The find provided some much-needed encouragement, especially as storm bursts had started to infiltrate our rain jackets. Next, we followed our compasses through a pine barren deeply carpeted in moss, which felt like walking on green clouds, and then boulder-hopped across an ancient glacial moraine, quickly locating two checkpoints. With each find, our hearts rose. Our searches became more efficient, too, as we coordinated more seamlessly. Feeling confident, we took a navigational gamble, cutting across the upper slopes of a thickly wooded mountain and ignoring a circuitous gravel road below. As we spiked the next checkpoint, we whooped at our success. I couldn’t help smiling as we soon crossed paths with a team we had leapfrogged, which took the easier but longer way and was still searching for the checkpoint.
As we dropped into a tight river valley devoid of any official trails, the storm intensified, but I didn’t mind. Despite being soaked, we found that if we maintained a decent pace, exertion kept us warm. And finally I was achieving the deep focus that was so central to my love of orienteering. With the heightened awareness of navigation, everything appeared extra beautiful. Against the smoky clouds, falling orange and yellow leaves shone like sparks cast from a fire. A cerulean blue crayfish crawling across the path seemed like a fairy-tale creature, as would, later, a six-point stag, its antlers pink from shedding velvet. I felt so merged with the landscape and the map that I sensed two checkpoints, one that hung over a river and another tucked into a ravine, before I even saw them.
When you’re navigating well, you and the map and the world merge. You become hyperaware of the slope of the ground, the bends in a valley, how many meters and kilometers your footsteps have paced out. It’s an immersion in oneself and nature, the interior and exterior worlds — harking back to when navigation was essential to humanity’s survival as hunter-gatherers. Your mind attunes itself to magnetic north almost as much as your compass does.
11:36 a.m.
We were pushing toward the end of the river valley, enjoying the burbling quiet that filled the lulls in the storm, when Helene’s next band roared in, thrashing the hardwoods around us. For the last four hours, I intermittently heard the tremendous pops of roots ripping out of sodden ground and booms of trunks snapping. Suddenly, I heard a thunderous crack above. I knew what it was even before I looked up and saw it: the top half of a dead maple shearing off.
I ran, shouting. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that MacRae and Jed had instinctively scattered, too. But the trunk was coming down at them like a giant arm, its branches spread like the fingers of a hand swatting at a fly. Some of the smaller lower branches were even snapping across Jed. If Jed was crushed, the situation would be desperate. Assuming MacRae and I could stabilize him, the nearest road was still at least a mile away, and there was no way we could carry him out. And even if our emergency beacon could manage to connect to a satellite through the clouds, no helicopter would fly in this weather.
