A Light In The Darkness

The very first hike i went on as a Boy Scout was to Daniel Boone National Forest in Kentucky.  We had scheduled a 12 mile course to take 5-6 hours.  It was a beautiful April day, cool and bright, a great day to go hiking.  Unfortunately, a blizzard back in February had brought a number of trees down across the path and then, on this first thaw of the year, melted all at once.  When we weren't hacking through branches we were building bridges across streams whose banks couldn't be reached with a long pole.  'Be prepared' is all well and good, but no one thought this hike would require machetes or hundreds of feet of rope.  Of course, it takes about 5 minutes of bridge planning before a bunch of bored 11-year-olds try to wade across.  It turns out streams have steep banks even when they're not visible.  To make matters worse, many of the trail markers were on downed trees or just washed away, making navigation dicey at times.

After 12 hours of this, we crested the last ridge and stopped to regroup.  With a mile to go and about half an hour of daylight left, we split into groups of kids who could travel at the same speed; when traveling at night, being lost isn't nearly so dangerous as being alone.  Naturally, the Senior Patrol Leader got stuck leading all the new kids to safety.  This guy was one of my childhood heroes, but he was having a rough night.  At the glacial pace of exhausted children, he guided us by fragments of white paint and gut instinct well into dusk.  But eventually the moonless night settled on us and there was just nothing to go by.  We should have been home hours ago; no one in our group had brought a flashlight.

But somebody had.  Off to one side of us, someone kept swinging a light right in our eyes.  The weird thing was, the light was moving around us much faster than we could walk, it only appeared intermittently and it didn't seem to be going in a straight line.  When you're trying to guide by night vision, a light in your face is more than a small annoyance and we learned a lot of new vocabulary from our SPL as he tried to avoid looking at it.  Finally when we couldn't even see each other, we formed a human chain and turned toward the light.  Even if the light-bearer was lost too, at least we wouldn't be alone.  After a very long time (~10 minutes), we emerged in a paved clearing.  There were three older boys there and a kid my age with a MagLite.  His dad had been the leader of the fastest group and they had reached the end point well before dark.  Only one car had been left at the trail-head, so the dads had driven back to base camp, leaving the boys with the light from the glove box and instructions: "Stay here and tell anyone who comes that we'll be back."

In other circumstances, the kid with the flashlight had no credentials as a guide.  He was a squirrelly little guy and this was his first hike as a Boy Scout too.  All he knew was that his dad was coming back here, he had a light and out in the miles of utter darkness all around him were a bunch of lost people.  So he turned on the light and swung it through the trees.  Sort of.  His attention span was pretty limited and the older boys kept yelling at him to stop wasting batteries.  No one came for a long time so he kept turning off the light until he got bored again.

As it turned out, almost no one heeded the light.  I learned much later that one of the dangers of navigating in a forest is that your sense of direction changes much faster than you realize.  If you don't have a distant fixed object to go by, it takes great skill to walk in a straight line just by looking at the trees.  And that's in broad daylight.  What is far more likely is that you will build for yourself a local reference frame with little bearing on reality and put much more confidence in it than is justified.  In those circumstances an external fixed reference that you refuse to acknowledge will appear to drift wildly around a shifting world that you have convinced yourself is stable.  Whatever path you walk, it is important to have a sense of the bigger geography around you so you can decide what ought to be the anchor point(s) of your personal world.  If the light of your world seems inconsistent, you should really think carefully about your local heading.

Eventually, of course, the convoy returned.  Trucks fanned out across the clearing and pointed their high beams into the woods.  Groups of boys appeared from every direction, soaked to the skin and nearly sleeping on their feet.  We didn't actually lose anyone that night, but we'd been lost for less than an hour.  The cost of ignoring the flashlight was a half mile or so of extra walking.  In the grand scheme of things, we failed at a very short navigational challenge and got off fairly light for being unprepared.  A lot of people who ignore their guiding light are nowhere to be found when rescue comes.

When the headlights turned on, it was obvious that that kind of power could only be emitted by a father or a ranger.  All sensible boys turned toward them, but found that they had wandered a long way from safety.  I wonder had the flashlight been more steady how many of us would have been waiting there when the dads returned.  Someday our Father will return with his high beams on.  In the meantime, we have all the problems that come with wielding a flashlight: limited energy, unfocused output, low visibility.  Holding up the light takes effort and there are people yelling at us to turn it off.  Even so, it is vitally important to keep the light turned on and pointed out into the darkness.  There are an awful lot of lost people out there.  Just try not to shine it in their eyes.