The question was whether to turn back or go ahead. The way ahead was uncertain. I couldn't see the trail picking up on the other side of the landslip and I knew it would be a difficult task to cross the rugged face of the scar, which was the only way to continue. It would take as much energy as I had already expended, maybe more, and there was no assurance that I would be able to find the trail again in the trees on the other side. I might just be plunging deeper into the wilderness with night coming on.
I thought about turning back and re-tracing the broken trail I had just traversed with such difficulty, but I knew with a terrible certainty that if I tried that, I would die. My hands were cramping up like claws and would be almost useless. My arms and legs were shaking and I was absolutely sure that I would fall if I tried to go back across three or four more of those muddy vertical rock faces, especially in the dark.
So I gathered my strength and continued on across the field of boulders, crawling like an ant, an insignificant dot on the flank of a mountain. I was impressed by the immense forces that had raised these rocks thousands of feet into the sky in the first place and now had torn down the mountainside. I finally made it across into the trees, winded, cold, and feeling at the end of my strength, but now there was a different problem. Where was the trail? There was no sign of it. Vague paths seemed to lead me deeper into darkness, into brambles, into impenetrable cool thickets like those surrounding cursed castles in fairy tales. I stumbled up and down the mountainside, my face and hands scratched by branches, hoping to intersect with the true path, but getting more and more hopelessly lost and frantic as night crept near. I had to get out of there. I knew it was a very bad idea to attempt to spend the night in the forest, unprepared. People die of exposure out here all the time. I noticed for the first time that air on a mountain flows at different times of day like a mass of water. Cold air seemed to be rushing downhill all around me, flooding the bottomless canyon and chilling my blood, dragging my spirits further down.
I dread that word "lost" and tried to deny it to myself, but I had to admit it. A whole host of unfamiliar sensations and thoughts came over me as I watched the shadows of the black trees march down the canyons. My heart pounded, my hands shook. The forest seemed to be speaking to me, pleading with me, calling to me. "Come," it said in a witch's voice of a million leaves rasping together. "Here is an easy end to your pain. Join us! Jump! Take a run and launch yourself off this cliff into this canyon. It will all be over in an instant. We'll take care of everything." And oddly enough, that plea sounded appealing and reasonable to some part of me, the part that was terrified, the part that just wanted this awful moment to be over.
But another sliver of my brain stepped back, and recognized that I was experiencing the common human psychological state known as panic. The Greeks, with their talent for naming things, called it panic because they believed it was a visit from the nature god Pan, goat-footed, flute-playing Pan, who can inspire mortals but also has the power to terrify them, overwhelming their senses with the awesome forces at his command, causing them to do foolish things and die.
I felt the presence too of the witches from the old European and Russian folk tales, fearsome figures who represent the dual nature of the primeval forest. The heroes of those tales learn that the witches, like the forest, can quickly break, destroy, and consume you, but, if you learn how to appease and honor them, they can also support and protect you like a kindly grandmother, hiding you from enemies and providing you food and shelter. At the moment, the forest was turning its nastiest and most seductive witchy face to me. There was something alive and evil and hungry out there, like the witch in "Hansel and Gretel" but stretched out over the whole forest. I was in big trouble.
I stopped and took a breath. That simple act brought a sudden surge of clarity and common sense to my panicked brain that was causing me to rush about like a terrified animal. I realized I had not been breathing properly, that my gasping and panting had deprived my brain of oxygen. Together with my exhaustion and the sudden chill, I was in a mild state of shock, blood rushing away from the head and extremities to preserve a core of life force and heat. I took a few deep breaths and could feel blood returning to my skull.
Instead of thrashing around pointlessly, I took in my surroundings and got in touch with something ancient and instinctive in me, a reliable inner sense of what to do in dangerous situations.
Just then, a voice came into my head, clear as sunlight. "Trust the path," it said. I truly heard this, as a spoken sentence that seemed to be coming from a deep part of me. But I smiled, scoffing at the idea. That's the problem, I said to myself. There is no path. I trusted the Forest Service trail and look where it got me. I've been looking for the path for half an hour and it's just not here. And in the larger sense, in the big picture of my life, over a period of years, I had also lost sight of the true way.
"Trust the path," said the voice again, patient and true. In that voice was a certainty that there must be a path, and that it could be relied upon to do its job.
I looked down and saw a little groove in the weeds — an ant trail. There, oblivious to my panic, ants were going about their tiny business in an endless column. With my eyes I followed the ant trail, the only path I could see.
It led me to a slightly deeper groove in the underbrush, a little trail used by field mice and other small creatures, almost a tunnel through the brambles. And soon that guided me to a broader path, a zigzagging deer trail that climbed the mountainside in easy stages. I started putting one foot in front of the other, following that trail. It led me out of the labyrinth, like Ariadne's thread leading Theseus out of the maze. In a few steps I came to a clearing, a mountain meadow were the sun was still shining. Across the meadow I found a well-maintained trail and realized I was back on an official Forest Service path, the right road, the way back.
As I walked along, calmer now, the way out of my personal confusion became clearer. "Trust the path," my voice had said, and I took that to mean "Keep marching ahead to the next stage of life. Don't try to go backwards, don't allow yourself to get paralyzed or panicked, just keep marching. Trust that your instincts are good and natural and will lead you to a happier, safer place." Then the hiking trail merged with a fire road, wide as two firetrucks, and in half an hour I was back on the highway where my blessed Volkswagen was parked. The sun was still blazing on the Western horizon, though I knew back in those canyons it was already deepest night, and I could have died there.
As I looked back at the mountains and forest that had just held me in their jaws, I realized I'd been given a gift with that phrase, Trust the Path, and I pass it on to you. It means that when you are lost and confused, you can trust the journey that you have chosen, or that has chosen you. It means others have been on the journey before you, the writer's journey, the storyteller's journey. You're not the first, you're not the last. Your experience of it is unique, your viewpoint has value, but you're also part of something, a long tradition that stretches back to the very beginnings of our race. The journey has it own wisdom, the story knows the way. Trust the journey. Trust the story. Trust the path.
As Dante says, at the beginning of the Inferno, "In the midst of life's journey I found myself in a dark wood, for the right path was lost." I think we're all doing that, in our various ways, finding ourselves through the journey of our writing lives. Looking for our Selves in the dark wood. I wish you luck and adventure and I hope you find yourself on your journey. Bon voyage.