The stay-at-home dad: Lost in the woods

Let me preface this story by saying none of my kids have ever actually been lost in the woods.

This is an indisputable fact, regardless of my oldest son’s many attempts to lose himself, his family and specifically me in the woods. Luckily, he’s 8 years old and never goes anywhere remotely dangerous.

I didn’t know my son had a hankering for a “Blair Witch” experience until recently. Saturday is typically a day I like to get some work done, and the last few weeks my wife has been taking our four kids on some mini-hiking adventures without me.

I finally joined them on one of these adventures last weekend. Given that we have a range of kids, ages 4-10, I assumed these “hikes” were casual walks on the paved Centennial Trail or something. Nope. These kids were blazing some trails!

For one, I didn’t dress appropriately. I’m a shorts and T-shirt guy until it snows, and, if I’m being honest, I’ve definitely gotten lazier throughout this pandemic situation.

My shoes were wrong. I needed pants. And I’m definitely more of a paved street traverser than a hoof-it-through narrow, bug-filled trails and in-between sappy trees kinda guy.

I don’t like admitting this, but we also weren’t in a difficult hiking area. At all. It might as well have been paved.

At one point we’re walking along a trail near the Spokane River, and the path splintered into two… one that stayed mostly straight and through an open field, and another closer to the shoreline through a more bushy, tree-filled area. Everyone but me had been on this trail before, and so everyone but me knew the trails would eventually converge again.

My sons dart onto the bushy trail and my wife and daughters keep going straight on the open field trail.

“Whoa, is it OK they’re going that way?” I ask my wife.

“Sure,” she said. “Go with them. They’ll show you the way.”

So we split up, which goes against everything I’ve ever learned from horror movies, and I follow the boys down the tree-covered trail. My foot hurt (because I didn’t tie my shoelaces tight enough) and I had to urinate really badly (because I didn’t go before we left… oh how the turntables have…).

Already the two boys are a few hundred feet in front of me, and the trail zigzags left and right so much that it’s easy to lose sight of them. I can hear them giggling at me, which is all fun and games until a grizzly bear attacks, but whatever. I yell at them to come back.

“Boys! Stay here on the path, I need to find a bush off the trail.”

Now, look, I want to be clear: I didn’t intend on peeing on any public path. This was an emergency, and I had every intention to use a bush so deep off the trail that no human would ever care about it.

Anyway, I didn’t get the chance, because almost immediately the boys ran down the path, zig-zagging left and right until I couldn't see or hear them anymore. At this point, of course I’m frustrated I can’t use the bathroom, but moreso I’m now worrying about the extremely likely scenario of my kids getting eaten by a grizzly bear along the Spokane River.

I’m hollering and rushing and twisting my bum ankle and causing a commotion that no bear, human or even squirrel would ever want to witness. Eventually, the path reaches a clearing and I come across my entire family — my sons are standing with my wife and daughters on the reconverged trails, and they’re all just laughing at me.

“The trail only separates for like an eighth of a mile,” my wife tells me. “You can basically see that entire path from this one.”

While I contend she couldn’t see me through all that thick, lush flora, she claims there was never a risk of anyone getting lost or separated on such a beginner-level trail system.

“Probably not the best place to go pee either,” she said.

Now my 8-year-old likes to say that he abandoned me in the woods, and that’s very funny to him.

“You were lost in the woods!” He said.

Fine. Joke’s on me. Let’s see how he feels after I show him “The Blair Witch Project.”

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Tyler Wilson is a freelance writer and stay-at-home dad to four kids, ages 4-10. He is tired. He can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.