I live in Montana and I have been camping three times in my life. Take a minute, get the shameful head shaking out of your system and let’s move on. I like the idea of camping, but the act of camping was rare and always regrettable.

Every ten years or so my parents would get the grand idea to explore the wild for a weekend and we’d head off to a federal campsite with rented supplies and way too much food. My mom hates bugs, bad weather, sunlight, grass, pollen and pretty much everything else that exists outside. My dad keeps his own company. The first time they took me camping I was a baby. I don’t remember it, but I’ve heard the story so many times that I have vivid visions of how there were so many flies that I had to be covered by a towel and was later smacked with a flyswatter by my father, who didn’t know why that lumpy towel was covered in flies.

The second time was my dad’s birthday when I was 10 years old. I remember that it was rainy and freezing cold, my dad fly fished the whole time, my mom and I laid in the tent and read gossip magazines, our dog jumped in the river right before bed and woke up stiff and matted, and my mom brought my favorite cucumber coleslaw. It wasn’t a complete wash.

The last time I went camping was my 18th birthday with my best friend, Liesl. As my first step into adulthood I wanted to embrace the elusive wild. I could make my own decisions about sleeping in the woods, so we packed up her van with our bikes, several gallons of diet iced green tea and way too much food. We drove an hour to our campsite in south central Montana and hopped on our bikes first thing to find a place to go lake swimming.

Almost immediately on entering the little lake that we found, I slipped and cut my knee to the bone on a sharp rock. We rode a good mile back to our campsite with blood streaming down my leg, but it’s OK because we didn’t bring a first aid kit and I washed it in the Stillwater River and wrapped it with a handkerchief. We enjoyed a dinner of cold sausage and strawberries because we couldn’t light the campfire in the drizzle. That drizzle continued and even intensified to the point that we couldn’t sleep in the tent, which we’d brought without a pad or rainguard.

But I was determined to camp. We set up our sleeping bags in the back of Liesl’s van and settled in for a cold but dry night. This is where the rain and the issues we had earlier with our fire become important.

We laid awake talking about our day, my injury and how despite all the setbacks we were having fun. We made plans for a morning hike and breakfast before we headed home. Then orange-gold light flickered through the windows of the van. There were campsites near us, but not close enough to cast light from their fires, and all the other campers had been quiet in their tents for more than an hour.

The light grew brighter and clearly was coming from the direction of our own failed fire. We stopped talking and flattened our bodies as much as we could. Then a long shadow was cast over us. Someone was walking between the fire and the van. We covered our heads and shivered silently under our blankets. I don’t know if anyone looked in the windows. We heard no noise and nothing knocked or pulled at the door handles. After a while we uncovered our heads enough to breath easier and see that the firelight was starting to fade. No more shadows moved across the windows, but we were quiet and cautious until we fell asleep, exhausted and stressed.

It wasn’t until the drive home the next day that I realized how dangerous our situation had been. We were sleeping in a locked car, but we could have been in a tent with only a zipper between us and the scoundrel — undoubtedly an ax-murderer — who restarted our fire and prowled our campsite in the middle of the night, far enough from other people and a town that we would have been defenseless in case of an attack.

Nine years later that fear is fresh-squeezed and bitter. I love Montana. The mountains, valleys, lakes and rivers are my home. I hike and gallivant and otherwise embrace the wild around me, but I never sleep in it. It doesn’t matter that the person who walked through our campsite was probably just looking for food or that nothing actually happened and they clearly weren’t a deranged ax-murderer. If they had been, I was fucked. I don’t ride my bike without a helmet, I don’t drive my car without a seat belt and I don’t sleep in the woods protected only by a zipper and sleeping bag.

In most ways this has no impact on my life. But in one very important way, it does. Since I moved to Missoula I haven’t been back to my favorite childhood hiking area, where I spent my youthful summers and spread the ashes of my first dog. Lake Sioux Charley lies a good hike into the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness. The trailhead is a six-hour drive from my house. The only way I could go back is to stay at a hotel — boring and expensive — or camp. I’m ashamed that my fear has kept me away from this beautiful, meaningful place for so long, so this spring I made a momentous decision: I am going camping for my birthday.

I’m moving away from Montana this summer to begin graduate school in Portland, and I want to take what may be my last trip to Lake Sioux Charley while I still have a reasonable chance. My birthday is near a weekend, which gives me a good enough excuse and motivation to take off for two nights into the woods with my husband and some borrowed and rented gear. We’ll probably bring too much food, because some traditions shouldn’t be broken. I’m certainly afraid, but for the first time, as I approach age 27, my desire to wake up among the pines is overwhelming the very real possibility that I may be ax-murdered.

In a less tangible sense, overcoming this fear is an important birthday gift to myself. The next couple of years will be full of uncertainty, the only thing I fear more than being ax-murdered, and I want to start 27 off on the right foot — if I still have one left after this trip.