Even though I can hear car after car driving down the street, the forest feels eerie and sinister as the sun begins to set. Plunged into blue shadows, I watch the last embers of my campfire glow weakly beneath a pile of white ash before heading towards my tarp. I peel my shoes off and hang them from my hammock strap. A woodpecker has been pounding on a tree for hours now.
Into the Wild sits next to me, newly finished and a bit bent from when I fell backwards out of my hammock and landed on top of it. McCandless’s words sit heavily with me, the last words he ever wrote to Wayne Westerberg – I now walk into the Wild. Even though the dark feels uneasy, I wish I couldn’t hear the distant sound of children playing, or the earth-shaking boom of a cranked-up car radio. Although I am surrounded by trees and can’t see signs of civilization, I can still feel it all around me. I know I am not in the wild. If something bad happens, it’s a minute walk to the car – for McCandless, or many in the Alaskan wilderness, i
t would perhaps be a death sentence. Even something as small as a wild potato seed was a death sentence. Nature has strange ways of taking us down, subtle, crafty methods. Krakauer went so far to try and prove the cause of McCandless’s death because even someone much more prepared could have been taken down by the same thing – it eluded our knowledge until Chris’s demise eventually brought it to light.
The woodpecker keeps going. The sun has completely set now, and when I peek over the edge of my hammock, I can barely make out the ground. Like solo on trip, I didn’t bring a light. I love to wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark, when I am not tired enough to fall asleep. Behind the hammock, a crooked shadow looms in the dark. I cower until I am able to make out the ragged stump of a long dead tree. Things are not quite as scary once I decide I am brave enough to uncover them.
Time is impossible to gauge without the sun. I have fallen asleep and woken up. The woodpecker has not stopped – but the cars have. I close my eyes and smile, take a breath of the warm summer air. All around me are the sounds of the forest, heavy humidity, the rustling of leaves every so often falling and sliding down my tarp. It is nature singing me to sleep, a reassurance that I was, at least tonight, in safe hands. Nature can be our demise, but it can also be a refuge. I know I am not, in any sense, within the wild – but for this moment, it feels as if I am at least separate from civilization for one brief night, and it is a comforting thought to know that even in a backyard I can find some semblance of wilderness.
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