Blind Sided ... Part One

January 7-15, 2022

Blind Sided

Above: The last sunset of our trip, January 14, 2022, at Fort Pickens, a campground in Gulf Islands National Seashore near Pensacola Beach, Florida.

Laura Butterworth and I had been traveling partners, with a couple short exceptions, since October 22. January 7 was day 77. It had been an amazingly fun adventure, which you know if you have been reading the descriptions and see the photos in my blog.

Fort Pickens was the last stop on our trip together. It was 1,165 miles from Big Bend to Fort Pickens. We had discussed whether to drive longer days or shorter days going there. Laura preferred shorter days, so I mapped out the route by which we could take five days to arrive there, arriving on Wednesday, January 11. I went over the route and the campgrounds with Laura. She said all was fine with her. We would make stops at (1) Amistad National Recreation Area, near Del Rio, Texas; (2) Palmetto State Park, on the east side of San Antonio; (3) Sea Rim State Park, in Texas on the Gulf Coast just before the Louisiana border, and (4) Fontainebleau State Park, just north of New Orleans. We would get to Fort Pickens on January 11.

As usual, we drove separately to Amistad. It was about 240 miles from Panther Junction to Amistad. I left just before Laura. She caught up to me and sped by about twenty miles down the road. I did not see or hear from her until I was nearly to Amistad. There was minimal if any cell service along Texas Route 90, the main road between Marathon and Amistad. She called me, saying she was uncertain of where the campground was. Suddenly, oddly enough, I saw her driving towards me. "You just passed me!" I told her, and I let her know my Google maps was working and I had a clear idea of where to find the campground, only a few miles up the road. She turned around and followed. My directions led me right to the campground.

The next day, we woke up to an early start, 6AM. We watched a nice sunrise for part of the morning, she had coffee, me my tea. We left for next destination just after 8AM, heading to Palmetto State Park, 245 miles east more or less. We arrived around the same time, around 1:45PM. I stopped at a McDonald’s for lunch take-out. Laura told me this morning, while getting groceries, that I looked like I lost weight. Maybe so, I don’t know, but maybe I should be eating more.

She asked me how I slept. I told her I wake up early morning with little panic attacks. I felt stressed since our talk about my feelings and the fact she had told me it was good to share them, while not sharing hers at all. She gave me a hug and said it will all work out.

I am very self-conscious around her now much of the time. I feel rejected, unimportant. She had not communicated to me in any way that I am unimportant, but when someone withholds information from you, calls you a good friend, encourages you to share your deeper thoughts, but then does not do so themselves, it is an uneven environment.

I showed her how to change a bike tube. She had a flat tire the other day at Big Bend, ran over some prickers, and got a thorn in the tire. We found the thorn and took it out. She did all the work and now she knows how to do it. Then we went for a bike ride, ten miles, a couple loops around park roads. It is very different terrain than we have had the past ten weeks. There are more trees, and it is more like a lush vegetation environment, plenty green. Maybe in the summer it is drier and less so?

It was a nice ride, and I liked riding with Laura. Later I took a shower and ran out of hot water. Told her about it, and I hoped there is hot water for her, as she had gone off to the showers. That night we had a campfire. The wood was popping and cracking often. At one point, there was a loud pop and I felt something hit me in the eye. It startled and frightened me, as if I had been burned. It stung. Laura noticed it, too. She told me I had moved quickly to block whatever it was the was headed my way, as if on impulse. My eye felt sore and I went to the bathrooms to look in the mirror at my eye. I did not notice anything unusual, though it still felt a little sore. I went to bed, while Laura stayed up for some time. I felt distance between us. I think she did, too. I also felt like an idiot for sharing my feelings, at her behest, and then her telling me she could not articulate hers. Could not? Or would not?

In the morning I made breakfast of eggs and cheese with sauteed peppers. I left early for Sea Rim State Park, another 250 miles east. Laura said she was going to stay at the campground for a while to hang out and write. We would meet later.

The approach road to Sea Rim went through several miles of oil refineries. I had a bad feeling as I drove through, and at one point I pulled over to look online for alternative campgrounds. I found a state park not too far away, just over the Louisiana border, but it was closed due to hurricane damage. I kept to the plan for Sea Rim. When I arrived, I checked in and then went for a bike ride. I did ten miles back the way I had driven in, then returned. This was a decent area for riding, a straight flat stretch of road with grassy areas a d a few homes. It was not part of the oil refinery area I had driven through earlier.

Laura passed me as I was riding back. When I arrived back at the campground, we went for a walk along the coast at sunset. Shortly after, we noticed some mosquitos. Then we noticed more, and it was not too long before there was a manifestation of mosquitos like I have never seen in my life. The air was thick with them. We both retreated to our vehicles. Laura had mosquito outfits, complete sets of screen pants, jacket, and headgear. She gave me one of them, and we said good night. The mere act of opening and closing the door to my van resulted in dozens of mosquitos getting in. I painstakingly hunted them all down, one by one, and eliminated them. In the morning there were fewer outside. We left the campground early, driving about an hour to the Louisiana Welcome Center on I-10, where we said "Whew. That was crazy, so many mosquitos. Hopefully, never again!"

Headline: "Connecticut Man Blindsided by Maine Woman"

In our travels, I often came up with a headline for a story that we both found very humorous at the moment. "Maine Woman Scales Ultimate Peak" or some other fantastic activity in Nature. This time, the head line is not so humorous. We arrived at Fontainebleau in the midafternoon on Tuesday. After getting settled, I went for a bike ride on a paved trail that came through the park. It was nice. Laura stayed at the campground. She was going to meet a friend, Jaime, the sister of Laura’s landlady, Molly, back in Maine. Jaime and Laura were talking when I came back from my ride. Jaime stayed and talked for a little while, commenting on our trip and the many places we had visited. She mentioned Laura said Death Valley was her favorite of all the places we visited. She asked me what I thought. I responded I did not have a favorite in that each place was so energizing, and to pick one or even a few would be difficult. I told her how great trip of a trip it had been.

After Jaime left, Laura and I sat down to chit-chat while having a beer, which we did frequently in the afternoons or evenings. I told Laura, concerning favorite places on the trip, there were so many good ones, but, central to me, seeing these places with her helped make each one of them great. It was just fun that we did this together.

Somewhat surprisingly, she did not make any comment about it being meaningful to her. She abruptly changed the subject, saying that, regarding the next chapter of our trip, going to Fort Pickens, what did I think of staying near New Orleans instead, to see museums and do some bar-hopping. I was surprised and a little upset. It was the night before going to Fort Pickens, we’d go there in the morning, and this was the first I heard anything about her not wanting to go there. I had told her, she knew, I had been looking forward to it a great deal, that it was important to me.

She then asked if I’d be upset if she stayed a night in New Orleans, and she would come meet me at Gulf Islands the next day. I said that was okay to me. We went for a walk that night. It felt strained. The next morning, she told me she would need to stay two nights in New Orleans, she would need more time, and that she would come to Florida Friday morning.

She also told me I seemed different in the past week, that I had been "melancholy" since our talk about matters of the heart at Big Bend (January 3 entry). I told her she knew why this was, and I repeated that I was not upset about the fact she did not have romantic feelings for me, but I was upset because she could not share what she thought and felt. I thought we had grown close and was surprised (shocked) that she had no words.

She grew tense and told me sometimes its better not to let someone know what you are thinking and feeling. This was a surprise too. In the course of one week, she had gone from telling me how it was good to share matters of the heart, to saying on a couple different occasions that she could not articulate her feelings, to now saying it was better that she not share her thoughts and feelings.

She also told me in a coldish impersonal tone that, going forward after Florida, not to expect much communication from her and not to expect answers to my questions.

I do not know what conversation Jaime and Laura had. Maybe it had nothing to do with this sudden change in her thinking and her plans, but it seemed it did. Or, was Laura planning this change all week and just now springing it on me? We had talked about heading to For Pickens several times during the week. It seemed like Laura was a different person before and after spending time with Jaime. Over all the time we spent talking evenings at the other places while crossing from Big Bend to Louisiana, on our nightly walks, meals together, and a campfire one night, she had not hinted the slightest about a change in plans.

One other unusual thing happened. Back in December at Petrified Forest National Park, we were in a rock shop that sold rocks, gems, and petrified wood. There were many artistic items and souvenirs, too. I bought a little green-stone lizard for her. I gave it to her when we were at Picacho Peak, the day we hiked the actual Peak, celebrating our 50th day since we met up at Colorado National Monument. She loved it and named it "Fifty." Somehow, over the next several weeks, "Fifty" stayed in my van, along with a couple other small plastic animal characters Laura had found at a campsite at Valley of Fire State Park. A child must have left them behind. They were some kid's action characters, a cougar and one other animal, a Javelina I believe it was.

We used my van often to sit and talk because on chilly mornings it was comfortable, and I usually put Fifty and the others on the counter, where they watched us have our coffee and tea and listened to us talk. So, I had them there in my van for over four weeks. Just before I was about to leave for Gulf Islands, I walked with her to the bathrooms, and as we arrived, she turned to me and said "Oh, I want to get "Fifty" before you go. It made me think that maybe she's not planning to come to Gulf Islands at all ...

She did not come to Florida Friday morning as planned. She texted me around 7:30 AM and said she wanted to go to a sculpture garden, and she'd see me later. I asked when she planned to meet me. She responded it would be sometime around sunset. I asked her to skip the sculpture and come in the morning, as planned, so we could do something during the day. I called her and pleaded with her. Eventually, she said OK, she’d come in the morning, but she said she did not want me to be melancholy, that she wanted me to be "happy and smiley." She did not show up until around 2PM. Somehow, the 200-mile drive took six hours. That day and Saturday, we did some hikes, walked on the beach, did a bike ride, had a campfire, the kinds of things we had been doing since we started traveling together. But it was strained. I don’t know what was happening in her mind.

I tried talking about it Saturday night, the night before I’d leave for Connecticut. I asked her why she had changed plans at the last minute about Florida, that we had talked about the plans several times and had agreed what to do, just as we had done all along the trip for those eleven weeks. We talked about it at Big Bend before we left there, and again at each of the three previous night’s campgrounds, at Amistad National Recreation Area, at Palmetto State Park, and at Sea Rim State Park. She had never even mentioned wanting to see New Orleans until the last minute. She responded with a strange statement, telling me, with some animosity in her voice, “We had no written contract,” about coming to Florida, and continued, “without a written contract, I don’t have to do anything!” She seemed angry with me.

Also, turning the subject to our plans to travel in Fall 2023, she told me that we had “no formal agreement” on doing anything together going forward. All the discussions about it, including the fun night New Year’s Eve talking about how amazing our travels together had been, and what appeared to be happy, mutual thinking about continuing our trip in the Fall, and about going to Hawaii and Alaska at some point, were apparently void, not real. She seems to have decided that all our discussions, which she had called epic, along with our hikes, were "informal" and basically, just talk.

The next day, Sunday January 15, was the day we parted. It was not a happy departure. I was upset about the change in her behavior. When leaving, I gave her a hug, said “thanks for a great trip, it was a lot of fun.” She looked at me blankly, and she did not say a word, except, as she turned towards her 4Runner, she said she was going over to Loop B and staying at the campground. She got in her car, and drove off.

I wondered to myself, what happened to her and Other Nice People? It seemed she was no longer in the Other Nice People camp, as her words and actions had turned cold.