Lost

It wasn’t until I sunk, ankle deep, into a soft spot in the mud and nearly lost my sandal that I realized I might be truly, actually, oh-shit-I-could-die-out-here lost. My bright idea to start at the stream in the woods and follow it all the way out to the lake was turning out to be much more intense than I’d bargained for. If you were wondering, streams do not, in fact, maintain a consistently comfortable width throughout their entirety, and when you find yourself off-trail in the woods, there truly is no path but directly through the burrs and bushes.

For someone as obsessed with planning and organizing as I am, I relish getting lost. Corn mazes, unmarked trails, the Hatcher library stacks - I love them all. Being lost is like going on my own, real-life version of the adventures I’ve only ever read about in fantasy books. To wander, alone or with a friend, into a great vastness is to hunt for treasure. Sometimes, that treasure is just a painted stone or a pretty bird or a raspberry patch. Sometimes it’s bigger, like a waterfall, a buck in the distance, or a bone. Sometimes, it’s a little bubble of cold stream water into the big lake, hidden under a low-hanging tree so you can only tell it’s there by the feeling of the gentle current against your toes. The treasure almost always comes at a price - scratched arms or a bee sting, a sliced knee or a leech on your foot - but these are the things that you have to show for your adventure. They make your treasure valuable and your story real.

I think that might be why I like getting lost so much: it’s an escape into my own personal story, an excuse to forget about everything in the world except for the exact moment I’m in. Maybe I'm never truly lost, but I feel that way because I want to be. I find the treasure because I believe it’s there. I’ll pay the price of burrs and bushes any day to feel the magic of discovering something special, even if it’s only special to me.