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5 | (continued) Several thoughts occurred to me at once: 1. Never again would I leave the big light behind; I never found the last two expedients necessary, but the first two I put into effect as soon as I could. Meanwhile, I still had to find my humble home. I knew that if I walked far enough to the west, I would soon reach the slope of the river’s ravine, and far enough to the east would take me back to the lane. These two lines were roughly parallel, and less than 75 yards apart. So the area of search was really quite small, yet truth to tell, it took me a good twenty minutes of wandering in circles before I finally caught a glimpse of the tent’s peak in the flashlight’s failing gleam. During that time I stumbled back on the tractor-lane, totally disoriented, and failed to recognize it at all—I thought it was some old road I’d never seen before. Such are the joys of a truly dark night in the woods.
The big flashlight soon became as indispensable as the sleeping-bags—I could not possibly have survived without it. But like the sleeping-bags, which should be aired out every day and washed every week, the flashlight was far from trouble-free. Replacing the batteries is an obvious necessity, but what I should not have found surprising, especially in the winter, was the need to warm the whole thing up before I could possibly begin to read by its light. This meant disassembling it down to its major components: the tube, the lamp housing, the rear cap and the three batteries.
With fresh batteries, fully warmed, such a flashlight will glow as brightly as a plug-in reading lamp. I had earlier stuck a patch of frosted vinyl on the lens, just to diffuse the beam—soften its light, for uniform illumination—a very welcome effect. (A trick learned years before in a large catalogue studio.) The final touch was inserting the whole unit into a long, fleece-lined leather mitt, complete with gauntlet—big enough to swallow the thing up to its lens and retain its warmth. This rested on the pillow just beside my head, for as long as I chose to use it: normally two or three hours of uninterrupted reading, until it was time to gulp down my ration of witfreeze and drift off to oblivion.
Despite my generally lowered mood, every now and then, late at night, whatever the season, I would be lying in the tent, reading or dozing, when I would once again be reminded that I was far too self-absorbed most of the time, and shamelessly unmoved by the rare glory of my circumstances. At such moments, appalled by my own emotional numbness, I would turn off the flashlight, crawl into the vestibule and stand up in its doorway, staring overhead at the silhouetted canopy of vast, black maple boughs against a cloudy or starry sky. I seldom stood there long, but I simply had to force myself to realize that whatever it cost me in isolation, I was actually living, day after day, in a place of rare beauty, which many wealthier people would have felt privileged to enjoy. |
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It soon became a nightly ritual—one battery under each armpit, the third in my crotch, the tube, cap and lamp separately spread out on my chest and stomach. Wait ten minutes, then extract the batteries from their nests while feeling returned to the affected zones, grip each battery in my hands to warm them further and monitor their progress, etc. After about twenty minutes of this, in apparent pitch-blackness, my eyes had fully adjusted to the faint light entering the tent from the night sky, all the flashlight parts had been raised to something near body temperature, and I could then reassemble them.|
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