Lost in the Woods

One beautiful day in Eureka the Hills family was visiting from San Diego.  It must have been summer because it was so sunny and warm; I think they were on their way to visit some family in Idaho or Oregon.

I decided to take the girls (Maggie, who was about my age, and Dakota, her little sister) on a walk.  I live on a little lane with just a couple other houses, and at the end of the lane is a gate that leads to the woods.

I have never been afraid of the woods.  Maybe it's because I have grown up surrounded by trees.  As long as I remember I have gone for walks on trails in the woods, and apparently I've always made it out alright.  My good friend Nina and I used to go walk in the woods.  We never knew where we were going, but we always popped out somewhere familiar before too long.  The trails always lead out, so what is there to fear?  And besides, I have an excellent sense of direction.

So at about 5:00pm the two out-of-towners and I began our trek in the woods.  It started out as the exact same walk I had taken many times before.  The beginning is always familiar, but we take slightly different routes every time we go.  Once Nina and I had to cross a pretty big stream.  Another time we walked through an overgrown field for twenty minutes.  We hit neither of these landmarks, so after a little while everything on this walk was new.

We walked along the trails in the woods for about an hour before I thought I recognized where we were.

"I know where we are," I told my friends.  "I'm pretty sure we're really close to my friend Kyle's house."  So I led them along these trails, which I was sure I had been on before.

Half an hour later we were still on those same familiar trails.  When we passed the same tire for the third time we decided to take the fork there that went the other way.  But somehow this trail ended up leading us back to the same place.

Now we were starting to get a little bit worried.  It was starting to get dark, none of us had a cell phone with us, and I had finally admitted that I had no idea where we were going.

We continued to take different forks in the trails, but somehow they all led back to the same place.  We were lost.

It's funny how much scarier being lost is once the sun starts setting.  I hadn't been concerned at all when our paths were still brightly lit, but now that all was getting darker, I was starting to doubt my navigational skills more and more.

But we kept going.  We are not the type to give up.

All of a sudden Dakota screamed.  Three figures ran toward us from behind.  I turned around.

"Kyle!"  It was my friend running shirtless with his two dogs.  One of the dogs is black and quite large, so apparently Dakota had mistaken it for a bear.  But I had never been so excited to see Kyle. 

"What are you doing here?" he asked us, so we told him the whole story.  "You just turn right here, then right again," he pointed and instructed us.

Surely enough, we had been really close to Kyle's house in Lundbar Hills, just as I had thought.  We had approached the correct fork in the trail multiple times, but I guess we had always turned the wrong way.

Kyle gave us a ride back to my parents' house, and by the time we got there it was around 8:00, and they had just begun to wonder where we were.

"We just got lost in the woods," we told them.

"Oh, okay," they replied.  "Well, I guess you made it."