Wednesday, 11th May 2005, 10:46am
An opinion by:
NoemiHow I rescued the RCMP from the Saskatchewan forest by Noemi Lopinto
In my co-worker Jean's defense, it was all my fault. It was my idea to go for a walk, it was my idea to leave the path to go look at the frogs, and it was I who led us back up to what looked like the walking path, but was not. But in my defense, it was Jean's idea to call Search and Rescue.
At ten in the morning on Sunday, April 24, I showed up unannounced at Jean's house and dragged her out to the St. Cyr walking trails outside of Meadow Lake. I was all excited because I had the day to myself. My daughter's father, Daniel, was visiting from Montreal, and I wanted to go for a long walk in the country. St. Cyr is one of my favourite places around here. It's this lovely forest full of trees, which for some reason are half-dead and covered in moss. There are three long walking paths through the trees: a 5-k, a 7.5-K and a 10-K walk. Usually we stick to the 5-k. The path is woefully lacking in signage, but then we never deviated from it before, either.
Now that I have had the experience of getting lost there, of walking in circles until my head spun, I think a little extra signage (other than the one that says: Start Here, and the last one that says: "Come again") would be a good idea. I may even write my MP about it.
Jean and I were doing fine, at first. We took pictures of the flowers. We took pictures of the dog. We took pictures of each other. (City Girl with Creepy Looking Tree, and Other City Girl with Creepy Looking Tree)
Then I heard the frogs. Feeling all nature girl-ish, I dragged Jean off the walking path to a small swamp in the middle of the bush. We listened to the amphibians sing, and talked about how to catch one. Jean took a picture of me demonstrating (City Girl Hypnotizes Frog). And from that moment on, I have no idea what happened.
We left the swamp, and found a path that didn't look like the path we had been on, but what the hey, right? They must all be interconnected and we would eventually find our way back. By then we had left the forest, and we were walking on bare hills under the burning sun. Neither of us had brought water, chapstick, a compass, a swiss army knife, a magnifying glass, matches. All things I later desperately wished for, that most Meadow Lakers are born holding in their tight little fists.
After a while, we noticed this 10-k walk was getting a little 20- or 30-k-ish. And the path didn't look much like a path. It looked like something that had been carved by a quad. Recently. We came to a fence and pasture, and because we didn t want to get shot walking on some farmer's land, we turned back. Also, we're both from the city; we like paths we can follow, even if they are the wrong ones. By then we were thirsty, tired, and hot. And we walked in circles for about five hours. I found out later, Daniel had already called the hospital, inquiring if there were any dead reporters there. He said the receptionist was quite snippy with him about it.
Jean, bless her Asian, technology-loving heart, had brought her cellphone. But at first it didn't work. We started looking for markers to find our way back. We saw--and this is the part that nearly killed my co-workers laughing--a pile of moose droppings that we were sure we had seen before. Really, it was quite distinctive. We even took a picture of it for posterity.
Next to the moose droppings was another pile of crap, which based on my vast experience with excrement, I thought belonged to a meat eater. All of these things, we took to be indications that we were on the right path. We were so happy we weren't lost anymore, we took more pictures. (City Girl Lost and Tired, and Other City Girl Lost and Tired.)
But I know now that following animal droppings when you are lost in a provincial park gets you nowhere. Actually, that's not fair; it gets you to a hill among a million other identical hills where you sit down and try the cell phone again. And this time, it worked.
Right about then, Jean and I had a minor philosophical argument about which was more embarrassing: calling, or not calling. I argued that if we called, the entire town would know within a couple of minutes that two intelligent city slickers, reporters who had both navigated the streets of Asia, couldn t find their way out of a treed park full of paths.
She argued that the longer we stayed there walking in circles, examining poop for answers to the great universal questions, the stupider we were. She won.
We dialed 911, and we took turns explaining to the RCMP how we got there. Both of us were imagining the night we faced if they didn't find us. I was picturing having to take my watch apart and use the glass lens to burn some moss to make fire. I was also imagining a night freezing my butt off, huddled up to a skinny Chinese girl for warmth. (Later, it occurred to me: what was I going to open the watch with? My teeth?)
I'm not sure what was going through Jean's head. She had her coat over her head and was pretty quiet. The RCMP sent a team coming from two different directions. They kept in communication with us by cell phone, running the sirens until they got close enough for us to walk towards the sound.
Search and Rescue member Roy Fillion found us. Apparently, if we had walked over one more anonymous hill, we would have found the walking path. It was less than 75 feet away. The RCMP drove us through the forest to the car, and we took pictures of each other in the back of the paddy wagon (City Girls Laughing their Heads Off).
I asked our driver, Constable Andrusiak, if people get lost in St. Cyr a lot. Oh yeah, all the time, he said. Then he paused a little. Not usually during the day, though. I told Andrusiak that, as members of the press, we were professionally obliged to report on how we had saved him from being lost in the forest overnight.
Jean and I had agreed not to tell anyone about our misadventure. But on Monday, I spilled the beans. I made the mistake of telling the Progress pressman, Gord Carter, first. Not normally a man given to smilling, I have never seen Gord so happy. Within minutes, the publisher, Ron Tetz, came in saying it was all over the radio. (He was kidding, but we believed him.)
Later, the Group Publisher from Bowes Publishers called Ron to ask him if he was going to include GPS Units in next year's budget. The whole office was delighted. From their level of amusement, you'd think we had done something really stupid, or something.
Now, it seems, I can't walk anywhere without hearing the word "GPS," or getting invitations to go hiking. Jean and I are the laughingstock in town, but in a nice way.
One person who showed tremendous class about it all was the manager of the Meadow Lake Co-op store. His store was robbed at the exact moment we were radio-ing for help from amidst the pussy willows.
In our interview this morning, he told me it took the RCMP two hours to get back to him. Because they were rescuing two people lost in the woods. "Remember?", he asked, with a little crook of a smile.
Later,
N
