The Wandering Agoraphobe's Wilderness Experiment: part 2

Sacha Vais and his faithful German Shepherd      
dog, Walden, in the wilds of Nova Scotia.      

The thing about living in a log cabin surrounded by 200 acres of wilderness is
... it can get lonely. Not always, not for everyone. But as any initial excitement about my solo adventure wore off, it started to sink in that I was all by myself.

I was okay while there was daylight. It was easy to be sane when I could see. I romped in the woods and the ravines, practiced snowshoeing (and mastered falling down), chopped firewood, gathered kindling, and played 'fetch' in the pasture with my dog. But the thing about daylight is that it disappears.

Night would fall quickly. And fall without warning. All of a sudden it would become never-endingly unlit. The charming mountains I could once see all around me disappeared into a pit of infinite blackness. The birds stopped twittering. The crickets curbed their rhythmic chirping. And silence would smother the world before high-pitched howls started to fill up the night. Just my luck to have coyotes nearby.

My car and I were separated by several kilometres of murky darkness. I had no way to reach it, no way out in an emergency and no way to get to a hospital. There was nobody to talk to or fall asleep beside. Walden, my dog, was never a help; he was usually to be found snoring by the fire, oblivious to everything.

At night, I was trapped and all alone. In cognitive behavioural therapy, they call this form of treatment 'induction'. It's the equivalent of taking a guy who is petrified of heights and dropping him off the Eiffel Tower.

By their nature, agoraphobes hate being trapped. I am uncommonly fond of exit strategies!

Every day, at 10.30pm, my wristwatch alarm was set to ring to tell me that it was time to take the dog out to pee. I’m not exaggerating when I say that, for the first week or so, taking Walden for his pre-bedtime bladder evacuation was a catastrophe of titanic proportions for me.

My fight-or-flight mechanism would go into overdrive at the merest thought of having to go outside after dark. I started panicking, dry-heaving and running in small circles. Perspiration flowed from head to toe before the shivering started. I would gag and hyperventilate simultaneously - which, trust me, ain’t no picnic.

Sacha heads out onto the freezing       
ground to practice his snowshoe skills.      

The routine for taking Walden out involved turning on the porch light and noisily POUNDING on the front door from the inside before opening it. I would then watch through the window as hares, squirrels and countless creepy crawlies scampered off the front deck into the dark woods in response.

Oh. Oh. Inescapable forest critters everywhere. Untold legions of beastly living things scurrying about. Things that could bite me. Things with rabies. Not to mention the tens of thousands of bats. Bats with rabies. And if they’re actually out there, then it's not just paranoia.

My dog and I would then proceed to walk (okay, run) into the tall, wet, itchy grass. I’d yell “hurry up, go peeee!” in my high-pitched, screechy, very manly voice. Then, while Walden obediently did his business, I’d clutch my hunting knife in one hand and my camping lantern in the other.

My girlfriend, a biologist, once told me that loud human voices tend to scare off wild animals. So while Walden would pee, I’d also recite what came to be my Cape Breton mantra, over and over, at the top of my lungs:

"Dangerous. Could kill you. Is terrific.
Dangerous. Could kill you. Is terrific.
Dangerous. Could kill you. Is terrific.
Dangerous. Could kill you. Is ..."

All I can say is, I’m deeply thankful that no one was around to witness the spectacle. If a video of my night-time routine in Cape Breton should ever surface on YouTube, I think I might have to move to Timbuktu.

Gradually, I started to get more comfortable with my nightly drill - until one rainy night, while Walden was peeing, all the lights suddenly went out.

A flash lightning storm caused a power outage in the area, which rendered my cabin pitch black. It was a moonless night. Overcast skies. My tiny camping lantern was the only thing generating light for dozens of kilometres.

That's got to hurt! Sacha misses his footing     
and topples over in his snowshoes.      

I nearly fainted. But instead, I did what any self-respecting survivalist would do. I snapped to full attention. I morphed into Grizzly Adams mode. I acted intrepidly. I did what needed to be done: sobbing, I dropped to my hands and knees, dragged the dog (mid-pee!) back into the cabin, and slammed the door tightly shut behind me.

Inside, I remained on the floor, trembling. I wiped the salty tears from my cheeks, and started counting upwards to calm myself. I count when I’m afraid.

When I reached the 400 mark, the power still hadn’t returned. But I was no longer feeling frightened. My eyes were slowly adjusting and my adrenaline levels were, too.

I fumbled around in the dark, managed to locate my acoustic guitar (another piece of 'necessary survival gear' I had brought with me), and then started playing Leonard Cohen’s overwhelmingly moving ballad, Hallelujah.

I plucked and strummed and belted out the tune. I played and I played and I played. I sang and I sang. I plucked and I plucked.

It worked. The holy dark began to move in me. There was nothing on my tongue but the song. Every breath I drew was Hallelujah. Believe it or not, I didn’t even notice when the lights came back on. My eyes were tightly shut, and I was too focused on the music to care.

That night, I learned that if the silence is deafening, make some noise. If it’s too dark, close your eyes.

So far, so good for this agoraphobe's girlfriend-induced therapy. But a few weeks later, taking Walden out to pee yet again precipitated a crisis of epic proportions. This time it was dawn, and I’d just stepped out onto the deck in my bare feet to admire the sunrise and give the pup a few minutes outside before breakfast. As I was yawning, stretching my limbs and congratulating myself on surviving yet another night, a gust of wind blew the front door shut. No problem, I thought, it’s unlocked anyway. Right? Wrong.

I was locked out, in the wintry wide open, with no boots on.

A morose-looking Sacha Vais, wrapped      
up against the cold in thick hat and coat.      

Mild hysteria set in. I had what any credentialed psychiatrist would diagnose as a 'Spaz Attack'. Then, almost as quickly, I felt completely apathetic. Indifferent. Resigned. I wanted to give up on life. To lie down and die. The only problem was that I was absolutely freezing cold!

I couldn’t help but feel like the voice in Samuel Beckett’s classic novel The Unnameable, whose concluding words are “I must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on”.

I ran through the snow - panicking, shivering, sweating and praying that I remembered the way to the cabin owner’s house. It was bitterly cold outside. I was falling up to my frostbitten thighs in slush. I kept thinking: What if the owner’s not home? What if I’m stuck outside? What if I die here in my pyjamas?

Walden thought the whole fiasco was highly amusing. In fact, he was delighted, since he rarely gets a morning walk.

I found the owner on my first attempt. He was home. He let me in, gave me socks and boots, offered me tea and handed me an extra key.

“Keep the boots and the key until you leave,” he said. I think he got a whiff of my clammy feet while I was drying off because he added: “Keep the socks forever”.

I felt extremely relieved as I began the hike back home. I also felt a little proud, and a little more ... able.

Over the next few weeks, I began to grow accustomed to the silence, and even to enjoy it. I learned to appreciate the forest. I made my peace with the darkness. I took photographs of wild animals instead of dreading them. And I eventually learned to relax, even at night-time.

Little did I know that my entire life was about to be turned upside down ...

• NEXT WEEK: Spring comes to Cape Breton, the snows melt, and Sacha relaxes into the solitude of life in the great outdoors. But sudden and unexpected events force him to discover just how much the wilderness experiment has helped him cope with his agoraphobia. Read the third and final part of Sacha's story from next Monday on BBC Ouch!