Around the table we went, our fears, our strengths, our worries laid out like the map of North America before us. I shared my truth: “I’m most concerned about COVID and that one of us will get ill.” Our guide announced she was most concerned about the wildfire smoke that was hanging over much of the trek’s proposed path.
For months, I had been looking forward to this once in a lifetime backpacking trek in Idaho, alongside four other environmental leaders and two guides thanks to a generous fellowship. We’d come together from across the U.S. to backpack as a group and now we were nearly ready to hit the trail. We headed outside onto the grassy edge of a subdivision’s parking lot to practice setting up our tents. My tent partner and I lubricated dusty zippers and inspected the fabric for holes.
The next day we began what was supposed to be two-and-a-half weeks of uninterrupted backpacking in the wilderness. I remarked how beautiful the view of the mountains was and thought I’d snap a picture. I can take one tomorrow, I thought.
But that chance never came. The next morning, our guide’s fears came into full view as the area was clouded by smoke. Later that evening, I woke up to pee and thought I saw snow falling in the light of my headlamp, only to realize it was ash.
Simultaneously, my tentmate expressed that she was not feeling well. I didn’t want to intrude and be that sensitive germaphobe, prying about her health and symptoms, but inside my head was a constant loop of I hope she doesn’t have COVID. Knowing we were now headed back to town to recalibrate our route due to the smoke, I requested we offer her a rapid test, and I put on an N-95 mask as we rode back to town.
Within minutes of testing, she announced, “It’s positive. I have COVID,” and was quarantined from the group.
Hours later, my thoughts took me to that place of anxiety I so desperately wanted to avoid. I couldn’t hold my feelings in. Everything felt so messy. So uncertain. Who would fall ill next? Was I safe? Should I get in my car and get out of here? Sitting on the edge of a driveway in town, I allowed my hot tears and my wails to flow and when that became too overwhelming, I went indoors to the home we were now staying in for the night and I poured a cup of hot water and felt its warmth.
The next day, my tentmate recovering from COVID back in town, I was handed a new tent that I hadn’t yet set up and we headed back into the wilderness. That first night, I noticed the zipper worked in one direction, but not the other. Then, about five nights into camping, the zipper stopped functioning at all.
I flagged down our guide and out she pulled a tube of lubricant that I easily could have mistaken for lip balm. She kneeled down with me as I spread the lubricant back and forth over the zipper. No matter the amount of lubricant, the zipper sides wouldn’t join together. It felt pointless after many minutes. I thanked her, brushed my teeth and readied myself to sleep in an open tent.
That evening, I itched to see if I could will the zipper together. After a dozen minutes of trying, I realized that if I slowly moved the zipper along with my hand outside the tent, as I sat inside, I could zip it up. It took about 20 minutes, but I had a zipped up tent! I threw my fists into the air in celebration.
The next afternoon, I set up my tent along a river for my solo, a 24-hour experience where each member of the group camped completely alone in the wilderness, and I was yet again trying to get the tent to zip up to no avail. Why was I wasting this precious solo on futile matters? I let go and allowed the ants to crawl in and the flies to buzz about the tent, so I could frolick along the river, nap and journal in the sunshine.
As the Shabbat sunset descended upon the mountains and the darkness set in, I rocked back and forth in my camp chair, singing the lines of “Shalom Aleichem” that I could remember, waiting for the stars to come out, praying that some angels would protect me. One by one and then by the dozen the stars glittered in the night sky. It was beautiful and yet, as I considered the sounds around me, the lack of light and my solitude, my mind wandered back into worry. Were animals nearby? Would they enter my tent? I could no longer handle the open darkness, and so I went into my tent and set to work on the zipper. Using a bit of face moisturizer for lubricant, I successfully zipped up my tent in 25 minutes.
That morning at 5:30am, my birthday, I woke up to a damp surface covering my face. And it wasn’t just my face that was covered in wetness — my whole sleeping bag was enveloped in wet fabric.
My tent had collapsed. I unzipped it, stood under the constellations taking in their birthday sparkle and restaked the guylines. I crawled back into my open tent and curled back into my sleeping bag. I wasn’t spending those dawn birthday hours struggling with a zipper.
I packed up the tent that afternoon and hiked to the group campsite, where I learned voracious mice had eaten through one of the group leader’s t-shirts the prior evening. Bugs were fine, but I couldn’t stomach thinking my open tent might mean rodents could run right in. That night, I cozied myself inside of the tent and bit by bit got the bottom section to zip up. The upper section wouldn’t close, but I decided this was sufficient to deter rodents. And suddenly I looked out of the tent and couldn’t believe it. My tent’s rain fly was totally open. I wasn’t going to unzip my hard work. I called over one of our leaders, who graciously and from the outside, zipped up the rain fly.
My last night in the tent, a wind whipped through alongside a drizzle. My tent was full of air and looked like a hot air balloon about to take flight. A group mate suggested I move my tent to another spot.
At that moment, instead of giving in to my worries, I turned inward and realized: Actually, it’s going to be fine.
In the midst of wilderness, it hit me. I, the only Jew in the group, come from a people who wandered the wilderness in tents and endured.
In tents where zippers weren’t an option.
In tents where journeying into the wilderness wasn’t a choice.
No matter how well functioning the zipper, I wrote in my journal, a tent is an illusion of safety. Sure it could protect me from rain and bugs, like it could have for my ancestors, but if wildlife wanted to eat me for a midnight snack, no zipped up tent was going to save me.
I slept that last night with an open tent. I didn’t try the zippers. There in my open tent, hand on heart, I held myself in the wilderness, in the tears, in joy, in community, in solitude, in gratitude. I went to sleep remembering I come from a people who survived generations in the wilderness in tents — and for that night, I would too.
