In a few days I'll be taking 27 teenagers on a four-day bike trip. Some of them, I think, have never camped before and more than a few of them are scared silly of creepy crawlers.

I found this wonderful sketchbook on the New Yorker website: "Camper Bug Alert" by Bruce McCall. You can click through all six juicy bug scenarios--but only if you dare.

Speaking of dare, my own kids know that I'm not too scared of bugs or snakes or lightning storms (boy was that a doozy here last night!) or even rabid foxes (which have been in one of my camps.) But they know that I am afraid of "the hacker." That guy, that deranged and soul-less guy out there in the woods, the one Alix Kates Shulman also fears in her memoir, Drinking the Rain. I was glad to find out I wasn't the only one with these fearful thoughts. When I hear the FDR refrain, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself," I say "Oh yeah? Let me tell you about the hacker."

In my twenties, I was a counselor at the YMCA Camp Winona. It was a day camp for kids ages 10 to 13, with two sleepover nights at the end of each week. I was good at building campfires, pitching tents, pulling ticks off ears and backs, and sleeping with 7 stinky, fidgety teen campers on the top of some secluded bluff. But at night I was always thinking about that hacker.

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Once, when my husband and I first bought our house in St. Paul, he had to leave on a long business trip. I was pretty new to the city and hadn't met the neighbors yet. That particular week there had been a string of beatings of elderly women in their homes. The St. Paul police had a police drawing of the suspect and it seemed I had that guy imprinted in my mind. The hacker, personified.

One night I came home late from my friend's Minneapolis apartment. The drive home seemed tense. The house was dark. I got spooked.

I ran upstairs and locked my bedroom door with the skeleton key, which I then gripped in my palm while I waited on my bed for the scared feeling to pass. It didn't. I put the key in my pocket and went down to my husband's locked cabinet for the .22. I had taken a riflery class in college and had grouse hunted some with my husband and duck hunted with some old high-school boyfriends. I knew how to handle a gun. It wasn't loaded and I didn't load it. It was just something to hold on to until I got over the heebie-jeebies.

I brought it back to our bedroom, laid it across my legs, and watched the back of that locked door most of the night. Finally, dawn came. I put down the gun, opened the door, and ran down the steps. I was so glad to have that night finally over. When I opened the door to check for the morning paper, I saw that I had left my keys in the door the whole night. So much for protecting myself from the hacker.

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So as a camp counselor, I wasn't much good at ghost stories or late-night treks to the outhouse. (I'm much better now.) But my fellow camp counselors were master storytellers and we'd all sit around the campfire listening to tales of chopped-off heads, and golden arms, and monsters in the night.

I always offered up a chance for immunity from breakfast clean-up to the first kid who volunteered to lead our group at midnight--post-ghost storytelling-- back up the hill to our tent. They always thought that was such a cool thing for me to do. Little did they know.