Never Lost

Photo credit: Laura Gannon. Used with permission.

Esther would later reflect back on her weeks in British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest with a fond nostalgia. Her friends and family had reported her lost, but she had always known exactly where she was, if not geographically, at least emotionally.

She was home in a way she never felt in the city. Confined by four walls situated on a manicured lawn with a cultivated garden, she had always experienced a restless longing for something else. Something different.

She had entered the wood, ostensibly for a day’s hiking on predefined trails. Instead, well-provisioned and equipped, she had stepped into the untamed wood and gone off grid.

For three glorious weeks, Esther had shared the forest with its abundant wildlife. She respected their space and, for the most part, they reciprocated. A nosy squirrel had tried to break into her food supplies at one point, but other creatures, including the Kermode, or rare white spirit bears, had kept to their own devices, while allowing her an unfettered peek into their worlds.

Esther did understand the dangers of traveling alone in the woods. She just didn’t care. She found peace in the quiet of the forest and in its sounds, so different from the quarrelsome, competing noises of city life.

Yet, her house remained, along with bills to pay and family and friends to placate. She had traveled in a more or less straight path on her trek and had only to follow her compass back, knowing she would emerge from the forest somewhere along the treeline from which she had entered.

She returned to her law practice, her manicured lawn, her family and friends, the noise, and a daily sense of loss she could never quite shake.

Three years later, when she quit her job, sold her house, and returned to school to become a park ranger, everyone was certain she had lost her mind. Esther, however, had found a plan.

Esther focused as much of her study as she could on wilderness survival. On graduation, she took a job in a remote area of the rainforest, where she established herself as a conscientious, reliable ranger.

She ranged far into the forest in the course of her work, reveling in its beauty, feeling its call. She would disappear for days, sometimes weeks, on her time off. Until one day weeks stretched into forever.

On her forty-fifth birthday, Esther realized her dream. She had slowly built up the resources she needed to survive totally off grid. She had searched for and found the perfect location and built a small one-room cabin which she had filled with survival gear.

Esther passed her days hiking, fishing, and cultivating the small, less than tame garden that supplied her vegetables, as well as fruit from the trees she had planted in a clearing nearby. Happy within herself, her only companions were the wildlife who had come to see her as a native inhabitant, such as themselves.

Her life was everything she had ever dreamed of.

Only once was her peaceful existence disrupted by a pair of lost, dehydrated, and malnourished hikers. She took them in and nursed them back to health, before escorting them back to the treeline, a hike of more than a week. At its edge, she admonished them, not for the first time, to tell no one of her existence, before turning her feet once again toward home.

Despite the rumors that began to circulate about the woman in the woods, Esther remained oblivious, living out her days in her beloved rainforest, never lost but never found.

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When Laura sent me this prompt, I immediately knew the story I would write, and I sat down at my laptop right then to do so. She texted me the above photo, along with the words reflect, lost, and peace. I hope this story, which holds so much of my own yearning (though I’m neither brave enough nor skilled enough to go off grid), also touches something in you.

Here’s a link to the Wikipedia article on Kermode bears, in case you’re interested in learning a bit about them. Kermode bears

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