{"id":471,"date":"2009-05-09T06:45:55","date_gmt":"2009-05-09T06:45:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/hiking-salvation-lost-but-how.html"},"modified":"2009-05-09T06:45:55","modified_gmt":"2009-05-09T06:45:55","slug":"hiking-salvation-lost-but-how","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/hiking-salvation-lost-but-how.html","title":{"rendered":"Hiking salvation: Lost, but how I’m found"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\"Joshua<\/span>The tale of three-year-old Johua Childers, who was lost in the deep Missouri woods with wild things and no food or water for more than two days, riveted the public the way such stories do. As the parent of a similarly-aged kid, I was of course imagining myself in the situation of his parents–and not enjoying it. Fortunately, the boy is okay–he was still being treated Friday, but was well enough to stay in bed and eat baloney and, as ABC reports<\/a>, to decline to go on “Good Morning America” because, as his father related, “it was too simple for him.”  <\/p>\n

Joshua’s simplicity may also have helped save him. I haven’t tramped about the woods as much as I used to, but the most fascinating story I’ve yet seen related to Joshua’s journey is survival expert Ben Sherwood’s column in The Huff Post, Lost & Found: How a Three-Year-Old Survived 52 Hours in the Woods (and How You Can Too)<\/a>. It’s about the science of “lost person behavior,” but sounds a lot like the kind of lore that nobody has anymore:<\/p>\n

\n

Expert trackers say that an average person leaves behind two thousand clues for every mile he travels. Each step you take produces evidence — a footprint, a broken twig, a clump of mud, a twisted blade of grass. A team of well-trained searchers spaced ten feet apart usually can detect 95 percent of the useful clues. If they’re spaced fifty feet apart, they’ll discover 75 percent of the clues. <\/p>\n

Ken Hill is the world’s foremost authority on the behavior of people who get lost. Hill is a child psychologist at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a densely wooded place once known as the “lost person capital of the world.”<\/p>\n

Hill says all you need to know about lost people is their age and their outdoor activity and you can calculate how far they’re likely to travel and where you should go looking. You don’t need a detailed personal history or psychological profile. You just need some basic information. “It is more important to realize that a known percentage of all lost persons is found within a one- or two-mile radius than it is to know how they got there,” he writes. <\/p>\n

Hill has interviewed countless people who have gone missing in the woods. He’s looked into their wide eyes and listened to the trembling in their voices. “Fear is the enemy,” he says. “Fear activates the large muscles in the legs.” Lost people want to run. They also lose their heads and sometimes forget even to look in their own backpacks for food and water.<\/p>\n

It turns out that no matter where you are in the world, lost people behave in the same way. Who you are determines how far you’re likely to wander. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Read the rest here<\/a> for who is smartest in the woods (hint: young kids and old folks) and why you should stay put–and few do. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The tale of three-year-old Johua Childers, who was lost in the deep Missouri woods with wild things and no food or water for more than two days, riveted the public the way such stories do. As the parent of a similarly-aged kid, I was of course imagining myself in the situation of his parents–and not…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nHiking salvation: Lost, but how I'm found - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/hiking-salvation-lost-but-how.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Hiking salvation: Lost, but how I'm found - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The tale of three-year-old Johua Childers, who was lost in the deep Missouri woods with wild things and no food or water for more than two days, riveted the public the way such stories do. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}