Day 3: Canyon Hikes

Despite the perfect and chilly conditions for a burrito-style slumber in our sleeping bags, last night was a long one as shrieks of pain and sobs of agony rang through the air around 3am.  After Propping up on our elbows and looking out the car windows, we could see flashlight beams slicing up the air like a rave concert from the site next to us.  We’d observed our neighbors through dinner last night to be a quiet family of three.  

The father moved around their site with the distracted determination of a small bear, methodically rooting through storage bins, always on the hunt for something seemingly essential.  Although he never seemed to find what he was looking for, he was a man with the peaceful forgetfulness of someone who kept discovering the same empty bin with fresh optimism. “Maybe it’s in this one,” he looked to say to same bin he just looked in, now for the third time. 

The mother seemed like one who never left the house, like literally never left the house, as if she was afraid of the sun or was painfully shy.  Like she asked her husband to do everything necessary to sustain life outside of the house while she observed the world in slivers, through blinds from a dim living room.  But she did it not in a bossy type of way, but rather from a place of fear and her husband seemed to carry the weight of the world for her, not begrudgingly, but with love, as though he wanted to be the one to face it all so she wouldn’t have to.  

Then their was the daughter, who when her nose wasn't lost in a book, she was asking her dad for this and that.  Not in a whiney voice though, just in a voice that, over the years, gets what it asks for because the father just does it.

   Well anyway, the mother just started howling, like the viral video of that newcast lady who was smashing grapes with her feet and then fell and was like “ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow” a million times.  That was how she cried.  The dad and daughter were very supportive of her sobbing, hovering near, kind and calmly, softly cooing to her.  It was actually quite beautiful, until a full hour of it passed.  It was like a real life action of the Sim’s video game, the mother would sob at the picnic table, then shuffle to one side of the tent, then the other, then back to the table, her family following her in silent orbit. 

Their huge ass tent stood like a shadowy dome, animated with their silhouettes pacing within.  Eventually, the sky began to pale, and just the father started packing while his daughter and wife consoled each other in a camp chair.  It took him forever and he was forever patient.  He kept trying to fit the tent all into the bag it came in, but he was nowhere near having the organizational capacity for the feat and so like a chaotic ball of spaghetti, just crammed it into the car.  As we pulled out, we waved and they waved back nonchalantly, like nothing had happened, like they hadn't been causing a massive ruckus for the last four hours.   

 We stopped and had coffee with some kids from Iowa before taking a easy walk along the river.