A Walk in the Woods

"Oh, between losing you and coming upon the mud slick, I tried to get to a lake I saw
from the mountain."
"Stephen, you didn't."
"Well, I was real thirsty, you know, and it didn't look too far. So I plunged off into the
woods. Not real smart, right?"
"No."
"Yeah, well, I learned that real fast because I hadn't gone more than half a mile before
I was totally lost. I mean totally lost. It's weird, you know, because you're thinking all
you've got to do is go downhill to the water and come back the same way, and that
shouldn't be too tough as long as you pay attention. But the thing is, Bryson, there's
nothing to pay attention to out there. It's just one big woods. So when I realized I didn't
have the faintest idea where I was I thought, 'OK, well, I got lost by going downhill, so I'd
better go back up.' But suddenly there's a lot of uphills, and a lot of downhills too, and it's
real confusing. So I went up and up and up until I knew I'd gone a lot farther than I'd
come, and then I thought, 'Well, Stephen, you stupid piece of shit'--'cause I was getting a
little cross with myself by this time, to tell you the truth-- I thought, 'you must have gone
too far, you jackass,' so I want back down a ways, and that didn't work, so then I tried
going sideways for a while and--well, you get the picture."
"You should never leave the trail, Stephen."
"Oh, now there's a timely piece of advice, Bryson. Thank you so much. That's like
telling somebody who's died in a crash, 'Drive safely now.' ''
"Sorry."
"Forget it. I think maybe I'm still a little, you know, unsettled. I thought I was done for.
Lost, no water--and you with the chocolate chip cookies."
"So how did you get back to the trail?"
"It was a miracle, I swear to God. Just when I was about to lie down and give myself
to the wolves and bobcats, I look up and there's a white blaze on a tree and I look down
and I'm standing on the AT. At the mudslick, as a matter of fact. I sat down and had
three smokes one after the other, just to calm myself down, and then I thought, 'Shit, I
bet Bryson's walked by here while I've been blundering around in the woods, and he'll
never come back because he's already checked this section of trail.' And then I began to
worry that I never would see you again. So I really was glad when you turned up. To tell
you the truth, I've never been so glad to see another person in my whole life, and that
includes some naked women."
There was something in his look.
"You want to go home?" I asked.
He thought for a moment. "Yeah. I do."
"Me, too."
So we decided to leave the endless trail and stop pretending we were mountain men
because we weren't. At the bottom of Chairback Mountain, four miles farther on, there
was a dirt logging road. We didn't know where it went other than that it must go
somewhere. An arrow on the edge of my map pointed south to Katahdin Iron Works, site
of an improbable nineteenth-century factory in the woods and now a state historical
monument. According to my Trail Guide there was public parking at the old iron works, so
there must be a road out. At the bottom of the mountain, we watered up at a brook that