Our theme for the month of October is “childhood fears.”
This summer, I worked a few weeks at my old summer camp. I avoided my old counselor job, wanting to avoid being direct colleagues with my students who had definitely seen enough of me over the school year, and took on a role driving middle schoolers around on a “field-trip-of-the-day”-type program.
My colleague and I spent time every day planning when we would leave, how we would fill the time, where we would eat lunch, and every day I would pore over Google Maps to answer the same two questions: how would we get there, and where would we park. I drove my colleague crazy, stressing about where we would deposit the two twelve-seater vans while we flounced around, doing whatever we needed to do to occupy the twelve-year-olds. Would this parking garage have high enough clearance? How much would we pay for street parking? Where are the parking passes camp bought us? Is someone else driving us?
A part of this is my type A personality—needing a plan for every given moment and a back-up plan just in case the other falls through if I am the person in charge. But a part of this particular need to know where I am going and where I will end up reaches further back.
I could blame this on Sunday mornings, piling in the car and getting to church a half an hour before anyone else so we could get the very limited legal parking spots in Boston. But the deeper roots are in a 2008 Indigenous Peoples’ Day camping trip, though we definitely didn’t call the holiday by that title at the time.
My family has a few traditions, and a sacred one was the four weeks a summer we spent up in New Hampshire camping at Pawtuckaway State Park. There were a few years that my parents decided they loved it enough to go up just for a weekend, to enjoy the last three days the park stayed open in October before it closed for winter hibernation. This trip, it was cool but not chilly, and my dad decided he wanted to go on a hike, one of the trails close to the usual Fire Tower hike we did.
Long story short, we took a picture, we got off the path believing we were taking a short cut, and we stopped two hours later, lost enough that we couldn’t hear the park ranger roaming around the trails on his ATV, looking for us. My dad’s flip phone and my siblings’ and my memories of the free survival session we had attended that summer were the only things that gave us something to do: my dad calling my mother, the ranger station, and 911; and my siblings and me building debris shelters. By the time the sun had set and the full moon had risen, I truly thought we were going to sleep out there.
The story ends just fine. The police bushwhacked their way to us after triangulating my dad’s cell signal (it was 2008) and setting off sirens to check what we could hear. I got to ride in a police car, which I used for the greatest hook I’ve ever written for a ninth grade essay, and we didn’t get fined for not being prepared enough hikers. My mother resisted the urge to strangle my father. I had a great anecdote to tell my lunch table when we got back to school on Tuesday.
Even still, I became neurotic about maps. Next hiking trip, we brought a portable GPS, just in case, and didn’t leave the free matches given to us at the ranger’s station in the car like last time. I checked every trail marker on our redemption hike next summer, hiking the same trail, and would get nervous if I didn’t see a white splotch for three minutes. My dad tried to get us to take a picture at the rock face where we originally got off trail; I staunchly refused. My mom bought my dad and me T-shirts with the Pawtuckaway hiking trails a year later, joking with a note of threat that now we would never get lost. Today I take pictures of trail maps and site maps when I’m visiting a place on vacation, referring to my phone religiously. Whenever I try to explain why I care so much about not getting lost, I say, “I got lost as a kid on a mountain for six hours,” and that usually gets across the gist.
It is a childhood fear, getting lost. It is one that I still contend with, even in the age of phone GPS and location sharing. Confronting it requires facing something even more deep-seated within me: a desire to be the one in control—a tendency that unfortunately serves me well in learning to command the attention of twenty-two sixteen-year-olds. So I don’t see myself outgrowing this bargain anytime soon, taking the fear and keeping my maps and my phone and my portable charger close at hand.
Alex Johnson (‘19) is a high school English teacher in Massachusetts. She spends her days being an uncool adult who enjoys reading romance novels and explaining niche rhythm game strategies.
