Cell phones can be a pain in the neck. Whenever I seem to need mine, I can never find it. And this was one of those times, standing by my SUV shivering and wet.
It was whitetail hunting season—a day my three buddies and I had been anticipating for months.
We parked our SUVs on a private, rural lot just after dawn and hiked two miles—lugging rifles and backpacks filled with food, water, flashlights, extra clothing, twoway radios and, yes, cell phones—into the Pennsylvania State Game Lands wilderness.
The weather was overcast and chilly, but we were determined to get us some deer.
We weren’t in the woods but an hour before we lost our will for the hunt. The wind started, and then the rain. Oh, did it pour!
The four of us huddled like soaked dogs under a stand of hemlocks before we gave up and slogged an hour back down the now-muddy mountain we had climbed.
Now, hunching under the raised hatch of my SUV, I stripped off my wet clothing and quickly changed into dry clothes. From force of habit I reached into my backpack for my cell phone. I felt around. Nothing there. I checked and double-checked.
I knew that I had packed it before we headed out. Somehow, the phone must have fallen out of my bag at the spot where we had hunkered down in the woods, near the hemlock trees.
“I have two options,” I told my friends. “One, I can forget the phone. Even if I hiked back to the stand of hemlocks and found it, it would probably be ruined by now.
“But I’m a stubborn guy. I can hike back up the mountain, in this pouring rain, and scrounge around in the brush trying to find it. I’m leaning toward option two.”
My friend Bill thought I was crazy but insisted for safety’s sake that he come along.
Back up the mountain Bill and I went. What had been a rocky path was now a muddy stream. Rain pelted us. Our feet slipped.
“You know,” Bill said, “this isn’t the brightest thing we’ve ever done.”
At last we reached the hemlocks. We looked everywhere. No phone.
Light was fading. Time to give up and head home. Down the mountain we went, the only sound the squishing of our boots in the mud.
Then from somewhere I thought I heard a voice. I immediately turned to Bill. “Did you hear someone?” I asked.
“No,” he said, keeping his head down, trying not to slip.
I heard the sound again.
“Bill?” I said. “Yeah, I heard something,” he admitted. It sounded like it came from somewhere up the mountain. We peered through the trees and the rain.
“There!” I said. “Up on that ridge!” Bill’s eyes followed where I was pointing.
A man was up there, waving his arms frantically. He was headed toward us, slipping and sliding. “Help!” he yelled. “Please help!”
We stood there. What kind of nut would be out here in the rain—well, other than us?
The man eventually reached us. He looked to be in his mid-twenties. “Please help me,” he said, panting. “I came up here with a friend. I can’t find him, and I don’t know how to get back to where we parked.” He told us his name was Tim.
I looked the young man up and down. His clothes were soaking wet. Not insulated or waterproof. Totally inadequate. He had an empty thermos. No food. He had a cell phone, but it was dead.
“Come with us. We’ll get you out of here,” I said.
The three of us started down the trail, Bill and I helping him as best we could.
“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” Tim asked.
“Just trust us,” I said.
It was clear that Tim was disoriented. He couldn’t even tell us his friend’s name. We tried to keep him talking, so that he wouldn’t pass out on the trail.
By the time we reached my SUV about 45 minutes later, Tim was shivering uncontrollably. We helped him into the backseat. Bill gave him some almonds from his snack pack and coffee from his thermos. I started the car, cranked the heat up and we wrapped him in a dry blanket.
Tim mentioned a general store he and his friend had passed on their way to the wilderness. I knew where it was. On the way there, a vehicle pulled up behind us and flashed his lights. For a second, I thought it was the cops. The driver got out. I rolled down the window.
“Are you Tim?” he asked.
I pointed to the backseat. “That’s Tim,” I said.
The driver said he had Tim’s friend in his truck. He’d found him in about the same condition that we found Tim.
Tim stumbled out of my SUV and into the truck. Bill and I drove on home.
On the way, we had a serious talk.
“Do you know the danger he was in,” I asked. “What would have happened if we hadn’t been up there and he had heard our voices?”
And then it hit us both—we would never have been up there to rescue him if not for my silly phone.
“I guess there was a good reason I lost it after all,” I said. Together we offered a prayer of thanks.
But I hadn’t lost it. Back home I finished unloading my backpack. That cell phone was right where I had put it.
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