The community in which I spend nine months of the year, my school, is separate from the places where and the people with whom I spend my summers. Like many other children, I inhabit a different environment, both physical and emotional, come June, July, and August. My formal education has spanned the halls of music institutes to a Russian after-school math program, the suburbs of Boston to those of Los Angeles. However, it has not strayed from the brick-and-mortar classrooms and conservatories of civilization. When the last, scorching days of school pass to the lazy, hazy days of summer, I head north to camp in the sylvan bliss of New England and Quebec. In accordance with the miles that separate these two habitats of mine, I have learned to express my anxiety, and accept the anxieties of others, differently in school and during the summer.

I attend a high school in Southern California whose students are as invested in shoes as they are in standardized tests — a lot. We students often express our concerns about nearing quizzes or tests quite vocally as though, if loud enough, our complaints might lead to success or, better, absolution from the evaluation altogether. Of course, these hopes are little based in reality. Impending exams offer an opportunity to inform one another that we are all equally unprepared, and so our academic doom is mutually assured and inevitable. Research papers and analytical essays can instigate unnecessary bouts of premonitory anxiety. And APs, subject tests, and the like seem to serve as a sort of trap door for today’s students, for whom failure is devastating and success merely expected. Students’ common desire to share their fears reflects the immense pressure under which many of us go through our daily lives.

Conversely, anxiety is antithetical to the pioneering spirit of canoe trips and hiking ventures. If a set of whitewater lies between the tripper and the campsite, the river must be run. If kilometers of portage trail separate one lake from the next, well, the gear must be unloaded; better to start walking now than later. If a day demands 40 kilometers, one must be up before the sun rises. Practicality, instead of fear or anxiety, drives camping. Moreover, it seems out of place to squander hours or even minutes concerned with inconsequence on the bucolic La Grande Riviere or Androscoggin River of Maine. The wilderness serves as a reprieve, deserved or otherwise, from the burdensome anxiety in which broader society has played at least some part.