I wake myself mid-dark from a dream I mostly don’t remember, that transformed before my eyes into a nightmare. I don’t check, but I know the watch from the level of quiet: between 1 and 4 a.m. Awake and uneasy, still twined in shreds of dream, I consider what this hour is like from a tent inside the wild. 

The train of thought makes regular departures. Yesterday I stopped mid-project to text my father, to remind him of that time we had to cut short our backpack in the eastern Sierra, for early September snow. I wanted to talk about our next trip, too. My hunger to inhabit granite boulders and talk about philosophy was suddenly too strong to bear alone.

Dad lives near Ventura, California. One of his friends recently suggested camping on the Channel Islands, and he’d thought I should go too, since I’ve brought it up before. Every year or so, in fact—probably ad nauseum—since I spent a long weekend on Santa Cruz Island, doing archaeological survey for the National Park Service. The wild pigs and windswept ridges and wide night skies have never left me.

I slept in a tiny cabin then, and was grateful for my four walls. Now I imagine a tent instead, unseparate from immense and breathing night. The land quiet, the sea never so, the stars huge or veiled, depending. The throat-catching noise of some animal—mouse? fox? pig?—or just the wind, and the way it takes your startled heart a full minute to stop drumming.

It’s an experience I equally crave and quail from. When you’re there, the night is inescapable, which is possibly why my dream recalled it so strongly. Alone and trapped in my tent, I never fail to wonder what the hell is wrong with me. Waking in the dawn, I feel reprieve. Also longing.

My extended family camps every summer in the coastal redwood forests of northern California. Since I was five, we’ve convened at the same state park, set on the banks of a bright young river running serpentine-green to the ocean, straight through my heart. Night there is different than the wildness that tangles my memory, and also the same.

Late in the evening, children are tucked up in sleeping bags, and adults are sipping their last glass of wine around a quieting fire. I zip open the roof of my tent, and let the rhythms of settling night settle me, too.

Tanoak understory reflects the firelight. Tall straight redwoods reach to a darkling canopy—trunks older than my religion, more massive and solid than every ideology employed to sell or to save them. Pitch snaps and burnt logs crumble. Human voices clatter, then shush each other. Slowly, humanity fades—our self-centered politics, our very timescales, silenced by the ancient darkness that thrives in this place.

In this resonating chamber, the river reclaims its voice. Invariably, I wake to its mid-night rushing. The fog’s rolled back, and stars glimmer through mesh. I watch as long as I can, then zip myself out and fumble for my sandals. Because of course, I have to pee.

It’s a tense journey, always: what if I cross paths with a bear? Even a raccoon would startle me badly. I know, because once I gasped at a left-out cooler I mistook for one. While everything else human sleeps, fears wake in deep nighttime. And I’m your classic scaredy-cat. More than once, I’ve waited to exit my tent for the last desperate second.

And more than once, leaving the yellow-lit bathroom, I’ve felt the night slip closed around me— not a comfort, exactly—and looked up into a canopy and a sky I cannot refuse. Instead of heading home, I circle the campground, slowly, stepping consciously and breathing quiet.

I’ve never learned to relax into the journey. The situation has more in common with facing a dare than taking a nature walk. It’s the opposite of my nervous mind’s desire, but perhaps it is my soul’s. I have been spellbound, every time: the moon was full, or the night breeze rising and falling like a beckoning hand. Or my mind had mired in fear, and I needed to get out and walk beside it.

The Park Service installs a footbridge over the river in summertime. Most years, it’s mostly steady. As kids, my cousin and I used to wobble across the murmuring current after darkfall, and pad into the deep hush of old growth on the other side. Here, only the deer and the flying squirrels may make camp. And here, the trees are full of invisible creakings and flutterings, every sound magnified by engulfing silence. These expeditions were sort of a dare and sort of a communion. Facing the awe and unknowing, sharing the heart-rush—that was the point. Without much discussing it, we made each other brave enough to walk into Mystery.

Grown, I have only ventured once across the river at night, to see the ancient woods in gray, and in fear and trembling. Each year it’s more difficult, convincing myself that even my midnight campground peregrinations are worth the trouble. I stay warmer without them, that’s for sure. My heartbeat steadies.

At least some of the reason I love the outdoors is that I do not have to live there. Imagine an island—I’m imagining Santa Cruz. The boat returns tomorrow; meanwhile unexpected clouds have gathered, and cold winds chase you down the ridgeline. Now picture the cabin you’re running home to, fast against the shoulder of the folded hills, with a window you can sit beside while rain swallows the sky. Picture the tent—its walls closing in with the weight of your breath—that you don’t have to check for leaks and spend a damp night shivering inside.

It’s gratitude, that feeling of contentment, as much as it’s anything else. And it works both ways. The privilege of taking shelter indoors exactly balances the deep gift of stepping out.

The midnight necessity scenario never feels like a gift when I wake in a tent with pressure on my bladder. I know the steps of this dance, but I fight it every time. When at last I rise and join the pattern, around me breathes a great and terrible truth the day forgets: deep in the night, time does not exist. I barely exist.

The world I think of in daylight as “around me” reveals itself as within and through and part and also other. We are one and many, tiny and infinitely massive, utterly unknown and intricately explored. If it takes the most prosaic of bodily demands to push me out into a space where I can touch this deepest Mystery, well—I’m listening.

Home, awake in the darkest hours after a troubling dream, the loneliness runs deep as my river in winter. I rise, pad camp-quiet to my library, and keep watch over suburban streets so humanly asleep they might be dead.

I think about walking, joining my tracks with the coyotes I see some nights slipping streetlight to streetlight. My heart skips a little, at that—and then I want to roll my eyes. But instead I say thank you. Better a little wild-fear than complacency.

And better to answer, when I hear that shivering voice. I find my walking stick, and cross the street toward the river I live beside now—not my teacher and friend from childhood, but a presence I am learning.

There are too many artificial lights—until suburban streets give out, and suddenly there are none. I pick my way in dark and silence, through maple-tangle and down the shadowed sand, unasked companion to the wondering moon.