The Wild
Going Through Old Notebooks Part 33: On being lost and found.
A few years ago, on Valentines Day, an elderly couple in California went out for a quick evening stroll near the Point Reyes National Seashore and found themselves lost, off trail, in the dark. Unable to find their way back again, they spent more than a week trapped in the dense coastal underbrush, holding hands, hallucinating from hunger, and surviving on small sips of water from a muddy puddle.
Reading about this couple made me think of the point-and-shoot selfies of Christopher McCandless, the doomed subject of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. These photos reveal a young man in a plaid shirt and patched jeans, gradually wasting away. He would never see the photographs he took, never see another human being again. The photographs were developed only after his death. That wild look in his eye. The spooky elation. These images have a heartbeat, like the beating heart of a bird, caught in the hand.
I had been dreaming of birds lately, of injured birds, which I then tried to rescue. I succeeded and didn’t succeed. Warblers, vireos, wrens. They grazed my shoulders with their spray of feathers. That twitch of wings against my palm. They couldn’t always be rescued. They fell prey to dream-logic. They disappeared, became gnats instead, too small to grab hold of. But in one dream, at least, a bird that was cold and deflated could be warmed and spring to life again. Hope was not always lost.
In the first story, the couple held hands and clung to one another in the dark woods. Concealed by vegetation, they were invisible to the search helicopters whirring overhead, until finally they were found, nine days later, by a search team’s golden retriever—hypothermic but still alive. They could hardly believe it. They were lifted out of the thicket by air.
This post has been adapted from a notebook entry originally shared in 2022.
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