Lost in the Woods

When I was a kid, I had the privilege of attending summer camp in the Missouri Ozarks. From the ages of 8 to 16, I went to camp every summer for a month. As the years progressed, the activities that we were allowed to participate in became more advanced, because we actually learned things at camp, and built on our skills from year to year. Camp Zoe was primarily a horseback riding camp, but we had many other activities including canoeing, riflery, archery, art and crafts, and nature crafts. What exactly is “Nature Crafts”? Nature crafts consisted of learning about plants and animals, nature hikes, spelunking, catching crawdads (and cooking and eating them), and orienteering.

When I went to camp during my 13^th year, I had a new nature crafts counselor. He was a long haired hippie freak. His name was Chris and he gave us 13 year olds far more credit than we deserved in regard to our nature crafts skill set. He came up with lots of new activities for us and, unfortunately, assumed we had the skills to pull it off. One such activity was orienteering. He gave us a quick lesson on how to use a compass, figure out a heading, and theoretically, find our way out of the woods. Great! We can do that! No problem!

So one evening, after dinner, he gathered us up and drove us off into the woods. He reviewed the map with us, showed us where we were, and the compass heading we needed to follow to get back to the road, where he would be waiting for us. It was around 6:00 in the evening and the sun was still up. We had about 2.5 hours of daylight left to find our way back. Great! We can do that! No problem! So off we went in groups of 4, leaving 15 minutes apart from each other. Alone in the woods – at last, no grownups, no rules, captains of our destiny.

We walked with purpose from the dry dirt road into the scruffy weeds that bordered the forest. I thought to myself, “shorts were probably a bad choice”, but continued on, undaunted. Approaching the edge of the forest, the trees, towering over our heads, were a beautiful, deep emerald green. The forest was filled with sounds; birds, mosquitoes and squirrels. The forest floor was littered with pine needles and twigs and, as we walked under the canopy, they seemed to absorb the sound of our footsteps. As we entered the forest, the light changed – dramatically. The deep emerald green was suddenly painted with a gray wash that dimmed our view. It felt a little eerie. The four of us exchanged glances of mild concern, giggled a little (as only 13 year old girls can do) and continued onward.

At first, the going was pretty easy. Just a pleasant walk in the woods. But then the terrain started to get a little more challenging. The scruffy weeds became more dense with lots of ferns and saplings and the occasional fallen tree, and the ground became more hilly. The increasing density of the floor growth changed the quality of the sounds in the forest. It felt muffled. Even our own voices seemed to be dampened by the green moisture surrounding us. The birds seemed farther away and the squirrels seemed to have disappeared. However, the mosquitoes remained our constant companions. What was lacking in birdsong and the chitter of squirrels was replaced by “other sounds”. To four 13 year old girls, this could have been anything! We did our best to ignore these sounds, and failing that, to make jokes about them (OMG it's a turtle!). This worked for the first hour and a half. At least we thought is was an hour and a half; no one had a watch.

As we continued on our way, we diligently checked our compass and felt confident that we were going the right direction. We certainly hoped so, seeing that the sun was beginning to set, casting an even deeper grayness throughout the forest, as well as over our sense of humor. Our continued trudging brought us to the edge of a very small, very deep valley. It was breathtaking in its isolation. Deep, deep green, no sounds at all and an overwhelming aroma of rich dirt; this was the real forest. Checking our heading once again, we headed down the slope to the bottom of the valley, where we ran straight into an enormous dead-fall. It was truly impressive in its magnitude. There must have been a hundred dead trees all piled up together in various stages of decay. There was moss growing on some of them; ferns and mushrooms growing out of others. A couple of them still had green leaves suspended from their branches. In retrospect, I am grateful that I had no idea who Stephen King was at the time, as this would have quite possibly been my undoing! It was huge; there was no way around it. Up and over was our only option. The trees at the bottom of the pile had the most moss, ferns and mushrooms growing on them, which made them slippery. We all had our moments of stepping down on a log, only to have our feet disappear into its rotted interior. But we forged onward. We were really beginning to feel the stress of our current situation: Four girls wandering the woods with diminishing daylight, a map, a compass, and no flashlight. Hmm...maybe we need to pick up our pace a little bit. So we did our best to conquer the dead-fall as quickly as we could. As hard as we tried to reach the other side of the dead-fall in a short amount of time, we were not very successful. By the time we alighted on the other side, the remaining daylight was ebbing quickly.

As we ascended the other side of the valley wall, the light seemed to stabilize, as did our mood. We once again consulted our map. Surely we should be near the road by now. We searched through the trees, hoping to catch a glimpse of dirt ribbon, but saw nothing but dimming greenness, rapidly descending to only shades of gray. The stabilized light, along with our stabilized mood, were short lived. Fear. Plain and simple. Our only saving grace at this point was that I was on the road to juvenile delinquency and had a Bic lighter in my pocket. We consulted the map and the compass, trying to see something far enough in the distance to set our bearing on. We were doing this every 10 minutes now because we could only see a 25 feet ahead of us. A funny thing happens in the forest when the light leaves. The sounds arrive. Thinking of turtles, squirrels and other benign forest dwellers quickly evolved into bears and bobcats, both of which are plentiful in the Missouri woods. We managed to keep some of our wits about us and pressed on. Where was the f***ing road? Our fear increased with every new sound and shadow that stalked us that night. It felt like hours had passed since the final light left our green canopied cave. It dawned on us that we now really understood that safety in numbers thing. In light of this new found understanding, we linked arms and continued, the monsters surely at our heels. To make ourselves feel better, and to drown out the sounds of the encroaching monsters, we started singing. I don't know who started it, but we all fell solidly into the Wizard of Oz mantra of “Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My.” We were banishing the monsters back to their dark lair. What resourceful little children we were! Our singing served an additional purpose. Our counselor heard us! It took us a while to hear his panicked screaming over our song, but finally we did. We were, finally, a mere 10 yards from the road!

There seems to be a universal belief that long haired hippie freaks are uber calm individuals. If the vein throbbing in Chris' forehead that night was any indication, I believe this to be untrue. In retrospect, this was a man who had clearly experienced one of the worst nights in his life. He was not calm. He was not cool. He was not collected. We didn't understand why he was so upset. In a fashion that only the young and immortal can muster, we looked at him with confusion on our faces and said “What?”

 

 The next year when we all showed up for our month of fun, Chris was not there. Neither was the after dinner orienteering activity.