#1
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“Come into the wilderness for a while,” said 663, hiding from the sunlight in a pile of forest detritus. “Bring what you need of civilization – food, tent, all the comforts. I’ll fix all your problems if you do that.”
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“What is it you want?” Moonlight filtered phantasmically through the LSD-twisted cedars. An image came to mind, that of the Cheshire cat in his tree over a lost winding path.
Lost.
“I… want to get lost.”
“Really. And, what do you want to get lost from?”
“You mean, what am I running from?”
“Is something chasing you?”
“Yes… and also, I’m running towards shit like that!” I said, pointing to a particularly whimsical construction of tree stump, hallucination and shadow.
Lost, I thought. To be lost, while having what I need to survive and keep finding new things. In that way, both escape and continuation.
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I remembered this conversation somewhat ruefully while shoving through thick, thick bushes on a steep, uneven slope. The trail had vanished under my feet several hours ago, and no amount of pouring over the map successfully matched it to the territory. The bushes were covered in some kind of sticky sweet droplets that, to my nose, smelled oddly of marijuana, and soon my clothes and all my things were covered as well. I sat down. My water was low. The river was close, but it would be a difficult climb to carry my pack back up the side of the valley. I can see it from here, I thought. I’ll set my pack against this tree, scramble down this drainage and come right back up.
I went down. I refilled my water. I scouted a short way upstream, appreciated a waterfall, came back to my starting point. I scrambled right back up the drainage.
Fuck.
I searched for my pack for hours, combing up and down, back and forth over an area that was probably only a few thousand square feet. The evening wore on, and I remembered a forecast in the low forties for that night. The neck-high brush had swallowed my gear and wouldn’t cough it up however nicely I asked. I called the names of friends bodied and disembodied, threw will and vision around, even followed a whistling bird around in a big circle on the off chance that it might help a sucker out. I was becoming desperate and exhausted.
“Here I am!” I said to a projection of the Doombringer sigil. “I’m all yours for this experience. Then when we’re ready, I can find my pack again. Because all the good stuff’s in the pack, ya know. The sacraments are are in the pack,” I said, bargaining for all my possessions were worth. “So we can’t have the sacraments until I find my pack, yeah?”
The sigil glowed, but there was no response.
My magic wasn’t working. Of course it wasn’t. And if I’d managed to find my way into a true initiatory test, that means I’d failed, as I knew I likely would. What kind of temperatures can a human body sit out in before hypothermia becomes a real problem? I honestly don’t know. It was worth it, I said to myself stubbornly.
The options ran though my mind of their own accord like a quiz in one of those survival handbooks. You are lost in the woods and have misplaced your gear. You are underdressed for the expected temperatures. After a long search proves fruitless, you are exhausted and the light is fading. What do you do?
a) Continue searching with decreasing visibility
b) Attempt to backtrack and find the trail in the dark, then retreat to the trailhead
c) Prepare for the night
Unlike most things in life, those quizzes always have one correct answer.
No more stupid decisions.
I began grabbing chunks of the thick moss that covers everything in the northwest and throwing it in a pile next to a small flat space, where the ground was covered by several inches of insulative growing stuff. My blanket-to-be accumulated quickly, and my actions brought purpose, confidence and fierce energy. I rested a moment under the oncoming night that I would survive, examining the bushes that surrounded me, and the mysterious sticky stuff that they seemed to produce.
Everything smelled like weed. As I finally put this together, I laughed, and looked up.
My pack was against a tree, fifteen feet from where I’d been building my bed.
No more stupid decisions. Of course, that’s not to say no more risks.
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I tried the moss thing that night anyway, to see if it would work. It helps a lot, but even after wimping out and putting on my layers, I was very cold. I think I would have lived, but I definitely wouldn’t have slept. Some tips if you ever have reason to use this trick:
- Although I would have eventually given up from the cold, what actually got me first was the sheer discomfort of dirt falling in my face and face holes. Save the cleaner clumps to put around your head.
- The moss in the northwest forest insulates almost as well as a blanket. The padding under me worked well; I didn’t feel myself losing heat to the ground, but I was definitely losing it through cracks in my covering. One thing that helps with this is if you peel off the big, intact sheets you can find on logs and especially boulders. Then you can set these like a shell over a layer or two of looser stuff.
- Another idea that I didn’t try would be to find or dig a deeper hole in the ground, or even create a sort of crib by driving sticks into the ground, close to each other to form a rectangle around your body – I think I’ve seen I diagram like this in a book somewhere. If you make it deep enough, you would have a kind of bowl that you could lay in and then fill with moss. That way it wouldn’t roll off you even if you moved.
- The moss is very absorbent, so keep several inches open under your nose so it doesn’t trap the water of your breath.
- This idea comes from a similar technique someone taught me once, using pine needles. Northwest moss works much better and is more comfortable, but of course it depends on your location.
