I took a late afternoon stroll into the forest, trying to find Sibley’s Farm. Walking on the Bobolink Trail, following the blue paint trail marks dotting the trees. As I wandered deeper and deeper into the forest, I noticed that the farm was not nearly where I thought it should be. And I was walking for a pretty long time. Somehow, somewhere along the way, I must have wandered off the Bobolink Trail, onto the Otter Pond Trail I had no idea how that happened. The blue dots on the trees were now yellow dots. I checked the GPS on my phone, but there was no signal and my battery was down to 5%. And the sun was beginning to set. And I tried not to panic. I tried not to think about the fact that I didn’t really know anybody in New England. And I tried not to think about getting shot by deer hunters. Or eaten by bears. Or snakes. And I tried not to think about how long it would take someone to discover my vulture-ravaged corpse. And I tried not to notice that I seemed to be wandering in circles. But maybe, if I walked exactly the right number of circles, I would get incredibly lucky and that a miracle would happen and the yellow dots on the trees would turn into blue dots and I would somehow find my way back to the parking lot where my car would be waiting for me and maybe I could then reward myself with dinner at a Thai restaurant because I probably would have earned it. And somehow, moments before sundown, that miracle did occur. I thanked the universe or whoever was listening for my good fortune. When I returned to the car, I turned on the radio and someone was interviewing Sarah Huckabee Sanders. She was ranting about the attempted coup by the Democrats, encouraged by liberal media, to take down the president. And she would not stop talking. On and on, she went. About treason. And wiretapping. And obstruction. It was then that I realized that getting lost and not found in strange forest was probably the least of my worries.
The Lost Pedestrian 