He didn't lose the expedition, it couldn't keep up with him. Sixty year old André was a school teacher, accomplished amateur chef, and expert bathroom surgeon. He had joined the geological survey expedition because he liked being outdoors.
One day six year old Susie came in from afternoon recess saying Donny used the "F"-word in the schoolyard. Feeling subversive and adventurous, André asked, "What's the 'F'-word?" Susie said, "Shit!"
As night fell, André built a lean-to. He had never built one before, but saw such things on The Discovery Channel, where he also watched surgeries performed, learning new techniques with his toenail scissors. Although he didn't know it at the time, his lean-to would stand for one hundred years. It would serve as a lifesaving example of wilderness architecture to the frontiersmen and aboriginal people who stumbled across it.
Although the occasion did not arise, André was the type of man who would treat a snake bite wound by biting a mouthful of flesh and sucking out the poison. He would then weave grass into a yard-long cable and use it as a tourniquet. In lieu of peroxide or liquor, he would treat the wound with urine as ill-equipped battlefield surgeons had treated wounds during World War One.
One evening André's wife repaired a picture frame with Super Glue and glued the tips of her thumb and forefinger together. She called to their teenaged son who was in the basement watching TV, tears in her voice, "I glued my fingers together. Your father…" She couldn't say it. André wanted to separate her fingers with a knife. Their son suggested soaking her hand in warm water. "You can do that, too," André said replacing his filet knife in the rack.
Night came and was cold. André built a fire. He had not eaten all day. He thought of his hunger pangs as his stomach practicing hand shadows within him. He wove together a hammock of leaves and twigs. It supported his weight fine and he lay beneath the canopy of tree limbs and slept. He dreamed of the morning recess when Donny came into the class crying, having skinned his knee in the schoolyard. André sat him down, placed his hand on the wound, and healed it. Donny laughed, thinking everyone could do this. He forgot about his fall by lunch time.
André woke the next morning before the birds. He did not stir, letting them sleep a few minutes more. He woke with his usual prodigious bedhead, looking as though he had traveled through the night at great velocity. His gray hair resembled a satellite photo of a hurricane. However, all was calm beneath. He chewed on a twig to clean his teeth.
André's thirty-third birthday fell on Easter Sunday.
He needed a clearing to do what he planned next. As André walked through the verdun he saw both the forest and the trees. He crossed a stream and found a clearing. There he built a DaVinci-esque flying machine with tree limbs. He had seen such things on The Discovery Channel.
André received Simon & Garfunkel's album Bridge Over Troubled Water as a gift when he completed his masters degree.
The flying contraption was crude, but it rose high enough above the trees to appear on NORAD's radar. He ascended three times, waited, then ascended three more times, signaling S.O.S.. He wore no watch but knew that three and one quarter hours passed by the time a Canadian Remote Services helicopter hovered above his clearing like a giant wasp.
In the early 1960s, André saw Lenny Bruce perform in a tent in a field outside of Toronto, Ontario.
A cable lowered from the helicopter. André grabbed hold, gave it two firm tugs, and ascended from the wilderness a final time.
In the helicopter André ascertained the type and grade of fuel it used, determined its cargo capacity, and then asked if he might try flying it. The pilot and co-pilot looked at one another, then at André. The pilot said, "I guess that would be all right."
Years previous, as Everly Brothers' songs were strummed around a campfire at a friend's cottage, André kept beat with a borrowed tambourine, eventually breaking it over his head during an inspired flourish. As the drunken laughter died down, one friend said into the firelight, "You're a man for all seasons."