The noise in the pines behind me grew until it sounded like a rushing spring waterfall on the North Shore.  I had been on the ice just long enough to set up my hub-style shelter, drop my Vexilar transducer and land my first fish of the new year when the fabric around me began to shake violently.  Suddenly with a pop and a flash of white, I was rolling across my newly drilled holes as the heater, sonar and bucket chair toppled around me.  I looked up and watched the alternating red-and-black-and-red-and-black of my shack rumble across the frozen lake, propelled by a wind gust of at least forty miles an hour which had sprung up from the only moderate breezes I had experienced to that point. 

“Guys, where are we,” this initial inquiry by Dominic Monaghan’s character, Charlie, summed up the question that I and ten million other viewers tried to figure out for six seasons on the TV show Lost. The J. J. Abrams sci-fi series focused on a group of plane crash survivors marooned on a mystical island, which - spoiler alert - turned out to be just one man’s purgatory, but the opening interrogatory hung on until we figured it out in the final episode.