Double Hamster on The Rocks

I set up the tent while Dave fiddled with the gas stove, priming it, pumping it, clearing snow off the stove/ canister jig and then priming it again. He set a steel pan above the flame and mixed five alarm chili with snow, heating it into a boiling morass. We ate this while sitting on a busted up tree trunk and then Dave smoked his pipe before crawling into a separate sleeping bag that I’d brought and passing out.

He remained asleep for thirty minutes, from eleven till eleven thirty maybe. I was asleep as well, curled in a larger minus 30 bag that I bought when I was winter camping out in the mountains above Silver city, New Mexico. I’d brought a second bag summer bag for Dave, who did not have any winter camping gear. The bag was really a summer/ fall bag and was rated to twenty degrees.

He started by turning over and over. Hunching down into fetal position and shivering.

-Dave, go to sleep.
-I can’t, I’m freezing.
-Shut up Dave, you’re not going to die. We can deal with this in the morning.
-Shut up John, I’m freezing.
-Dave, go the heck to sleep.

These were not my exact words but they convey the gist of our conversation. We lasted through twenty minutes of this before Dave hurled himself from the tent and began throwing up in the clearing near the camping stove.

-Dave, stop throwing up and go to sleep.
-Shut up John.

He couldn’t stop throwing up; a visceral, stomach churning heaving sound, over and over.

-Okay Dave, look, we are going back. It’s past midnight.

Again, not my exact words. Dave was on his knees in the snow, hunched over with stomach seizures.

I kept the sleeping bags in the tent and rolled everything up into a large camping burrito which I slung over the pannier on the back of my bike. We were both dressed because we’d gone to sleep in our clothes. Dave was shivering uncontrollably and I started to think that, while he might have a fever, he might depress his core temperature by throwing up and that he would crash out if his fever dropped.

I pulled Dave’s gear on to my bike, hoisted the pans and the camping stove on top of the mess and wobbled my bike down the trail. Dave walked behind me, leaning on his bike, stopping to dry heave into the snow.

This was a slow, painful march. We drifted downhill on the bikes and then stopped and walked the flats and the inclines. There was no question of pedaling. Dave walked a few paces behind me. His heaving became background music. The least pleasant marching music in the world. We were both concerned that he keep walking. The cold presented a more immediate problem than the fever and five miles was far enough to die, even if you were biking part of the way. Neither of us wanted a crash and Dave was too weak to stay on top of his bike. The sky was clear, with a sliver of moon that washed, icy, over the trail.

For my part I started composing the explanation for the police. It made no sense that he’d gotten food poisoning from the snow while I’d escaped. I’d grown up drinking out of polluted creeks and waterways in Virginia, Pennsylvania and the Chesapeake but I couldn’t have complete immunity. Maybe the ride—which was difficult—had triggered a bug. Maybe he was just sick. There wasn’t going to be an easy explanation if he kicked off. I didn’t want to explain this to his fiancée.

We reached the car at two in the morning. Dave had stopped the constant heaving, in favor of a more tasteful intermittent approach but we were locked out of the car. I’d lost the keys when repacking the bags. We waited another few minutes as I looked through the bags for a third time. Gone, totally gone. I grabbed my cell phone to call 911. The signal was weak, tenuous. I could not reach MD dispatch but I managed a full conversation with at Virginia dispatcher after another twenty minutes.

Fire trucks arrived at three. We slept in the firehouse bunks. Dave’s fiancée arrived at the firehouse the next morning and collected him with the same even expression. I hitched a ride with the locksmith, who gave me a new set of keys to the car.

The locksmith drove off, leaving me alone in the parking lot. I pulled the bag of coffee grounds off of the bike, dumped my water bottle into the pan and primed the stove. Gas spilled out of the retainer cup as I lit it and in seconds the hood of my car was covered in light blue flames that required two additional water bottles and an old shirt to extinguish. No coffee then. I drove back to DC understanding that certain camping trips just shouldn’t take place. That’s the wonderful thing about camping. It’s impossible to identify a cursed trip until you set out on it.

That's an amazing story. I'm thankful you both made it out ok.