Last weekend as we were coming home from our wedding with two trucks full of kids, we overheard on the radio that one of our more remote buddies was about five hours late coming in. We cruised on by his camp only to find that nobody left there had a base station radio. He’d been up hunting near our camp, an area he doesn’t know all that well, and had his two boys and someone else’s with him. The someone else was getting rather worried but didn’t want to leave camp in case he came back in.
So after a little consulting, we pulled the base station out of Junior’s truck and piled all the kids into that one. He had to get the girls home by a specific time while I happened to have the next day off. We gave the radio to our friend at camp and left a third friend there with a portable to wait for him. Then Junior left out slightly worried while I stayed in the mountains and started driving a search pattern hollering on the radio while our friend went up the other way doing the same thing.
We were worried that he’d got himself hurt or run off the road or lost. I would not be amused if someone knew that my family was lost up there and went home without doing anything about it. It wasn’t even a question that we would stay to help; the only factor was which one of us would do it, and logistics made me the choice this time.
The other guy and I almost met around the other side of the mountain when he called me on the radio. He’d found the guy by radio, who said he was only fifteen minutes from camp. We both hustled back only to find no guy. After sitting and waiting for another hour, here he comes tooling in, completely unconcerned. Apparently he really didn’t know the area, but they’d been out having a good time and didn’t really get that the rest of us thought he was lost.
No harm, no foul, but those guys are going to get better radios next time. I got ours back and booked it on home so Junior wouldn’t worry.
Then last week I got a call from Maverick. He’d turned dogs out on Wednesday morning and they’d gone in back of beyond and were stuck there. It was a wilderness area, so there aren’t any roads and it’s rugged as hell. The signal from the tracking collars bounces off the rocks and gives all sorts of false directions. Maverick was just hoping to find someone coming up before the weekend so he could have some clean clothes; he’d only planned to hunt the day. He keeps enough food and water in the truck to get him through a week, but his shorts were past the point of no return.
I did some calling around trying to find Fran’s number to get his sizes. He’d called from on top of the mountain, so there wasn’t any point in calling him back. I realized while I was doing the calling that the game of telephone was only working so well, and that we should have an emergency contact list of all of us that hunt together that we can keep in the trucks or leave with the family members at home. If we can only get ahold of one of them due to bad phone service, that one should know how to contact the rest of them.
Long story short, Junior was going up Thursday night anyway, so he picked Maverick up some clothes. On Friday morning the two of them left out on a hike into no-man’s land to get the dogs out. It’s country near Yosemite, and every bit as rugged as Yosemite’s back country, only with fewer people. It’s as wild a land as California gets. I’ve been in it farther north on horseback, and it’s brutal and gorgeous. I would have loved to go too, but I am in no shape for that kind of hiking.
After doing some rock climbing and getting around massive granite bluffs, the boys finally found the last two dogs. The tracking collar had indicated that one of them wasn’t moving, but it must have been a collar malfunction, as they got him out just fine too. They came out of those mountains just before I got up there, filthy and sweaty and exhausted. I’m pretty damn proud of Junior; it’s not every man who will drop what he’s doing to beat himself up to rescue someone else’s dogs.
After Junior got back, the nice ladies at camp had cooked dinner for us. We had some really great soup, beans, cornbread, and little homemade apple pies. Everything was great, but after we ate, I got inexplicably worn out. It was weird; I hadn’t been the one busting my butt in the back country. So I went to bed and so did Junior. It wasn’t long after that I started having major breathing problems. I couldn’t catch my breath and it felt like an elephant was standing on my chest. I’d start to fall asleep, stop breathing at all, and wake myself up gasping for air. I kind of mentally wrote it off as an asthma attack, but I wasn’t getting enough oxygen to my brain to really do anything about it. Junior had taken some benadryl and was out too hard to notice, and I wasn’t coherent enough to really wake him up.
I was beat in the morning, but went out hunting anyway. We didn’t catch anything, so when we came home and Junior went to cut wood in the afternoon, I tried to take a nap, but the breathing still wasn’t good. Finally I went out by the campfire and was sitting talking with the other women when one of them mentioned those pies. She was talking about her recipe and mentioned that she adds ground up pecans to the filling.
Oh, crap. I’m terribly allergic to walnuts, and while I’ve never tried pecans, it’s because they are so closely related to the walnut that I avoid them. Since she’d ground them, I didn’t see any suspicious pieces, and the pie became a perfect delivery device of doom. No wonder I was having trouble breathing; my airway was completely shutting down. I never did get the mouth swelling that walnuts give me, so I didn’t know what was going on. I easily could have died.
The next night, I thought I’d be OK. I was acceptable while I was awake and could make myself breathe on command, and I took some benadryl I had in the trailer to get me through the night. It wasn’t long until it started again though. Junior was listening to me breathe and getting worried, and I was afraid to fall asleep in case I woke up dead. We were a good two hours from a hospital and I wasn’t quite coherent enough to tell him what was going on. Finally, he realized that the benadryl we had in the trailer was probably old, and went next door to get some his mom had just brought up. After a half-hour or so, that one kicked in and I was able to breathe. He listened to me long after I fell asleep.
I’ve still got a touch of that allergic reaction going on; things are tight in my chest and I’m drugging up pretty heavily at night. I was pretty close to death that first night though, and I didn’t know it until later. That would have sucked, to lose a spouse on the first-week anniversary. I don’t even have my name changed yet, or my insurance beneficiary. So Junior was a rescueing fool this weekend, and I’m very lucky to have him. I learned a lesson about keeping unexpired antihistamines on my person at all times, I need to talk to my Doc about an epipen, and I really need to watch what goes into my mouth a little more closely. I always ask with things that commonly contain nuts, like cookies and brownies, but who would have guessed it with pie, especially if you can’t taste it? I ruined my whole weekend, and almost both of our lives, over one piece of dessert.
Pie of doom, I tell you. What a strange weekend.