Three Lemons
There is a peculiar moment in a wilderness trip when nothing is wrong, exactly, but the trip has begun acquiring a character.
The boot is wet. Someone is tired. The trail has taken longer than expected. The weather has become less convincing. None of these events deserves to be promoted to an emergency. Outdoor life would become rather impractical if it did. You deal with the boot, stop for a few minutes, check the map, put on another layer, and continue. The problem is not the individual inconvenience. It is that they have begun arriving with suspicious regularity.
This is where experience earns its keep. A beginner tends to evaluate each problem on its own merits. Someone with enough time in the woods starts noticing the direction in which the problems are pointing. That distinction is subtle enough to be missed and important enough to matter. A wet boot means very little. A wet boot on a person who is already cold, several kilometres from the vehicle, with less daylight than expected, belongs to a different sentence.
The Three Lemon Rule grew out of that kind of observation. One lemon is life. Two lemons are worth noticing. By the third, I am generally interested in the company they are keeping.
There is also the matter of human attachment to a plan. We become strangely loyal to decisions once they have cost us something. Three hours of walking creates an argument for walking another hour that has nothing to do with geography. We have already come this far. We are almost there. Turning around would mean that the last three hours had been spent going in the wrong direction, which is apparently more difficult for the mind to accept than spending four hours making the same mistake.
The woods are refreshingly uninterested in sunk costs.
They also have a habit of making preparation look excessive until the day it doesn’t. A spare layer, fire-making equipment, water treatment, navigation gear, food and other small redundancies can spend years accomplishing absolutely nothing. That is generally considered a successful career for emergency equipment. Its purpose is not to be useful on every trip. Its purpose is to prevent one bad afternoon from becoming a very long one.
After decades of teaching survival, I have become less interested in the supposed spectacular mistake than in the moment when a person still has several easy ways out and does not recognize their value. Options tend to disappear quietly. By the time you are cold, lost, injured and running out of daylight, the decision-making has become considerably less democratic.
The first lemon is therefore the useful one. It is still possible to dismiss it, which is precisely why it deserves a little attention. By the third, the woods have usually stopped being subtle.
Thoughts related to “The 3 Lemon Rule: Staying Safe in the Outdoors,” Episode 18 of the Reverie Nature Podcast, July 20, 2024.