about how, as much as I wanted to see Australia, it was precisely its ecological diversity that gave me pause. Australia’s sheer abundance of flying, skittering, crawling horrors constituted a deal-breaker, I said, in terms of my prospects for ever visiting the country.
I asked Amelia whether snakes were a particular concern in Melbourne, and she said that she did from time to time come across them in her work as a fire department volunteer.
“Now and then,” she said, “you’ll get a situation where you’re dealing with a bush fire, and there are snakes in the bush, and the snakes are leaping out of the bush towards you.”
“You mean, like, right at you?” I said.
“Yeah,” she replied, in a tone that sounded to me almost apologetic.
“At your face?”
“More or less, yeah. Not deliberately, but you’re in their path. And they’re on fire, of course, when they’re leaping at you, which is not great.”
“So this is something that has happened to you, in your own life, as a person? Actual snakes that are on fire have leapt towards you from vegetation that is also on fire.”
“Yeah,” she said, and chuckled happily.
“I would not enjoy that at all,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s not great, as I said.”
* * *
—
I was out of my comfort zone. It was a narrow zone, but deceptively spacious, and I did not like to be out of it. My comfort zone had good Wi-Fi and 3G coverage, and you could get Japanese food delivered to it, and there was craft beer within walking distance, and bookshops, and it was clean and it was at all times more or less room temperature. It was a good place to be, my comfort zone. There were rarely spiders in it, and never any spiders that were on fire. There was not much nature in it at all, in fact, unless you counted potted plants, which were very much optional. My comfort zone was, strictly speaking, inside.
I had been thinking about this quite a bit before I came to Alladale, about my somewhat arm’s-length relationship with nature. I was all for nature in theory, but in practice I had no feel for it, no sense of any relationship with it at all.
Actually that is not entirely true, because I was afraid of it—or certain aspects of it, at any rate, certain parts of it—and to be afraid of a thing is to have a relationship with it, however dysfunctional. I had certain quite intense nature-based phobias. I was, most pressingly, profoundly terrified of moths. It’s a phobia I’d had for as long as I could remember, and was so mysterious to me in its weird urgency and intensity that I could only conceive of it as psychologically fundamental. It seemed to me that to disclose its origins would be in some sense to uncover the truth about myself.
When a moth enters a room I am in, or when I enter a room in which a moth is already established, it has long been my custom to swiftly withdraw. I cede the territory, no questions asked.
What is it about these small, defenseless creatures that so overwhelms me with elemental fear and disgust?
I find their blunt, furred bodies and twitching wings unpleasant to look at, certainly, but it is the manner of their movement that I find especially horrific: the total randomness of it, the indiscriminate courses of their flight. A moth will dart in one direction and then, for no good reason, just switch trajectories and double back the way it came. If your face happens to be positioned at any point along that trajectory, chances are the moth will blunder into it. And to be touched by such a thing, to have its body in contact with one’s skin, seems to me a prospect beyond the realm of the thinkable.
I’d been seeing my therapist for more than a year by the time I brought this phobia up, and I could detect in her reaction some surprise that it had taken me so long to turn my attention to something so obviously ripe for the picking, so dense with analytic possibility. I had long thought of my moth phobia as an essentially comic neurosis, as a strange but basically minor personality quirk whose mysteriousness constituted a kind of psychological parlor game. (What could it mean? Where did it come from? Why moths?) But what I found as soon as I began to speak about it, there in her office, was that