Vision Quest

On September 1, 2018, three days before the start of senior year, I became dangerously lost in the desert. I was camping with five of my friends in the high desert outside of Bend, Oregon. I have spent nearly ten years immersed in wilderness programs, going from a student to a teacher in the survival skills I became knowledgeable about. I had been in several pretend survival situations, and I considered my knowledge of what to do in survival to be fairly well developed. My understanding was put to the test when I wandered off alone and became a kind of lost in which I had never found myself before.

The climate of the high desert of Oregon is, as one could assume, dry. It is a desert, but not the kind you’d see on a postcard from Arizona, with large cacti sticking out of sandy dunes. Bend’s desert is home to many large ponderosa pine, douglas fir, sagebrush, and other perennial plant life. The open plain my friends and I were camped on was a brown dusty ground with a scattering of trees and shrubbery. As night fell, we could see the city lights of Bend not far in the distance. We watched a magnificent desert sunset followed by an even more mystifying moonrise. After exploring the nearby caves and making a trip into town for water at 3am, I found myself sitting in my friend’s car, sheltered from the cold outside, when the sun began to peak over the horizon. Having not slept the previous night back in town, and staying up all of this night in the wilderness, this sunrise felt like defeat. I decided to lie down and get some sleep before the heat of the day broke and we would pack up to leave.

My hammock was stretched between two trees at our camp no more than 150 yards from where the cars were parked. Stepping into the cold morning air, I looked up to see the nearly full moon surrounded now by only the brightest stars. To the east, the sky turned a wonderful gradient from the darkest of blues, to pinks and purples, but the sun itself had not made itself visible yet. I decided to walk to the top of the hill a small distance from our camp to better view the sky. I stood there in wonder at the painted sky behind the distant mountains and hills. I don’t know how long I stood there, but the sky began to lighten before me. Behind me, the cars and the camp were still shrouded in darkness. I heard my friend’s voices behind a small hillcrest, likely making the chilly walk from the parking area to the camp, as I had planned to. This moment felt too powerful to share, and I decided to wait a while before joining them in our hammocks, not wanting to ruin the serenity and stillness of this experience. A few more minutes of staring off into the sky before I turned by back to it and started walking towards the cluster of trees where I would finally kick off my boots and crawl into my sleeping bag to wash away the fatigue. I never made it.

Perhaps it was the sheer lack of sleep, the dehydration, the morning darkness, or the unchanging landscape of the desert, but I must’ve walked right past the camp. Not long into walking, and I realized I didn’t know where I was going. I turned around back in the direction where I had come from, but suddenly every cluster of trees looked like it had hammocks strung in it. Every hill looked like the one we had parked next too. It had been drilled into my brain that, when lost, one should not keep walking, rather stop and wait for help or a plan to formulate. I did not do this. Had I merely sat down and waited for the sun to fully  come up, I would’ve been able to better see where I was and where I needed to go. I was delusional however, and kept walking away from the sunrise, as if this new day was chasing me and I needed to escape. I do not know how long I walked before realizing I was truly lost. For a while I knew that I didn’t know where camp was, but I was convinced I was still in the general vicinity and would stumble upon it soon.

The sun had risen and the sky was a pale blue before I decided it was time to seriously find my way back. I pulled out my phone, half expecting it to be dead already, but I used my final 1% to pull up a map and try to locate the cave that we parked next to. I was able to see my location, a good distance northwest of where I needed to be, before my phone died in my hand. Tired, sore, and hot now, with all of my night layers still on, I began to walk southeast as best I could, using the sun to gauge direction.

Several hours later and I was no closer to an area I recognized, coming over new hills and tree clusters I had not seen before. By this point I had shed my warm layers, tying my jacket around my waist and my two pairs of long johns around my head. I sat under the slight shade of a ponderosa and tried not to think about water. I had drinken only a mere few sips the entire trip, and I started to worry I might not have water again. A human being can survive for three days without water, and I didn’t know how long it would take for rescue efforts to find me. I imagined my friends, some of them awake by now from their early morning slumber. We had planned to pack up and drive home somewhat early that day, and I was sure they would be irritated, then confused when I was nowhere to be found and unable to be reached by phone. I hoped they would not come looking for me themselves, risking one of them getting lost too. A vision flashed through my head of a search and rescue team dragging my dehydrated body out from the open plain, or worse, discovering my lifeless corpse under this very tree. I did not want to start out senior year having just been rescued from a stupid predicament in the wilderness, an area I had felt so confident in before. Worse, I did not want to die in this harsh climate that I now hated on the first day of the month in which I was set to turn 18.

Deciding if I sat for too long in this shade, I would lose all will to rescue myself, I got up and climbed to the top of the hill under which I had been resting. There, I saw three tall trees lined up in the distance. I remembered there had been a line of three trees next to our cars. These trees I saw appeared to be miles in the distance. They were the opposite way that I had been walking for hours, but I didn’t doubt that my stupidity had walked me miles off course. I set out across the plain. My legs ached and my throat was sore. The sun beating down overhead now was baking the exposed skin of my face and arms. My pace did not waver for the next few hours it took to reach these trees.

Finally, I stood before them. Behind these trees atop their hill spread a whole forest of trees. We had not been camped near a forest. These were not our three trees. Having spent the remainder of my energy to reach this place, I felt nothing but defeat. There was not another plan in my head other than to keep walking, but that was becoming increasingly difficult as the effects of dehydration and overexertion were setting in. I stood there for only a few minutes, surveying the landscape, when I noticed a jogger coming up in the distance. I prepared myself to speak to him, but he ran right past me before I could talk through the desert air that had encrusted my throat. I watched the man run up a hill. Once he had gone, I struggled to climb the hill over which he disappeared. Below me I saw a development of big houses. Their shocking green lawns looked unnatural against the browns and tans of the ground. I stepped out of the open desert and onto a freshly paved cul-de-sac.

I saw no one other than a woman checking her mail at the bottom of the street. I limped down to her driveway and tried to figure out what I should say. “Excuse me,” I choked out, “I’m very lost. Could you please help me?”. The words sounded fake and rehearsed coming out of my mouth, and without even taking time to consider, the woman responded.

“No. Just turn around and go right back up the street.” I tried to interject, but she had already turned her back to me and taken out her cell phone. Defeated, I buried my face in my hands. No tears came, as there was not enough liquid left in my body to produce any. Then I heard the woman speak again. I turned back to her and saw she was holding the phone to her ear, “Yeah can you please send someone to-”. I didn’t wait to hear her reading off the address, knowing she was talking to the police. Confused, scared, and bewildered, I retreated back to the top of the street and the open desert from which I thought I was finally free. I figured The police would help me once I explained my situation, so I sat at the edge of the street and waited.

Out of habit, I pulled out my dead phone and attempted to check it. To my surprise, it powered on and gave me a magical 8% of battery life. Frantically, I called every friend I had been camping with. None of them answered, so I texted the most responsible one. I shared my location and told him to come quick. Neighbors watched through their windows as a rugged-looking desert wanderer sat in the middle of the street, intruding on their quiet cul-de-sac life. Fifteen minutes later, I saw my friend’s car flying down the hill on the street above. I chugged water out of the gallon jug in his backseat, and attempted to relay to my friends what had happened. They had been asleep, and had not noticed my absence.