Here's a story unrelated to Vivian in any way, except that it happened to her father - when Gunaraja and I were at Lake Ohara in Yoho National Park, Canada.
Background: Lake Ohara sits in a sensitive area of Yoho. You can only travel there by foot or take a park bus. There is a small campsite at the lake. Because it is bear country, the campsites are off to one side and there's a communal cooking and eating area. There are bear-safe lockers near the cooking area for all your food.
When we get there, one of the campsites that is available is number 31. An oldish Canadian couple grabs it. We get campsite 30. We cook. We eat. We get ready to put our food in our alloted bear locker. Gunaraja notices that our locker is full of someone else's stuff: three bright yellow bags of groceries, a very old and dirty canvas backpack with a Canadian flag on it, and a nasty looking Coleman stove. I think that the people who just vacated Number. 30 have forgotten their shit. I rush off towards the bus stop. Alas the last bus of the day has already departed.
We know that the locker 6 must be empty because there is no tent on that site. After thinking about our options, we schlep all the crap that someone else had left in our locker to locker 6. Then we neatly put our belongings in our locker and go off to set up our tents.
After a bit, the old Canadian guy stops by politely and asks if we have, by any chance, put our stuff in locker 31. A light bulb immediately (and admittedly long after it should have) clicks on in both Gunaraja and my heads at the same time. All this time, we have been screwing around with their locker - thinking it was ours.
It turns out that they put their food away, and then went off to set up their tents and drink a bit of wine. After a couple of glasses, they come back down to cook. And whoa - their stuff is gone, and someone else's crap is there instead. After much hand-wringing and worrying about their sobriety and convincing themselves that they had in fact not imagined putting their stuff in their locker, they peek in all the lockers and find their stuff in locker 6. More searching - and they the find locker 30 empty. So they rightly guess that the idiots in campsite 30 have put their shit in locker 31 after moving the original contents of locker 31 to locker 6 for some unknown and inexplicable reason. They come looking for said idiots and there we are.
They are Canadian. So they are extremely polite about the whole thing. We can't find any reason to dislike our victims to mitigate our feeling like idiots. The lady asks me if I am Canadian too. I say that I am from Texas. She says "Hmm - I saw you carrying a backpack with a Canadian flag on it just a little while ago". She had seen me moving her stuff from her locker and hadn't recognized her pack. Must be some good wine.
We apologize frequently and profusely. They try to make us feel better: "Any one could have made that mistake". Really?
It's 8pm. To hide our embarrassed asses, we decide to quietly leave the campsite and go for a short hike. We run into our Canadian friends several times. Three days and many miles later, Gunajara runs into them at the Lake Louise campsite.
I blame Gunaraja and the altitude and acid rain and several other things.
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