Lost
Plaster Rock was at the end of a road to nowhere, a concealed portal to New Brunswick wilderness. Three stubbled sportsmen huddled together in the town’s only coffee shop whispering about a nearby secret lake teeming with trout. I, the only other customer, gazed through the window onto an empty Main Street, listening attentively to every word. It took me a few days to figure out exactly where the secret lake was, then waited anxiously for the first day of trout season. When it finally came, I found the truck turn-out the men described. I parked and looked for a trail. If there was one, it was hidden by the forest and buried beneath still deep snow.
Early that afternoon my enthusiasm was shattered when I found the lake. It was frozen. How could a sixteen-year-old not have figured out that the lake would thaw after the snow? I felt shame. Like a five-year-old realizing that his cousins had duped him into chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Cold and wet from the spring snow heaped between the descending boughs of evergreens hiding tangles of underbrush, I began my return, taking what I thought was a short cut. I trudged through the snow forcing my way through brittle branches for hours, refusing to believe I was lost.
A sea of whispering treetops lapped a cobalt sky. Tips stretching for the last few rays of sunlight while darkness crept up from below. The wet, knee-deep snow frustrated progress. Boughs of tall evergreens sheltered the ground on a knoll ahead. Breathless, I forced my way through grasping branches to find dry ground. I stashed my fishing rod and tackle box near the largest tree trunk and rested. I thought that if I couldn’t make it out before dark, this would be the most likely place to survive the night.
My head was filled with impressions of the calm irresistible sleep that precedes freezing to death. Fear gave way to survival instinct. I removed my soaked leather boots and socks to work some warmth into numb ruby-red toes. Thoughts of freezing to death were replaced by images of my father’s too vivid description of a young woman, appearing to be asleep, holding a straitened coat hanger in a hand draped over the side of a bathtub filled with crimson water. Death seemed as close to me now as it had been then.
The certainty that I had walked in a straight line was destroyed by the discovery of my own footprints at the edge of the lake. I had walked full circle. How could I have been so lost only a mile from the road? Following the footsteps made on my trek to the lake was difficult as darkness erased the line separating forest and sky. On the verge of giving in to exhaustion, I made out the sound of a truck on a distant highway. I knew I would, once again, endure.