(me on the right in my cool kid clothes, with my brother;center and cousin;left, the following summer)
When I started 6th grade I again moved to a new school to follow the special education program as it moved each year. This year brought me closer to home than ever before. A school that my older brother Josh had just left the year before to move to Jr High. I was now a student at Parmalee Elementary School, in Indian Hills, Colorado, just three miles from home.
Three of my major life memories happened during this school year. First, I was on flag duty the day the Challenger exploded. I remember watching it in class, being shocked and crying and then having to leave the classroom to go lower the flag to half mast.
Second, I got my first real hardcore bully. Shawn Mackenzie and his goons. They targeted me because I was in the special-ed classes, and they made my life hell for that year. But I remember being cornered by them one day, in front of the offices and they tried to keep me from going inside, but I yanked the door so hard it pushed him off balance and I remember distinctly, hearing one of his goons say to Shawn, "watch out, he's starting to fight back". I never felt more powerful.
The third thing to happen here was probably the most impactful and life changing thing that happened in my young life that still shapes who I am today. It was here that I discovered acting. The year prior, my mom had made me come to Josh's graduation performance where I watched in amazement as he sang from the choir. And I wanted to do that too. Mrs. Johnston, my teacher somehow got it into her head that a bunch of 6th grade kids had that capability and capacity to do, for their senior show, Gilbert and Sullivan's' operetta "The Mikado". I was the Mikado. I was hooked. And the rest is history.
But that's not today's story... While I like to tell stories about the days that my brother almost died, today's story is one of the day's that I almost died. And it happened one winter day when I was going to school at Parmalee Elementary. It had been a normal mid-winter day, so after the last bell had rung for day I immediately went into hiding/stealth mode as I tried to make my way to the front of the school while avoiding Shawn and his goon-squad. They had started in on me as soon as I had walked into the cafeteria that day at lunch.
He liked to get as close as he could to me so that I was cornered and so that he could use his body to cover his quick punches and pinches from any nearby teachers. I was still a runt at this point, four foot nothin, 70lbs soaking wet and fully dressed and very emotional. In other words, a bully's wet dream. Well, I was little and quick and managed to get away and get to a teacher before he could reach me again and as they separated us he whispered the words that strike fear into nerds everywhere: "after school".
So naturally, I was trying to stealthily get to my bus without being seen while shaking in terror at every sound. Waiting for every approaching footfall to fade away. Taking my time and being invisible. So it should be no surprise to anyone that I not only missed the bus, but by the time I got to the parking lot, most of the teachers had already left as well.
Now you kid's may not understand this, but there was a time when cell phones didn't exist. Neither did GPS to tell me where to go. Only governments had satellites, the internet hadn't been invented and there was no uber to call to take me home. But I was a rough and tumble Colorado Rocky Mountain boy and I decided that I would walk home since the bus ride didn't seem like it was that far... And I felt that for an 11 year old, I had an amazing sense of direction.
While the journey clocked in at a three mile walk, I was a young explorer out in the wilderness and as we all know, you can't discover new things if you stay on someone else's road. About half way through the gulch I look up, and from a distance, I thought I recognized the Kittredge "Mansion" that sat on the mountain right above our house. Josh and I had explored up that mountain and come across that mansion right around the same time that a rumor of a mountain lion hiding under their porch started going around town a year earlier. No correlation, I swear.
The road began to curve away from the big house on the hill and I thought "If I just cut through this field, then over that ridge, then the Kittredge house will be just above me, then it's just a quick jog down the hill to our back yard and I'm home free!
Two things I should mention here. First, though you can see little neighborhood roads on the map that I would have come across on this trek, these are recent additions and they didn't exist then. Only the last road going up to the mansion existed at that time, though I didn't ever notice it when driving to and from school as it just looked like a tiny dirt pull off road. Second, this was in February and the ground was covered with at least two feet of snow and looked a bit more like this:
Well, it didn't go quite that well... When I got through the field that had much deeper snow that I would have guessed at first glance, I got to the tree line and entered the forest walking slowly and deep in snow over the ridge into the next small valley.
It looks small on the map, but I was 11, and all of a sudden I was in the wilderness with no sign of humanity. I lost sight of the house on the hill and the road and began to wander around that snowy hillside for what felt like an hour. I tried to get to the highest point I could find but I must have gotten turned around somehow because I saw nothing but trees and snow and mountains everywhere I looked.
I'm pretty sure this was where I started crying. I was shivering from the cold, I was wet and I was lost in the woods. As a kid growing up in the mountains I had heard stories of people lost in the woods getting turned around and never being found again. I also knew that when you get lost you are supposed to stay where you are and hope someone finds you.
I knew I couldn't stay where I was because it was snowy out and the sun was setting and the temperature would soon start dropping and being cold and wet, that could end very badly for me. Two things occurred to me, first I was a latchkey kid. Mom and Chuck were both at work and while Josh might be home when I got there, no one would know that I was missing for at least a couple hours. Which brought the second more terrifying thought, that no one knew where I was or where to look. No one had seen me leave school. I hadn't been on the bus. No one had seen me walking down or leaving the road. No one had seen me disappear into the forest. If I didn't find my way out. No one would see me ever again.
That motivated me. The terror of being lost frozen forever in the woods was enough to dry my eyes and get my feet moving again. The only trick that I knew for getting yourself out of the snow when you're lost I learned from watching "the Shining". So I looked at all the tracks I had made in the snow and was able to see one particular path of my tracks leading out of the forest, hopefully leading the way I had come. So I started backtracking my own footsteps and before too long I was back into the field and in view of the road.
It's funny how quickly I was able to backtrack, I felt like I had been wandering the woods for hours, but it only took me less than ten minutes to find and get back to the road. Once back on the road, I quickly walked the rest of the way home, cold and wet. And I managed to get home before the sun had set.
I was a smart boy, I loved to read and hear about explorers and go on adventures, but that was the first time I knew I had done the wrong thing. That I had made a mistake big enough to cost a life. Had I stayed scared and not moved I very well may have died right there in that snowy winter forest at the age of eleven. But I liked to read, and we had cable, so thanks to Steven King and Stanley Kubrick for scaring me for pretend so I knew how to survive for real.
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