At the end of the week, look at the twenty-one problems you have listed. How many of them make you curious enough to go and look for an answer?
The Fourth Key
The Wild
Nature is a misty place where soul and world, inside and outside, meet, and become one
When I finally admitted, ‘Okay, we are lost,’ I still thought it was funny.
Paola did too. It was the month of May and the sun was shining. Everywhere I looked, I could see that luminous frail green that survives only for a handful of days, when the sap has just begun to stir within trees and shrubs, making them yawn and stretch, not quite awakening them just yet. It gets stronger by the hour – and darker. That shade of green does not exist in southern Italy: I had never seen it before moving to England. It makes me wistful. It is destined for an early death, to fade away and yield to less subtle hues. I was wandering along, thinking these thoughts and thinking how clever I was to be thinking them, which is probably why we got lost.
Another reason we got lost was Paola. My wife and I complement each other in many ways. For example, while I am inclined towards the big picture, she is fascinated by detail. I tend to like people, she likes certain individuals. She has been patiently teaching me the importance of the small, the local, the contingent. I have learned from her, but she is still more talented than me. Come springtime, a walk to a café with Paola can be excruciatingly slow: she will stop for every flower born in a crack of the asphalt and every new leaf, for every robin and every blackbird, and will comment on the lovely way a fern I hadn’t noticed curls its fresh blades. In the woods, her fondness for small marvels makes her stray from the path. It is my job to keep us on track, but on this occasion I had followed her, absorbed in contemplation. I was looking at the forest, she was looking at the trees; no one was looking at the path.
‘Are you sure?’ she asked.
‘Have you been on this bridleway before?’
She glanced at the oaks, at the rocks, at the shrubs. ‘No,’ she said.
I brandished the walk I had printed off the Internet. ‘We are supposed to be on our way back, on a path we walked earlier this morning.’
‘We are not.’
‘Exactly.’
Paola said, ‘You have a compass.’
‘Yeah,’ I admitted, in my most noncommittal voice.
‘But?’
‘But I left it in the car. Besides, it’d be kind of useless. We have no idea where we are, so we don’t know what direction we need to walk in to get back to our starting point.’
‘Are you for real?’
I waved the printout once again. ‘If we had stuck to the route without taking detours, we’d know where we are.’
‘The sun was on our left this morning.’
‘Wasn’t it on our right?’
She looked again at the woods, as if she was seeking their advice. ‘We could always double back.’
‘Agreed. I think I know where we took a wrong turn.’
We turned off the bridleway to follow a narrower side path, a barely visible strip among ferns, which then gave way to a larger path running beside a stream. Both of us remembered the stream; neither of us remembered how we had got there the first time. ‘But I was sure…’ I mumbled.
The sun was still high in the sky, and we were not worried yet.
We sat by the stream, and drank from our bottles. Paola teased me good-naturedly for not checking the compass.
‘You are the one who kept leaving the path,’ I said, to defend myself.
‘I allow myself to get sidetracked because I trust you to keep us on the right track.’
‘Blame it on the fairies, then. They’re planning to snatch us and take us to Faerie.’
‘I wouldn’t mind visiting Faerie.’
‘Me too.’ And it seemed perfectly possible that we were there already. The stream in the woods felt very remote. The only sounds we could hear were the trickling of water, the crackling of leaves and the singing of birds.
I took out my phone. I hadn’t had a signal for a while, since before getting lost. I still had no signal.
‘Mine’s dead,’ Paola said. Her phone is always out of juice, not because she uses it often but because she charges it so rarely.
‘Any ideas about what we should do next?’ I asked.
‘We keep walking until we hit either a road, a spot we recognize, or one where we have a signal. If we do find a signal, we call the rangers.’
‘That would be embarrassing.’
‘Better than dying out here.’
‘As soon as we find a signal, we use Google Maps to get an idea of where we are, and then walk to the nearest road.’
We were having a great time. We were in the New Forest, rather than the depths of Tolkien’s Mirkwood, and the possibility of actual death was far lower than on a packed Tube train in central London. The woods of the New Forest might look dark and deep to city-dwellers like Paola and me, but they are tame, and empty of predators. We had a good three hours of light left, and my phone had enough charge. Our being lost was real, and yet it was also make-believe, because we were not actually in danger: the worst that could happen was being lectured by a forest ranger dragged away from his comfy chair. We left the stream and kept walking, with that congenial feeling you have when you can pretend that you are on an adventure, but without the raging torrents, sheer precipices and orc attacks that a proper adventure entails.
After an hour or so we still didn’t have the faintest idea where we were. We had crossed the bridleway again, and then walked into heathland, and then, somehow, ended up in a different part of the forest, with fewer oak trees and more beeches. We hadn’t met a single human being; perhaps we were indeed in Faerie. I checked my phone at intervals, but never found any signal. And the phone was running out of charge faster than I expected. I had forgotten that when they can’t find a steady signal, phones stretch desperately in search of one, eating up their charge like locusts. I checked my phone again.
‘No joy?’ asked Paola, the cheerfulness gone from her voice.
‘Nope.’
We kept walking, pretending there was a principle behind our choice of paths. We went deeper and deeper into the woods, getting more lost with every step. Woods are bigger on the inside: the fantasy writer Robert Holdstock, in his novel Mythago Wood, created a complete mythological world set in a three-square-mile piece of woodland, within which magical realms are hidden. But you don’t need magic to get lost in a patch of Hampshire woodland three miles square. You can wander for hours without finding a way out, although you probably won’t be in much danger.
We certainly weren’t in danger. So why was I beginning to feel afraid?
The shadows grew longer, the air cooler. The breeze had become a light wind. Paola and I pulled our ponchos out of our backpacks: they wouldn’t be much use if it got cold, but they offered some protection from the wind. We were not having fun any more. The prospect of spending the night in the woods, without a sleeping bag, without a fire, without so much as a flashlight, loomed larger. We had agreed to forget Google Maps, and to call the rangers at the first opportunity, but we still couldn’t find a signal. And my phone’s battery was draining fast.
We might stumble upon a road at any moment, but we might also not.
What was the worst that could happen? A night spent on the forest floor; and then, tomorrow, we would encounter other walkers. Or perhaps the owner of the B&B where we were staying would notice that our beds had not been slept in and would work out that those stupid Londoners had got themselves lost. The night would be cold, but not dangerously so. We would keep walking as long as we could, then wrap ourselves in our picnic blanket, and get a few hours of sleep. It wouldn’t be that bad. It wouldn’t be that good either.