This Saturday I went to the park. I got there rather late, around 8:00 pm and, since I knew I would most likely be there after the sun went down, I brought a flashlight. I walked and I sat and I thought and I walked some more. I had some wonderful encounters with local wildlife, eventually though the sun did set and I found myself in a rapidly darkening forest. As the last bits of daylight blinked out of existence the ‘night shift’ came onto duty.
In conditions that would likely have terrified most men, almost absolute blindness, dark shapes of animals staying just outside the area of my sight, the sounds of a rather large pack of coyotes coming closer, I sat down. I sat, in the middle of this space and I felt more at ease and more at home and confident than I ever feel at the store or in public.
The darkness wasn’t scary. The animals weren’t scary. The fact that I couldn’t see wasn’t scary. I sat there for a good long time and then something occured to me. The park closes at dusk, but I was aware that the gates are rarely closed and that forestry people rarely come to this place. However, I was certain that men came here to drink, I had seen the evidence of this several times in the form of beer bottles and headlights at night.
Men occasionally come to the park after hours. Men who likely travelled with other men. Perhaps they were teenagers, not yet 21 but sure as hell in a grown male body.
My blood ran cold in my veins. I fumbled immediately for my fanny pack and my flashlight and then I paused and decided that a flashlight would sure as hell let any man know precisely where I was.
In a secluded forest, a place that has always been a sort of chapel to me, a place where I slip off the well worn trail and meditate for hours in the darkening forest I was scared. I was terrified because I know what men are like. I know through many painful encounters that a woman, in the middle of a forest, with no ability to defend herself, at night, is a target.
The coyotes closing in around me brought smiles to my lips and a sense of wonder and childlike safety and good humor. The thought of a group of young men sneaking into the park after hours to drink a stolen or illegally bought 6 pack of beer was bone chilling.
It occured to me then that there is no animal on this proud planet that is more dangerous to a lone woman than a man.
I scurried out of the park, thinking all the while about male hunters in the woods trying to poach the wildlife and what could possibly happen to me if they came upon me out there, defenseless.
It also occured to me that there is no place on this planet where I can go to feel safe from men. No place where my autonomy and body isn’t threatened, even if my actual chances of being harmed by a strange man in the woods are remote, I have FELT male violence my whole life and my head remembers it very clearly.
This is what men have made of me. Of my life and my existence. And even in places where we feel we are safe, the internet, a remote forest, we are reminded, violently if necessary, that we will never be far enough out of the way. We will never be able to put enough distance between us and them, they will find us and remind us that they will violate us if given half the chance.
Until last weekend I would occasionally go to the park at dusk. After recalling and remembering that no place is actually safe, I will probably not be doing that again.
Chalk up yet another win for the terrorism of man.
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