Reality Reconstruction

Lost

Once I was on this backpacking trip with a friend of mine. We’d planned this trip out for a few weeks, and had been really looking forward to it. It wasn’t a loop trip, which meant that we had to find somebody to drop us off at the trailhead, so that when we came out a week later our car would be there. We had decided to hike over this pass that was relatively tough, so we had to get in shape physically.

We also had to plan for a bit of cross-country, off trail hiking. We only had so many days off of work, and the particular semi-loop we wanted to do was a bit of a stretch. It was feasible given our time frame, but we would have had to hike quite a few miles every day, which wouldn’t have given us much time for fishing.

Our guidebook listed a “shortcut” that cut across a small pass, and saved us about ten miles of hiking. It seemed, (like most things do) good enough on paper, so we figured we’d give it a go.

Only when we got to the “shortcut” it involved walking over this huge field of large boulders. And when I say huge field, I mean like three or football fields huge. And the boulders were between the size of your desk, and your car. And, it was slightly up hill. Not only that but every third or fourth boulder would “move” slightly when you stepped on it, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.

About a third of the way through this “shortcut,” I looked up to see my friend just barely within shouting distance ahead of me. Suddenly I started to feel anxious. What happened if I slipped on one of these unstable boulders and snapped my ankle? I might slip into a crevice between them and who knows how long before anybody found me? As I was carrying about a fifty-pound pack, each step was becoming more and more dangers. I looked up at my friend, and back down to the dirt trail below, which was still within view.

“Hey” I shouted. I waited. I shouted again. Finally my friend turned to look.

“I’m going around!” I wasn’t sure if he heard me or not, but I went back down toward the dirt trail. I wasn’t looking forward to hiking the extra ten miles around the next set up mountains, but it seemed better than possible snapping ankle.

What happened after that is something I’ll never forget.

Once I went on this date with a girl. It had taken me quite a while to get up the courage to ask her out. Finally I did, and she happily agreed. I figured I’d impress her with my culinary knowledge, and take her to a Vietnamese-French restaurant. The only place where I’d actually eaten snails, er, escargot. I had everything planned out. Next to this restaurant was a pretty decent cafe, and they were all within a few miles of her apartment. I had everything planned. I’d pick her up, take her to this nice restaurant, we’d walk over to the cafe, and I’d impress her with my stimulating conversation skills, and then take her home. If I were lucky she’d ask me in for a cup of coffee. (Whatever that means.)

I picked her up, told her all about how wonderful this restaurant was on the way there. Only when we got there, the place was gone. Burned to the ground. She looked at me with a, “now what?” look on her face.

I had this roommate in college who was a computer programmer. I always wondered why those guys would spend all night long programming, and typing in code. I never really understand how to program, despite taking a class in BASIC while I was in high school many years ago.

He explained that a programmer has to plan for all possible events, and come up with a way for the software to handle everything. He was trained well by his professor. He would write some code, present it to his prof, and the prof would do all kinds of things that he hadn’t expected, in order to crash the program. His particular favorite was to randomly type in as many keystrokes as possible, until the program just froze.

All the students in his class quickly learned that because you never know what is going to happen, you have to plan for everything, and then test it out. No matter how much you plan, there are still things that can come up that you didn’t expect, so you need to go back and program that into the software as well.

Biologists will say that the reason that the human species is so incredibly prolific is that we are incredibly flexible. You can travel to any remote corner of the world, any environment, any food source, and there’s a chance that humans have no only lived there, but thrived there. Caves, cliffs, houses made from ice, deserts, rainforests. We seem to have some incredibly rich and complex circuitry programmed into our collective human brain that makes us incredibly responsive to whatever happens.

An evolutionary biologist will tell you that just like my roommate kept presenting his computer program to his professor over and over again, every generation of humans has produced an iteration slightly better equipped than the previous.

A theologian or a deist will tell you our Creator endowed us with such incredible circuitry simply because that’s who She is.

Of course, my own personal circuitry seemed to be taking the night off, as I stared back at my date, for a while, and then just figured we’d skip the restaurant, and go straight to the café. They have food at café’s, right? The date didn’t come out as planned, in large part because I didn’t have a plan B, nor did I check with the restaurant (e.g. make reservations like any normal person would have), or at least drive by the place to make sure it was still there.

And when I came back down to the dirt trail, and started walking, it really started to sink in. I was all alone, in the middle of the wilderness, with no cell phone, and no way of communicating with anybody. Since we hadn’t planned on taking the long way around, we hadn’t purchased any maps or checked out any guidebooks for that particular area. I only had a couple of large mountain peaks as my guideline, and a trail that may or may not fork off into other trails. I basically had two large mountains to my left, that I had to walk around, and not only find the meadow that was between them, but find my friend who would be hopefully be waiting for me.

It took me about six hours to finally meet up with my friend again, and I was physically and emotionally exhausted. Luckily, the contour of the mountains and the meadow, and also the fact that there was a decent spring running up the middle made it fairly straightforward.

But during those six hours, I had some pretty interesting conversations with myself. Something I shall never forget.

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