The Backpacking Incidents
It’s been almost exactly a year since I wrote the last post here. A month and a half after I wrote that, I ran away from home and am now happily living alone. But recently I was thinking about a couple of tantrum incidents that happened on two separate backpacking trips in the Emigrant Wilderness of the Sierra Nevada.
Incident #1:
The first incident happened in 2015. We were camping at Lertora Lake, and had the entire place to ourselves. On the morning when we were going to pack up and hike to the next lake, I couldn’t find her anywhere, and got a little worried. I took a quick look at the tent, and didn’t see her (this turned out to be my big mistake). So I quickly walked up to the top of little granite knoll a couple of hundred yards away, where I should have a view of the larger area around the camp. There was no sign of her, so I walked back to camp. When I reached the tent, she rushed in from somewhere (perhaps the lake shore) and started in with a long, angry rant about how she’d been lookinng for me everywhere. I told her I hadn’t seen her and had gotten worried, and she said she’d been napping in the tent the entire time. In her rant she told me how irresposible I’d been to leave camp without telling her, how I’d not been looking very hard, etc. Her anger left me shaky for a long time, as was usually case when these things happened (which was pretty frequently by this point in our relationship).
Incident #2:
The next incident happened in 2019, rather late in the season. It was the first day of our trip, and we’d hiked a long way in, we were tired, it was getting dark, and it was very cold and windy. We reached the side trail that led to nearby Toejam Lake, where I’d camped a dozen years before. The turnoff wasn’t marked by a sign, which didn’t fit with my memory of the place, but I was very sure it was the right trail. She’d never been to this area before, but wasn’t convinced that I was right about the turnoff. She said we should continue along the main trail for 15 minutes to see if the turnoff was actually ahead. I knew this was a waste of time, and I checked the map to make sure of our location. But she insisted, and here is where I made my big mistake. I said something like: “Then we’ll just have to backtrack to this point again”, with a note of resignation. She interpreted this as sarcasm and launched into one of her usual angry rages. She threw down her pack and departed down the main trail, leaving me alone with both of our packs and not sure when she’d return. A half hour later she came back, still angry, and told me I had a real mean streak, and that I hadn’t apologized earlier. This wasn’t true: I had apologized profusely before she threw down her pack and stalked off, but she claimed she never heard the apologies. (Yet all through our marriage, I was supposedly the one who was a terrible listener.)
Then she ordered me to hike down the side trail that I was sure led to Toejam Lake, and said she’d follow 15 minutes behind me in case it was the wrong trail. But it was the correct trail. I got to the lake, and tried to find a sheltered place to camp out of the wind. Eventually she showed up, when it was getting even colder. She never apologized for her tantrum or doubting my knowledge of the area, apparently believing that I was entirely at fault, as usual. As before, this incident left me feeling very shaky for the rest of the day.