The Willow Glen Resident Good deed brings back memories of being lost Carl Heintze Have you ever been lost, truly lost? It's only happened to me twice in my lifetime, and it's an experience I don't want to repeat. The first instance was physical, the second emotional. The first happened during World War II when the platoon to which I belonged was assigned to outpost a large, barren hill near the Urft River in western Germany. It was so high and barren that we only outposted it at night to prevent infiltration. In the daytime we stayed in our miserable holes in the ground in woods below the brow of the hill. It was February, and although winter was waning, it was still with us. As soon as it was dark we ventured out on the barren hilltop and dropped off two men to a hole. There we sat and shivered until about midnight, when it began to snow. The snow whirled down from a cloud backlit by the moon, and soon the entire hilltop was white. About 1 a.m. contravening my orders, I got up out of the hole, mostly to get warm, and headed toward the next hole and the next two men, hoping at least to get some sympathy. My companion remained behind huddled under his poncho. I'd only gone a little way when I discovered I didn't know where I was. I didn't have any sense of direction. I was like a black dot in the middle of a white circle. I didn't know whether to go right or left, up or down. My second feeling of being lost came years later when I moved my wife and three children to New Jersey to spend an academic year in a fellowship program. We drove across the country with no idea of where we were going to live and arrived in the middle of Hurricane Esther. There wasn't a furnished house in sight nor a landlord who wanted to rent to anyone with three children. We wandered up and down the streets of various small towns in Bergen County, N.J., in the rain and wind, with the prospect that we were either going to have to go back home, camp in our car indefinitely or stay in a motel forever--or at least for a school year. I had not a clue as to what to do. I was paralyzed of will and bereft of ideas. I had tried all I could before our arrival to locate a house. I'd had absolutely no success. I had appealed to the university, which knew a lot about single rooms in Manhattan but nothing about New Jersey. I've never felt as abandoned, forlorn or alone, except on the hillside above the Urft River. Well, obviously, I didn't stay lost. In the first instance, I began walking in ever-widening circles until I found another hole and two more men--we were about to be ordered back off the hill and into the woods, anyway--and in the second, a kindly real estate saleslady and my wife established instant rapport and talked a landlady headed for Florida for the winter into leaving a little early. We had a home, temporarily, but one which was to last through the winter and spring until we came back to California. But I never relished the fearful prospect of being lost in either instance. And both experiences have made me forever grateful for the life I've led among the familiar with the constant close at hand. Both instances also remind me of how thin is the screen between being in the center of a universe where all parts are familiar, and being separated from everything we have come to expect from life. I was reminded of all this recently when, as a volunteer, I helped to feed some of the homeless. It wasn't much of a volunteer effort: We made sandwiches, helped serve about 50 people breakfast in downtown San Jose, and then escaped to the security of our own familiar houses and streets. We left the homeless, the lost, behind, but not the memory of their faces. About six of them were children. They'd spent the night sleeping on exercise mats in the church gym. The sandwiches we made were all the lunch they were going to get. I don't know what they had for dinner. They faced the prospect of another night in the gym, maybe many nights in the gym. I see them still, just as I see the blank emptiness of that hilltop in Germany where I could find neither friend nor foe, and the alien city in another state where I knew not a soul, nor any way out of being lost again. For they had done nothing but arrive in it unbidden. It seemed to me they were simply paying a price for being born. I wished not that I could see them again but that I could find something for them, some assurance, some knowledge that the world is neither as lost nor as terrible as it must seem to them every morning. But I was not sure I could. I was not sure they would not spend days, months or years lost, lost in the middle of what the rest of us find so secure and sustaining. I was less than sure the world would treat them as gently as it had treated me. But I hoped it might. [ Back to Contents Page | Willow Glen Resident Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Willow Glen Resident, November 18, 1998. ©1998 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.