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5 | (continued) The poles of course started very short, just above the tree’s roots, then got progressively longer, where the trunk rose higher than a man’s head. I inspected it the next day and was truly surprised at the size and solidity of the thing. It was bigger than the sleeping compartment of my tent, and would not have taken much reinforcement to make it tornado-proof. It had the appearance of a brigand’s lair, a crude, stout, gloomy wooden cave, timeless in its design and materials. I was amazed that a loud gang of kids could have created such a thing, but one should never underestimate kids. I wouldn’t be too surprised to find it still standing even now.
I spoke earlier about the psychic discomforts of darkness and tranquillity. After setting up at the first site, my adjustment to those conditions seemed to pass through several phases. For the first few weeks, I made a point of returning “home” every day, well before sunset; I was simply not ready to go walking in the woods after dark. In order to be less conspicuous, I would usually walk along the railroad tracks until I was around the south end of the woods, and enter from there, over a low barbed-wire fence and down a short foot-path to the tractor lane, where it rose from the river-slope and turned north. While the sun was still up, this walk was often pleasant, especially if the day had been a hard one; I could bathe and relax while the traffic on the highway slowly tapered off, then settle into the tent to read yet another carefully-chosen account of some intrepid soul wandering through yet another Godforsaken stretch of the world, with his eyes and ears wide open. That small collection has grown since. Only a part of my library, it consists largely of narratives of remote travel and exploration—an endlessly absorbing genre.
Thus, at any rate, the walk by day. But when it happened that I had been somehow delayed, and was obliged to find my way back to the tent in the dark, the last few hundred yards was a severe test of my center of gravity. Recall that it was then approaching summer. I can report authoritatively that nights in a largely deciduous forest of maple and beech are at their darkest in full summer. This is when the canopy is most dense, and the ground is dark with grasses and low plants—least likely to reflect any light. The moon is little help, even when it’s full, and the stars, which are quite adequate night-lights with a clear and open sky, might as well not be there. You’ll be amused to learn that the brightest source of light in that place on many a moonless evening was the glow of Toronto’s street-lamps, reflected from an overcast sky. Gradually, the terrors of that nightly walk fell away, especially when I finally started carrying the big MAG-light, which I would stash for the day in the garage. I had been using a mini-MAG, just for convenience, but it didn’t give off enough light even for safety, much less for the relief of fear; it has an effective range of barely thirty feet. Gradually, of course, the place was becoming a familiar haven to me. After it really began to feel like home—the only one I had—I was far less prone to populate it with monsters lying in wait for a hapless hobo. There was one incident, however, that did feed my fears, though when I describe it, I know you’re going to think it sounds silly as hell. It happens that I know two brothers, fraternal twins, who are devout believers in UFOs. The older one claims to have read over a hundred books on the subject, and probably has, warned me that UFO abductions are most common in situations just such as mine, where a lone person is camped in an isolated place, with no means of alerting the outside world when Trouble strikes. I recall him saying that They would find a “rotund photographer” very tempting. |
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Many times the walk along the tracks was a depressing trudge. If at the close of day I still had a hunger for conversation, or simple human companionship, it felt as if I were being sent once again into a strange kind of banishment or exile, all too symbolic of my life in general. The fact that the whole adventure was ostensibly voluntary was by that time carried no weight; the $800 had been deeply whittled down, and I had been kicked out of two snug harbors so far.|
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