Life is full of little ironies. One of which is that the art of getting lost is now fast becoming a lost art itself. It used to be that a person could go out darn near anywhere and in the space of an hour or two become well and truly lost. Sadly, with the advent of modern technology, much of the fun of getting lost is pretty much behind us now. With the absolute plethora of GPS devices available anymore it is practically impossible to get even a little bit lost nowadays. Old-fashioned woodcraft, orienteering and line of sight have now been replaced by plotting in waypoints on an electronic device or keying in a destination and having it not only produce a digital readout map but also speak to you in the language of your choice telling you which way to go! Where’s the romance and fun in that? Where’s the danger? This electronic revolution has gotten so bad that if you ask a young person today anything about a ram, they think you’re talking about computer memory instead of a male sheep. The only saving grace to all this electronic gadgetry is that sometimes it’s wrong and if you’re lucky (dependent upon what you consider lucky) you can still get an adventure or two out of it. Talking about adventures, there have been times that my erstwhile know it-all electronic navigator has unwittingly (or on purpose, I’m not really sure which) guided me to some areas (usually urban) where encountering a grizzly bear would have been much more welcome and definitely more preferable to what I actually encountered. The old west had nothing on the “hood”! What? That’s right!
Hmm, okay, we’ve come full circle and not that much has really changed has it? Back in the by-gone days of yore (and mine) when men were men, women were women and apes hadn’t yet taken over the planet and captured Charlton Heston, it would have still been fairly easy to get oneself lost if one indeed had the desire… or even if one didn’t. Ah, good times! All that was required was to go outside; pick a direction (any direction used to work) and head off while not paying attention to your surroundings. Bingo! Instant adventure! When your brain realized what your feet already knew (That you were lost!) the adrenaline would kick in and your mind would start to race with all sorts of weird scary thoughts and scenarios such as:
- How do you know for sure that dinosaurs are really extinct?
- Okay, something has to be the basis for all those monster movies they make, how else could somebody just come up with them out of the clear blue if there wasn’t some grain of truth hidden in them?
- I thought I saw a UFO land just over that next little rise, I’ve heard they do anal probing…ouch!
- Oh my blessed, look at the size of those footprints! Wait, Bigfoot doesn’t wear boots…does he?
- Oh crap! We were having roast beef for dinner tonight, now I’m going to miss it!
What’s the big deal, you ask? Just stop and ask for directions, you say? Ha! Fat chance of that! It’s a well known fact that men are loathe to ask for directions, just ask any woman they’ll tell you. They’ll tell you even if you don’t ask! But what most people don’t realize is that there are some very good historical reasons men are hesitant to ask for directions, the origins of which date way back in the mists of time.
They are:
- There was usually no one around to ask anyway.
- Any people that may have been around were more often than not hostile and highly inclined to kill you for being there (wherever there was) in the first place.
- What with all the earthquakes, volcanoes and violent storms back then, not to mention the huge rampaging herds of carnivorous ducks, the landscape was in an ever constant state of flux. In other words the landmarks and scenery changed roughly every ten minutes or thereabouts so directions were pretty much useless anyway. Duh!
As you can see, it was not the most conducive environment in which to try to gain any type of useful geographical information and the consensus at the time was that you pretty much had to tough it out on your own or die; it became ingrained then into our primal psyche and continues to this very day! (By the way, as a side note, this is also where the term “dead reckoning” originated… “Hey, buddy, sorry to trouble you but I appear to have taken a wrong turn back at the tar pits and I was wondering if you could help direct me to the Woolly Mammoth breeding grounds. I’ve heard that the hunting is pretty good around there this time of year and I…and I… why are you looking at me like that? On second thought, never mind, I reckon I’ll just mosey on out of here and head back from whence I came. What are you doing? Hey! Back off! Put the spear down! PUT THE SPEAR DOWN! NO WAIT! AAAAHHH!!”) Hey, it could have happened, you don’t know. Bottom line is, don’t ask for directions!
To help deal with the paralyzing trauma of being lost and to assist one to cope with it I developed a procedural system a number of years ago which I would like to share with you now. It is fairly easy to remember, because that is the hallmark of a good system, being able to remember it and apply it when things get dicey. It’s only five steps and goes like this:
- Pause
- Assess your surroundings
- Notice how nothing around you looks familiar
- Immediately pick a direction and start running
- Collapse in a quivering heap from the exertion and wait for rescue
It’s amazing how quickly and easily this premise initially came to me. You might even say that it was developed on the fly. I don’t mean to brag but I will say that I came up with it rather quickly right on the spot. All I know is that it felt like a very natural response to have in this type of situation. It’s almost a no-brainer! Unfortunately it never really caught on because a bunch of jealous so-called “Safety Experts” got together to try and discredit me for their own personal gain and started preaching that the worst thing that you can do if you find yourself lost is to PANIC. I considered suing but didn’t want to sink to their level so I will just leave it to you to make up your own mind.
When lost, one thing that we do agree on that will really make you feel better is starting a fire. This is usually best done when lost out in the true wilds somewhere and not in a more “civilized” environment such as a city or a town as the authorities in those places generally tend to frown on it. Just goes to show how much things have gone downhill these days when you can’t even build yourself a nice warming fire in an IHOP parking lot anymore without getting into trouble. As a side note, should you do that, you will be able to meet a lot of really nice homeless people… at least until the cops show up. However, if you’re in an area where a fire is feasible, necessary and won’t immediately land you in jail, it can serve multiple purposes: It can keep you warm, allow you to cook, boil water to make it safe to drink, keep dinosaurs and Bigfoot at bay, and if you are lucky enough to be lost in a no-fire or restricted open flame zone it will even bring Forest Rangers to your location PDQ! The down side is that starting a fire is somewhat specialized and is fairly difficult to do without a lighter or matches handy and does require a fair amount of practice to be able to do handily. As hard as it is to coax a fire into life these days (or even to find a safe location for one) it was nothing and took little to no effort to get a good roaring blaze going when I was a kid. Once the initial “I” step of PANIC had subsided somewhat (See, I told you this was good stuff!), which usually occurred after I had only covered a mere five miles or so (unless the sun was starting to go down and then it was every man for himself), all that was required was to assemble the makings for a fire, drop to my knees on either side of the tinder and the intense heat generated from the friction of my corduroy pants legs rubbing together during the run would ignite it instantly! It’s hard to get the same heat like that generated from a pair of Dockers nowadays because:
- I can no longer run as fast or as long as I could as a kid and
- The few vertical creases along with the lighter weight of the material is just not as conducive as good old indestructible corduroy used to be for incendiary purposes.
Another plus which sometimes aided in bringing help to your location was the sound that corduroy makes as it rubs against itself. If you’ve ever owned a pair of corduroys you know exactly what I’m talking about, for those rare few of you that haven’t, it is kind of a “Zzzzzzzzz” sound. When corduroy rubs together at the hyper speeds that it can attain during the “I” step of the PANIC process (as long as it is being correctly performed) it can be loud enough to scream almost like a siren. When you combine the siren sound with the ability to start a fire it can bring people to you from miles away because everyone loves to follow the fire trucks and see where the fire is! I sure turned a lot of corduroy pants into corduroy shorts that way. Stop, drop and roll!
The other nice thing about getting lost back then was that you didn’t have to have any special skills or abilities in order to do it. As a matter of fact the fewer skills of any kind that you possessed, the easier it was to become a statistic. One of the skills that I was sadly lacking in was mathematics and since statistics deals almost entirely with math it took a conscious effort on my part to get lost. It wasn’t for lack of encouragement from my peers either, I could walk up to any one of the girls in my class at school and usually the first response that I would get from them would be, “Get lost!” It’s true what they say, sometimes peer pressure can be one of the hardest things a kid has to deal with. If it wasn’t for the fact that I knew I was so good looking and smart and that they only had my best interests at heart it might have bothered me at the time!
I was a Hunter Safety and Bowhunter Education Instructor for years and taught alongside quite a few talented individuals, people that you would never dream could get lost. One of the things that we instructors would always preach was to be prepared, never go out without a survival day-pack with you and always check your bearings with a compass before you entered the woods just in case something happened. (Something always happens, you know that.) This way, you know which direction is out, or at least which direction is supposed to be out. In my case, I have found that a lot of my hunting spots tended to be in areas of weird energy vortexes, places where magnetic anomalies are the rule of the day rather than the exception and compasses (Even when you remembered to carry one) would point to a direction for North that I didn’t think was right. Even weirder than that was the fact that GPS units and even my hunting companions would always point in the same direction as the compass would, agreeing that was the way out! Good thing I was along as the voice of reason… Back in ancient times they would refer to these areas as “lay lines”. I figured they called them this because as soon as someone figured out they were lost, never to see “civilization” again, they would just “lay down” there and wait to die. Go figure. I was astounded to discover that such places are everywhere! Almost every place that I end up hunting seems to encompass such an area! (See what I did there with compass? Ha ha! My wife says that I can get lost in our living room, while I don’t disagree, I contend that it’s because she keeps changing the furniture around.)
One memorable example of getting lost happened to me in western Kentucky. I was deer hunting with a couple friends, both of which were also Hunter Safety Instructors. We were hunting in a “bottom” not too terribly far away from where we parked the truck. Here’s the sequence of events that unfolded and led to our getting lost on that fateful day:
- We all had day-packs with us when we left the house to head to the woods.
- We all had compasses with us in our daypacks.
- We all had the thought that we would be hunting just a short way from the truck and fairly close to each other (We could see one another from our stands) and that surely one of the others would take the necessary gear with them.
- We were all wrong.
We ended up blood trailing a deer for quite a ways through this bottom in the dark. We followed it for the length of a football field, twisting and turning this way and that, the blood getting scarcer and scarcer until it stopped altogether and we realized that it had to have been just a superficial wound. We had been concentrating so intently on the trail itself that we failed to take note of our surroundings (Which, by the way, were trees and while I don’t wish to be politically incorrect…they all looked alike! Especially in the dark…) and Voila! We were lost! For those of you who might be wondering whether we made it out alive or not, yes, we did. But not before drawing straws to decide which one of us got eaten first if it came to that. We were lucky. Let my story be a warning to you to always be prepared for the worst. Believe me, being lost in the primitive wilds of western Kentucky were two of the longest hours of my life…