The Lost List

Abstract

The Lost List Ryan Bradley (bio) My grandfather once taught me how to use a sextant. We were at sea, motoring toward Baja California’s Isla San Martín, many miles off Punta Colonet, out of sight of land. The time was important, as I recall. We took turns squinting into the sextant’s sight, lining up the angle of the noonday sun so that the mirrors reflected its image onto the horizon line, which kept bouncing up and down with us and the boat and the ocean’s swell. It was hot, and awkward, and I remember wanting to give up on the task several times. Someone on board — my uncle, most likely — snapped a photo of us. I must have been aware of his taking it, because I’m hamming it up, brow furrowed and squinting hard into the sight, like I know what the hell I am doing. It’s not a good photo of me, but my grandfather looks perfectly at ease. He’d navigated this way during World War II, up to and even after his ship, a combat cutter, was torpedoed by a German sub and partially sank in the North Atlantic. He would have died were it not for some Icelandic fisherman who happened to be trawling nearby, and to whom I owe my existence. After making note of the angle, I [End Page 480] remember retreating into the shade and staring at a nautical chart, then drawing a line from where we had been to where we now, with the help of the sextant, supposed we were. It seemed both very precise — the instrument, the charts, the various calculations — and something approximating a tremendous guess. The great blue sky and deep blue sea and us, on a little white boat, out in the vastness, trying to find our way. ________ About a year ago I began keeping a list of lost things: objects and areas that acted as engines of disappearance or disorientation; individuals who had vanished suddenly and mysteriously, then returned, or not; animals that had taken strange and extraordinary rambles trying to find — something, whatever it was wasn’t always clear. I suppose my intent was something like the sun lines I’d learned from my grandfather, the plotted points on a nautical chart. If I could take all these entries and order them just so, perhaps they would lead somewhere. When I began the list, the world was shutting down, the future felt terribly uncertain, and I felt lost. My lost list was a way to calm my mind, order chaos, plot a course through the unknown. I began with places. The first entry is the Box-Death Hollow Wilderness, in southern Utah — a mess of slot canyons, dry washes, and a few trails. People often get lost there. In 2012, a fifty-nine-year-old woman hiking the Box-Death Hollow jumped down a small ledge and broke her leg. Lying there, she realized she hadn’t told anyone where she was. She was also a diabetic and had failed to pack food. Forty years earlier, however, she’d taken a survival course; she had on her person a scarf and a walking stick, which she used to fashion a brace for her leg. During the day, she slept, so that she could stay up all [End Page 481] night, huddled beneath her poncho in order to stave off hypothermia. She did not wander, for she knew that she wouldn’t get far with her leg. More importantly, she recalled from her course that once someone began looking for her, she had a much better chance of being found if she stayed put. On the fourth day, a local search and rescue team spotted her. Beneath places there are entries for the Black Sea, the North Sea, the Orkney Islands, the Bermuda Triangle, and Mocha Island, off the coast of Chile, where shipwrecks are so common that many of its houses are cobbled together from the scavenged parts of boats run aground. The Lost Sea in Tennessee is an underground lake, the largest in the United States, and where some 20,000 years ago, a giant jaguar...