Every tree looks like every other tree to me. I went for a wee hike with my pal Kai on a tiny and thickly wooded island. A few minutes into the hike I decided to head back to camp. Kai continued on as I turned back along the the single trail. Soon enough I found myself bushwhacking through the scrub. The ocean was right there just beyond that clump of salal but the tide had come in and there was no longer a beach to follow back to the tent site. It was getting dark fast. A familiar panic rose as I turned this way and that, trying to discern one mossy stump from another. Embarrassed and annoyed at myself I finally bellowed out, “Kai!” “What?!” Came a voice from a few metres away. “I’m right here. Are you still where I left you? Stay there.” A moment later Kai popped out of the woods, taunting me as only a faux bro will. “Geez, you could get lost in a cardboard box.”
He’s right about that. I could get lost in a cardboard box. I have spent hours walking back and forth on the same street, unsure which way to turn. I once went the wrong direction while biking south down the California coast until I finally got curious about why the ocean was on my left side. I am an anti-compass. If anyone wants to know which direction to go they should just watch where I’m headed and then go the other way.
I get lost in parks, in supermarkets, in suburban cul-de-sacs. In Sun Yat Sen Gardens – which is tiny — and I was supposed to be managing an event there at the time. Among the skyscrapers of Kowloon. In the exurbs of Bangkok. In the old stockyards of the Junction, as hair tumbleweeds rolled across the empty paddocks. On the ferry more times than I can count — once I had to walk off and reconnect with my ride in the Horseshoe Bay parking lot. Google Maps doesn’t help. I just stand on a street corner twirling like a weather vane in a hurricane. Phone in hand.
As a child I got lost on the way home from school and in department stores and at Santa’s Village, to be located at last by my pissed-off mother or store staff and dragged home by the hand. Somehow I never heard the intercom calling my name.
As a young teen I once went swimming at the high school pool with my gang. The high school was in dense clump of highrises – at the time, in fact, the most population-dense neighbourhood in Canada. Kind of a rough hood. My friends left without me and by the time I packed up it was dark and a thick fog had descended. I set out in a random direction. All the tall square buildings looked the same, lights glimmering way up in the fog. I don’t know how long I walked, eyes red and stinging from the pool chlorine, trying to find my way home. No matter which way I went I ended up back at the shopping mall. I was wandering hungry and weeping through Safeway when a woman spotted me in the produce section and asked what was wrong. She drove me home and dropped me a block from my house as per my instructions, so my parents wouldn’t see me get out of a stranger’s car. Saved by a stranger, again.
I’ve come to expect the kindness of strangers. In turn I’ve rescued many wanderers and helped them find their street or their bus stop or a place to sleep. I have been lost so many times and I have always, always, been found.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.