by Will
This is based on a true story.
The crunch of the snow under my boots kept me company and the stars shone warmly above. The grey light was falling beyond the pine trees, ever so distant. Somewhere under the North Star was a fireplace and a warm bed.
In the early afternoon I’d left home on my Yamaha Bravo, pulling a trailer sled. It was not a very fast machine, but it was a workhorse favored by the Inuit for being dependable where no car or truck could go.
Woe to him who trusts in machines.
Three quarters of the way across the lake I’d gotten bogged down in slush. With each pump of the throttle the tread dug deeper. Water must have gotten into the engine. The Bravo stopped and did not start again.
Grace lake was about 4 miles wide. To the north was a road and houses running along a strip of land between the lake and a river. To the east was a small airport and a little bit further, the town. To the south were trees for many miles. All this trouble for a stupid tree. I had been planning to ride across the lake, harvest a Christmas tree, and pull it home in time for supper. My new plan was to get home without dying of hypothermia.
After two hours, I gave up trying to restart the engine and started walking. It was snowing. Earlier that day the temperature had been so mild, I hadn’t bothered putting on snow pants. Riding a snowmobile in jeans was fine, but walking through slush and snow was not. I was wet and coated with slush up to my ankles, and progress was slow. The snow was falling heavily and drifting. Before long the trail left by the snowmobile was difficult to see. I had a GPS, an early commercial model.
The Magellan 300 was not like the handhelds we have today with colorful topographic maps. It had a simple black and white display with a limited range of symbols. It was not capable of showing a map, but it could tell you what direction each satellite was in relative to your position, in case you needed to know. I selected HOME from navigation memory. A waypoint arrow appeared indicating which direction to walk in.
The wind picked up. I could not see far. It was getting colder. After some time I decided to check the navigation arrow. The device was off. Apparently it didn’t like being cold. That was bad. I put it inside my jacket against my skin for a few minutes.
The Magellan only stayed on for a few minutes, just long enough to acquire satellites and then check the HOME arrow. I was dismayed to find I had drifted almost 90 degrees off course. Over the next several hours this happened several times as the device would only stay on briefly. It is very hard to walk in a straight line in a blizzard.
Eventually the screen would merely flicker when I pushed the power button. My feet were numb and heavy with ice stuck to my boots. In desperation I took the AA batteries out and warmed them inside my glove for a while. If I couldn’t keep the GPS running I was going to wander aimlessly and die.
I inserted the batteries. The symbols on the frozen screen appeared faintly but did not disappear. Thank God. I went to saved waypoints. The word HOME did not appear. The list was blank. How could this be?, I thought, despair beginning to return.
Turns out those early GPSs had a primitive form of memory that goes blank if batteries are removed for more than a few minutes. The coordinates of HOME were gone like tears in a blizzard. A minute later the device shut off. It would not turn on again.
Game over.
If I just keep walking I’ll eventually get off this lake, I thought. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll last though.
I said a prayer. I’m not the kind of person who prays every day. Just get me home, please, God. They say if you believe, anything is possible. I wasn’t sure if I believed, but it can’t hurt to try.
Daylight was fading. In the swirling snow I perceived something fly quickly overhead, like a shadow.
Have you ever watched tall grass blowing in the wind? Sometimes the waves make it look as if something dark is racing through the field, but this is only a construct of perception.
Maybe what I saw was an optical illusion, an aberration in the chaotic patterns of dense snowflakes, though I’m not certain it was my imagination.
Soon it was dark. The clouds opened and the snowfall had diminished enough to see a few stars.
My knowledge of constellations is almost non-existent. I do remember something Mom taught me: The big Dipper points to the North Star. The dipper end does, not the handle. I could see three bright stars in an irregular line. That was the handle. From that I could identify part of the bowl, the rest of it being obscured by clouds. In my imagination I completed the picture and then drew a line off of the end of the bowl. How far would it be to the North Star? I wasn’t sure but knew it wasn’t very far. I mentally marked a spot on the clouds, estimating the location of Polaris. Then I traced straight downward to the horizon. That was north, I figured.
As I approached the frozen cattails at the edge of the lake I was nearly unable to walk. A light approached, and then the sound of a two stroke engine. I shouted for the rider’s attention. The light came close and slowed.
Loved it. Great stuff.