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This article was originally published in PL's April/May 2000 issue.
I stayed too late in the woods one evening last winter. I waited too long to turn back from my innocent walk and darkness overtook me. It was so dark that I lost my way on the trail and in my confusion came within an ace of getting lost in a dense laurel thicket a good mile from home.
I didn’t have a flashlight, among all the equipment I carry on my walks, no radio or cell-phone. I had a compass, with a luminous dial, but this wasn’t a situation where generally knowing your direction would do much good. I needed to find and stay on a path that was only a couple of feet wide at best- sometimes no more than a smudge on the ground. Once off that path the dense underbrush would enmesh me and little-by-little tear me to pieces.
My wife knew where I was going, but could only guess where I’d ended up. The woods were so large, there were so many paths and trails. I had a nightmare vision of tracking dogs, the rescue squad, coming through the woods with lights. I would hear about it for the rest of my life.
Getting lost is nothing new to me. I’ve been lost plenty of times-but always in the daytime. In the daytime you have time to reorient yourself, to move father to the east or west or whatever, upstream or downstream. It may be a surprise, or a disappointment, to come out a half-mile or a quarter mile from where you thought you were, but it’s not a killing affair.
Several years ago I was leading a troop of boy scouts through these same woods on a ten mile hike. At a crucial intersection of two small streams joining, I took us left instead of right, and we walked a long way away from where we needed to go. The boys, with the exception of a couple who’d developed blisters, didn’t mind so much. They had energy left for climbing the sides of massive ravines. It was the adults in the party who were peeved, like my wife- who was the one who noticed we were lost and told me which way we should have gone. Nothing like a needless extra half mile to top off an already over-long hike.
I rate such miscues by how many degrees of the intended course we end up- 90 degrees is bad. One day my brother and I were walking together, exploring new territory. The sun was going down and we were trying to make it back to the edge of known territory before dark. Since it was virtually all new to us as we’d never put foot on most of this land before, we blundered along with little way of knowing whether we were passing familiar landmarks (certain trees, gullies, and ridges in the land) or not. It turned out not.
We’d missed our target by four-tenths of a mile and 160 degrees on the compass we’d been futilely consulting. (Instead of coming out on Dameron’s stream bottom, we were on Bloyces.) If it had mattered, we would have been up the proverbial creek. As it was, as soon as we came into the bottom we knew where we were, and so crossed the stream and picked up a path that led towards home.
It was my zeal for exploring this same vast new territory that got me into trouble that winter night I stayed too long in the woods. I’d reached a bend in the stream that I’d reached twice before and each time had to turn back. I should have turned, but I was having such a good time that I just wanted to go a little farther. there’s only one time if your life that you see land for the first time, the virgin sight, the virgin walk, and I was enjoying exploring this twisting, completely canopied stream bottom so intensely that I could barely tear myself away from it.
I was following two mossy-banked streamlets so narrow you could step over either one. In this confined stream bottom between two walls of ravine, the two streams had created a meandering flood plain like a delta. Debris was everywhere from the heavy rains of the year before. The topo map showed twin tributaries, a west and a northwest. Both were big enough to have perennial streams, and I wanted to find the place where the two streams divided, which would create an interesting land form, but I kept coming up with half-dry gullies, or little wet spots, instead of streams as I probed for the northwest tributary.
When I reached the sharp bend in the valley we called the “Beak”- from its map contour appearance- I expected the boundary waters to be right there. When they weren’t, I realized I’d misread the map scale. At this point I was on unexplored ground and did not know what lay ahead of me. I set the goal of another hundred feet. In this part of the stream bottom the going was devilish slow because of the dense, briar-laced bushes and the numerous puddles, seeps, and blind offshoots that could suck your foot in up over your boot tops. Picking my way through just a few feed of this stuff took long enough to make me late.
I was examining a curious collection of snags- standing dead trees, some rotted and broken all the way down to human scale, with a fascinating pattern of decaying trunks and tops still evident where they’d tumbled down onto the ravine floor- when I decided I had to turn back. By my watch it was 5:30 P.M. The sky was thick overcast, so I’d get no help from the twilight. It would be dark in an hour and I was an hour from home.
I climbed out of Dameron’s Bottom, and ran into a gully I’d never seen before, draining back down into Dameron’s. It was just a small thing but it was a disconcerting surprise, coming on it unexpectedly. Extra climbing, right at the start.
Once I’d negotiated it, and a little more light had faded, I was on familiar ground: the neighborhood of the Beak. The timber around the Beak was under contract to be harvested, a fact that had added urgency to my walks those days- it’s what’s got me exploring this particular part of the Kinsale quadrangle. Every time I went out, I ended up working around some part of this watershed. The trees were mostly oaks and poplars, two and three feet thick, with laurel, holly and dogwood in abundance. By the end of the summer this place would be clearcut. Presently the streams ran clear all the time. Soon, I would get to see how much they changed.
I followed the north side of the ravine fairly easily. It was fed or indented by numerous tributary gullies and I had learned in the past month exactly where the work-arounds were. It was about a quarter mile to the place where I had to make a hard left and turn out onto the land form we call the “island”- a land island, floating on a sea of laurel.
The key to getting through laurel hells is to pick a path carefully. If you don’t mind crawling on your hands and knees, or if you’re nimble-enough to step through the crotches and duck under the branches, then you can worm your way through it, as we do all the time. But you have to be able to see. I’d been through this particular stretch enough times to have made a half-path, but in the gloom I must have gotten off of it, because it seemed like twice as much laurel as usual, and twice the distance of laurel hell. The laurel was snatching at me and grabbing at my clothes, whipping me in the fact. Laurel is not sticky or briary, but it confines you; you’re enmeshed, like the lovers trapped in Hephaestus’s net. It was here, trapped by the laurel in the gathering darkness that the first notions of real discomfort crept into my mind, a foreshadowing of what was to come. I had an idea of how long it should take to get through the laurel, and when it took longer than it seemed it should, it unnerved me. Finally I broke through.
On the very tip of the island was a tiny clear spot where we’d often stop and look out at the beauty around us: the large standing trees and the moldering trunks of fallen giants, everything mossy, lichenclad. Twin deep ravines swept down both sides of the island, making union just below where I stood. The island, too, would be clear-cut, so each visit was like a hospice-call. This time I only stopped long enough to record some notes and gather my wits after the struggle with the laurel. It had taken twenty minutes to get back to the island, and I estimated I was still forty minutes form home. From this point on, the unfamiliar paths were behind me; what lay ahead I knew as well as the back of my hand. It was just a matter of making the right moves and grinding it out. At ten of six I plunged down the hillside that dropped me from the island into Bloyces Bottom.
One thing different about this winter as compared to the previous one was how easily we could get across Bloyce’s Run. This far downstream, Bloyces, even before it joins with Dameron’s, was too wide to easily jump, especially when encumbered by boots, briar-proof clothing, and other gear. When we were first getting to know the place, our main crossing point was a log snagged in a beaver lodge, with a quagmire just where you’d land after a desperate leap. You also had to fight through briars after you cleared the stream and the mud.
About a month before I had discovered a place right at the foot of the island where the stream was narrow enough to safely jump across. The stream made a sharp “S” here, and the backwaters had captured some of the stream load and piled up sand and mud that eventually became turf firm enough to support my heavy feet. I jumped and made for the base of an eighty-foot hill.
My ascent was by way of a narrow spine between two coves that went back into the side of Bloyces Bottom. It was steep and there was no formal path, just a trace we had made that respected the natural features. You had to duck and dodge, and try to avoid mistakes.
At the top I came out onto a farm lane that skirted the edge of Courtney’s Greatfield. Within 100 yards the lane forked and I had a choice to make. One way followed the edge of the field. Going that way made my walk into a big circle and it was usually the way I went. It was longer, by one third of a mile. We’d had rain the night before, along with sleet and snow, and the wheat field would be muddy, something that would slow me down even more. The woods way, besides being shorter, was paved the entire length with oak leaves and pine needles. I took the woods fork, and in no time was in the soup.
The sun was down, or out of sight. The farm lane had great western exposure over the open field and gathered the fading daylight. Once I stepped into the woods the shades dropped.
I didn’t have time to stop and let my eyes get accustomed to the dark, and this may have accounted for what happened next. I was on what we call the mill road, because it eventually leads to Bailey’s mill. I have consulted a 1943 topo map and believe that the road originally led to someone’s house- there’s nothing there now- but suffice to say that all roads led to the mill. To get home on this one, I had to make a right turn within a short distance, say 150 yards, of leaving the field. In the gloom, with my eyes still dazzled, I walked right by the turn.
I had a sense something wasn’t right, by my reckoning of distance. Confirmation came when I walked up to a tree someone years ago had thoughtfully blazed with red spray paint. This was a turn signal to go left, toward Bailey’s Mill. The rational thing to do at this point would have been to backtrack. The mill road was wide enough that I wouldn’t likely get off of it and I could simply pick up the turn-off towards home on my second try, going back. This was no problem technically. From many trips to the mill, one of my favorite walks, I was used to hitting the turn form either direction. Due to some blind sense of unreason, I did not backtrack, but instead tried to complete the hypotenuse of a right triangle, trusting my usually reliable sense of direction to guide me across the thickly wooded hillside.
My plan was a good one if I could reckon angle and distance properly. Unfortunately I did neither. I didn’t intersect the path leading down from the mill road, as I’d expected. I hit the stream bottom. A slight miscalculation. No problem. I wasn’t miles, but maybe a hundred feet from where I was supposed to be, but when I hit that bottom, in the gathering darkness, I didn’t know where I was. I was lost.
Usually when I’m feeling uncertain (and it happens with embarrassing frequency) I consult whatever stream I happen to be nearest. Usually I’m trying to find my way home, and so downstream is the direction I need, regardless of where in the network of streams and tributaries I am. Downstream, or left, would have been wrong. I needed to go upstream, to the right, to regain the path home. And as I stood there, hesitating, feeling the last light slip away moment by moment, my usual sense of certainty was replaced by doubt. What if I’d already crossed the path home and not realized it? Then
I would already be upstream of it, and right could be wrong.
The consequence of a bad decision would be disastrous. I had no more time to waste. If I took the wrong turn here, I would be spending the night in these woods. Once it was pitch dark, between the laurel and the briars and the gullies and the ravines and the tangled dead trees and the streams and the marshy places, I would never find my way out.
I turned right, and started upstream, but instead of a comfortable sense of confidence and assurance, doubt and second-guessing followed me like a cloud of furies. It would have helped if the stream itself had been more distinct. This stream, which is nameless on the map, but dubbed Jerry’s Run after one of the late owners of this property, is marked on the topo maps with a broken blue line that means intermittent (as opposed to perennial) stream. Intermittent streams, supposedly, can dry up in the summertime, but even when there is plenty of water flowing they don’t flow continuously down a bottom. They can be flowing along merrily, a few inches deep, a foot or two wide, and then just disappear and go to ground, only to emerge twenty or thirty feet downstream, bubbling up spring-like from the roots of a tree.
No sooner had I put all my slim hopes on following Jerry’s Run to its intersection with the path, than the stream, tiny as best, vanished. Where the path crosses the stream there is a modest flow and I was assuming that it continued from that point. Had I truly overshot, and was actually much farther upstream than I realized? I looked up the hill to the left, and considered whether I should continue my slantward attempt to intersect the path home, then ruled out. My mind was like a top- tipping over and bouncing back up at random. I needed to right myself, and regain my sense of where I was.
I’d just heard an NPR (National Public Radio) report on the Norwegian who’d crossed Antarctica alone, on skis. When he came to deep crevasses bridged over by snow, he had about a split second to decide whether to ski over them- which he often did- or go around- which might mean miles of extra skiing. To break through could be fatal, and he’d broken through once. I wasn’t going to die for my mistake, just be miserable. Right or left?
That was when I though of Wiggins, the blind sawyer, of whom my father had spoken so many times. Wiggins was a black man of medium complexion, sort of stout, born about 1890. He lived in the Devils Run area of Sandy Point Neck but in making his living roamed as far as Kinsale and Coles Point.
In those days, everybody heated their homes with wood and bought it in four-foot cordwood lengths. Somebody had to saw it up into smaller lengths, either you or your kids or perhaps a servant, or you could hire Wiggins. He would come to the house with his long two-handled lumber saw over his shoulder and in a week or so, in increments of two cuts for a fireplace, or three cuts for a stove, all the firewood for the winter would be cut.
Wiggin’s gift for navigating the woods of the Yeocomico watershed was what gave him the status of legend in Dad’s mind. Wiggins got around completely on his own, sometimes traveling miles in the process. He most often traveled alone but he would take people with him if they needed a guide.
One time he was in Parks’ store in Kinsale, picking up some groceries after a job in the village and taking a little break before walking the three miles or so back to his home. There was a group of young men in the store, who, for one reason or another had stayed too long in the village to have sufficient daylight to get home taking the usual forest shortcuts. Walking the long way around on the road would take a good hour or more.
“Boys, I’ll take you,” Wiggins told them.
One of the group was younger than the rest, didn’t know Wiggins, didn’t realize he was blind for the longest time- until Wiggins left the men in the woods for a moment to go off and hide his saw, and they talked about him, how astounding it was that a blind man could take them home through the woods.
Wiggins must have been lost plenty of times when he was learning the woods paths. And when he did, he had no choice but to remember and reason his way back. I reasoned that my best chance to get out of my mess was to attempt to regain the mill road which must be only 100 feet away from me, above me, on the ridge top that ran parallel to Jerry’s Bottom. The mill road was wide. I could find that in the dark.
And when I did, which was easy, I turned left, and kept moving upstream. Either I would see the path shortly, or if I were beyond it, I would soon come back to the field.
Once I had regained the mill road and walked a few feet I hit the stump that marks the turn-off and I was back on the trail.
No problem staying on it after that, even though it has its indistinct stretches. I made good time and it was 6:30 P.M. when I came to the trail head and stopped. Through the bare trees I could see the lights of the village. It was almost full dark. pl
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