Terror In The Woods

Fear can immobilize us. Communing with Nature can make us whole.

There are no atheists in foxholes is a well-known saying which describes our reaction to extreme fear. We understand that we are in a situation that we cannot control. My own personal corollary to that would be Or when you hear the howl of a wolf.

There are events in our lives that we never forget. The hope and the spark of life you felt the day you met your significant other. The joy and exuberance that came when your children were born. And the sad times when a loved one passes on. We don’t forget the details of those experiences. Sometimes they grow in dimension. We embellish whatever makes us look good (the awards or compliments we get whenever we’ve done something noble) and minimize those low points we would like to forget.

I still have vivid memories of the events that happened to me 50 years ago. I have been able to reconstruct that experience with the help of the journal I kept at the time.

If you can remember yourself at 21 years old, most of us smile and think of the recklessness with which we pursued life. Sometimes we consider it a small miracle that we came out of those years alive!

After graduating from a northeastern college, I visited friends in northern New Hampshire, right below the Canadian border. It was the middle of winter, and the landscape was beautiful, with freshly fallen snow covering the woods. The roads were winding, narrow, and dangerous, and as I climbed to a higher elevation, I became worried that my little Hornet would overheat. Luckily, the car survived the trip.

I couldn’t understand why anyone would choose to live in such an isolated area, away from all of the luxuries and conveniences of city life. At the time, I didn’t understand that the beauty and peacefulness of the area were worth much more than anything they had given up.

My friends were older than I, and they had a little toddler with blue eyes and curly blond hair. We ate like kings, played board games, and planned to watch the Super Bowl game the following day. The temperature hovered near zero. I distinctly remember an outside thermometer that you could read from inside the house. I got into a habit of checking it every hour to see how low it would go.

Being an adventurist on the second day of the visit, I decided to bundle up and walk in the woods. It was late afternoon, and as I headed out, it began to snow. The house was situated far from the road, and there weren’t any other houses visible.

It didn’t take long to distance myself from the house and lose sight of it because of the hilly landscape. At the onset, I wasn’t worried about getting lost because I planned to follow in my footsteps back. But as I trudged onward, the snow and the wind picked up considerably. I didn’t notice that within minutes my footsteps were getting covered over.

I emerged out of a wooded area into a large clearing with few trees. The snow was now much deeper, and I started to slow down. The sky was a beautiful grey, and the wind was picking up. The only sound came from the wind blowing the snow out of the trees. I stopped in the middle of the clearing and looked around. I pulled the hood up over my head as the temperature was dropping fast. It starts to get dark early in the country's northern tip, and I should have started back, but I was transfixed. It was so peaceful out there that I couldn’t move. I had never experienced such complete solitude, but it was a feeling of seeing myself as part of the landscape and not separate from it. Even though I was alone, I had never felt such contentment. I was oblivious to the cold and the rapidly descending darkness.

I can only describe the experience as surreal, which I believe caused me to stop thinking rationally. The awareness I felt was acute but not ego-driven, so I had no sense of fear or worry. When I think back upon that time now, I cannot explain the actions I took before the left side of my brain finally kicked in, and I was able to start walking back to my friends' house. Because before that happened, I was immobilized and unable to think of anything.

In my journal, I had recorded that after a short time of letting my mind succumb to the beauty of the moment, I was jolted back by the sounds of an animal howling in the distance. Of course, at the time, I was sure that I had heard a wolf, and I’ve since researched whether or not wolves could have inhabited that part of the country 50 years ago. To this present day, there is a small population of wolves on the Canadian side of the border opposite New England. I won’t make any unsubstantiated claims here, but the terror I felt was just as intense as the awareness that had overcome me the previous 30 minutes.

By this time, darkness was settling in, and I started my trek back, only to realize after about 10 minutes that I was unsure of where I was going and still spooked with that awful howling I heard in the distance. My mind was racing out of control, and the only emotion directing me was fear. My heart was beating so hard that I was sure I could hear it bounding out of my chest. The fact that I was lost only compounded how scared I was.

The snow and wind had covered up my tracks, and I stumbled through the trees hoping to find a landmark to send me on the right path. It took me a grueling 2 hours before I finally saw the light from the house in the distance, which is where I headed. By the time I got to the house, my hands, feet, and face were frozen, but underneath my clothing, a nervous sweat had soaked through everything, through my long underwear and onto my clothes.

The range of emotions that I had experienced left me exhausted both mentally and physically, but my 21-year-old self had emerged a little wiser. It wasn’t that I had gained any perceptible knowledge. Still, from then on, I was more aware that the thoughts and feelings we hold from our experiences are just as valuable to our growth as the academic knowledge we cram into our brains constantly. I was nudged into a less rational approach to my life.

This was not a conscious decision I made but was the result of the events of that day.

Since then, I’ve gone over the events in my mind many times and tried to categorize what happened to me out there in the semi-wilderness. But I always fall short of fully understanding or describing any of it. I’m still a very rational, logical person, but I don’t discount anyone’s beliefs or their experiences that take place outside the realm of science.

I’ve also recognized that the more knowledge we uncover about the universe, the more we realize everything we know is just the tip of the iceberg compared to everything we don’t know. We know a lot about the human brain but very little about the human mind.

Research into the nature of consciousness is in its infancy. Some scientists can’t explain exactly where it comes from. Others are sure it is extinguished at death. Because it can’t be quantified and packaged, it gets little consideration. In my layman’s view, it is the crux of what makes us human. And I believe that accepting the fact that we know so little about it is the first step to understanding.

And that is where I’m left after 50 years of trying to figure out what happened that wonderful, terrifying time in the woods. I’ve thought about returning to the area many times, but I know that I could never duplicate the total experience. It would certainly be a letdown if I tried. So I accept it as just one of the many experiences I’ve had throughout my life that makes me who I am today. Life is full of turns and nuances that can cause us to change course. Sometimes we have to be open to it.

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