I've strayed too far off the beaten track – but there are degrees of lostness
Two years ago this month, I was in Ukraine’s Carpathian Mountains, as part of an overland journey from the Arctic to Crimea.
My local guide, Maks, ate up the miles with his long, loping stride, a cigarette permanently attached to his lips, as he regaled me with tales of Hutsul warriors, banshee witches and snakes that transformed into dragons.
We had planned to summit Mount Hoverla, Ukraine’s highest peak, but bad weather meant a change of plan. Maks had been this way only once before, years ago, and the low cloud was making it hard to get our bearings. We were getting lost.
“There used to be some shepherds living near here,” Maks said. “Let’s ask them.”
The fog parted to reveal a dark wooden hut, with smoke rising from its chimney. Maks called out, but there was no one around, and it all started to feel a bit creepy. On the hut’s front door was a freshly carved rune, which looked like a large, spiky “Y”.
“It’s pagan,” Maks said. “Shepherds are very superstitious, and this was carved by a shaman to protect them from lightning and evil.”
“Might come in handy,” I said, “in case we bump into those banshees. But with these clouds closing in, I’m more worried about the lightning.”
Maks nodded and led us off in the most likely direction. Within an hour, we were lost.
As someone who has made a career out of long-distance walking, I’ve been lost a lot: I’ve been lost in Ukraine; I’ve been lost in the Himalayas without warm clothing or shelter; and I’ve been lost on Salisbury Plain more times than I care to remember, leading my platoon to a woodblock at night.
There are degrees of lost-ness. First there is temporary lost: that unsettling moment when you don’t spot the landmark that you expected to see. You stop to reorientate yourself, work out a new route and eventually reach your destination, albeit by a different path to the one you had planned.
Then there is proper lost, when you follow the wrong path for far too long, carry on when you should turn back, and don’t stop until it’s far too late. In these situations, you should give up on your planned destination. You just have to survive and get to somewhere safe.
The good news is that every time I’ve got lost, it has ended with a “found”. Admittedly, I haven’t always found the place that I set out for – and, sometimes, someone has had to come and find me – but it’s a soothing thought when I’m in the midst of being lost.
In this instance, we got proper lost, stumbling around on mist-shrouded ridge lines, with criss-crossing tracks making things even harder.
Eventually, we found a power line that headed downhill, and followed it along an old maintenance track. At the bottom, we waded across a river, where we asked a team of foresters if they knew a place where we could stay for the night.
They told us to follow them, until we arrived at an old cabin surrounded by saws and chains. Then four more foresters appeared from the shadows. For a moment I thought we had stumbled into a horror movie, then they cracked open some moonshine, and handed us some extremely welcome pork-and-gherkin sandwiches.
After an uproarious night of axe-throwing, singing and promises of eternal friendship, I passed out on a bunk. We didn’t make it to the summit of Hoverla, but we ended up finding a much better adventure.
It can be frustrating to be lost, and even scary, but the more it happens, the more comfortable you become with lostness. You come to accept that, sometimes, no matter how much you plan, the fog comes in, signposts go missing, and paths get washed away.
You will get lost. You just have to learn how to cope with it.
With the current pandemic, it’s been hard to work out exactly how lost we all are: if we are just temporarily lost, then we will eventually find the world we were aiming for, and everything will return to normal; but if we are proper lost, we will have to abandon those plans and find some kind of sanctuary.
And yes, who knows, we might accidentally end up finding something even better.
