On the Seawalla community gallery of new writing, art and commentary hosted by Ron Slate

In 1805, while foraging for sarsaparilla on the shore of Lake Ontario, four-year-old Paul Gasford got lost. His family, en route from the Bay of Quinté to resettle in Niagara, New York, built bonfires and fired guns in hopes that young Paul would return. But after a three-day search, the Gasfords, fearing the worst, continued onward to their new American home.

Paul was not only alive, he survived. But not before succumbing to terror and helplessness. On that first day separated from his family, as told in The True and Wonderful Story of Paul Gasford, a children’s book published in 1826, “he continued running about and crying until nearly sun down.” He soon made up his mind to follow the coastline: surviving on grapes, hiding from Indians, hiking forty miles in four days to find his family.

Stories, like little Paul Gasford’s, are usually stricken from the national narrative, according to historian Jon T. Coleman. “Well-oriented people litter American history,” he writes in Nature Shock: Getting Lost in America. Lewis and Clark, Pike and Powell, Armstrong and Aldrin, these men — and History (mis-)remembers trailblazers as mostly all men — might have wrongly taken a right turn instead of a left at some clump of sagebrush or mistaken one moon rock for another, but, as was their manifest destiny, they got where they were going.

Coleman, a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, is more interested in the “befuddled drifters,” the “strays,” those unfortunate lost souls who “stumbled around, made hasty decisions, and sometimes perished only to be buried in unmarked graves.” Their stories, he writes, allow us to understand how individuals have navigated their way from relational spaces (towns, cities, and other connection-oriented communities) to individual spaces (the wilds of the natural world). This jump, from the familiar to the unknown, often resulted in what Coleman terms “nature shock,” that moment when the hippocampus of some poor lost person shifts into overdrive, flooding the mind with dismay and delirium — a mental and emotional point of no return.  

Take, for example, Hernando de Soto. For over three years, the Spanish conquistador pillaged, plundered, and murdered his way across much of the present-day American South, beginning at the Gulf coastal, native Floridian settlement of Uzita. At first, he made sure to keep his ships, a literal and symbolic anchor to home, well within sight. He camped atop town pyramids and ordered his troops to improve sight lines by clearcutting the forests that stood between him and the sea. He force-conscripted locals to work as translators and guides, but their utility, like their linguistic and spatial knowledge, was limited by cultural and geographic experience. The borders and boundaries that lined the American interior, de Soto learned much too late, were as real as the one that separated Spain from Portugal. The Spaniards bushwhacked and circled back, before eventually losing their path back to their ships. Nature shocked de Soto into a “great confusion” — a fever he contracted didn’t help — that eventually led to an unmarked trench forever lost on the Mississippi River’s western banks.

Homesteading American colonists likewise infiltrated the continental interior knowing that the woods that stood just beyond their doorsteps could and would disorient. What appeared empty was suffused with peril.  Coleman does a fine job of scouring the archives for grisly tales of frontier people devoured by bears and wolves, children suffocated under snowfall, and priests who simply disappeared.

The lost humans altered the historical and cultural landscape as much as those pioneers that “found” new lands. Parents strung cowbells on their children, including at least one future president: James Buchanan. The Algonquins and other Indigenous peoples did a healthy trade in catching and releasing lost settlers for bounty. Today, lost place-names dot the nation. Check a map: there’s likely a Lost Creek, Lost River, or Lost Trail near you.

But not all lost stories need such rigorous locating. Davy Crockett met his second wife after trekking several miles off course while on a communal wolf hunt. “Whenever a fellow gets bad lost,” he wrote in his memoirs, channeling a future Yoga Berra, “the way home is just the way he don’t think it is.” Henry David Thoreau praised the virtues of getting lost. “It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience,” he wrote, “to be lost in the woods any time.”

For the enslaved, getting lost could mean liberation and vice versa. “Runaways could get even more lost,” Coleman writes, “when they were found.” Freedom narratives often detail such quandaries, as in John “Fed” Brown’s memoir, which describes being caught and questioned by an armed posse after crossing state lines with a forged pass.

“What are you doing here,” the men asked Brown.

“I got lost, sir,” he responded.

“Oh, you got lost, did you? And pray, sir, did you come here on purpose to get lost?”

“No, sir. I got lost before I got here.”

Following several more attempts, Brown got lost for good, eventually finding freedom in England.

After the Civil War, nature became the Great Outdoors, the domain of hikers, campers, and other leisure- and thrill-seekers. Guidebooks and an avalanche of new outdoor periodicals took a new tack. Getting lost, they said, is all well and good — rewarding even! — as long as you did not succumb to nature shock. Beware of “the little blue devils of terror,” one outdoorsman-journalist cautioned. “Don’t get flurried,” warned another. Stop, sit, and calmly think it over, most all experts agreed. “Many a man has got lost and staid lost a week or a month,” advised a popular guide, “and come out smiling in the end.” This blessed-are-the-lost creed reached its apex in 2010, when a campaign by the Montana Office of Tourism encouraged visitors to “Get Lost.”

Coleman covers a lot of ground in this book: historically, geographically, and narratively. Occasionally, the stories he’s uncovered, especially in the middle sections of the book, begin to bleed together. Lacking a central, captivating character, these sections get lost in the metaphorical weeds.

Despite the ubiquity of GPS-enabled smart phones, we still get lost. Around 3,000 national park visitors require search-and-rescue services annually. (Those most commonly in need are day-hiking men between the ages of 20 and 40.) But of course nature shock afflicts more than just hikers. As a recent New York Times Magazine article about migrant deaths in the Sonoran Desert makes heartbreakingly clear, men, women, and children continue to get lost in the name of freedom, at the average death rate of one per day, every day for over two decades. It’s further proof that we — as a nation, a people, an experiment in democracy — have yet to find our way.