Out of the woods and in the clear.

Getting lost in the woods isn't an experience I can recommend, not from going through it twice in one day. A cold, wet, cloudless day in unfamiliar terrain with few major landmarks and not a lot of people around - my family was out on those trails for six hours and saw only one other person that whole time - makes realizing you've been walking down the wrong path for almost twenty minutes something that's chilling in a way that has nothing to do with the weather. And it happened twice.

We were able to figure out where we were because of the iPhone's compass app and the trail map indicating where power lines cut through the forest, so each time it happened, we only lost forty minutes. Twenty going the wrong way, and twenty retracing our steps back to where we needed to go. If we'd been out in May or July, there wouldn't have been the same miserable urgency to figure out exactly where we went wrong as there'd been today. We got back to the car about fifteen minutes before sunset, which meant about forty-five minutes to dark.

It was beautiful, in any measure. Not too far up north along the Hudson valley, deep into the mountains, more nature than you'd think so relatively close to Manhattan. A deer turned and looked my way when I whistled at it. There were crows off in the distance, and perfectly reflective lakes, with a tiny island just big enough for a couple of short-slung trees. We ate turkey sandwiches on a rock outcropping and watched the layers of clouds drift along. And back in Manhattan, with warm feet and dry clothes, I'm glad I went, and not just to say that I've come back.