My personal story about being lost in the woods at age 7 with my younger brother.
I grew up on a “hobby farm” in the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia. My dad’s day job was a provincial wildlife biologist, and he loves the farming lifestyle.
In the fall of 1964, when I was a boy of about 7 years old, my 5 year old brother Stuart and I accompanied my dad to a friend’s woodlot near Kentville. He was getting some tall slender tree’s to make into fence posts for the farm pasture. Our little white VW bug pulling a home-made green trailer served as our tractor and wagon.
My dad can become very focused when he is working. As he set about his task of making fence posts in the clearing, my younger brother and I discovered a narrow natural trail into the woods, which we decided to follow. Even at this tender age, we were quite comfortable being in the woods because of my dad’s job as a biologist. I knew that if I stayed on the path, we could easily return back to the clearing by simply following it back…
My brother and I enjoyed the fall colours along the trail, and then played in a small inner clearing with tall weeds, until we decided to return. We followed the trail back to the clearing where we started, but it wasn’t the same clearing!!
Once I realized that we were lost, I also had enough knowledge of the geography of Nova Scotia to realize that if we walked the wrong way it would be a very long walk to the south shore of the province, but if we walked the right way it should be less than a kilometer to the main highway. So, I climbed a tall tree and looked for civilization. Fortunately I spotted a furl of smoke rising from someone’s chimney, and my brother and I headed off in that direction.
Eventually, we came upon the home beneath the chimney smoke and knocked on the door of the house. When we explained to the man who lived there, that our dad was friends with Russ Freeman, who was the man who owns the Hardware Store in Kentville, he offered to drive us to the store.
We told the man that our last name was “vanNostrand”, which has Dutch origins, so he assumed we were Dutch boys. The man went into Freeman’s Hardware Store and spoke to Russ. He explained to Russ that he had two little “Dutch Boys” in his car who said Russ was friends with their father. Russ doesn’t think of us as “Dutch”, and denied knowing the boys.
Eventually we ended up at the Kentville Police Station, where they were able to phone my mother at home. We only had one car in our family, so she arranged for one of our neighbors to drive the 15 km drive into town.
When my mom arrived back in the clearing with us in the neighbors’ car, my dad was still working away at loading fence posts into the trailer, oblivious to the fine adventure that my brother and I had just completed.
Epilog:
I remember being afraid when going for drives in the woods for a few years afterwards, but thankfully I have put that behind me and always enjoy excursions into the woods to this day.
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