Location/occasion: Late summer of 1998, Branbury State Park, Vt., – between Brandon and Middlebury, in case you’re curious, or have ever been there. Car camping.

Husband: bad knees, needs electricity or at least a car battery to run the machine to help him breathe at night, but eager to see (and show the kids) the night sky without much light pollution, scared of heights, a worrier and a careful planner.

Me: happy to assure husband I will “be careful” … no clue what that means. Generally my first thought when something goes wrong is, “What will I tell Lew?”

Kids: 10 and 12. Not the least bit scared of heights. Quite agile.

I think we stayed there two or three nights. Nope, must’ve been just two; the car battery couldn’t last three. One evening, husband explained over dinner (with a Styrofoam plate) what a galaxy is and why the stars you see are all in our galaxy and in all different directions, but the Milky Way IS our galaxy and appears as a band in the sky. (“How could a star over there be “in” the Milky Way?” Thinking back to the thick plate helped.) Then he had us stay up until it was late enough and dark enough to see the “teapot” constellation (which spews steam which looks like it becomes the Milky Way (which I hadn’t seen as well we could that night at any point since I was a kid in Western Mass.) and ALSO another galaxy (the only thing we could see which wasn’t in our galaxy) with the naked eye and also through the telescope he had brought. Great science lesson. (Is this why neither of them has any interest in science?)

This was the next night or the previous night. I noticed the rangers were leading a “sunset walk” to a nearby outlook at say, 6:30PM. I wanted to go in the worst way, and the girls were interested too. Bad knees/scared of heights husband couldn’t come. “Be careful. Do you have everything you need? Don’t let them … ” Of course, of course, of course not. (It must be safe; the rangers are leading it.) We got there … what, a few minutes early? No, must’ve been a few minutes late? In any case, no one was there. But there was only one place it could be; Cat had been there before. So we started the climb. The first part involved a lot of boulder scrambling. I figured we’d meet the ranger and the group on the way up. Then there were choices and Cat had crossed that stream, gone through that meadow – but the other way was the only one reasonable way to a sunset view.

We finally got to the place where you could duck under just a few bushes and be on an outlook. I can’t remember – was it a 45 minute climb? I don’t think it was over an hour. I hadn’t expected it to be more than a half-hour because I knew when the sun would set, and I figured the rangers would have planned for us to get there in time for the moment of sunset, let us admire it for a few minutes because isn’t it always best afterwards? and then head us back down, not wanting us to be hiking in the dark. We must have been just behind the group the whole time. We got on to the ledge/rocky outcropping. The view was just incredible – over 180 degrees with the color going from orange to deep blue; the layers of mountains in the distance each a different shade … just gorgeous. (“It’s nice to be here without Lew worrying the girls will fall off. Hey, if we cross to that ledge we would be able to see better. Good thing Lew isn’t here to be freaking out. It’s really quite safe – steep but not unstable.”) It started to rain a bit, then stopped. People appeared from the other direction than I expected – without a ranger – we chatted for a bit and they moved on. It started to rain again.

“Hmm. The ranger group still hasn’t come back and now that rock we crossed is wet and slippery. It must be closer back to the campground in the other direction – where those folks came from. It would be a bad idea to go back the way we came – we’d have to go up and over this bit and there were some pretty steep places other places … and we don’t have a flashlight.”

I’m not at all sure that we ever found the right downward trail. If we did, we lost it several times. It wasn’t rocky and steep – I was right about that. It was borderline swampy. It didn’t seem like it could get dark so fast but of course, we were no longer on a rocky outcropping. And where there had been a nice breeze before, now there were amazing mosquitoes. (Are you wondering about bug stuff? Look, we didn’t bring food, flashlights, or rain gear, you think I thought of bug stuff?) We could hear people in the campground, but a very different part of the campground, and we didn’t get to it for a very long time. I couldn’t see my watch, so I don’t know how long.

At some point the worry shifted from “Will we get back ok?” to “What will my frantic husband do?” Then the realization hit that he – bad knees and all – would start up after us, the way we weren’t going down. Ultimately we did get back, and first I tried to find the rangers who (I was sure) would help me retrieve my husband. That’s when I found out that the ranger-led sunset hike had been the previous week (which also explained why the hike started as late as it had … sunset had gotten noticeably earlier since then). And no, rangers do not hunt for missing husbands.