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3 | (continued) Some of that anxiety is of course justifiable in purely practical terms. In territory where bears are common—not here, but less than an hour’s drive north—they should certainly be avoided, and this is impossible to do at night, except by making an unholy racket. Whereas it is very easy after dark—with or without a flashlight—to lose an eye to a bare conifer branch, step down a crack in the Shield and take an unscheduled dip in some very cold water, or just plain get lost. In fact it is damned near effortless to accomplish at least one of these feats just leaving the tent to take a leak—unless you’ve been in the same place for at least a week, and have a safe trail between the tent and the latrine. (Or use a sealed chamber-jar, as I did.) But we know it isn’t just the physical dangers of a wild place that make the night so much more fearsome than the day. I realized years ago that fear of the dark, in a visually-dominated species, is largely a fear of helplessness. I’ve since learned that this is only half the answer, and not the most interesting half. I was at a friend’s cottage in ’71 when his sweet but sensitive girlfriend asked him to escort her twenty-five yards to the outhouse at night. Said he: “It looks the same as it does in the day—you just can’t see it.” She was not amused, but I silently agreed with him, because I’d been staying there for months, and going to the outhouse at night had never bothered me. What did bother me though, more than I ever imagined it would, was walking the full length of his quarter-mile driveway, which wound through the woods, in the darkness well before dawn, to meet a neighbor for a ride to the city. Fears that I never knew I had filled my mind on that forced march, and the cartoon image of a child lost in a forest, where trees all look like monsters, ceased forever to be a fantasy. (This was years before I had done any serious camping.) We may never know how long our species has experienced this kind of fear, but many living peoples have only recently escaped its primal causes. In a fascinating collection of essays, The Hunting Animal, Franklin Russell tells of the human toll that Bengal tigers took in India before the Indian people were permitted to own guns: about three hundred thousand victims in the 19th century alone, or some eight people every day—along with perhaps eight million farm animals over that same time.
After I recovered from the flight of the fawn, I traversed the woodlot from north to south along an old tractor-lane as far as the railroad tracks, then followed the lane as it turned west, downhill to the river’s shore. The whole woodlot turned out to be far larger when seen from within than it seemed to be from across the field. And strangely, not only in breadth, from the field to the river—the river meanders west through that area, and the woods were on the eastern shore—but also in height: seen from the house, the trees appeared, at the most, thirty or forty feet tall; in reality, the oldest ones stood fifty to eighty feet high. The downward slope of the land was partly responsible for this deception, but distances of this kind are impossible to judge without a clear reference of some kind, and there was none. The woods were much closer to the house, as the crow flies, than the route I had to travel to reach my camp. I had just assumed that the trees were about as tall as the houses, whereas they were easily twice that. So they appeared to be only about 300 yards away, but after walking over and entering them a couple of hundred times, I knew the practical distance to the taller ones was close to half a mile. This distance made me very uncomfortable at the beginning. Hence the first tentsite I chose was scarcely forty feet from the edge of the woods, though it was also as far from the highway as possible—less than 200 feet from the railroad tracks. I had mixed motives for this odd location. While I was staying in the garage, I had noticed that there was only one train every 24 hours, around 2:30 a.m. and about 100 feet away, but that the highway, which the house faced from scarcely fifty feet, was noisy from dawn ’til dusk, and a tent offers very little sound-proofing. Yet my loneliness and fear of total isolation were such that it meant a lot to be able to see the lights of houses across the fields at night.
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