If it’s spring — and we know it doesn’t feel like spring, but it is — it must be time for spring cleaning. In my house that means, at lazy minimum, an examination of closets and drawers. Out goes the old and unworn, at least in theory. 

In days that seem long gone, people of certain means separated their winter and summer wardrobes. In the fall, summer whites (linens and cottons and organdies and so on) were nicely washed and pressed and put away for the winter. Down from storage came carefully tissue-wrapped furs and sweaters, all the wools and cashmere, smelling of mothballs or sachets of cedar or lavender. This still may be a ritual in some households, but most of us don’t make that dramatic a change in our clothes from season to season these days. 

Partly, this must be because we wear so many synthetic materials and blends. Partly, it is because fashion dictates and dictums were thrown out the window in the 1960s and never jumped back into fashion again. No more ironing of white gloves, no more stuffing straw hats with newspaper and packing them away for warmer days in hatboxes.

Even styles for separate seasons have given way. Women used to wait for good weather to wear sleeveless tops or dresses. If you watch TV these days, you know that has become (you’ll excuse me) old hat. And speaking of hats, some hipsters still, I suppose, switch their felt fedoras for Panama hats depending on the time of year, but most don’t. Baseball caps and what the kids call “trucker hats” are now seen on even the most distinguished heads year round. Even in July and August I’ve seen some heads covered with what we used to call a “watch cap” — the knit hat now universally called a “beanie,” although readers above 50 or so will know what a beanie really is (and sometimes it sported a propeller on the crown!).

This leads me to admit that during a recent spring foray into the very depths of my double-deep closet I realized I have a lot of clothes I haven’t worn in years and haven’t gotten around to giving away. I don’t even recognize everything I’ve tucked away in the darkest recesses, much less recall why I thought I needed them. For example, I must have eight or more long-sleeve crewneck T-shirts, including matching pairs in ice-blue and in dove-gray. They are identical. Why? Wouldn’t three or four be more than sufficient?

The other day, while digging in one of my T-shirt drawers, I found a flouncy nightgown that had been a present from the man I married in 1960, and an authentic sari in black silk with gold embellishments that was given to my late mother-in-law, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, by Evan Frankel (a once formidable East Hampton presence and landowner) at some point before 1974, when she died. 

Some of these things would probably be acceptable in the eyes of the ladies who sort donations at the Ladies Village Improvement Society Bargain Box, but some of them would probably be better off in one of the clothes-donation bins at the dump. And then comes the good part: Finding an excuse to buy something new from one of the 10,000 catalogs of spring clothes that have been stuffing our mailbox since the end of March.

What struck me most at the March For Our Lives in Washington, D.C., was how eloquent all the speakers, who ranged in age from 11 to 18, were.

Was it their suffering that had made them so eloquent? That had concentrated their minds so that their aim was true? And it was true. For four hours we stood in one small green spot at the side of Pennsylvania Avenue, barely moving more than a few inches, four people (one of us an 11-year-old) among about a million, attentively listening. I’m glad I went. 

“Right/Left, It’s Life or Death” read one of the myriad signs, which pretty much summed it up. 

One gathered after the Stoneman Douglas students (and students from Los Angeles, Chicago, and D.C.) spoke, that things really might, after such a long period of depressing entropy, change — to wit, that people may no longer be able to amass caches of military weapons willy-nilly, invidiously citing “self-defense,” that there finally may be thorough rather than cursory background checks, that there even may be licensing and registration and mandated insurance, and that maybe no longer would manufacturers of arms remain immune from lawsuits.

“If you run over someone with a car, they don’t blame the car, but if someone is shot they immediately blame the guns,” a young counterprotester in Boston was quoted as saying in the next day’s Washington Post, an analogy that was not apt.

The chief purpose of cars is to get us from place to place safely. And, of course, their drivers must be licensed and the cars must be registered and insured. The purpose of guns, when not aimed at inanimate targets, is largely to kill or maim, or, at the least, threaten. 

Nobody was saying at the march, as far as I know, that firearms should be utterly banned — aside from the aforementioned military weapons like the AR-15, which, come to think of it, have no place in police departments, either — but that, at long last, their sales and ownership particulars be well-regulated.

Call it a revolution if you want, as Cameron Kasky, a Stoneman Douglas student, did, but gun control is not such a radical idea. The great majority of the country believes it’s past time that something, something effective, be done. 

Nor is it radical to propose that each school be adequately staffed with psychologists and social workers, that kids not be afraid to go to school each day, and that we citizens, at long last again, vote in healthy rather than in the customary apathetic numbers.

Pedestrians in Mumbai have no zebra crossings, no rights, and, by the law of averages, not a long life expectancy. There are barely any traffic lights to give a moment’s grace to those who have to get to the other side. Unencumbered by rules, training, or insurance, Indians drive with an ethereal airbag of reincarnation. They follow no laws of the road, only some eternal and unwritten commandments of existence. Stopping for pedestrians isn’t one of them.

I stood on one side of Hill Road in Mumbai’s swank suburb of Bandra, contemplating the moment to plunge myself into the maze of bumpers and wheels, the honking, heaving, never-ending flow of vehicles and hawkers, an occasional cow, and the clog of pollution. It’s a road I effortlessly crossed every day as a child, to and from Apostolic Carmel Convent School. Forty years later, I’m paralyzed.

There’s a beggar boy I’ve seen often during my two weeks here who seems to have staked out his patch on the traffic island outside St. Andrew’s Church. He whips his arm out of his sleeve, binds it across his back, and taps mournfully on the window of a sleek BMW stuck in the jam. The pane closes in response and the car nudges away. He shrugs and leaves his island, unfurls his arm, and walks away with carefree abandon. Perhaps he has already made enough to avoid a beating from his father. He walks ramrod straight, tall for a street urchin, a good-looking boy, even under his matted hair. Maybe he dreams of being a Bollywood star.

A nearby chai wallah stands behind his sun-faded stall. He’s been there for years, I’m told, and, although he never went to school, has taught himself English. If you stop and chat with him, he’ll tell you that Starbucks is killing his business as he pours his liquid caramel mix of tea, milk, sugar, cardamom, anise, and black pepper from one pan to another. He catches my eye that day on Hill Road and calls out to me, all the while continuing to pour between pots without losing a drop. 

“Madam, a cup of chai today?” he shouts, waggling his head.

I go over, as I have done a few times during the past week. He launches into his usual complaint but always with a lovely smile. 

“The Indians are only wanting cappuccino Frappuccinos nowadays, so I am relying upon the foreigners to still drink my chai.”

I pay him 20 rupees, about 25 cents, for the cup of tea, but don’t drink it, for he is right, I am a foreigner now in my own home city. With a very first-world stomach.

I go back to my spot to contemplate the crossing once more when suddenly there’s a cacophonous honking of horns, and men start jubilantly pointing up to the heavens. High above the six lanes of vehicular indigestion is an advertising billboard that two men have scaled onto from bamboo ladders, the rungs tied together with fraying rope. They are plastering a poster for the next Hindi film that promises the usual three hours of a sexy, spicy tale of forbidden love told in trilling song-and-dance routines as fountains spurt forth and guys in black jeans go from car chases to line dancing, up there on the silver screen.

The billboard men, or maybe boys, are squeegeeing one side of the poster with loving tenderness; their gloriously Technicolored heroine is now looking down on Bandra through her impossibly green eyes. As a mop caresses her mountainous curves beneath the token diaphanous layer of wet sari, it produces another round of orgasmic honking from the gridlocked traffic below. A group of skinny schoolboys next to me moan in echo, then lunge forward into the crush.

A heavily tressed, mobile-wielding housewife appears beside me. “Yah, yah, 100 percent confirmed. Dinner tonight at the gastro pub. Ciao, baby,” she says in a strange Mid-Atlantic twang that is now a requisite of Mumbai’s burgeoning middle class. But it is her hair that is her real cultural badge, a thick dark mane falling over one shoulder. Not a bead of sweat visible either, while I melt in the fermenting heat.

I decide to use her fleshy frame as a buffer to cross the street, and dart into the traffic next to her, mirroring her moves, the stops and starts, in perfect unison with the drivers who choose to brake or not. 

You often hear earnest foreigners talking about wanting to see the “real India.” They mean village India, those parts relatively untouched by modernity and the crass outside world. But it’s in the subcontinent’s great and growing cities where you’ll see the fulcrum of modern India’s culture. Cities that are undoubtedly some of the most gorgeously complex places on earth.

I finally leave Hill Road and walk into the frantic scurry of Bandra’s fish market. Shoppers haggle with squatting fisherwomen. The floor is slick and slimy. A scrawny cat makes off with a fish head. In the midst of this hullabaloo, a man bumps into me. I mention this only because it’s rare. Indians are dexterous in crowds. As our shoulders touch just lightly, he brings his fingers up to his heart, a silent apology and a prayer. 

No matter where we come from or what we look like, to Indians there’s a spark of God in all of us. He was saying sorry to one of his 33 million gods for bumping into mine, whoever my God might be.

Judy D’Mello is The Star’s education reporter.

I had had my doubts that the cheap Chinese remote-controlled boat that Ellis ordered from Amazon would work as advertised. But after it arrived on Monday and we charged its battery and took it to Town Pond and worlds collided, I changed my mind.

Unlike previous disappointing RC toys of one sort or another, the boat moved at a satisfying clip. Ellis, his sister Evvy, and the cousins took turns sending it skittering over the pond’s surface, cranking and screeching hairpin turns at a speed that I was certain would sink the thing.

A lone swan, who had hung around menacingly the day before when we had gone to the pond piloting a plodding plastic warship of an earlier vintage, lit out wisely for the far end. The muskrat that spends its days crossing from one side to the other took a break from its rounds.

Town Pond was not always a pond, and I have long been fascinated by this bit of historical trivia. When the English colonial settlement was plotted out in what would eventually become East Hampton, the first 34 allotments and the church and burying ground were on lots around the low, wet marsh that we know today as Town Pond. Parcels were from 8 to 12 acres each, some running all the way to Hook Pond.

Fresh water was critical for home uses and livestock, and it was clear early on that the marsh needed to be more accessible. The town fathers ordered the pond “diged at the Spring Eastward” in June 1653, just five years after the colonists arrived. Today, the Gardiner Home Lot on James Lane, purchased by the village three years ago with money from the community preservation fund, is the last remaining more-or-less complete example of one of these 17th-century allotments.

Town Pond has had a long tradition as a kind of catcher’s mitt for errant vehicles, though the row of trees now grown large along Main Street may have cut down on the frequency of these incidents. One notable plunge, reported in The Star in 1927, ascribed the cause to a New York City driver being handed a sandwich by someone in the back seat. It is pleasing to see that the tradition of amiable lunatics who write for The Star has early antecedents. According to its report, “The goldfish of Town Pond were indignant at this intrusion, and it is understood that they have prepared a petition to the Village Board demanding that the ‘No Bathing in Town Pond’ ordinance be enforced.”

One would not think of going for a swim in the pond today. Nor would anyone have done so even in the days when fertilizers that helped turn it an otherworldly green in hot weather were limited. In recent years, the village has tried with some success to trap pollutants coursing over the Village Green and into the pond, but bathing is not in the cards.

Today, Town Pond is mostly there for passing motorists to admire and to provide a fond “welcome home” for those who have been away. It also is there for skating when the winter is cold enough, and it is utterly perfectly suited for cheap Chinese boats.

Does a person really revert to childhood in old age? Clearly, that can be true in extremes, as when dementia sets in. But what about ordinary aging, the kind that I and many of my friends now testify to? Our bodies give evidence of our having grown older, sure, but have our minds inevitably followed suit? No way.

I have a longtime friend who is 10 years older than I and has always been a role model. If she can do XYZ — yoga, political activism, attendance on the boards of various organizations — I can, too. Of course, maybe I’m indulging myself in wishful thinking on that score: Although we share the good fortune of both our sets of parents having lived into their 90s, there are genetic differences between us. Her father was a wrestler; mine went bowling. My friend was always athletic; me, not so much.

Given that my friend and I have had more up-to-date health care than our parents did in the course of their lifetimes, we should probably live longer than our parents did, barring any unfortunate accident or lightning-strike malady.

I asked my friend the other day if she wanted to make it to 100. “No way,” she said. 

But as for me? A hundred? Oh, yes, I want to hang in there as long as I can.

My mother, who dabbled in real estate as a career late in life, was very active long after most of her friends had decided to throw in the kitchen towel and stay homebound. She was an absolute card shark, outwitting her grandchildren at bridge and canasta, when she was 93 and 94.

Given my optimism about my own longevity, I absolutely refuse to entertain the possibility that I could wind up bedridden, or disabled with Alzheimer’s disease, at some point in the future. Hanging around a nursing home? You have to be kidding me.

Nevertheless, my husband, whose mobility isn’t what it once was, and I have been watching time pass and begun talking about suitable future living arrangements, with an eye toward what might come. We took a look at a brochure the other day for Peconic Landing, the planned community in Greenport that welcomes people over 62. Peconic Landing offers living quarters that can be simple apartments or more elaborate cottages, with all services and conveniences (snowplowing, linens, cleaning, landscaping) handled by the management, as well as guaranteeing continuing health care for those who eventually come to need assistance. It also promises a relay of cultural activities, concerts, and lectures.

It doesn’t sound that bad, I suppose, if you can afford the high costs. But my main intention as I age is to stay as close as possible to my grandchildren here in East Hampton and Amagansett. Revert to childhood? Forget about it. Stay young by hanging around with children? That’s what I’m talking about.

Walk-off home runs, leadoff grand slams, great pitching, Elroy Face throwing out the first forkball of the season. . . . Is there to be no respite from excellence? 

The Steelers, the Penguins, and now, at long last, the Pirates too? Hold, hold my heart. 

Oh, and by the way, not to belabor the point, which I will, but did you notice recently that Jesse James’s nullified touchdown reception versus the Patriots would have counted had the N.F.L.’s recently revised catch rules been in place? He broke the plane, yet we were in pain.

Yeah, yeah, a fellow fan said, but what about the Jaguars? 

“Ah yes, the Jaguars. . . . What about them?” I said, not waiting for an answer.

Interesting how the mind works. Losses fade quickly into oblivion and even mediocre seasons in time take on a glow. Soon it all becomes one — one circumambient championship season.

It was not always that way. The Steelers in the ’50s were pedestrian, a .500 finish was the best they could hope for, the Pirates were bumblers and fumblers reminiscent of a minor league team, and the Hornets, the Penguins’ predecessors, were a minor league team, playing out of the Duquesne Gardens, a rink near the East End Lutheran school, where I, a sixth grader then, was peaking academically (especially when it came to the boorish recital of catechism passages), and was warned I risked perdition by holding myself in such high regard. This was said, I recall, after Mr. Koehler found me laughing at my distorted reflection in a Christmas tree bulb. I was chastened, momentarily, and then continued on my merry way.

But back to the Pirates of the ’50s. They were pretty awful, and yet I loved to go to the games, often by trolley on a Sunday, and sit in the bleachers watching doubleheaders for 50 cents. I’ve always liked to think they were major league baseball’s absolutely worst team, certainly if you take their combined record of 454-777 throughout my formative years. The Mets of ’62 barely edged them out, by two or so losses.

Win, lose . . . as long as it’s singular, distinctive, as it were, that’s all that matters. Strive for excellence, strive for klutziness, it’s all one as far as I’m concerned — as long as mediocrity is lowered to new heights. One wants to be distinctive, whether it be at the top or the bottom of the scale. 

One of our favorite quotes comes from Bernard Malamud’s “The Natural.” “We live two lives, I think, the one we learn with and the one after that. Suffering teaches us what to want.” We want a good game, in other words, not so much the winning, which can be cloying after a while — Super Bowl and Stanley Cup championships can tend to make one a bore — but valiant efforts. If you’re going to lose, lose with panache. If you’re going to suffer, suffer with aplomb. And thus reveal victory and defeat as the imposters they are. 

“You had many great shots,” an opponent of mine said the other day, “and many lousy ones.”

Ah, the human condition. We all had our moments, in fact — of triumph, of chagrin. Of “Damn, ain’t I great,” and of “How could I have missed?!”

“The average age of mortality is 76 now,” my partner said. “Though, of course, that’s if you were born this year. I just feel lucky every day I wake up, knowing I’m ahead of the game.”

Our losses increase and yet we’re winners! Winners all.

“I dreamt I’d won a Peace prize. . . .” “No, no, that was my Peace prize,” corrected Mary, who recently had spent hours straightening out one of my bill-paying gaffes with State Farm, had painstakingly laid the groundwork for a tax grievance, and had raked leaves and edged until she was a physical wreck.

“Ah, mind and body,” I said. “Actually, you were the one who gave it to me, though you’re right, I should have been the one to give it to you. Dreamlife’s unfair. It was a photograph of my mother with me as an infant . . . blissful.”

“I would like to have a dream like that. . . .”

“And then I dreamt I was flying the night before. On my back, borne up by a breeze, dipping and soaring above everyone. The sun was shining. I’d been with a group of people. I began doing jumping jacks, and then I began to fly, out into the outdoors.”

“I love dreams of flying. . . . You were joyful.”

“Yes, joyful. . . . Maybe some of it has to do with the fact that there are things to write about now, now that it’s ostensibly spring. It’s a relief, I no longer have to dream things up as I did all winter, just hang on for the ride.”

“Or maybe it was about ducking out on hours of phone calls to State Farm to get the insurance snafu ironed out, or checking the internet for comps. . . .”

“Yes, it could have been about escape. . . . I mean, there are so many reasons now not to neaten up so much around the house. We want to win our tax grievance, don’t we? Shouldn’t we cultivate more of a down-in-the-mouth look? Where’s that old baby puke-green Ford Falcon when I need it? The night it died I pushed it back onto the front lawn, where it stood for years by the mailbox. . . .”

“When we had that town party everyone covered it with graffiti. Georgie and Johnna used to wait for the school bus in it. You began calling it ‘a home for wayward dolls.’ There were four or five of them propped up against the rear window.”

“Then a neighbor left that note: ‘Usually, after the viewing the dead are interred, Mr. Graves.’ The Reids towed it away. Geoff Gehman thinks I was inspired by the Beales’ Buick that I saw that wintry day in the bracken as I was biking down West End Road long ago. Perhaps I was, subconsciously. There’s not so much living down the Joneses anymore. The houses are obese, the lawns just so. Bonac yards — folk art really — are rarities now. I saw one the other day and was smitten. I thought of writing it up and photographing it, but then reined myself in. ‘In your dreams,’ I said. ‘It won’t fly.’ ”

Tuesday morning awoke with a snarl. Two raccoons had gotten into the chicken run and were squabbling over something or other, making an indescribable clamor, kind of a blend of exercised chatter, hisses, and a predator’s growl. That roused the dogs, which roused me, and together we ran out to see what was going on.

As it was not quite 5 a.m., and there was only a hint of glow in the sky to the east, I could not observe what happened. I heard Weasel, the biggest of our dogs, making attack sounds and a raccoon screeching its answer. Then nothing.

I grabbed a flashlight. In its beam, there were two sets of eyes, coming from inside the wire mesh of the chicken run. Getting closer, I watched as a raccoon, with the shape of a slightly deflated balloon, rushed back and forth on the chicken coop roof before finding a hole in the mesh and squeezing to freedom. Its compatriot, with whom it had been wrangling just moments earlier, clung to a post about six feet off ground, not eager to descend. 

Thinking I might dislodge it somehow and shoo it through an open gate, I went inside to poke at it with an old clam rake that had been hanging around nearby. Mr. Raccoon was having none of it. I poked him a few times with the handle end of the rake; it snapped and carried on and refused to get down. After a bit more of this, it climbed on the mesh, upside down, and found a spot on the coop roof from which to glare at me.

I made sure that the chickens were securely locked inside the coop and left, keeping the gate open in case the raccoon eventually wised up and lit out for the woods and its now-gone rival. By that point Weasel, the dog, had gone to our house and was eager, I could tell from the way she was scratching at the porch door, to get inside and forget the entire thing.

Raccoons have been on my mind lately. I wage a never-ending battle with them over possession of the household garbage. But ever since a report that dog or dog-related waste was to blame in periodic bacteria spikes at Georgica Pond, I have wondered if raccoons might be to blame. A friend who grows grapes outside his bedroom window swears that there are more raccoons than people here, at least around harvest time, when they lodge on his arbor to gorge.

At Georgica, suspicion has been directed hypothetically toward people walking their dogs in a roadside pull-off just east of Wainscott Stone Road. No one I have talked to has said they have ever seen dogs doing their business in there. The bacteria could come from the prodigious droppings of raccoons instead, but that would not explain why the bacteria are so much higher in the pond than in other locations sampled by Concerned Citizens of Montauk and the Surfrider Blue Water Task Force, given that raccoons are everywhere there is something to feed on.

The bright side of Tuesday morning’s excitement is that I now know where to close up the wire mesh. The bad news is that the raccoons will sooner or later find another way in. They always do.

What would you do if you unexpectedly found yourself with two hours to kill on a Sunday morning in Manhattan? It didn’t seem civilized to call a friend, before 9 on a Sunday, with my old “flip phone” to ask if I could drop in. Art galleries were not likely to be open yet, and it was too early to go to a movie.

Chris and I had gone to a party on Saturday night celebrating a book of poetry by his sister Thayer Cory, and a friend had put us up for the night. On Sunday morning, Chris, who is on a committee that chooses the recipients of social-justice journalism awards, bustled off to one of its meetings. It came to pass that I missed the 10:15 a.m. Hampton Jitney, by a minute or two, and the next bus wouldn’t take off for two hours. 

People often curse the Jitney in such situations, but I adore the Jitney. I remember when Jim Davidson got it going, and one of its very first drivers, Sisco Barnard, was a friend. In those days, I used to go “to town” more frequently than I do in recent years, and being able to get off along Third Avenue way back then seemed like a very welcome convenience, when compared with the only other option, which was navigating Penn Station on the West Side.

So there I was. The obvious way to eat up two hours was — you guessed it — Starbucks. The problem was that I had just finished reading the book on the Kindle I was carrying, and I didn’t have another book in hand, and I couldn’t find a newsstand in the vicinity to buy a New York Times. The kiosk on 40th and Third was closed. 

Remember when there was a newsstand on practically every corner in Midtown? That is an example of a way in which times have changed for the worse: hardly any newsstands, and fewer newspapers.

I am electronically challenged and didn’t have a clue about how to download another book to read on the Kindle. Although Starbucks has Wi-Fi, I didn’t think anyone there would enjoy being asked to help. Starbucks is an oasis — at least if you aren’t attempting to “sit in Starbucks while black,” as the two young men in Philadelphia were doing last week, before they were unjustly arrested — but it isn’t like a bar or pub, where once upon a time customers chit-chatted with one another whether they know one another or not. Starbucks  people are generally preoccupied with their own private thoughts and occupations and cellphones.

The book I had just finished on the Kindle was Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” one of his most well-known and popular novels, which was published in 2000 and won a Pulitzer Prize. I had found it thoroughly enjoyable, so, with nothing else to do, I reread the first chapter!

This probably sounds like I’m trying to tell a story about how much better the world was before the digital universe existed, when newspapers were a dime a dozen and strangers weren’t shy about saying “hello” — but that isn’t my point at all. The moral of this story is that for perhaps the first time it occurred to me that I might have had a more pleasant Sunday morning if I had been hooked up to the world via an iPhone. Yes, I’m finally going to get one. I might need to attend one of those remedial tech classes the libraries offer just to get comfortable with the on/off switch, but the grandkids will be happy.

On the way to school on Tuesday morning, one of the kids announced that she and a classmate had a plan if a shooter ever turned up. They would stash some food and water in a tree in the woods behind the school, which they would grab as they fled for the power lines. From there, they would work their way toward East Hampton Airport, where, they figured, they would be safe.

It is obvious to remark here about the unfortunate things kids today have to think about. Gun violence continues at a tragic rate in the United States, with school shootings now commonplace. But it is also true that for people of my generation, there were fears as well. 

I remember clearly the nuclear attack drills we had when I was attending East Hampton Middle School in the 1970s. Teachers would lead us from our classrooms into the basement, where we were told to sit in rows with our backs against the hallway walls. At the end of the drills, the school would serve us ice cream from five-gallon pails, both as a reward and a way of dispelling any lingering fear.

It was the height of the Cold War at the time, and for us kids, the thought of dying in an atomic attack seemed real enough. As giggle-inducing as sheltering in a school hallway might have been, we could not escape the back-of-the-mind notion and would confess to each other that there was at least a small chance our town could be swept into a nuclear blast as the Russians took aim at the submarine base across Long Island Sound in Connecticut, There would be no running for safety in the scenarios we envisioned.

The Russians never came, of course. Not so, school shooters. For children today, horrors are frequent enough that they must appear much more of a possibility. What a tragedy to hear kids talking among themselves about what it would be like to have to leave slower friends behind as they sprinted for their lives into the woods.