Wild Woods Wallace

Ankle deep in black mud, with blisters screaming on both heels, and too many mosquito bites to count.  No - this was not the Golden State of Claire’s dreams.

Claire fantasized about living in California for as long as she could remember. She loved her cosmopolitan life in Paris, but California was sunshine, miles of beaches, and year-round warm weather appropriate for tank tops, flip-flops, and jean cut offs. It had become her personal Shangri-la.

She decided to take the plunge and move to California for a year before she started her Uni-years, living with family friends. Despite her concentrated effort to savor every moment, the year sped by all too quickly just the same.  And she still had one last unchecked item on her “California bucket list.”

While living in the States, it had become increasingly evident that the marker of the true American experience was roughing it in the backwoods.  As a young nation, the United States didn’t have all the historic wealth that France did, but it did have mountains of natural beauty caged within the expansive national parks system.  Claire was desperate to finish up her Californian adventure with a backpacking trip.

As luck would have it, she had stumbled into a group of friends who ventured into the back-country yearly, and their trip that year was to take place a week before her departure back to France.  She eagerly accepted their invitation to come along.

She was not unacquainted with hiking.  She knew it required a certain sort of mental toughness, demanded a severing from hygiene standards for the week of no-bathrooms-to-be-had dirt trails.  It was an embrace of continuous discomfort, and she welcomed it. And she was in the proper physical stamina to spend all day on her feet with a pack, switchbacking to higher altitude.  So none of those challenges were the cause of the travesties she faced.

Good fortune died a sudden and brutal death about a mile into the first day of the trip.  That year had been an uncommonly rainy, which begot a route more closely resembling a bog from Dante’s Divine Comedy than an Ansel Adam paradise. Its obscurity, while ideal in the sense that few other hikers were about, resulted in a path that was at best difficult to follow, and more often impossible to find due to blankets of debris and fallen trees.

However, this muddy mire was not loathed by all: mosquitoes, apparently, find it to be Utopia and flock to it in plague-like hoards.

Claire quickly discovered that she was found to be most appetizing by these blood-sucking pests.   While everyone in her hiking group suffered from attacks of the winged assailants, Claire was bombarded relentlessly.  And, to add fuel to the flame of torture, she was semi allergic to mosquitoes, making each bite turn into a welt.

Since the trail was wet, and her hiking boots borrowed, Claire was additionally afflicted with blisters that grew in area to a degree most impressive and horrifying.  But when you are 12 miles into a looped trail in the back-country, there is simply no turning back: you must simply press on. 

Any single one of these circumstances would warrant constant verbal complains.  However, Claire kept a positive facade, and anyone looking at her would have thought she was spending a day at the Happiest Place on Earth rather than the most hopeless.

As she passed the hiking hours, Claire concluded that Americans, or at least this group of Americans, must surely be masochists.  As she limped along, she wondered in the quiet recesses of her thoughts whether she should have come on this trip at all.  She seemed to be suffering more than the others with the bites and blisters, and she couldn’t fight off her cognitive whispers that perhaps this was all a massive mistake.

When the group rolled into camp on the final evening, the circumstances were taking their toll on her.  She could not remember a time in her life she had felt this low, miserable, and exhausted.  Although surrounded by her friends, she felt unbearably lonely in the sense of helplessness grown stronger by days of constant discomfort and battles with biting bugs.  She desperately missed Paris.

She took a walk on her own toward the lake nearby, so as not to let the others see her impending breakdown, swatting the buzzing, winged demons from her ears as she shuffled off.  And it was then that she saw them.

Through the gallery of thinly-trunked pine trees, their needles filtering the honey-evening light, came a caravan of seven horsemen complete with boots, plaid shirts, Wrangle jeans, and cowboy hats.

Cowboys! 

They emerged out of the forest glen as if a mirage and Claire stood, star-struck. A true deer-in-the-headlights.

“Well, hello there little lady.  What do ya call yurself?”

Claire found herself tongue-tied. She was meeting real cowboys in the sap-smelling woods of the Californian Sierras. She was living out the Wild West.  She was Annie Oakley.

The man who had asked for her name was white-haired, with a whisky-rounded-belly and a wind-wrinkled face, tanned by long hours of riding in the sun. His hands were worn from a lifetime of hard work, and trail dust accented all this clothes.  He slipped off his mustang and seated himself on a camp chair as if it were a throne.  Surely this must be the king of the backwoods.

In a husky voice, full of weathered wisdom, and a twinkle in his eye, he continued his one-way conversation, “My name is W…W…W: Wild Woods Wallace.”

Claire suddenly realized she’d been standing speechless, jaw ajar for the fast few minutes.

“I’m...um...I’m Claire,” she managed at last.

“Well Claire, you travelin’ these parts alone? Or do you have yurself some friends?”

WWW invited Claire and her company to steaks and a jug of whisky passed around the the campfire.  She even got a lesson in square dancing as the a blanket of stars snuffed out the sun.

When she crawled into her sleeping bag that night, she did not notice her blisters, her increasing number of mosquito bites, or her sore muscles. She was simply in a glow of the unanticipated marvel of meeting cowboys in the mountains, miles away from urban comfort.  She fell asleep with the satisfied smirk of realizing that no one at home would ever believe her.

The following week, her bites finally grown smaller and the blisters nearly healed, she boarded a plane bound for home.  She was excited to return to Paris, anticipating the beginning of her university years, and looking forward to sharing her year abroad with her friends.  As the plane ascended and California grew small and then invisible below the clouds, Claire mused over the revelation that it took the worst of circumstances to bring her into the most memorable of experiences. 

Maybe Wild Woods Wallace had simply been her guardian angel in a cowboy disguise.