Have you ever had an adventure in your life that you really did not think was so great? You were sure that everyone there had just as bad a time as you did. Then many years later you talk to some of the people who were with you and you see a VERY different account of the event although you still recognize it as the one you lived through.
One day my cousins and I were playing in the woods. My parents lived on the back side of a game preserve so we treated the preserve like our own back yard. Well we’d gone a bit further than usual and on a new trail. Now when I say trail I mean more like a deer trail than an actual path that someone has carved out of the landscape. There were several of both in these woods. But we had gone farther and not paid much attention to where we were going as we were picking flowers or gathering berries or pinecones or some such thing. We had been walking for quite some time, when we decided that we were hungry so maybe we should go home. Which way is home? We kept walking until we found a fence. Someone I think it was DB said that if you follow a fence you will always wind up at a house or barn. So that sounded like good advice. Then the fence went through a swamp, now how do you follow a fence through a swamp? So we left the fence. We walked for hours finally we got to the old railroad bed. Oh great, this goes into town. We’ll just follow it until we get there and then call Mom and tell her where we are. (To this day I don't know where in town the railroad bed comes out but we were always told it came out in town. The railroad bed probably goes to the fair grounds since everything else goes there but I'm not sure.)
We followed that for about 20 minutes when the caretaker of the game preserve found us. He was out working in the woods so he took us home.
Now my memory of that day is cloudy and dark as though there is a storm coming, I remember being scared and hungry we finally got home around 2 in the afternoon we’d left probably around 10.
I don’t remember Mom being particularly worried about us. When I spoke to one of the other kids that were there they don’t remember that we were lost. And the caretaker finding us was just a good excuse to have a ride on the wagon. We had found the spring where they had a cup to drink from so we weren’t particularly thirsty and berries to eat so we weren’t too hungry either. My main memory of that day is that I was scared. I was afraid that we were lost and would never get home. I know I was not the oldest one there but I was probably between 8 and 10 so the oldest one who might have been there would have been no older than 12. We’d been gone for 4 hours and Mom just said that we should have stayed close enough so that we could have heard the horn when she honked it. We missed lunch so, oh well, we could wait for supper since we didn’t stay close enough, and that would teach us to not go so far.
I think about that now and how if my niece and nephew who live there now were gone for four hours that the police probably would be called. And a search conducted. Sex offenders in the area would be chased down and the pond would be searched. Just cause some kids got turned around in the woods.
But it truly amazes me that to this day; I am the only one that remembers that we were lost. No one remembers the idea to follow the fence because it would take us to a home; no one remembers the plan to follow the railroad tracks to town, or even trying to remember which side of the tree the moss grows on. My memory was that we were just guessing which way to follow the railroad bed but who knew where else it might go if town was behind us. Now I know that as long as we walked in a straight line we would have had to walk no more than a mile or two in any one direction before we would have come to a road. The road would have led to a house and we would have been “saved.” But at the time I didn’t understand that, I was scared.
