Clean White Sheets

How wonderful to experience nature by taking a long walk in the woods. The sounds of song birds calm the mind, the blue sky flecked with fluffy clouds awakens the senses, the feel of soft breezes through the soaring trees stirs the soul, tiny critters circle around your head, the strangest looking insects crawl at your feet, the incessant buzzing of mosquitoes drives you nuts, tiny gnats try to hitch a ride on your eyeballs and what the hell is that unidentifiable creature dangling from a swaying branch. I’m heading for the nearest Starbucks.

Yes, we all sing the praises of nature, but let’s be truthful, nature can be uncomfortable, inconvenient and downright scary. Could this be the reason why newly arrived pilgrims to American shores stripped the forests of its trees, people clustered together in concrete cities and ornamental gardens were invented?  Who knows what’s lurking behind all that foliage and dirt?  It turns out I’m not too far off base with my theory of environmental destruction. Renowned wilderness historian Roderick Nash notes in an essay that at some point in human history “uncontrolled nature became the enemy.”

When I was about 14 years old I came face to face with humanities’ primordial fear of nature. I was a Girl Scout on a camping trip. It wasn’t my first so I was pretty sure I could handle anything nature could throw at me. All Girl Scouts on Long Island went to Camp Wunnegan, a large stretch of trees, rough paths, a few wooden outhouses (until they were outlawed) and two very long, nearly vertical hills which served as entrances and exits to the camp. Each time I sat in the bus as it drove up or down these “mountains,” which to my young eyes rivaled Mt. Everest, I couldn’t imagine what was holding its wheels to the ground. My knuckles turned white as I clenched the seat in front of me and tried to sing, “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.”  Once the bus became horizontal again, I slowly unwrapped my fingers, breathed again, and looked forward to my week of lashing tables, learning how to wield a knife, pitching tents and singing around campfires.  This was primitive camping at its finest.  Little did I expect that in the summer of 1964 I would experience … terror week.

Camp Wunnegan was located on the north shore of Long Island along a stretch of road with the mystifying name of Bread and Cheese Hollow Road. It felt remote and otherworldly, although the camp was probably not more than a few miles from the closest Levitt-style suburb. Those few miles made all the difference.  It seems that insects throughout the Island took refuge from suburbia in this enclave of greenness and, surprisingly, they tended to coordinate their travels so a particular species was the master of a particular summer. There was The year of the Raining Inch Worms, so called because the sound of pitter patter created by so many little green worms falling from the trees onto your tent made you swear on your favorite Girl Scout badge it was raining.  Then there was the Cricket Epidemic.  I thought crickets stayed in basements or chirped unseen in trees.  But that year I found out they have no aversion to humans and sleeping bags seemed to be a particularly favorite habitat of these jumping insects that looked nothing like Jimminy Cricket.  These were the first clues that maybe tent life was not for me, but I soldiered on, only occasionally thinking about my nice clean, warm bed at home.  Then it happened — the Great Daddy Longlegs Invasion.

Before you smirk and say, “Big deal a few spiders*,” let me explain.  This was not a few spiders — they were EVERYWHERE (emphasis mine).  Plus, have you ever really looked at a daddy longlegs. They are uglier than your average spider. These pustules with legs clung to tents, inside and out, crawled up your knee-high socks and made homes in your hair.  A wide-eyed look from a fellow camper let you know somewhere on your person was one (or more) of these things on you. The night was the worst. You never knew where they were and if, in the morning, you would awake staring eye-to-eye with one (or more) of the invaders. (Metaphorically speaking because I have no idea where a daddy longleg’s eyes are.) My occasional thoughts of home with its solid roof and a bed with clean (bug-less) white sheets became an obsession. Extinctions of entire species wasn’t discussed at that time, but if I had heard of this phenomenon back then, I would have rejoiced at the prospect that this creeping creatures of my nightmares might get what was coming to it — annihilation.

Now that I am older and wiser (or just older), I realize nature is not an ala carte menu where you can decide what to keep or what to discard. The natural world is an incredibly tangled web of links and interactions and how cute or hideous a critter (which is in the eye of the beholder) has nothing to do with its value. There is the possibility that extinction of a seemingly innocuous species could ripple through an entire ecosystem.  Who knows — the loss of daddy longlegs could somehow affect the plight of polar bears. You just never know.

After that summer, I became more like Thomas Jefferson or, perhaps, Henry David Thoreau, in my relationship with nature, preferring a somewhat tidier version of the natural world.  I still meander down rutted paths in the woods, but I look forward to clean white sheets at the end of the trail.

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*Daddy longlegs are not technically spiders. They belong to the order of opiliones. In opilionids, the head, thorax and abdomen are fused  while the bodies of spiders are segmented.