On fear: wild-camping
One night, when my partner and I were cycle touring in the USA, we decided to set up camp in a small park by the side of the road. The site was perfect. It was close to a fast moving river, the water misting over dense forest on its far side bank. The ground was flat and well-kept, the pegs burying into the ground with little resistance. Best of all, our small tent was hidden behind a collection of trees. We had set up late, and there was little chance of anyone discovering our one-night-only trespass. There was a road close by too, cut into the side of the rock in steep switchbacks. Living in a city, the distant sound of cars always make me feel safer, a reminder that I am still close enough to civilisation, that I am not lost, that I have not deviated too far from an established path.
Recently, I’ve been reading The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard looks at how we interact with the house as a place of memory and image, something best described in poetry. In one chapter, he thinks about the city and how our proximity to other houses impacts our relationship with space.
…our houses are no longer aware of the storms of the universe outside. […] The house does not tremble […] when thunder rolls. It trembles neither with nor through us. In our houses set close one up against the other, we are less afraid.
(Bachelard)
Back in Vermont, at some point in the middle of the night, I woke up to an intermittent burst of small white flashes. At first, I thought they were fireflies, those small cosmic pinpricks of light. Sleepy and sluggish, it took a while for my senses to engage, for me to realise that the white flashes were lightening, prophesying an oncoming thunderstorm. Positioned as we were in the crook of a valley the thunder, when it came, ricocheted off the banks of the river and exploded into a hundred echoes. It started to rain in heavy bullets, and the wind hit in crisscrossed fury. In the tent, it no longer felt like we were close to anything, neither the road nor the town we had left in the fine afternoon, only 20 or so km away. I suddenly felt very isolated and alone, attached to the immediate ground beneath us by guy ropes but surrounded by a vast howling void, and it was threatening to drag me in.
In the throes of the storm I was terrified. It was something akin to being a child again, when the shadows on my bedroom wall would metamorphose into monsters; when I would pull the covers to my chin, skin pin-pricked with fear. I also catastrophized, panicked, was convinced that a bolt of lightning was going to hit a tree, causing it to split and fall on top of us. I clung onto my partner and wept. I told the storm over and over to go away, just go away, my voice sounding choked and unfamiliar. I couldn’t tell you how many times I sat with my flashlight and counted the space between the thunder and lightning, attempting to measure the distance between them and, therefore, their proximity to us. The seconds got closer together until the storm was on top of us. It felt like it was going to tear through the tent like some kind of wild creature.
There’s this great video by Jora from Jambi-Jambi, a cyclist from Australia, where they talk about fear, in response to a question about getting more comfortable with touring solo. Jora suggests that one of the best ways to combat fear is exposure, purposefully seeking your fear out. Part of this is educating yourself, but it is also knowing yourself and thinking about why it is that you’re scared. Using their own fear of the dark as an example, they speak about their experiences of cycling down their local streets at night and then listening to how their body reacts. By recognising, sitting in and then digesting your own fear it no longer becomes something that dictates your thought process. By doing this in a comfortable, familiar space at first you can then call on the embodied experience of fear when it happens outside of your comfort zone.
…a house in a big city lacks cosmicity. For here, where houses are no longer set in natural surroundings, the relationship between house and space becomes an artificial one.
(Bachelard)
I wonder, now, if I had invited the storm in, instead of trying to deny its existence, whether I could have howled with it. Fear is important; it is a natural and innate state. By embracing and learning from that emotion we place ourselves back into the world. A tent, unlike a house, trembles and, like the thunder, it trembles through us. Our relationship between house and space is no longer artificial, we are there, out in the storm, and sometimes this makes us so afraid that we could vomit. This is not to say however, that the houses we find ourselves in close proximity to day to day are not important. Proximity can dull these innate senses, make us forget that we exist in a brutal, unforgiving but beautiful natural world. However, like Jora suggests, when these ‘safer’ spaces are utilised, they can also prepare us when the storm comes beckoning again.
I would love to hear from you guys! What’s the scariest moment you have had outdoors? How did it make you feel?
