The Little Things

Back in high school I was much more of an outside person. I went on many camping trips with my scouting/venture crews and enjoyed being alone outdoors as well. Once school started getting more difficult, though, I let that part of myself slip away as I spent ever longer chunks of my time looking at various flat surfaces in attempts to find wisdom. I lost contact with most of my outdoorsy friends and let the stress of life keep me inside.

After about a year of this, I decided to go on my old Venture Crew's next scouting trip. It was fall, and the trip was the last one before the winter. The thing I enjoyed rediscovering most was how quiet everything could be. I had forgotten that I didn't need aural input during my every waking moment. I remembered that it was possible to enjoy the company of others just by walking together, sharing an experience, and that every moment of silence spent with others didn't need to be filled with banal chatter. I basked in the lovely quiet as we walked unspeaking through the leaf-littered woods, six of us I think, and felt perfectly content as we sat around looking at the fire, all of us deep within our own minds yet still somehow sharing in the loveliness of the moment.

After so many packed lunches full of individually wrapped goodies to be scarfed down during a short lunch break, it felt refreshing, and even oddly taboo, to cook successive meals in the same cast iron pot with only a splash of water to cleanse its palate in between. The main course's beef would flavor the apple crisp dessert, which would in turn give a faint sweetness to the bacon or sausage cooked the next morning. The tastes alway carried over just a little, giving a vague but satisfying sense of gustatory continuity to the trip.

When the sun set and the glowing fire burned down to its last glowing ember, I retreated into my dark tent where the only stimuli available to my usually racing mind was the musty smell of the ground that was unaccustomedly close to my head. Trying to pack light, the only thing I ever brought as a pillow was the jacket I had worn all day. As burrowed my face into it, I was pleasantly reminded of all the smells of the day that had been trapped in its folds. They always seemed to come back in order, ending with the smoke of the campfire, and I wondered what wood we had burned that night, and if there might be any way to imbue its scent into a car freshener so I could replace the omnipresent chemical pine smell in my mom's suv.

I have always wondered why I sleep so well on hard ground with rocks pressing into my ribs and a tent's damp fabric pressing against bare skin whenever I rolled over. I think this is probably the reason- there is really nothing for your mind to do but drift off into the sea of the unconscious.

This wasn't one of those well-slept nights, though. At some dark hour of the night, I awoke to hear something rustling outside my tent. Probably just one of my fellow campers stumbling into the night after drinking multiple nalgene's worth of water that day. But it kept rustling, and seemed to have paused right outside my tent. Hello? No answer. This was just the excuse my mind needed rush off and remind me of all the unlikely possibilities. In my adventures with that very group, I had encountered everything from fellow scouts waking up with squirrels joyously pillaging the contraband food items stashed in their sleeping bags to seeing a bear kill and drag off a young dear forty feet from our campsite. I knew I didn't have any so-called "smellables" in my tent, so whatever it was would likely leave me alone. But it didn't go away. It didn't sound large enough to be a threatening predator, said the rational part of my brain, and was movingly timidly enough that it was probably a good sized deer... which was probably being silently stalked by a much larger bear.

As the minutes wore on I had to know what is was, no matter what the purely-imagined danger. My plan was to unzip my tent-flap as quietly as I could, and then open my rainfly as quickly as possible and blind the lurking beast with my flashlight. I didn't have much of a plan after that, but I figured it was good enough. I executed it perfectly. But after ripping open the rainfly in record time and dashingly pointing my flashlight at the source of the noise, I saw... nothing. Nothing at all. I was prepared for my ego to feel shamed and embarrassed at seeing that the source of my nighttime dread was just a 'possum, or at least a very large squirrel, but I was completely baffled to see that there didn't seem to be anything outside my tent at all.

I waited, listened, and eventually heard the noise again. From outside of my tent, I could now tell that it was coming from beneath leaves on the ground. I got down close enough to see a dead leaf shutter and tremble, and then another one nearby did the same. I held on to my last chance to save my pride, hoping that it was a least some fangy, dangerous snake I would discover as I flipped over the leaves. It was a spider. A slender, friendly, almost translucent daddy long legs, working laboriously to navigate his comedically long limbs through the leaf litter.

In all my time wrapped up in the every day life of cars and central heating and headphones, I had forgotten the noise a single spider makes as it walks through crunchy leaves on a crisp autumn night. I gently uppicked my nocturnal nemesis and moved him far from my tent, a just punishment, I think, for such an obvious breach of the peace. As I drifted off for the second time that night, I wondered how I could possibly fall asleep back in the real world among sounds many magnitudes louder than the one that had just caused me to lose a half hour of well-earned sleep. Actually, I still kind of wonder.