Raphael had only disdain for the flick. He wasn't unsettled by it in the least. After dropping him off at his apartment building, I continued down Connecticut Avenue pondering the movie's effect on me. For the first half, I had been wondering why I would pay to be scared by a film, when simply driving a car in Washington DC offers me so many low-cost natural possibilities for fear. For the second half, I began to grow irritated at the film's inability to overwhelm my defenses and frighten me in spite of myself.

I should have been particularly horrified by the plight of the movie's three doomed characters. Like them, I have been lost and scared in the woods. It is a more nerve-shattering sensation than this or any film can inspire. It happened when I was growing up in the foothills the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Every summer break, we would receive a list of books to read before the following school year, and as a natural procrastinator, I would put off the task until the last minute. Then I would check out or buy all the books, and take them and a tent and food up into the mountains. I wouldn't come down until I had finished the whole pile. With nothing else to do but read, eat, walk around, and sleep, it usually didn't take more than a few days.

One time, somewhere in the middle of The Grapes of Wrath, I walked off from my campsite to hike around for a while. I had been in the area many times before, and knew it well. Somehow, in the next hour or so, I became disoriented. The terrain became horrifyingly unfamiliar. I could no longer tell which direction I was heading. The sun was smothered behind low-hanging, evil clouds that erased my ability to judge directions, and I couldn't tell if I was heading toward my campsite or further into the woods. The forest that had felt utterly wondrous only an hour before was unearthly silent, waiting, sensing this new birth of raw fear in its midst.

It was one of the very few moments in my life when I have felt the animal power of blind panic. My eyes seized on a tree or rock that looked familiar, and I approached with the anxiety beginning to retreat from my chest. Then I realized I was mistaken, and I felt the terror bloom more painfully inside me. I started crying. I began walking more quickly, hoping desperately for a glimpse of the red canvas of my tent. I had an overwhelming desire to run, mindlessly, until I found my way again or lost consciousness.

Logically, I knew that I could easily weather several days there without a tent or supplies. I had no water with me, but springs were plentiful, and I would likely find water if I headed down the ridge line into the valley below. Even if I set off in the wrong direction, I would probably hit human habitation by the next day. But I was fourteen years old and had just fallen off the edge of the world. In a couple hours, the light would begin to drain from the forest. The space under the trees would grow murky and dark while the sky still shone blue through the gaps in the leaves. The noises would begin. As night fell, all the things that lived in the woods and slept in the daytime would emerge, and I would listen to them, shivering, wrapped in leaves, utterly blind, as they moved around me through underbrush and dry leaves.

I was nearly running by then. I remembered what happened to people when they got lost: they panicked, and it was their panic that got them into trouble. I forced myself to stop. I sat down on the dry leaves of the forest floor. I sat with my arms wrapped around my bent knees and waited for the panic to subside. I waited. I felt my heart begin to slow. Some amount of time vanished into a blank space in my mind.

Then I got up and began methodically walking in circles, enlarging the radius every time I completed a circuit. In this way, I would painstakingly cover an expanding swath of terrain, looking for something I recognized. I walked slowly and deliberately, stopping every minute or so to survey my surroundings with exaggerated care. I completed a circle, and another larger one, and a third. And then, without warning, the woods coalesced around me. There was an audible breath as the features fell into place. My tent was ahead through the trees. I knew exactly where I was. The very stones emerging from the leafy earth wavered and made themselves known to me. I fell suddenly and joyously back into the world I knew. I started, at last, to run.