5. I got pretty close to dying of hypothermia when I was 16 years old. I had a penchant then, then as now, for the high desert of Oregon, but also less sense, less fear and more headlong idiocy. It was winter, February, I think, and I had been spurned by a boy, the back story of which would fill many pages and lead us off course here. So I drove into the high desert.

Let it suffice to say that I had been half-living with a gang of people in a house with a second-floor exterior doorway that opened onto nothing in a strange, outflung scattering of residences and small landholdings on the outskirts of Bend, Ore. This had been happening for a few weeks, and many things happened, including but not limited to: someone’s father showing up with a shotgun, two or three totalled vehicles, me jumping off a roof and landing on a fence (I was fine), horses, llamas, Rottweilers, a forest freaking fire (we had to spray down the roof). You get the idea.

Not exactly a quiet time. Except at night. At night, if the party was elsewhere for the evening, you could walk along the road next to the house and it was completely silent except when the deer hiding in the shadows sensed your presence and leapt off into the night away from you with a vibration kind of like the tiniest of earthquakes.

I drove off into my own on Forest Road 18, also known as China Hat road for the landform of obvious resemblance at which it terminates. This road has since been paved further, but not too far, I don’t think. I drove past Skeleton and Wind Caves in the icy time well after dark, then kept going. It was clear when I left but clouded as I covered the forty or so miles into the nowhere desert.

By eleven I was thirty miles from anywhere, by eleven-thirty probably more than forty. This is a mixture of forest and BLM land we’re talking about here, no settlements, fences, cattle or marks of humanity, just scrub juniper and sage, and, higher up as I went, Ponderosa and cold.

Suddenly I took a corner too fast–I was on gravel–and lost control of the car. Unfortunately the road was on a high embankment, probably 15 or 20 feet, so this meant plunging off the side and landing–hard. In restrospect I realize I’m extremely lucky I didn’t roll the thing.

Adrenaline-charged, shaken, but otherwise apparently fine, I started scrambling around, in full must-deal-with-this fashion. I hadn’t passed a single car on my entire drive, so, even though I had a fair amount of gas, sitting it out didn’t seem like a proper tactic. In fact, I was strangely well-outfitted, with a USGS quadrangle of the area I was in, a good down jacket and shell, and, if not gloves, rags, at least, which I stuffed in my pockets. And a flashlight, even.

Daft and foolhardy I may have been, but I had a good sense of direction. I knew I had passed a sign a while ago at a small intersection that had pointed towards Highway 20, the main east-west highway from Bend to Burns. That became my destination.

As I started walking, snow started falling. Calm and pretty at first, and then harder and soaking. I found the intersection I was looking for after about three miles, the one that pointed to the highway.

HIGHWAY 20 –> 11 MILES

As I started walking the long walk it got colder and the snow started making me dizzy. After about five miles I was tired and irritable and unsure of myself. The forestation had thickened.

It started to seem like a very pleasing idea to sit down in a snow nest under any one of the trees and sleep for a while. If I could just nap and then walk the rest of the way later.

The following scene repeated itself perhaps a dozen times over the next several miles:

1) See nice-looking tree
2) Walk toward it and sit down underneath it
3) Lean head back and feel drowsy
4) Realize what the hell is going on and jump up from tree-well with a start
5) More trudging

I reached a Y in the road after about 7 miles and chose to go right, randomly, which was a good decision (note that, though I had a map with me in the car, I didn’t bring it). The left branch circled up to a site called Evans Wells. Nowhere useful.

My hair had frozen to me in a solid blanket by the time I approached highway 20 and frantically waved down a pickup truck. The guy in the truck was not amused, but did drive me all the way up to my car–then he winched it out with a big winch. Which was impressive. Also impressive was that the car ran, sort of. There was clearly something wrong with it, but it got me back where I’d started.

I crept into the quiet-breathing house full of people at about 3:30 in the morning and found my sleeping bag on the floor, quietly. Around me the sighing of sleep and the smell of underage drinking (I didn’t drink until I was 21–talk about being alienated from my peers).

The saddest part is: No one had even noticed I was gone.