I don’t remember the first time I got lost, but I remember every time after that.
I’ve held tight to a lifetime of under-knowing my way. Though getting lost may have robbed me of time and pride, it has given me more than it’s taken.
When I was younger, I struggled to embrace the reality of not knowing where I was. However, I was always with friends, so maybe not recognizing my surroundings while surrounded by friends was never alarming. Each of us waited for the other to pronounce being lost, but it never came.
On Starmount, in Tallahassee, Florida, nineteen seventy-seven, we knew every blade of grass growing between the backdoor of each house, through the great field, around Alligator Pond, and into the dark woods. That should have been the first lesson of getting lost. The more you know about your path, the more likely you’ll take it for granted or become bored with it and wander off.
That happened daily, so maybe because of the constancy of my early disorientation, being lost was less a warning and more a calling. We got turned around more often than we admitted to in that vast swampy woods between the cul-de-sac at Starmount and the Tallahassee Mall.
Lost lesson number one. The thing about being lost is that if you’re not really interested in getting found, lost is just a word.
1985, somewhere between Dorothy Molter’s cabin on Knife Lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and the Man Chain lakes in Canada’s Quetico Provincial Park. The summer after high school, my pal, Mark McCarthy, and I took our first swipe at wilderness canoeing and navigating. We had paper maps, compasses, permits, and seven days to find our way in and out of that boreal playground. Maps look easy to follow when you bury your head in them but raise your eyes above the map to see how large a lake is and how small a point of land can be, and things can go south quickly. Well, they can go north, south, east, and west, all simultaneously and quickly.
We stayed steady on the first couple of days, building confidence in our abilities to navigate around islands and through small passages. That confidence met its match while resting along a pretty little creek draining from one lake to another. In between handfuls of GORP trail mix and Kool-Aid™, I stared across the small, round lake ahead of us.
I watched Mark stare at the map and then out at the lake, back and forth, until I couldn’t take it any longer.
“What?” I said.
“That lake is small and round,” Mark replied.
“Yeah, so?”
“Well, on the map, the lake is pretty damn big and not so round.” That would be the only true and obvious piece of knowledge we would own for the next few days. After deciding we were lost on that end of the portage trail, we hiked back to the beginning of the creek to see if we were lost on that end too. We were.
Unfortunately, the lake on that side also looked completely different from the map. That was my first of about thirty trips into canoe country, so my most seasoned advice was,
“let’s keep going until we see something we recognize.”
We moved forward for three days until we lucked out, and the land and water before us matched the topographic paper in our canoes. We both felt frustrated and unnerved at being so turned around. Looking back now, having a hard deadline of when we had to be out of the wilderness made being lost more threatening. Knowing where we were on the map gave us some power to control time. And that seemed helpful.
Lost lesson number two. Panic and frustration make getting lost the center of the journey rather than just a part of it.
1992, deep in the woods along the Joyce-Kilmer Slick Back Rock Wilderness. A friendly first-date Sunday outing turned into a three-day Twilight Zone of dwindling deer trails, familiar places, and leafy rugs pulled from beneath our feet.
My friend Donna and I bounded down the trail from the parking lot, spurred on by a perfect October morning and the best of what the Cherokee National Forest offered on a snappy fall day. We paid little attention to the winding, intersecting trails that fell down the hill toward a creek, ending at an odd pile of old railroad ties and bent iron.
We spent the day climbing hills, hopping stones across the river, and walking miles of backcountry trails. We even set up a perfect trail lunch, complete with a single burner stove and the fixings of a restaurant meal. Then, as the sun cast from the other side of the sky, we made our way back off the mountain, down into that river valley where the pile of old rails lay. We knew the rails were only about fifteen minutes from the parking lot. We had plenty of light left. Plenty of time.
We ambled up the small trail toward the parking lot, but it ended in just a few minutes, tapering into open woods. It was a head-scratcher.
“What happened to the trail?” Donna asked.
“We must have taken a game trail by mistake,” I replied. “A real trail wouldn’t just end like this.” So back to the stack of rails to start over again. Sure enough, there was another trail just yards away from the mistaken one.
“Aw, that’s it,” I said, with the confidence only a lost person would project. Then, after about five minutes, that trail, too, emptied into nothing.
“What the fuck?” I said, semi under my breath. Certain words carry the day in times of ridiculousness, and cuss words are like fine wines in those moments. We repeated our process for the next two hours, back down to the rail stack and back up a trail that refused to take us home.
Night and the fall temperatures fell fast.
The uncertainty of which trail to take back to the parking lot turned into the certainty that we would sleep on the ground that night.
We felt too tired to worry. It was slightly funny and so ridiculous that the reality of a simple day trip had become something different, something unknown.
The following two days were a blur of trails, backtracking, trying to hike out the opposite direction, and even climbing a cliff to get a better view. It was Donna’s first real wilderness adventure. And even though she was, by Monday morning, the absent manager of a huge Nashville bookstore, she was cool-headed and warm-spirited.
Lost in the wilderness was a challenge we worked together to solve. We stayed near water, rationed the large lunch portions from the first day, walked grid lines, and burned cerebral fuel on the whys and what’s of our lostness.
On Tuesday afternoon, we started again at that stack of rails and ties we believed sat only fifteen minutes from the car. We had been walking a random series of connector trails that initially gave us hope but then dashed it reasonably quickly. But like a combination lock, one more try, and we hit on the correct sections of the little trails. They miraculously ended in another trail and another, ultimately opening up into a larger well-worn path, dumping us into the parking lot within minutes.
We were gone long enough to feel embarrassed, but our experience seemed so bizarre that we thought there might be other powers at work making us lost. Plus, we kinda’ enjoyed it.
Lost lesson number three. Becoming lost is harder on the psyche than being lost.
Present-day, Nashville, TN, writing songs, books, blogs. The life of a creative is ninety-nine percent “Why am I here” and one percent, “oh, yeah, that’s right.” Even though I’ve lived those percentages in my professional life for decades now, how the ninety-nine percent is worth the one still escapes reasonable thought. But it is.
I am forever lost at the beginning of a blank page, but curiously at the end of thousands of words as well. How can a great song, not saying those come around all the time, be a letdown? How can the end of a sharply worded essay or even full-throated memoir leave me wondering what it’s all worth and what comes next?
I think the most challenging part of a creative life is melding the worlds of commercial appeal, monetary gain, and the soul happiness that comes with producing work despite all else.
Talking to others about it, even other creatives doesn’t always put me back on track. The minute you talk about the need to make money or gain some measure of social proof with your work, you run into voices echoing words like sellout, superficial, and copycat. And the minute you talk about making art for art’s sake, the voices spit words like dreamer, naïve, and self-absorbed.
That brings a more fervent danger. So be careful not to measure your creative worthiness and success by someone else’s ruler.
It’s a forever eighth-grade existence. You want to stand out. You want to fit in. You want to be noticed. You want to work with no one watching over you. It’s hard to have both in the eighth grade. And it’s also hard to have both forty years later.
Life has lost me along rivers, in mountain valleys, and on more back roads than I can count, even with Google Maps™ mounted on my dash. But being that kind of lost doesn’t come close to the sense of lost I feel when I foolishly cede the ground of personal purpose to social media metrics, the subjective opinions of others, or the green-eyed monster of jealousy. Even the North star isn’t true when you’re that lost.
Lost lesson number four. Nothing will make you feel lost quicker than following someone else’s path to a destination that is not your own.
I would love to hear what you thought about this essay and if it brought any personal memories or stories to mind. Please feel free to leave a comment. I’ll answer all of them. I would love to strike up a conversation about this piece and your thoughts. Please consider sharing this newsletter with a friend. Thank you. - Mark
Wow, I can so relate. Always terrified of being lost because I have no, none, absolutely no sense of direction. And now I do art and feel lost all the time.
Another insightful great story ! Thank you for sharing