Face to Face with a Skunk
In the middle of the night, the sound of my ground tarp crinkling woke me up. Instead of sitting bolt upright, I assumed that if I could identify what was standing on my ground tarp, I could figure out how to handle the situation, hopefully, on my terms. To this day, I’ve never made a better decision. The crinkling continued, which allowed me to eliminate human from the list of potential things making the noise. A person would definitely stop making the same noise, realizing it was alerting the person on the inside of the tent of their presence. Or, I guess, I could eliminate rational human, which made me put human back on the list, but this time, a scarier version of the human I’d previously removed. With a small break in the noise, I very slowly rolled over onto my stomach, which changed my viewing angle from the roof of the tent to directly out of the door. With no rainfly, my view outside the tent was unobstructed.
As I slowly raised my eyes, I found myself nose to nose with a full-grown, mature skunk. Hooollllyyy shhhhiiiiittttt, I thought to myself in slow motion. I assumed that if the skunk wanted to spray me, he’d have done it. I very, very, very, very (cannot emphasize how slow I moved) slowly backed away from the door until I was crammed as far into the foot of my one-man tent as I could get.
The skunk must have been very confused, or entertained, because he just kept staring at me from his side of the door. “Okay, buddy, you win,” I said as passively and submissively as possible. Still, he just stared back. It felt like I was engaged in the longest staring contest of my life, paralyzed with fear and absolutely nowhere to go. Eventually, he lost interest and shuffled off toward the garage, where I watched him trace the perimeter, disappear for a few minutes, and then make his way back toward the church, walking across my ground tarp, not even glancing inside the tent this time as he passed by. Once he was in the shadows of the church, I lost sight of him, but as I was now processing all of the adrenaline that had dumped into my system, I wasn’t going back to sleep for a while, so I kept watch of the shadows.
After a minute or two, he reappeared pretty close to the exact spot he’d entered the shadows, crossed the small open space between the garage and the church, and again walked directly across my ground tarp making his way to the garage. Besides the crinkling of the ground tarp, he moved silently between these two structures. I realized that we’d both picked this set of shadows to provide a bit of cover from the street lights. For at least the next half hour, I debated whether I should get out and move my tent away from his preferred trail, or just try to go back to sleep, assuming that if he didn’t currently deem me a threat he wouldn’t arbitrarily change his mind and spray me on a future passing. I decided I didn’t want to change our current dynamic so I laid back down, trying to remain as still as possible, hoping that he’d get bored running across my tarp and go find some other place to do whatever skunk things he was doing.
For the next hour or so, this pattern continued, and with each crinkle I’d tense up slightly, expecting this to be the time I got sprayed, but it never came. I’m guessing the skunk eventually moved on because the next thing I was aware of was the sun coming through the roof as it woke me up. Before letting out a sigh of relief, I pulled the edge of my sleeping bag up to my nose and took a big whiff. It didn’t smell like skunk! I rolled over and surveyed the property and was relieved when I didn’t see him.
With the dawn of the new day, I couldn’t help but feel lucky to not smell like skunk and I was going to get to see my mom later that evening. All I had to do was get to the Rochester airport. I hopped out of the tent, broke down camp, shoved it all in the BOB, and took off without even glancing at the map. I waved a friendly goodbye to my skunk friend, wherever he was, and thanked him for his bravery in not spraying me in the night. If I never got that close to a skunk ever again, I’d be fine with it.
