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Arroyo Seco, June 2004
Day 3
I slept in. But
by noon I hadn’t heard from M&M so I began to instigate the
search. It turned out to be
much more difficult than one would imagine since I was not able to reach
the Arroyo Seco Ranger Station. Instead,
after many false starts, recordings, and nice but useless people I
reached the Search and Rescue Division of the Monterey County Sheriffs
Department. I gave the car make, model, and license plate number, along
with M&M’s vital statistics.
The sheriff kept in touch for several hours and just as they were
about to start the search, M&M showed up and had a chat with the
ranger on duty. This was
confirmed by a phone call Emily received that night around 7 pm while I
was out getting ice cream. Mr.
Woods recounted events that unfolded since the time we separated and
Emily screamed at him to burn his clothes after he remarked that he
didn’t feel any affects from the poison oak.
Apparently M&M didn’t realize that the wrath of the vine is
not felt until sometimes days after the exposure, and as it turns out,
they did feel the wrath and are suffering from it as I write this.
In the end it all worked out. No one was physically damaged although M&M don’t yet
know about the extra 430 miles on her car.
Although I may have been hard on M&M in the text I harbor no
ill will (and I hope they feel the same way), in fact, I have nothing
but the up most respect for Mr. Woods for the way he dealt with
adversity. On the one hand
he had me telling him we had to go faster, and on the other hand he had
to convey this to Mani, his new girlfriend, in some sort of tactful
fashion. Add to that the
utter failure of his dry bag, which resulted in him carrying a 30-pound
water sack under his arm rather than having it float along side him (his
dry bag didn’t have shoulder straps) and you could have had a very
unhappy camper. The same
goes for Mani; very early on her knees started to bother her, yet other
than suggesting that we climb out of the gorge to the road, I heard
absolutely no complaints from her.
Later in the week, while discussing the trip at work,
Mr. Woods and I could only go back to the website that inspired the
trip, and look at the naked men and women with awe, wondering how they
made the river walk look so easy.
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