pezar wrote:
Whatever the "communication exercise" was that this father was attempting, it obviously was poorly thought out since the boy wandered off. Given that autistics tend to wander off if something catches their fancy, I think that to try something like that in the forest where distractions are legion was the height of folly. The good thing is, the boy's autism may have helped him in that he simply followed the trail back to the trailhead, very logically. A NT may have gone blindly crashing through the forest where there was no trail, making him that much harder to find. I've heard numerous stories where NT people, lost in a forest, will go wandering blindly through dense brush because they thought there was a mining camp nearby or something similar, not having a compass with them or really knowing where the miners are, and ending up dead. A couple years ago a San Francisco family got lost in the Cascades near Roseburg, Oregon, and after a while the father went off pell mell trying to find a mining camp he thought existed but hadn't for a while, and walked in circles before dying. He had no map or compass. The logging road he'd followed to his doom was still visible despite several inches of snow. But instead he went crashing through the forest blindly.
I heard about that story, quite close by my area where I go to college at. very surprising how it all turned out.
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I want peace for all. Simple yet elegant.