Lost in the woods
Well, the good news is that something happened this week that was worth blogging about. I know, I am not meeting my goal of updating this blog at least once per week, but the fact of the matter is that my life is boring most of the time. Sure, there is the occasional giant spider attack or something like that, but if I can describe the entire event in 420 characters, then I may as well just do a status update. (As an aside, I'm still confused as to why Twitter is so popular... Can you possibly say anything worth reading in 170 characters or less? I can't even answer yes/no questions in less than 170 characters. ;) ) And when you try to force yourself to write about your life when there is nothing to write about... Well, my dad said that he was going to write to me every week when I was in Brazil... And I remember one month where every single letter was about the new sprinkler system he was installing. I'm just like, "Dad, I really appreciate the fact that you're thinking about me, but next week, if you don't have anything to write about other than sprinklers, you really don't have to write at all. In fact, I would kind of prefer that you didn't." ;)
At any rate, I have something to write about this week. That was the good news. The bad news is that it involved Aryn and I almost dying. Well, I don't think we were ever in serious danger of dying. (I don't think; I'm not really sure.) But it is correct to say that the title of this post is not an exaggeration.
Last Sunday after church Aryn wanted to spend some time with me. She suggested we play a game. But I said, "You always tell me how you used to go look at leaves on Sunday afternoons at Princeton and how you want to do it here. I think today is the perfect day. The weather is nice, the leaves are starting to turn, and if we wait one more week we will lose an hour of daylight."
Aryn wasn't sold, though. "But I'm tired and my knee hurts. Let's wait until next week."
I didn't like that idea. "Next week it will be dark by the time we get out of church." So she told me to go online and see if I can find some place to go walking that would be fairly short and easy. I read about a walking trail in Duke Forest in Durham (probably about a 25-minute drive from where we live). Aryn didn't want to go that far. But I twisted her arm. "Come on! It's not very long, it's flat, it has water, and we should easily be able to finish the entire thing before dark." Aryn finally relented and we got ready to go. Aryn wanted to bring a water bottle and a flash light "just in case," but I didn't want to carry more stuff. I finally agreed to carry a small emergency flash light that didn't even take batteries (you had to turn a crank in order to power it).
Well, you can probably see where this is going. Basically every thing I told Aryn in the previous paragraph turned out to be false. When we got there, we discovered that the trail was about three miles long. I told her we should do it anyway. "Why not? If it starts to get dark, we can always turn around and go back." So we started walking. We then discovered that the trail was not particularly flat; there were a bunch of hills. Not particularly strenuous hills, but walking up and down hills made Aryn's knee hurt even worse. And there wasn't really water, either; just one drinking fountain over the course of the entire trail.
The really dicey part, however, was yet to come... It started to get dark when we were about a mile in. I looked at Aryn and said, "What should we do?" She told me that if she had to walk back down the hill we just went up her knee might give out. So we decided to keep going. I think you can add that to the list of regrettable decisions we made that night. :) It wasn't so bad at first... Aryn would try to take a picture, and say, "Too bad there isn't more light; I can't get a decent shot." A few minutes later, that had changed to, "Too bad there isn't more light; I bet that tree would be really pretty if I could actually see it." And that quickly became, "Too bad there isn't more light; I can't really see the trail any more."
Yeah, not good... We could see the trail well enough to follow it, but we couldn't see much more than that. Aryn's knee starting hurting even worse; she had to lean on me for support. And she started to get a little nervous about the fact that we were, well, in the middle of woods, at night, at least a mile or two away from any kind of civilization.
"Do you think there are bears out here?" she asked.
"I'm a bear! RAWR!"
Aryn jumped. I don't think she thought it was very funny. (My last name is "Bair." Get it? Ha ha! I bet that's the funniest joke you ever heard. ;) ) She was kind of mad at me for a while. Then she suddenly said, "You know, I think we might be in the spectrum of light where we are tetrachromads." I love having a smart wife with ADD. Not only do I learn cool stuff (like the fact that humans can be tetrachromads when the light is dim), but if she gets mad at me, she will usually forget about it a few minutes later when she gets distracted by some random thing. ;)
(In case you were wondering, humans are normally trichromads, since our rods only allow us to see three colors; we see other colors by mixing those three primary colors. Other animals have more than three "primary colors" in their rods; I think some kind of sea animals has like 14. Presumably they can see more colors than we can. However, at low levels of light, both our rods and cones are active so we technically become tetrachromads. I think. I might be explaining this wrong. Aryn, if I butchered this, please correct me in the comments. :) )
Anyway, we kept walking. Soon we came to a fork in the trail. We didn't know which fork to take. We were hoping there was a sign somewhere that would tell us, but we couldn't really see. I finally saw something on the side of the trail that looked like a sign. I started cranking my little hand-powered flashlight so that I could read the sign. It didn't give us very much light. I squinted at the sign and finally made out the words: "Do you know what is worse than picking up your dog's poop on the trail? Stepping in someone else's dog's poop!" Thank you; that was very helpful. :P Aryn asked me what I thought we should do. I'm like, "Eeny Meeny miney moe... Let's go right!" (Since I am a man, I insisted at the start of the hike that there was no need for a map.) So I led us to the right... Which, although I did not realize this at the time, took us even deeper into the forest...
So yeah... We kept walking... We could barely see our feet in front of us. Aryn's knee kept hurting worse and worse. I kept waiting for Aryn to grab my phone and start Googling "divorce lawyers." (Actually, I have to give Aryn credit; given the number of things that I messed up that night, she was actually pretty nice about it. Although she did remind me that, "This is your fault," approximately 50,000 times over the course of the night.) Some jogger guy almost runs into us; he apparently couldn't see us, either. He said to us, "Do you know how to get out of here? I am pretty sure I have gone around in a circle three times now and I didn't see a way out of the forest."
Now even I was starting to get nervous... I thought we could probably make it back to the original fork in the trail... Or at least I could... Aryn's knee was getting worse and worse; she couldn't walk at all without leaning on me. And I wasn't sure I wanted to leave my wife alone in the woods and then call the cavalry. I started wondering if we would freeze to death if it got cold at night. So we just kept walking, hoping to find a way out of there.
We finally saw something that looked like a sign. I cranked my light to read it... "This is exercise station 26. Do 20 reps on the sit-up bar before continuing." Wow, these signs are so helpful for people who are lost in the dark. We kept walking. Finally, we saw another sign... It was a big one, and we were hoping it was a map. I cranked the light again, and it was indeed, a map. Unfortunately my light did not produce enough light to be able to read the map. Fabulous. Well, luckily, my brain clicked into crisis mode and thought of a solution. I pulled out my phone and turned on the LED display. I told the jogger to get out his iPod and do the same thing. Voila! And then there was light! xD
We still weren't out of the proverbial woods, though. (Come to think of it, in this case, we weren't out of the literal woods, either. ;) ) The map did not actually have a "You are here" marker on it. But I wasn't ready to give up yet. "That junction there must have been the fork in the trail that we saw... I guess I must have made a wrong turn there... But if that is the fork in the trail, then we must be here... So if we cut through the trees in that direction, there should be a highway over there." (Given that I was pretty sure I could hear cars, I was fairly confident that I was right.) So we started bush-whacking through the trees... And we found a road! HOORAY! We escaped from the forest!
Of course, there was still the minor problem that our little detour had taken us at least a mile or two away from where we were supposed to be. And the minor problem that Aryn could barely walk at this point. But what do you do? We saw a streetlight. I told Aryn to just wait for me under the streetlight. I gave her my phone and told her to call her mom or something so that if some crazy serial killer tried to grab her then her mom would know something happened. And I just started power-walking back to the car before some crazy serial killer found my wife. The road was not particularly pedestrian-friendly; the cars were going fast and there weren't really any shoulders. I just kind of jumped off the road every time I saw a car coming. (Why do I always seem to end up having to dodge cars on dark roads when i need to rescue my wife?) I got back to the car, drove back to Aryn, and she was still alive. And remarkably enough she even seemed happy to see me. Although she did remind me that it was my fault. "You owe me a really nice dinner now. Because this was your fault." Then I think she got distracted again and started talking about metaphysics or something.
So yeah... That was our adventure. I hope it wasn't too boring. Next week I can blog about sprinklers if you prefer. ;)
At any rate, I have something to write about this week. That was the good news. The bad news is that it involved Aryn and I almost dying. Well, I don't think we were ever in serious danger of dying. (I don't think; I'm not really sure.) But it is correct to say that the title of this post is not an exaggeration.
Last Sunday after church Aryn wanted to spend some time with me. She suggested we play a game. But I said, "You always tell me how you used to go look at leaves on Sunday afternoons at Princeton and how you want to do it here. I think today is the perfect day. The weather is nice, the leaves are starting to turn, and if we wait one more week we will lose an hour of daylight."
Aryn wasn't sold, though. "But I'm tired and my knee hurts. Let's wait until next week."
I didn't like that idea. "Next week it will be dark by the time we get out of church." So she told me to go online and see if I can find some place to go walking that would be fairly short and easy. I read about a walking trail in Duke Forest in Durham (probably about a 25-minute drive from where we live). Aryn didn't want to go that far. But I twisted her arm. "Come on! It's not very long, it's flat, it has water, and we should easily be able to finish the entire thing before dark." Aryn finally relented and we got ready to go. Aryn wanted to bring a water bottle and a flash light "just in case," but I didn't want to carry more stuff. I finally agreed to carry a small emergency flash light that didn't even take batteries (you had to turn a crank in order to power it).
Well, you can probably see where this is going. Basically every thing I told Aryn in the previous paragraph turned out to be false. When we got there, we discovered that the trail was about three miles long. I told her we should do it anyway. "Why not? If it starts to get dark, we can always turn around and go back." So we started walking. We then discovered that the trail was not particularly flat; there were a bunch of hills. Not particularly strenuous hills, but walking up and down hills made Aryn's knee hurt even worse. And there wasn't really water, either; just one drinking fountain over the course of the entire trail.
The really dicey part, however, was yet to come... It started to get dark when we were about a mile in. I looked at Aryn and said, "What should we do?" She told me that if she had to walk back down the hill we just went up her knee might give out. So we decided to keep going. I think you can add that to the list of regrettable decisions we made that night. :) It wasn't so bad at first... Aryn would try to take a picture, and say, "Too bad there isn't more light; I can't get a decent shot." A few minutes later, that had changed to, "Too bad there isn't more light; I bet that tree would be really pretty if I could actually see it." And that quickly became, "Too bad there isn't more light; I can't really see the trail any more."
Yeah, not good... We could see the trail well enough to follow it, but we couldn't see much more than that. Aryn's knee starting hurting even worse; she had to lean on me for support. And she started to get a little nervous about the fact that we were, well, in the middle of woods, at night, at least a mile or two away from any kind of civilization.
"Do you think there are bears out here?" she asked.
"I'm a bear! RAWR!"
Aryn jumped. I don't think she thought it was very funny. (My last name is "Bair." Get it? Ha ha! I bet that's the funniest joke you ever heard. ;) ) She was kind of mad at me for a while. Then she suddenly said, "You know, I think we might be in the spectrum of light where we are tetrachromads." I love having a smart wife with ADD. Not only do I learn cool stuff (like the fact that humans can be tetrachromads when the light is dim), but if she gets mad at me, she will usually forget about it a few minutes later when she gets distracted by some random thing. ;)
(In case you were wondering, humans are normally trichromads, since our rods only allow us to see three colors; we see other colors by mixing those three primary colors. Other animals have more than three "primary colors" in their rods; I think some kind of sea animals has like 14. Presumably they can see more colors than we can. However, at low levels of light, both our rods and cones are active so we technically become tetrachromads. I think. I might be explaining this wrong. Aryn, if I butchered this, please correct me in the comments. :) )
Anyway, we kept walking. Soon we came to a fork in the trail. We didn't know which fork to take. We were hoping there was a sign somewhere that would tell us, but we couldn't really see. I finally saw something on the side of the trail that looked like a sign. I started cranking my little hand-powered flashlight so that I could read the sign. It didn't give us very much light. I squinted at the sign and finally made out the words: "Do you know what is worse than picking up your dog's poop on the trail? Stepping in someone else's dog's poop!" Thank you; that was very helpful. :P Aryn asked me what I thought we should do. I'm like, "Eeny Meeny miney moe... Let's go right!" (Since I am a man, I insisted at the start of the hike that there was no need for a map.) So I led us to the right... Which, although I did not realize this at the time, took us even deeper into the forest...
So yeah... We kept walking... We could barely see our feet in front of us. Aryn's knee kept hurting worse and worse. I kept waiting for Aryn to grab my phone and start Googling "divorce lawyers." (Actually, I have to give Aryn credit; given the number of things that I messed up that night, she was actually pretty nice about it. Although she did remind me that, "This is your fault," approximately 50,000 times over the course of the night.) Some jogger guy almost runs into us; he apparently couldn't see us, either. He said to us, "Do you know how to get out of here? I am pretty sure I have gone around in a circle three times now and I didn't see a way out of the forest."
Now even I was starting to get nervous... I thought we could probably make it back to the original fork in the trail... Or at least I could... Aryn's knee was getting worse and worse; she couldn't walk at all without leaning on me. And I wasn't sure I wanted to leave my wife alone in the woods and then call the cavalry. I started wondering if we would freeze to death if it got cold at night. So we just kept walking, hoping to find a way out of there.
We finally saw something that looked like a sign. I cranked my light to read it... "This is exercise station 26. Do 20 reps on the sit-up bar before continuing." Wow, these signs are so helpful for people who are lost in the dark. We kept walking. Finally, we saw another sign... It was a big one, and we were hoping it was a map. I cranked the light again, and it was indeed, a map. Unfortunately my light did not produce enough light to be able to read the map. Fabulous. Well, luckily, my brain clicked into crisis mode and thought of a solution. I pulled out my phone and turned on the LED display. I told the jogger to get out his iPod and do the same thing. Voila! And then there was light! xD
We still weren't out of the proverbial woods, though. (Come to think of it, in this case, we weren't out of the literal woods, either. ;) ) The map did not actually have a "You are here" marker on it. But I wasn't ready to give up yet. "That junction there must have been the fork in the trail that we saw... I guess I must have made a wrong turn there... But if that is the fork in the trail, then we must be here... So if we cut through the trees in that direction, there should be a highway over there." (Given that I was pretty sure I could hear cars, I was fairly confident that I was right.) So we started bush-whacking through the trees... And we found a road! HOORAY! We escaped from the forest!
Of course, there was still the minor problem that our little detour had taken us at least a mile or two away from where we were supposed to be. And the minor problem that Aryn could barely walk at this point. But what do you do? We saw a streetlight. I told Aryn to just wait for me under the streetlight. I gave her my phone and told her to call her mom or something so that if some crazy serial killer tried to grab her then her mom would know something happened. And I just started power-walking back to the car before some crazy serial killer found my wife. The road was not particularly pedestrian-friendly; the cars were going fast and there weren't really any shoulders. I just kind of jumped off the road every time I saw a car coming. (Why do I always seem to end up having to dodge cars on dark roads when i need to rescue my wife?) I got back to the car, drove back to Aryn, and she was still alive. And remarkably enough she even seemed happy to see me. Although she did remind me that it was my fault. "You owe me a really nice dinner now. Because this was your fault." Then I think she got distracted again and started talking about metaphysics or something.
So yeah... That was our adventure. I hope it wasn't too boring. Next week I can blog about sprinklers if you prefer. ;)