At around 8:30 PM every night the summer after my first year of college, I brushed my teeth in the cool New England twilight and prepared to enter My Tent. I dared enter My Tent only once daily, to minimize opportunities for infiltration. Standing poised by the tent zipper, I pulled my Eye Mask over my head and drew it over my eyes. With my eyes pinned shut, I whipped the zipper open, dove into My Tent, whipped it shut, changed into my pajamas guided only by my sense of touch and my mental map of my (organized, plastic-bagged) belongings, and slid into my sleeping bag.
I was working on a trail crew in New England that summer, performing the manual labor behind the gravel paths, bog bridges, stone staircases, and clearly marked trails you encounter when you go out for a hike. My crew usually camped at or near our worksite for the three nights of each four-day workweek. We camped both to minimize travel time and because there was certainly no budget to put us up in a motel.
The truck that we drove to our campsite had limited space (mostly taken up by tools), so it was important to pack personal items practically and sparingly. Yet camping is rather object-intensive. It takes a lot to keep a human safe, sheltered, fed, and perhaps semi-comfortable in the outdoors. So each item I brought with me mattered. There were the “essentials,” tent, sleeping bag, knife, water bottle, etc; the “highly advisables,” purell, sunscreen, bug spray, toothbrush, tarp, camp shoes, etc; the “nice to haves,” including a spare set of clothes, ear buds, face wash, a book; and, of course, there were all the little pouches, baggies, and satchels that protected all these items from the elements and from filth, while keeping them organized and findable inside my cavernous rucksack.
But for me, packing could never be a purely practical affair. It was also preparation for the righteous battle I would wage each week against the encroaching chaos of the outdoors. While my crewmates met nature’s messiness with maddening equanimity, my own approach to camping out on the job was governed by fear, superstition, and a desperate pursuit of ever-elusive cleanliness and order. I liked spending the day outside, shoveling gravel, dragging boulders through mud, and getting dirty and sweaty. But at night, unable to retreat indoors and reset, I felt trapped and besieged by nature.
My attempts to stave off this feeling gave my camping routine an anxious, regimented quality. I always brought an extra tarp to hang above My Tent so that I could enter and exit without getting water inside while it was raining. I wiped the DEET off my skin each night with a wet wipe, fretting that I couldn’t follow the spray bottle’s instructions to rinse it off with water. I systematically cycled my clothes from one plastic bag to another based on their state of cleanliness.
But my Number One fear and fixation was having Bugs In My Tent. Bugs outside are bad enough: I have always been prone to flinch and flail helplessly when I see one, desperate to get it away from me but too scared to kill or relocate it. But outside, at least, I know that bugs are likely enough to crawl or fly away, and if they don’t, I can always get up and move myself. Inside My Tent it’s another story. Once there is a bug in there, it’s there to stay—see aforementioned fear of killing or relocating. And once I know there’s a bug in my tent, I will be reduced to fearfully following its movements, tracking it to make sure it doesn’t come too close. If it’s big and scary enough, I will spend the whole night sitting outside my tent, shivering, tired, terrified.
I knew this about myself, which is why, every week, I packed an Eye Mask in my bag of important things. Unlike my sunscreen or my jacket, the Eye Mask protected me not from the elements but from myself. The Eye Mask prevented my eyes from fluttering open–whether unwittingly or by force of morbid temptation–and encountering the spindly demons that might be stalking the walls of My Tent. Of course, the possibility that they were lurking just beyond my Eye Mask still haunted me. But the Eye Mask’s comforting tautness against my eyes prevented this vision from becoming established reality. The premise that My Tent was bug-free unless visibly proven otherwise gave the Eye Mask the power to protect me from Bugs In My Tent by magically ensuring that there weren’t any. With the Eye Mask, my nights were by no means serene, but they were manageable.
To ensure I would never misplace it, I kept the Eye Mask in a dedicated pocket in my rucksack, where it lived alongside a Backup Eye Mask (of lesser quality, but would do the job in a pinch). Losing the Eye Mask would be a sign that my vigilance was wavering, that other blows to my defenses were sure to follow.
You may be wondering why I describe my battle as solitary, when the tents of my fellow crew members stood just a few yards from my own. After all, we cooked our meals together, drove long hours together, and spent ten-hour days hauling lumber through wifi-less woods together. Couldn’t I enlist them to kill a beetle for me? Yet asking someone else for help with Bugs In My Tent was a humiliation I submitted to only once, when, having seen the daddy-long-legs with my own eyes and established its corporeal presence in My Tent, I was left with no choice.
It wasn’t just that I didn’t trust my cavalier crewmates to approach the task of purifying My Tent with the requisite scrupulousness and reverence. I also didn’t want to stand out as a burdensome princess in a crew of seemingly fearless self-proclaimed dirtbags. The Eye Mask granted me self-sufficiency, a prized attribute on the trails. With its help, I could fit in, sleeping (almost) as soundly as my crewmates without sacrificing my dignity and their respect.
When the summer ended, the Eye Mask mostly lost its apotropaic quality, reduced to a “nice to have” for long plane rides once more. But – call it clinical anxiety or a personal religion–call it both–I have never fully freed myself from the belief system that sacralized the Eye Mask. In a world with no shortage of frightening things, I remain beholden to the value of facing my fears armed and outfitted, to the principle of defensive object impermanence, and to the importance and fierce pride of proving my own self-sufficiency.
