Darkness

I love being outside; have loved it since I was a kid.  I spent summers at Camp Keewano and Crystal Lake, disappearing after breakfast and returning for dinner, filthy, scratched, sunburned and mosquito bitten.  In between those ordinal points I climbed trees, built forts, learned my woodcraft, rode my bicycle; and as I grew older, I camped and backpacked  in the glacial moraines of Northern Michigan and the rougher and more forbidding Appalachian terrain of Pennsylvania and New York.  I learned to budget my time and strength, to read the nature of the trail, to keep an eye cocked at the luminous, ever changing sky and to feel that deep, profound reverberation in my soul of being there.  Just being there, in the moment, in the place and in the still, serene wildness of it all.

It has never left me, this sense of belonging to the wild, even through the massive disasters and minor disruptions of every day life.   With an ordinary arrogance, I always assumed that I knew my way in the woods, walking up and down upon the earth. Bad things only happened to others, amateurs with their department store hiking gear, who couldn’t orient themselves out of a small elevator.  I wore my Patagonia, North Face and Vibram proudly, and even fancied a through hike of the Appalachian Trail; the ex husband particularly disapproved of that idea.  The divorce divested me of all my hard earned gear and left me doing some real life camping out of my car for a period of time.  Homelessness is a great leveler of egos.

I pointed my Honda west to Arizona and, in the process of rebuilding my world, found new campgrounds, new roads, new mountains and a man who shared my passion for living under the open sky.  Some of the happiest days of my life were spent with Bill, prowling through desert washes and mountain mining roads; the end of the day would often find us filthy, scratched, sunburned and mosquito bitten, slouched in front of the fire with snoring Labradors under our feet and a mug of Kentucky whisky balanced on a knee.  There was nothing to fear, nothing at all.  We were kings of our world, the woods behind us, the flames before us, and the galaxy lazily circling over our heads like a banner of distant fire.

That world included a particularly lovely campground in the Granite Mountain Wilderness outside Prescott, Arizona.  Yavapai had been built in the thirties by a gang of young Civilian Conservation Corps workers.  Some of the original foundations were still present, and the campsites were scattered through these ground works in a grove of fragrant ponderosa and scrub oak.  One blue, sunlit September day, we set up camp after a day in the woods; enjoyed dinner and a night cap and after settling the dogs, we fell asleep in the pop up camper.

Somewhere after midnight, nature called, and I crawled out of a warm sleeping bag and headed out to take care of business.    Coming back, I laid out flat on the concrete picnic table and watched the sky.  Jupiter was falling to the west; the moon had already slid below the horizon.  The stars burned steady and unblinking through the clear, crystalline air; my eyes traced the old, familiar constellations.  The Big Dipper; Cygnus; Corona Borealis.  Bootes.  I looked for my old friend Camelopardalis, but the Camel was out of sight.  It was an incredibly silent, calm, peaceful night and I could feel the massive bulk of the Earth hurtling through that darkness, that void.

Then I heard five, loud, distinct steps crunching through the woods.  Fear, terror, indescribable horror washed over me as if I had fallen through rotten ice and submerged, drowning, into freezing dark water.  I had never felt this before, this sense of imminent death, of being petrified and unable to move.  Somehow I did move, rolling off the table and onto my feet.  My primate eyes, even dark sensitized, couldn’t make out the black mass in front of me, but something was there.  It moved forward with three deliberate steps and I saw it was a fully grown brown bear, teeth glittering in the dim starlight.

Adrenaline flooded over me; my palms were greasy with sweat, and I felt my heart hammering in my chest.  I had no weapon but a large Maglight flashlight like security guards carry; my pistol and knife were in the camper.  This bear looked thin and I stood between it and the pop up with its snoring collection of dogs and husband.  What should I do?  I balanced on the balls of my feet, feeling the rocky ground through my moccasins, holding the Maglight with both hands like a baseball bat.  It seemed like an eon passed as the bear and I glared each other.  It was hungry and I was scared, but neither one of us moved, frozen in an eternal regard.  I could hear the breathing, smell the rotten musty odor of fur and feces.  This too was the wilderness.  On any given day, anyone can die.  In a campground, dismembered into a bloody mess.  By a bear.

Suddenly the spell was shattered.  One of the dogs finally woke up and realized that stink was something new and dangerous, and a volley of barking, snarling and howling erupted from the camper.  Bill’s voice called to me and a light came on.  “Bear!” I screamed.  “Don’t open the door!”  I was afraid the dogs would pour out and attack the beast.  With my words the bear’s head swung back towards me; I could see, sense its confusion.  Now.  Now.  Now.

I took a quick step forward and brought the Maglight down across the bear’s muzzle with all my panic driven strength.  I felt bone crunch and shatter.  The bear howled in pain and rage and leapt over the table, across the wall and off into the darkness.  I could hear the crashing dim and disappear over the thunder of my own beating heart.  Looking down, I saw the front of my t shirt was spattered with black blood and hair; the Maglight was slick in my blood covered hands.  I stood there, petrified, unable to move, swaying in the starlight, the sky whirling over my head.

Time seemed elastic; ages passed, and I felt Bill’s arms around me, soothing me as I dissolved into a shaking mess of tears and incoherence.  He sat me down at the picnic table; the dogs started licking the blood from my hands.  “Don’t worry, honey.  I get the picture.  My flashlight?  What the hell did you do to my flashlight?”  He turned it over and over in his hands.  The lens was shattered, the head of the light was cracked, clotted with a thickening mass of fur and sticky blood.  I felt an arm snake around my quivering shoulders, pulling me close, holding me, guarding against the darkness, the wilderness. 

On any given day: if you walk in the wilderness, you play by its rules, and they are not fair, even to the prepared.  But on that night, in that darkness, I won; I felt my heart reach back to the hunters of Lascaux, survivors of the hunt, sketching out pictures of bears in the smoky firelight.  Every day is a victory if you make it alive to the next dawn.