A Pretty Good Lesson

That's a pretty good lesson on life. I got to interrupt my journey and return to another possibility when I was a mechanic for several years, in the Southern Illinois oilfields and coalfields. I was glad to get back to the right path. But that is really not the story that comes to my mind with that poem.

I made it a rule to always carry a compass when I went into the woods.  Navigating without one on a cloudy day you may find that you can get lost in a five acre woods; it's the same at night, only quicker.  A co-worker in Eastern Kentucky told what happened to him early in my forestry career.  He was going to look at a property in Martin County, Kentucky; a rough and isolated part of the state that is sparsely populated.  Ford and other companies bought up coal in Martin, and it has been incredibly changed by mining, but this story occurred before strip mining devastated the landscape.  Art left his truck and hiked to a mountaintop to begin his reconnaissance, and was suddenly boxed in by clouds that rolled in.  He couldn't see the sun, and became disoriented.  There were three drainages that ran away from the mountaintop, and he did not have his compass with him.  He made a guess and started downhill.  Late that night he found a mountain home down that drainage and begged a ride.  He had walked 25 miles.  I have fought fire with Art, and he could walk you into the ground, so I have no doubt about the distance he covered.  That is a lesson I did not have to learn the hard way.  I always had at least one compass in my vest, and on most hikes I had an aerial photo or hand drawn map to navigate.