“I know a shortcut” my cousin said as we were figuring out how to get to her friends house. We had walked through the forest before, but whenever we did it ended up taking us longer than if we had walked on the streets. So when she said she knew a shortcut I asked her if she was positive it was an actual shortcut. She said “If we take side streets we have to walk to Milwaukee and then keep walking straight for half an hour until we get to her street, but if we go through the forest it will take us 20 minutes”. At the time we had just started hanging out more often since she lived so far away. Her house was in Lake Villa near Gurnee, so all I knew how to get to was Six Flags and the highway to get back home. So since I barely knew where anything was and I had never been to her friends house I believed her and we left her house and began walking down the street towards the forest.
We still had a hour before her friend was going to be home so while we were in the forest we decided to wander around for a little bit. As we walked through the forest she showed me the fort her friends had made at the beginning of the summer and she ensured me that she knew where we were when she saw it. After walking around for a good thirty minutes we decided that we should start walking to her friends house. We walked through the forest for another ten minutes until it ended and then there was a huge field with long grass and a small river.
Once we got out of the forest I asked her “Are you sure this is the right way” and she responded “Yeah we just have to cross the river and we should start seeing houses soon, gosh don’t you think I know where I’m going? I mean I do live around here”, and then I responded “ Okay, I just don’t want to get lost in here because if we do it’s going to be hard to find our way out”, and then she said “Oh, don’t worry about getting lost because if we do I can just use the GPS on my phone to get us out of here”, and then I gave her a confused look and told her “Okay, so if you use you phone then what are you going to write as your starting location? the middle of a forest, and what directions can we get? take a right at that tree?” she started laughing and said “Don’t worry were not lost”. Believing her we walked towards the little river, hopped over it and kept walking. After about ten more minutes I asked her again “Are you sure you know where we are” and she replied “Yeah just five more minutes and were there”. Fifteen minutes passed and she finally admitted that we were lost.
We turned around and began walking towards the river again. Once we got to the river she realized that we were suppose to keep walking along the river until we saw a tree with a mark left on the side from lightning hitting it and of course she said she knew a quicker way to get there, but we had to go back into the forest. At this point I knew we were lost and that this would end up taking a while, but I didn’t really care since it was only six o’ clock and we had still had another two hours before it would start getting dark, so as long as we got out of there before it was night time the fact that we were lost didn’t bother me that much.
The problem with getting lost in the forest is that everything looks the same and once you go far enough into it it’s hard to find your way out without getting yourself even more lost and confused and there’s no one you can really call and help you get out because there’s no way someone can easily find you. Another problem was that there wasn’t suppose to be people going into the forest and wandering around since many people in her town had the forest as part of their backyard and many wolves wandered around there at night so there was never a dirt path made to help people find their way around which made it even more difficult .
We kept walking and then I realized that my cousins friend had already been waiting for us and that we should call her and tell her that we got lost in the forest and that it might take us a little bit longer than we planned on. So my cousin took out her phone to call her and once the phone started ringing her phone died. My cousin then told me to try calling her off my phone and as I went reaching for my phone I felt nothing in my pocket and remembered that I had left my phone at her house charging. So at this point we had no way of even contacting anyone if we couldn’t find our way out. Once we realized that we started to get scared and we didn’t have her phone anymore to look at the time so we didn’t how long we had before it got dark out.
We stopped trying to figure out how to get to her friends house and we started trying to find our way out. We tried look for houses, a dirt road, or even a fence that we could possibly jump over, but nothing. We kept walking in a straight line, but it felt like we just kept going in circles. After what felt like forever we finally found a fence but it had barbed wire on top of it for some reason so we began walking up and down the fence trying to find some sort of opening that we could both fit through and get out. Soon enough we started to hear someone chuckling and at first we thought it was someone in the forest with us so we got scared, but we then realized that it was an old guy sitting on his porch in his backyard watching and laughing at the two of us. We then asked him if there was an opening anywhere and he said to take a couple steps to the right and there should be a small one. Once we got out we walked towards him to thank him for getting us out of there and he asked us “How long have you girls been in there for?” and I asked him “What time is it?” and he responded “It’s almost seven o’clock,” and then my cousin and I looked at each other and she said “ About two hours”. He just continued on laughing and the two of us just ran out of his backyard.
When we got out to the street my cousin started laughing and I was confused so I asked her “What’s so funny?”, and she said “I don’t know how we ended up over here, but my house is the next block over”, all I could say was “Wow what a shortcut”. I started laughing with her as we began walking to her house. Once we got to her house her dad asked us where we had gone and when we told him the whole story he started laughing and said only the two of you could do that. After that happened I never went back into the forest especially since her dad later told us that there was many tics in there and I got my license a couple weeks after so we never had to walk to her friends house again.