The Fog Above the Tree Line

When Ms Aydın announced that the school hiking club would climb Uludağ in late October, nobody was more excited than Mert. He had the best boots, the lightest backpack and, as he reminded us every ten minutes, the most advanced navigation app money could buy. I had a paper map, a small compass and a sandwich that had been squashed since breakfast. The first two hours were glorious. The pine forest smelled of resin, the path was dry, and Mert strode ahead, glancing at his phone and calling out our height above sea level. Ms Aydın had asked us to stay within sight of the person in front, but by the time we reached the open slopes above the trees, Mert, Aylin and I were a good distance ahead of the rest of the group. Then the fog came. It rolled across the mountain so quickly that within a minute I could not see the end of my own arm. Mert held up his phone triumphantly, then frowned. "No signal," he muttered. "The app won't load the map." He shook it as if that might help. Aylin looked at me. I would have preferred to be somewhere else, because I am not someone who normally takes the lead. But I remembered the lesson Ms Aydın had given us in September, when we had practised with maps in the school garden. "We stop here," I said, surprised by how steady my voice sounded. "She told us that if visibility drops, we should stay at the last marker and wait." Mert opened his mouth to argue, then looked at the grey wall around us and closed it again. We sat behind a rock, shared my flattened sandwich three ways, and blew the emergency whistle on Aylin's keyring every few minutes. Mert had gone remarkably quiet. It took about forty minutes for the first torch beam to appear through the mist. Ms Aydın was carrying two torches and the calm expression of someone who had been through this before. "Well done," she said simply. "Anyone can read a screen when it works. What matters is knowing what to do when it doesn't." On the way down, Mert walked beside me. "Can you show me how the compass works?" he asked, without looking at me. I handed it over. It was, I thought, the best moment of the whole trip.