the average Cub Scout, as a dismal failure. But to me, that first foray was a thumping success.

  For the first time that I could remember, I did not follow my own instinct as to where Harriet’s house ought to be according to the dictates of my own permanently skewed mental map. No, this time the mistakes I made were logical ones, based on facts—incorrectly interpreted, but facts nonetheless. I knew my bearing was off because I remembered what the map looked like, even if I had forgotten to bring it, remembered that my route should not be as steep as it was, that I was headed up the ridge, not around it as I should have been. I had an image of the gently undulating lines that indicate a gain in altitude; getting to Harriet’s house had not involved intersecting these lines the way you would in a straight march up rising ground, but crossing them at a much gentler angle than the one on which the compass was currently insisting. For a moment I was able to see in my mind’s eye the L-shaped angle of the two roads I normally took to Harriet’s house and the unknown terrain that lay between them. And that brief vision pointed toward a different way.

  So I ignored the compass, although I kept it out as a kind of moral checkpoint, and walked along the slope of the hill at an angle that felt right. Before too long, I had crossed a stone wall—no idea whose stone wall or why it should be where it was—and entered the checkerboard maze of maple trees strung with waist-high plastic tubing.

  Eventually I came to another stone wall, and on the other side was something familiar: the wide green meadow that bordered the woods and descended to a largish pond, which in the summer lay placidly in a riot of dark blue lupine. I knew that pond, and was always grateful when I saw it. I thought about swimming there when I was bald and wondered if I would be embarrassed if I were to face the same situation again, wondered if I would have to find out: the kinds of questions that put all the others into perspective.

  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.

  The 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 ca
n 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.

  Still, 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.