Fellow Travelers

An extremely tall, skinny man, wearing coveralls and sporting a beard that hung like a wispy curtain passed us on the way to the bathroom saying that his young daughter wanted to “pet our pups.” So, we walked slowly and reluctantly in the direction where he’d motioned she was waiting, both of us stiff and lumbering and without any coffee. Then a woman with long thin hair parted on the side appeared and told us that she had been a vet but wasn’t anymore but what she liked most about being a vet was petting the animals. We walked away knowing that something hard had happened to her but we didn’t know what.

A slender older woman with close-cropped gray hair sat in her camp chair next to her orange and gray tent and matching towel hanging from the hook where people are supposed to hang their food to keep it away from bears. I’d watched her earlier methodically arranging her camp so that every piece of equipment was in its perfect place. I realized that she was camping alone and I reflected on that for some time. When we walked by with the dogs, she lifted her head from her book and her face split into a brilliant smile.

Two young men, lean with very short hair, military-looking, arrived in two separate pick-up trucks and then erected canopies over their open truck beds where they put big inflated mattresses, sleeping outside but protected from the rain should it come. Yesterday, they walked by in shorts with towels slung over their shoulders, heading to the river, I think, for a bath since our campground was without showers. They stood talking together for a long while this morning before getting in their trucks and driving away.

An older man wearing khakis and a worn t-shirt pulled up late last night in a large white camper van. He backed into his spot, started a campfire and then proceeded to unload his gear which included an old cooler and a wooden chair and table. Last, he unfolded a long metal ramp and rolled a motorcycle out of his van. All the while he played Steely Dan, a startling sound in a campground where the birds are the loudest creatures. This morning, I saw that he rode his motorcycle to the bathroom.

Two young women, one very tall with wildly curly hair and the other short with black hair in a short braid, backed their camper van into the space next to us and then put on roller blades and skated through the campground. Later, when they were testing out a hammock hung between two trees, we struck up a conversation that reveals that Red was from Scotland and her partner was from New Zealand. They’d saved their money to buy the van and planned to visit all U.S. national parks in four months. The Smoky Mountains was #18. They told the story of having gone scuba diving in an abandoned coal mine that had been flooded. “They left all their equipment there!” I said it sounded creepy and Red responded that “If you don’t like being underwater and also underground, you really wouldn’t like it.” I think perhaps the two of them captured this year’s global allotment of joie de vivre.