Posted: 5/5/04

Accidental Orienteering

You are in trouble when you hear these stark words of panic:

"It all looks the same!"

The sameness of the country never occurs to you until you are thoroughly lost. We arrived in this predicament innocently enough. We were two adults and eight high-school students, canoeing well off the civilized track. Our diet of pancakes, trail mix, and evening pasta was good, but boring. When a student reported blueberries, we were ready for a pause. What a patch it was! Ten, twelve, sixteen ripe blueberries fell into our hands at one swipe. Sweetly, seductively, the patch laid its trap. The bushes became even more numerous as we ascended the hill, and the girl at the top suggested we had not seen anything yet. The high country was even better!

It was a long, long while before anyone even looked up. Longer still before someone asked the tentative, loaded question: ìSay, which way back to the canoes?î

Looking around, there was no water visible. None of us had thought to bring map and compass. The sun was under deep clouds; there were no shadows. There was no moss on the trees. We were lost.
We stationed one person at the spot where we had realized we were lost. He was not allowed to move. The rest fanned out in all directions, a slowly expanding circle. The only rule was that we had to stay in sight of the fixed person. When we reached the edge of visual contact, we stopped. Half the searchers now also became stationary, while the rest explored further, keeping in visual contact with one of the stationary ones.
In the expanding circle, someone startled a nighthawk from its ground nestñthe same bird we had startled on our way in. Now we had a course to follow. From our first stationary person (where the picking had ended), in the general direction of the nest, we sent out a line of explorers. Soon enough we found the lake, and our canoes.

The harvest was great; we had blueberries to liven up our meals for the next two days. For me, however, the highlight of the adventure was simply seeing those canoes again!

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