July 23, 2009

Listening to NPR while making the daily commute to work is my sole consolation to make driving in L.A. traffic bearable. A few weeks ago they were interviewing a psychology professor in Morning Edition about why it is that humans can get lost so easily. According to the professor, it's because we're easily distracted and when in dense vegetation it's easy to unknowingly veer off that straight path you thought you were following. This story reminded me of a incident that happened to me in my youth. It was during the third day of a 4-day trek to Mount Pulag (this was in the 80's before vehicles could get you within a day's hike to reach the peak). My best friends and I had decided to join this climb thinking it would be a "fun" thing to do. At 4:30 the morning of the third day we had climbed the summit (and watched a spectacular sunrise with purple orange hues that I have never seen in a sunrise before) and then climbed back down for an 8-hour hike to Kabayan, Benguet where we would attend the Bendian Festival and catch our ride back to civilization the next day.

I discovered that each person will have their own pace and in long distance hikes it would difficult to stick together as a group. My best friends from high school were with me on this trip and we were usually a boisterous and inseparable bunch, but this 3-day trek took a toll on our stamina.  We tried to stick together as much as we could but after three days of hiking with full camping gear on our backs fatigue had set in.. We started to lope along by ourselves and would catch up at rest stops. It was during one o these this solitary treks that I found myself in a fork on the trail trying to decipher a trail marker left by our guides.  My friends were either several minutes ahead of me or behind me.

Left on the dirt trail was a tree branch that probably fell of one of the pine trees, with a long end and a small angled end (like a check mark). The long end was pointed to the right towards a rocky path heading down a mountain ridge. The one with the angled end was pointing towards a dirt path through a copse of tall pines and sloping down into a glade some distance away on the left. I a Boy Scout for 4 years, and I was pretty confident that I was reading the trail blaze correctly--I went left.

The path sloped down and was covered with a thick layer of pine needles making the descent slippery and difficult.  The distance to the clearing was longer than I thought and it took several minutes of trudging through the path to get to it. One thing that will strike anyone who grew up in the city when they first experience the wilderness is the eerie silence.   Here it was absolutely quiet. All I could hear were my footsteps as I trampled on the dry pine needles, my labored breathing, the jostling of my camping gear, and the low hum of the wind as it rushed past the pine trees and over the mountain.

Fatigued, I was in this trance-like state when I reached the glade.  The clearing was overgrown with underbrush mixed in with mud, twigs and pines leaves.  I had to dig my feet and brace myself to stop since gravity had pulled me to a trot down the trail.  I walked to the middle of the clearing, and under the late morning sun stopped to reorient myself.   I looked back at the way I had just gone and was surprised to see that there was more than one path that led to this clearing.  My view was partly obscured by the trees, but I could see the top of the hill where I had just climbed down from.  I looked around for any sign of where the path continued on and realized that these weren't paths at all, but channels that rains had eroded as water flowed downhill. I decided to climb back up but found that I was constantly slipping on the pine needles and made climbing back up near impossible.  I decided to veer at a slight angle as I made my way back up. Making my way around the copse of trees and brush, I was confident that I was still heading up the right general direction.

After what seemed like several minutes I stopped to see my progress but my view was obstructed by the dense vegetation.  Refusing to admit I was lost, I told myself that if I just kept going uphill I would eventually get back to the trail.  I jumped into a dense brush thinking I'd be able to make it over the hill a short distance away.  I crashed and trampled my way through determined to get to the other side.  I don't remember how long it took me to get out of the brush, but I remember stumbling and wavering as I struggled to move around.  Sweaty, tired and close to panic, I finally found my way out and saw a wide path leading to a what looked like a farmhouse up the hill in the distance.  As I walked up the hill the farmhouse's outline reminded me of Beorn's cabin in "The Hobbit".  A dog started barking as I approached a gate blocking of the dirt path. It was made of wood with barbed-wired wrapped on the top section. The dog was squat, brown, and muscular.  It's what's called in the the Mountain Province as a "native dog", fiercely loyal and noisy.  I kept my distance a few feet from the gate as it ferociously jumped up and down, barking on the other side of it. After a few seconds a figure of a man emerged from the house and trotted down towards me.

Kumusta po!" I shouted over the dog's bark.  The dog ducked just in time to avoid the man's hand as it came down to swat its head, but wasn't fast enough to dodge a kick to its hind legs.  Yelping, it skulked behind the man.  In a stern voice the man asked who I was in Ilocano.  The Ilocano dialect is the spoken language in the Mountain Province and, although I can understand it, I can't speak it with any fluency.

I asked in incomplete sentences (mixing tagalog and ilocano), "Galing kami idyay Pulag...Asaan ti Kabayan...Bendian Festival?"  He seemed to understand this and must have realized that I didn't speak Ilocano.  He pointed back towards the path I had come from muttering in the same dialect.

"Ag ngato ak?", I asked if I should go up." 

"Wen", he said gesturing in a waving motion indicating that I should make it over the ridge he was pointing to.

The farmer indicated that I should follow a dirt trail leading off the main path and climbed of towards that ridge. I thanked him and followed his instructions.  After a short hike I soon recognized I was walking on the original trail.  I came upon the tree branch that I wrongly interpreted and made my way down the correct path. The path met up with a dirt road, and from there I could smell the pinewood fires burning a short distance away. I met up with my friends and told them of my misadventure to their amusement. I also discovered that the brush I trampled through was probably some variety of poison oak. My face down to my legs were covered by a nasty rash and the nurse with us did not have any antihistamines in her first-aid kit, so I settled for an uncomfortable night with with just some Tylenol to ease my pain.  (It took over a week for the rash to go away using a treatment of bathing in boiled guava leaves.) The following day we celebrated the Bendian festival with the kind people of Kabayan before riding in jeepneys in a bumpy ride back to the city of Baguio.

In hindsight I realized that my cockiness caused me to misinterpret a simple trail blaze, and this in turn led me astray.  Another life lesson for you:  Overconfidence might make you lose your way but through serendipity and some luck we can find our way back.  Just make sure you have some calamine lotion with you.