Sometime during my first year in the Boy Scouts, I went on a hike and never came back. I wasn’t alone; perhaps five other kids and an adult scoutmaster set off with me early that morning. It was meant to be a five-miler and we were supposed to be back by lunchtime. I wasn’t found until one in the morning.
The trip was one of the troop’s monthly weekend excursions. The details are hard to remember. From our homes near Dallas, we drove five hours to Enchanted Rock State Park near Fredericksburg, Texas. The park surrounds a hulking pink granite batholith in the Texas hill country. The Indians that once inhabited the area supposedly believed the rock would bewitch those who visited it.
Our leader was a portly man in his late forties with a bushy moustache and coke-bottle eyeglasses. He used only a small park map as a guide. The route was clearly labeled on the brochure—a circuit around the pink granite monolith—and initially, the trail was cleanly carved out of the grassy earth. Soon, though, it disintegrated and dropped down into a dry riverbed. We went around eight or nine long bends in the arroyo, expecting to see the trail reemerge from the bank. We passed through two barbed-wire fences. I don’t know why the scoutmaster thought crossing a river and hopping fences was part of the hike, but we followed him nonetheless.
Eventually, we stumbled upon a dirt road, and followed it to a large oak tree, where we rested. In was noon, and we should have been back at camp eating lunch. The rock sat off in the distance and we were running low on water. We realized just how lost we were.
Our scoutmaster then decided to take a friend of mine, the most athletic among us, and set off overland toward the enchanted rock. He left a few bottles of water and told the rest of us to wait under the tree for his return. I remember watching as he and my friend slowly dipped below the horizon.
We passed the next three hours telling stories and wastefully testing iodine tablets in clean water. But as the sun began to set, we became anxious. Feeling abandoned, we wandered off, following the road. But it led us away from the rock, and eventually found its terminus in that same sandy creek.
We clambered through ravines and up hillsides, scraping through brush toward the rock. We grew more lost as the sky grew darker. One boy looked up at the sky pointed to a dark gray rain cloud, wispy and round in shape. “That looks like a funnel cloud,” he stuttered. We knew he had no meteorological knowledge, but the idea of a tornado was enough to panic us.
The sun began to set, and we rested in grove of trees, where a boy named Sean began to cry. He was an outcast, the poor boy from the other side of town in a troop full of upper-middle class kids. “I’m too young to die,” Sean wailed. Some tried to console him, others mocked him. We then decided to pray. I don’t remember if anyone said anything, or if we simply bowed our heads in silence and fear.
At twilight, we stumbled across two parallel dirt tracks leading back toward the park, and broke another rule by splitting up. My neighbor and a few friends struck off down the road while another friend and I stayed behind. He was overweight, new to the scouts and probably just tired of walking. Finally, we followed the handbook’s advice: stay put and wait.
We dozed off in exhaustion, and at dark a truck whizzed by. We thought we had missed our chance at rescue, petrified at the thought of spending the night under the elements. My friend claimed to have a road flare—a strange item to bring hiking, I thought. He promised to use it the next time.
For the next few hours, we tried to stay awake, telling stories to stay alert for cars. Our water was gone. At one a.m., another truck ambled down the road. This time, we waved it down, without the flare. The driver was a game warden, looking for us. He gave us some beef jerky as we hopped into the truck’s bed. I know, the ending is anticlimactic.
