We blew out the candles, and when I turned off the hissing Coleman lantern the night sounds came around us for the first time. I could hear Cat shifting uncomfortably, scratching at bug bites.
“It’s like this every night?” she whispered.
“Sometimes it’s windy or there’s rain. Then it’s very different.”
“Do you ever get … nervous?”
“Like, afraid of the dark? Always.”
A long silence, a distant owl quoting the Beatles: goo-goo-ga-joob.
“Are there animals?” she asked.
“I’ve seen deer. Raccoons. Mice. Cute little snakes. Mostly I see porcupines. The buggers come into the camp and chew on things, so sometimes I have to get up and chase them away.”
“So that’s why you sleep with the shovel by your bed?”
“Yes,” I lied. It was there for wolves and mountain lions and serial killers and, when the night fears were upon me, chupacabras and aliens and demons of the earth. “There aren’t any animals that’ll hurt humans here in Vermont.”
Another long silence. “Don’t you get lonely?”
I was going to say, “Of course!” because I was very much, increasingly, missing the company of other people, Cat, a man, my Boston friends, my long-lost brother. At night, I cried for the absence of everyone I ever loved, and I felt small and anguished by my solitude.
But I had also realized that in the woods there’s another set of feelings that we mistake for more familiar emotions. Sometimes the loneliness here was a feeling for which I had no name. It had to do with being supremely aware of existing as a separate, unique self, not a cell in a larger social organism. I suspect that many people spend their entire lives without once experiencing that. In a way, “loneliness” demeans it, stressing the absence of others, but this feeling is a keen, strong sense of self-presence, of standing sharp and clear and fully defined. Imagine you’re a small, bright fountain of light, urgent and utterly distinct against the night sky. That feeling. It is acutely solitary, disconcerting, but for me that particular species of loneliness is more like what we call “reverence.”
So I said something like, “Yeah. It can get really bad. But sometimes it’s in a kind of good way.”
She said, “Mm,” thoughtfully or wearily. After a while, I heard her snoring. I cherished the human sound as it folded into the night symphony.
We awoke to the clang of a cooking pot outside the tent. It was pitch dark, dead black.
“What?” Cat whispered.
We heard a thump and a ripping and dragging sound, and then a deep whuffle of breath and some more ripping.
“Porcupine?” Cat asked hopefully.
I groped for a flashlight, flicked it on and saw Cat sitting up wide-eyed, then shined it out toward the fire pit. Four orange eyes reflected it back, and it took me a moment to see that they belonged to two bears. From fifteen feet away, they looked gigantic. They had something on the ground and they’d been ripping at it with their claws.
They looked away from the light, as if unsure what to do.
“Oh, shit,” Cat quavered. Then: “I’ve got some pepper spray! It’s in my pack!”
Then we realized it was her pack that the bears were opening out into a scattered mishmash.
“Hey! That’s Cat’s!” I called irrationally. “Cut it out!”
The bears shied like horses at the sound of my voice. Then I found the shovel and beat the handle of my Buck knife against it, making a metallic racket, and they turned in place and moved quickly away into the woods. I kept my flashlight on until the crackling of twigs faded out of hearing.
“I forgot to mention the bears,” I said, pretending to be used to this. But my heartbeat was banging in my throat and wrists.
“Jesus, Ann! Fuck me, I thought we were gonna get killed! Get eaten.”
“They never hurt people. They’ve never come to camp before.”
I heard her breathing hard in the dark. “Fuck,” she said.
“It’s my fault. I should have told you about not leaving your pack outside. I was too pickled. I always bring everything inside with me so the critters don’t get at it.”
“That would have been worse—they’d have come in here for it!” After a pause, she said, “There goes my surprise. I brought a bunch of those good sausages you like. Thought we’d have them for breakfast.”
I was touched, and thanked her. We both took a long time to find sleep again, but probably for different reasons. I’m pretty sure Cat remained frightened they would return, but though I still trembled with adrenaline, I felt elated: I’d seen bears! Close up! They hadn’t killed me! There were bears on my hill! I had bears for neighbors.
We awoke in the morning to a steady drizzle. Cat’s pack was a mess, the sausages gone along with a box of granola bars. Her swimsuit and other essentials were ripped and soaked. The rain turned my tidy campsite into a sloppy mess. I made coffee and fried eggs on the Coleman stove in the tent. The eggs were great, but the bread I’d bought to go with had grown mold overnight, so we ate them with saltines and used our tongues to mop up the yolks.
There’s not much to do in heavy forest when it’s raining. Walking is muddy and slippery, and every low-growing tree or bush soaks you as you pass. The boughs sag and a haze rises, so views are short: more trees, more bushes, without the relief of windows onto sky, distant hills, fields. We stayed in the tent, chilled, until we got too claustrophobic, then gave up and hiked down wearing black plastic garbage bags for raincoats. We changed to dry clothes in the car, then drove to Montpelier, where we had lunch in
