Stories of being lost can often be about being found.

Stories of being lost can often be about being found. I got lost in the Sperrin Mountains of N Ireland and yet found a tale of kindness and mirth with one Thomas McClary.

Plan was to go to the O’Neill family farm for lunch with Annie and Niall (ny-ale); I had last been in 2010. But the best-laid plans fell by the really thin wayside of GPS screwy roads. Two-way, one-lane. The most direct route was one only the sheep took.

The GPS took the shortest route which just happen to be going across this sheep-populated mountain pass that you’ve never seen raw just pure raw countryside everywhere. Cattleguards, huge peat harvest machines. No people.

And I got utterly lost. At a vista point, I got out and just stared.Know how the iPhone captures location? There was none. I didn’t feel lost, though I was.

That’s when I met the retired mechanic, Thomas McClary (he spelled it for me). He saw me at his crossroad and walked over and we got to talking. I had backed down the unmarked lane by a rare house in the wilds (photo attached).

He walked up to my car and introduced himself, a portly man, with a stained shirt of a thousand wears and fewer washes. “And you’d be?” He asked.

“My name is lost,” and we chuckled.

When I told him I was lost trying to get to my family farm in Claude. He said “ I have to go there today — “ story ensues — and says if I wait for a few (I was already very late) he’ll take me there; he rambled around his giant shed of cars and parts and told me more of his life. Showing off his 1964 Dart that was his sons’. Spoke of his health and early retirement. A lifetime of fixing trucks. Ruddy cheeked massive belly.

“Are you scared of small roads?”

No, I told him, having gotten over that fear in my first thousand miles of this trip.

“Well this is a tough one; we’re crossing the mountain and it may be the most beautiful ride of your life. Just follow me.”

And he got me there — but only after pulling off the two-way/one-lane road to tell me a few stories leaning in my window. At one point, he stopped and got out to share a tale of a plane crashing on a nearby mountaintop, and decades later, a relative, a daughter, hired a helicopter to go find her father’s remains. (Photo attached)

I handed him my card and he laughed, “ I’ll have to call you just to tell stories.”

I hope he does.