I need to be more careful about being careful about what I wish for. My new job has me down in the Imnaha Canyon a bunch, and it’s great. So they say to me, hey, do you wanna go around and do the temperature loggers once a month? These logging devices are small doodads in the water that take the temperature of the stream every so often. They scribble little digital notes to themselves and you come along periodically to squeeze the information out through some wires. Then you carry that info back to town and put the numbers inside a thinking box, which is called a “computer.” It’s kind of technical.

The part that sounded good to me was walking up the creeks every month. Seeing new territory is always nice but I sure do enjoy revisiting certain spots to see what they look and act like in different moods. So I was keen to get acquainted with these creeks through regular checkups. I believe I went so far as to say these words out loud: “It’ll be great to really get to know them.”

Well, mission accomplished. I was shown the locations of the temperature logger sites and when the next month rolled around, I assured my bosses I could find those suckers again, no problem. You just go up the creek and then there’s that trail, by those trees. And some rocks. Maybe a bush? Um. Man, there’s a lot of rocks and little trails and bushes in the world. And a lot of them start looking alike if a person isn’t careful.

On my very first try I gained intimate knowledge of two drainages in particular. There was some poison ivy involved. Thorns. It was snowing. Lots of backtracking. Getting whipped in the face by tiny branches. What I was looking for were sections of small cable, attached to trees and running into the creek. The business end of the cable is attached to metal housings to protect the little digital loggers. The diameter and color of the cable is not too much different from the fourteen-zillion stalks of grass and small twigs that also drape themselves along these creekbeds and run into the water at the same angle a cable would. I, uh, really got to know the area.

Thing was, when I was shown the sites on the first go-round we were walking along talking about work and this and that and a few other things and then suddenly, whoah. Here we are. See this rock here? And this tree? OK. Now, this very faint trail is what we’re looking for. I tried to sear the landmarks into my brain. Really took some mental notes. What I should have taken was my GPS.

Back when I was learning the ropes of rafting on the Grande Ronde, rowing the gearboat for Winding Waters River Expeditions, there may have been some trial and error involved with me finding certain camps. “Remember: start pulling over when you see that tree on the bend with those rocks, next to the bushes. Can’t miss it.” OK. Got it. Rocks and bushes. And a tree. But, hey, it’s like taking the wrong exit off the freeway in Portland. You end up going over some bridge and it takes forty minutes to backtrack and you learn your lesson after doing that three or four times.

I wish I was one of those people with a built-in compass that was factory-installed before being born. Or do I? Do those people ever really appreciate the instinctive knowing of exact coordinates? Maybe, just maybe, a person needs to experience some fruitless searching first with a vague understanding of where they need to be before they can truly know what it is to find what they’re after. Yeah, probably not. That internal compass program sounds way better.

Jon Rombach is a local columnist for the Chieftain.