A Camping Neighbor, of All Things

It has been a long time since an impudent camper had the effrontery to move in on my dispersed campsite. My campsite. I took an instant dislike to the guy and to his large wide-jawed dog.

But he was a real camper, and you have to admire that. All his junk was in the back of a regular cab pickup truck. No cap. In no time he had his tent and tarp set up. He used a shovel to dig a drainage ditch to empty out some of the puddles that were threatening to trap us. (So I'm not the only person who does silly things like that.) The campsite was at 10,000 ft. It was raining day and night, as it is prone to do in the Colorado high country.

Coffee Girl sneaked away from me and went over to see his rather intimidating dog. But he was young and playful, and soon they were wrestling and frolicking to their hearts' content.

He had an amazing ability to spot elk on a ridge above tree-line, maybe 2000 feet above us. With his naked eye! He got out his snooper scope, and it was all I could do to see them in his scope. That wasn't the only example of his phenomenal ability to spot wildlife.

There was a good reason for this skill. He had been a hunter and guide all his life, including Alaska. But he lived in Texas, so Colorado was his area of expertise.

My dog's collar slipped off because it was too large and loose. I admitted that I had made of mess of adding another hole in the collar by trying to drill through the nylon collar. He suggested that I heat a nail on the stove and then poke/melt it through the nylon collar. Well duh, why hadn't I thought of that? It worked well.

Perhaps the lousy weather drove us to more conversation than we would normally have had. The last thing he did was tow me out to the main road with his four wheel drive truck. We left quite good buddies.

But what is the moral of this story? Have I made a mistake by camping alone too much? I seldom feel a desire to "converse" with most people. Why is that? Is that the sign of a recluse or misanthrope?

If disappointment results from excessive expectations, well then, we must pound our expectations down into the mud. But then we give up entirely, which is not a happy ending either. That is the conundrum: no matter how you adjust your expectations, the result seems unhappy.

There might be a third choice, a subtle one: don't expect a good result today, but leave the door open to a lucky event in the future. I find it difficult to maintain such balance and equipoise.
 
So goes my usual thinking. But what happened with this fellow shows that the calculus of expectations doesn't explain everything. It was easy for a stranger's conversation to please me, under the right conditions. What a pleasant surprise! Maybe this applies to other curmudgeons out there. It is why I am writing about it.

Perhaps the secret lies in the topics of conversation: most people rattle on about the standard Ten Questions. They want to be some sort of entertainer, with their dumb jokes. The quips remind me of television or Facebook. Or they think they are going to win the other person over with their magnetic or attractive personality. I simply am not "buying" what they are selling.

But I love talking to people who know things, who approach any new topic with a sense of perspective, know tricks of the trade, and how to solve problems.

I guess that is it: they are selling "themselves", while I am more interested in things.