Different kind of tail-chasing

My hiking experience has almost entirely been in heavily forested mountains, where it's just as impossible to go in a circle as it is to go in a straight line. In mountains, topographic features are what matter to navigation.

Still, it's easy to get disoriented in mountains, especially when you're a tiny little ant on the feature and it's too large to use it to orient yourself. The reported finding, in keeping with long anecdotal experience, is one more feature of human behavior to watch for when navigating without the crutch of a GPS.

Well-known advice bears repeating:

“Your job as the lost person is to sit down,” [Carroll M. Ware, a licensed guide in Maine,] said. “By moving you make everybody’s job more difficult.”

This is good advice even if you're still oriented to the local features. It's very easy to over-exert, even if you don't panic, and make a little trouble into a lot of trouble.

Kindness of strangers

Most people who have been in the backcountry for any good length of time at all, including me, have benefited from the kindness of strangers. The moral obligation is that you look out for each other.

In this story, a stranger named Karen Picotte was instrumental in saving the life of a lost man hiking alone. Picotte acted altruistically even though her phone call did not take a huge effort.

This generosity of spirit is widely spread among humans and knows no ideological boundaries. There are differences in how it applies, however.

My mother is fond of saying that East Tennesseans would literally give you their shirt if they found you in dire straits, but that they'd never ever put together a program to distribute shirts to people in need.

Liberals like me are willing to tax ourselves and, yes, conservatives to make the moral obligation legal, as well as more consistent and widespread. Sometimes we do it badly, but the results are pretty good, despite what you may hear from libertarians who put their precious theories ahead of actual real-world facts. Look around: The high tax states with strong commitment to the common weal are by and large the wealthy states, while the low tax states without that commitment are the poor states.

Conservatives resent every dime they pay in taxes. Well, maybe not what goes to the military, to the police, and to themselves - but every other dime. They are happy to say when there's no Karen Picotte around to help: Tough luck, you deserve what happened to you.

Somewhere in that tough luck is a willingness to cast others in an out group aside that few people have when confronted with a single person in need, an eagerness to rationalize that bad choices are the problem (and they do sometimes contribute) instead of imperfect social organization.

Survival

Stories of survival such as this small collection have fascinated me for almost as long as I've been able to read. I remember a specific book of stories from second grade.

I've long prepared mentally for all sorts of disasters - finding the gap in a pi-cross-sectioned concrete garage form if an earthquake hits Boston, not going gently in a terrorist situation, finding the exit in a plane crash (yes, I do read the cards and orient myself to all the exits), swimming down an avalanche, getting lost in the mountains, preventing hypothermia, surviving if shipwrecked or cast away.

Much of it is the romance of imagining myself in danger, but I have gotten lost in the mountains. Since it was in familiar territory and there was no immediate danger, I quelled my rising fear, took off my cotton sweatshirt to keep it dry in case I had to spend the night out, and sat down to think. Panic, says Time, can be useful. The trick is not to panic when that would be counterproductive.

Preparation also makes it easier to help others caught in a disaster. Unlike Rick Rescorla, I'm no hero, but I am ready enough to help that I'll never be classified with Kitty Genovese's neighbors.