Lost on a Mountain in Maine - Book Review

Donn Fendler is well and deservedly remembered for something that happened to him when he was just twelve. We will get to that but first consider the following.

After graduating from the New Hampton School in New Hampshire, Fendler enlisted in the Navy in 1944 and served as a Seabee in the Pacific theater during World War II. He studied forestry at the University of Maine for two years and briefly attended the University of Georgia before making a career in the Army.

Trained as a Green Beret, he served in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division. In 1962, he was posted to West Germany. With the rank of lieutenant colonel, Fendler later assumed command of a battalion at Fort Campbell, Ky. He retired in 1978 and moved to Clarksville, Tennessee, not far from the Army base.

There is something in the chronology of his service record that needs a bit more explaining. That is for someone else to uncover. Suffice it to say, all that describes a pretty full life. However, Fendler became a national sensation before his military service in 1939 for surviving in the woods for nine days alone.

The young lad from Rye, New York was separated from family members on Maine's Mount Katahdin. Famous as the popular end point of the Appalachian Trail, Katahdin was still wild in many respects.

The search became front page news and hundreds pitched in to find the boy. Without food or proper clothing (some he lost while drying it out), Fendler followed a stream and telephone line out of the woods 35 miles from where he went missing. Dehydrated and covered with insect bites, and 16 pounds lighter, he looked like a liberated prisoner of war. Fendler credited his experience as a Boy Scout in helping him survive (many fellow Scouts were involved in the search).

For any hiker who has battled bugs, you will appreciate this, “Somebody ought to do something about those black flies,” Mr. Fendler said. “They’re terrible — around your forehead, under your hair, in your eyebrows and in the corners of your eyes and in the corners of your mouth, and they get up your nose like dust and make you sneeze, and you keep digging them out of your ears.”

His story has joined the canon of missing hiker tales. The separation from family is a familiar mistake, doomed to be repeated. Later, with the book and memories still fresh, he would give public talks on his experience. Nearly 7 decades of retelling honed the story. “I hope the message that I give sinks in,” he told The Bangor Daily News in 2008. “It’s really about faith and determination. That’s the whole message.”