230625 not lost!

June 25

If asked, I would have said I was walking north-northwest, towards the central creek and the lower cross-path. 

I opened my compass: I was facing south-south west! In the woods I had turned around without realizing it. This is the trouble with going off-path. You can so easily, with weaving between branches and swampy places, turn yourself in entirely the wrong direction. You might walk in circles for a long time. 

 Could have sworn I was facing north!

In these woods, even without a compass, you could probably find your way to one of the barriers of the land, the road, the paths, the creeks. Following a permanent creek one way or another will probably take you to a path or road. However, I was not hitting the creek which I thought was to my left; yes, for those who, like me, sometimes don't know left from right, it was really left. Except that I think sub-consciously I was aware that the sun wasn't right somehow. I don't know why else I would have thought to check my compass. Even then, I suspected its accuracy and opened maps to locate the direction of the house. Sure enough, it was behind me! 

In spite of feeling like it was totally wrong, I turned about and headed through the woods, calling for Rocky, who had disappeared. I did not want to leave him going the other way, since we were way off-path.  Laughing, because he may know exactly where he is all the time! 

The sun was dappling through the canopy of the trees in small spotlights and I did consciously wonder what direction the beams were falling from, but it was quite high in the sky and the light was blurred and obscured by the cloud cover so I could not tell. 

Spilled gold: sunlight through the canopy.

 

I have a good sense of direction, although I get lost going places by car, because I tend to not worry about it. You will eventually figure out your mistake and can always turn around. I love maps, paper maps, and always carry them in the car. You can see big and small at the same time and compare, whereas the phone map will give you big (main roads and towns) or small, but not at the same time. I can think better with pictures, or in this instance, maps. So yes, we might be "lost" but we can find ourselves again!

Before I had my phone compass I did carry a physical compass when walking here. 

*****

Two lost tales:

My family was driving west in Saskatchewan, on summer holiday. The roads in Saskatchewan run east-west and north-south, straight as an arrow as far as you can drive, so that from the air it would look like a grid. My father, who was raised here, still thought that we could find a short-cut to our destination. Now I realize that the short cut might just have been a more interesting route, or less travelled, or it may have taken criss-cross roads like the hypotenuse of a triangle, while the main roads were the adjacent and opposite sides: that still would have been just as long given the grid, but would seem shorter. So I get it now. But we used to groan and shake our heads. Our favorite story is of travelling for hours on some of these two-lane unpaved country roads, not a house or living creature in sight, except that we all exclaimed at once when, we saw again, on a hillside, the same farmer and his tractor, plowing the same field, that we had seen some hours before!

*****

One night, at the Hideaway, the cottage we went to, my brother, Brian, and I were waiting for my parents and little brother to return from a walk. I was about ten and he would have been sixteen. It got on to eleven pm and they'd been gone since noon, taken the boat across to the main side of the bay, to walk south. Now it was storming: rain, lightning and thunder. Towards midnight we decided we had to go across to Ken's and let them know Scot and Elsa were not back. We had the six-foot, single-sail sailboat. Brian was competent from the time he was born and could put his hand to anything. This was his sailboat, built by him from a kit. The night was very black, except when the lightning flashed, but there was enough light on the water and we knew the bay like the backs of our hands. We sailed easily across, although I still have a mental picture of two little figures in a very little boat, with a tall sail, white against the crowding blackness, and the deep water, in the circle of cedar forest that cupped the bay that we floated on like a leaf. All the while it rained. We knew only too well that we were a lightning rod! We arrived, tied up at Ken's dock, and walked up to the house just in time to find the others staggering in, Matthew on my father's shoulders; though the burden of his responsibility was, I could see that night, weighing more heavily. There are back roads and the shore of Huron, and farms and cottages within a few minutes' walk in most directions. But the old logging roads have been unused for years and may disappear among new growth, and a path you are following may not be one at all. You might zigzag among the trees for a long time without happening upon a landmark. I don't know if they were still in the woods when darkness fell, or had found a road to bring them back. I wonder if Brian remembers that night, or Matthew!

*****

Today, once I had figured out my mistake, I turned towards the house, and in two minutes I was at the bottom of the second meadow by the line of trees and fieldstone that was the fence.

Here I am!

*****

It is so smoky here today that I can smell it, and it lurks among the tress and hills in a way that clouds do not, when the sun is shining, bleary, and it is so warm. It does not move like a cloud does, but hangs, still. I  am thinking of, sending hope to, those fighting the fires, and those who are watching the world burning from their doors.

 We are here.

Mumma Yaga