Camping With Women, Chapter 4

“What have you been up to for the past decade?” my old friend Francine wanted to know. We hadn’t talked in years when she telephoned out of the blue one day. I described a life of PTA meetings, youth baseball games, band boosters, Scout meetings and campouts. She’d had a much different life with two more divorces to add to her previous two, plus she’d been struck by lightning. Her life definitely held more drama than mine.

“Do you like camping?” she wanted to know.

“I love camping! I teach it to new Boy Scouts and their parents.”

“I go to Yosemite every summer and I always take friends,” she continued. “You wanna go with me next July?” She offered to make the reservations and outfit the entire trip; we could split the costs. I’d never been to Yosemite and it sounded like a wonderful opportunity to me.

The Control Freak: Francine

“Do you like to ride horses?” Francine asked.

“I did before my knee problems,” I replied. I had dislocated my knee twenty-five years earlier, and it had been temperamental the past several years. “The last time I rode a horse my knee gave out on me and it took two grown men to peel me off the creature. I still get embarrassed when I think about it.”

“Oh well, you can ride a little bit,” she insisted.

“I really don’t think so. Don’t plan on it.” I thought I’d convinced her. “I’d like to do some hiking while we’re there, though.”

We talked on the phone regularly, going over plans and details for the trip. When the day came, I flew to Sacramento and Francine picked me up in a well-maintained, older model white pickup truck with an over-sized, two horse trailer in tow. There were two very exuberant black labs in the crew cab’s front seat with her. “Say hi to Donna, kids,” she said to the two dogs. “This is Angie and this is Bruno,” she announced, caressing and kissing each one on the nose as she said their names.

“You decided to bring the dogs and the horses. Great!" I tried to sound enthusiastic. The dogs retreated behind the front seat and I climbed into the truck. As the two animals sniffed and checked me over, I told myself to be a good sport about the saliva on my head, neck and back.

“Yet our lessons come from the journey, not the destination.” Don Williams, Jr.

We left Sacramento Airport and set out on our one hundred seventy-five mile (or so) drive to Yosemite. As we climbed through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, the truck labored to keep up with traffic. The old pickup was dragging about three thousand pounds of trailer, a couple thousand pounds of Arabian horses, and probably another 1000 pounds or more of food, gear, and passengers. By the time we were in the real mountains the truck was slowing to the point of becoming a road hazard.

We had cars and trucks backed up behind us as far as we could see—and hear. The angry drivers blasted us with their horns. Francine would have pulled off the highway more often if she could have. The twisting mountain road had very few “turn-outs,” and they were seldom designed so that she could prepare to stop far enough in advance that she didn’t jackknife the trailer. When she was able to pull over to the side of the road, dozens of driver’s would tear past us, sometimes with their arms raised in one-finger salutes; sometimes shouting that we were “stupid bitches” and worse.

“They’d call us gypsies, tramps, and thieves.” Cher

That July Yosemite was so booked that the horses had to be moved from stable to stable, and we had to pick up stakes every night and move from campsite to campsite like gypsies. Francine was annoyed that I wouldn't go horseback riding. Morning and night we took care of the horses and the dogs, and the dogs were always with us. If we stopped somewhere to eat or sightsee, our time was limited by how long Angie and Bruno could remain alone in the truck.

Francine treated me like a novice camper. When I cooked, she told me how I could have done it better. When I set up my tent, she repositioned my tent stakes. Whatever the issue, whatever the discussion, she always had the last word. She retied my hitches when we were tending to the horses. “I teach knots and hitches to Boy Scouts,” I told her.

“My hitch is better!” she said. Each day I found it harder and harder to be a happy camper.

“Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.” Confucius

For three days she wore the same baby doll cotton blouse. It was dotted liberally with big black boogers from her sneezing horses. I didn’t say anything about the blouse until day three when we were planning to have dinner at the beautiful old Wawona Hotel restaurant. “Francine, we are going to dress up a little for dinner, right?” So far, shorts and tee shirts had been my daily uniform.

“We’re fine dressed the way we are,” she said.

“Well, you are going to change that blouse, aren’t you? It’s covered with horse snot.”

“There’s nothing more beautiful than horse boogies,” she argued. Finally, at my insistence, she changed the blouse in the parking lot of the hotel just before we went in for dinner.

On the last morning when we were leaving Yosemite to head back to Sacramento, I was up long before dawn, breaking down my tent and packing up the gear. When she woke up I was sitting on my camp chair, completely packed and ready to load up the truck. “You’re the most competent person I’ve ever brought up here,” she said, looking over the packs. All I wanted to do was get on an airplane heading back to Texas.

“He who would travel happily must travel light.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Francine called a few days later and asked if I wanted to camp with her again the following summer. “I don’t think so,” I told her. “Look, I really appreciate all you did to set up this trip, but the horses and the dogs—it was all too Lewis and Clark for me. I’m more a Johnny Appleseed kinda camper. Let’s just be friends without camping together.” I haven’t heard from her since.

Donna