If you’ve gotten the L.L. Bean winter catalogs, you’ve seen photographs of unnaturally smiling and impeccably clad folks from away bounding across the snow on little snowshoes. What fun it is! they seem to be saying, to fly over the surface of the snow as lightly as birds. If you know snow, however, you’ll notice they’re leaping over a surface packed hard as concrete, and would do almost as well without the dinky little snowshoes. If you know snowshoeing, you’ll notice that none of them is even threatening to break a sweat, and not even one of the kids is complaining.

The Saami, Norse, Iranians, and Siberians apparently devised wooden skis (“snow shoes”) as early as 4500 years ago. The technology migrated east with the ancestors of the Inuit and other native Americans; but the immigrants to the New World made use of animal hide strips and supple wood to devise what we have known as the snowshoe. The Europeans stuck with the ski, and they’re still beating us with depressing regularity at cross-country racing.

I prefer skis to snowshoes, myself, but with advancing age don’t ski alone out in the woods anymore. My snowshoes are safer. So on the day before the winter solstice – just below freezing, two feet of snow in the woods, Mother and the dogs away and not due back till evening – I dug out my Adirondack bearpaws, adjusted the bindings to a new pair of snow sneakers, and clomped across the yard to the edge of the unplowed snow. I would follow our western property line north to the pink-wrapped corner stake, continue in a straight line till I’d been out half an hour, make a 180-degree turn about 100 yards in diameter, and follow a line parallel to the first, back to the house. It was a foolproof plan: rather like the Russian one at the Battle of Austerlitz. Nothing possibly could go wrong. Just to make sure, I took a cell phone. I’d check for service at the far end of my loop.

When I was young, I believed in the notion of human perfectibility: that, with assiduous adherence to the best practices of the past and rigorous application of intelligence and common sense, humankind could lift itself out of its morass of ignorance, prejudice, and belligerence. With age, I have given that up. Pulling up on our own bootstraps doesn’t get our feet off the ground; only divine intervention can possibly elevate us. And this little snowshoe jaunt out into the swamps and thickets behind the house was a perfect illustration of that.

Fifteen years ago – our old dog was still a puppy then – she and I set off on a similar jaunt that nearly ended in a night spent jogging in place in a frozen New Hampshire swamp. The sky had turned to oatmeal and my sense of direction to mush. Through a series of lucky guesses, and because we both still moved pretty briskly in those days, we made it home by dark. But I swore afterward never to enter unfamiliar woods under cloudy skies without a compass. Later I added a Bic lighter, a space blanket, and a flashlight to the list. But never having had to use them, I have more often than not left them all behind. As I did last week.

My first step into the unplowed snow should have reminded me. I sank below my knee. Uh-oh, I thought. This is gonna be slow going. But no problem. I’ll go for 40 minutes and if it hasn’t gotten better, I’ll take my back track, which should have me skipping like a Gore-Tex-clad model in an L.L. Bean catalog.

There were deer tracks wandering in every direction; it was clearly a wintering area. Beds everywhere, like oval bathtubs in the snow. I trudged northward (as I fancied), stumbling often on the little stubs sticking up from downed trees. After half an hour, bathed in sweat under my Polartec shirt, I swung to the right and headed back toward the house – and promptly came to a stream running north in a place I knew they all flowed south.

The first, and most important thing to appreciate in that situation is that your assumptions about direction are false: that your head needs to be screwed around before you can make any creative decisions. Well, I thought, I’ve been trending to the right; so I’ll just turn sharply right and go till I cross my own track. But twenty minutes later, that still hadn’t happened. Instead, I could see an open field with a strange house at the far end, in a place that no houses could be. So, with snow in the offing, and recalling the story I’d read the day earlier of the Christmas tree-hunting Dominguez family that had spent three days lost in snowy woods north of Sacramento, I reluctantly turned tail and rather shamefacedly followed my own winding back track home.

I daresay that most of us who go into the woods have from time to time become “a bit confused.” as Daniel Boone used to say. When I was young, I often came out miles from where I’d intended. But it was no problem because I could walk the long miles home, even if it took till midnight. Things get a little dicier when that surplus of energy has been reduced, and it makes sense to begin taking the things you might need to spend the night out, if you have to. The greatest danger is the feeling, “This is a piece of cake. What possibly could go wrong?”

So the compass, space blanket, and Bic lighter are by the door again, along with a few pieces of cord and a lightweight raincoat. The cell phone? Yes, it would have worked; there was a signal, even out in the swamp at the end of my route. But that’s the last ditch. Death before dishonor!