I almost posted this story as one of the Ancient History entries because it occurred over 5 years ago, when we were living in the South of France. Then I realized it would introduce so much about me to my newer readers that I decided it deserved a spot front and center. Not to mention the fact that it continues the saga of Barney being Barney.
In this story you’ll get to meet my best friend in the world, Queenabelle. I met Queenabelle when I joined a hiking group in Aix-en-Provence and it turned out that she was the leader, or, as I fondly referred to her, the “hiking leader from hell”. I called her this because each week she would send out an email describing the hike we were about to go on, including a difficulty rating on a scale from 1 to 10. A rating of one was equivalent to a stroll through the markets of Aix, whereas a rating of ten was equivalent to a hike up Mount St. Victoire, which we did each year, and which was definitely not for sissies.
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Here’s Queenabelle at the start of a hike, frustrated because no one is paying attention to her. This is because she is little and beautiful and fun and therefore we all like to hate her. Kidding! Really it’s because we know she’s rated the hike a 5, or maybe 6, and we know that half way into the hike we’ll all feel like we’re going to die, she’ll be bouncing along like nothing’s wrong, and we’ll be complaining that she should have rated it a 12.
I told you she’s beautiful. She cleans up quite nicely, don’t you think?
This particular hike from hell was in the Luberon, the beautiful mountainous region north of us. We drove about 45 minutes to the tiny village of Oppèdes le Vieux and started our hike from there. The directions we had been given were a bit botched, so we got slightly lost.
This is where roundabouts come in handy, and I still miss them, even though it’s been 5 long years since we moved back from France. Roundabouts are excellent for going in circles to turn around and go back to where you really wanted to be. They’re great for circling while you figure out which direction you need to take. If you make a mistake and take the wrong exit out of a roundabout, in France you knew you could just drive a little farther and you’d be in another roundabout, where you’d simply circle around and return to the place where you’d made your mistake. It was all so very simple and made the whole process of finding your way so much less stressful. The other huge benefit to them is that they keep traffic moving. I think of this every time I’m sitting at a red light … WAITING. I can’t stand it. I sit there, impatiently, wishing we had roundabouts so we could all be on our way. Once again I’ve digressed … why do you keep letting me do that?
While driving in circles at one roundabout, I phone Queenabelle to get some help. Turned out she was also lost.
“Where are you?” I asked her.
“Freaking bloody hell!” she yelled back, “I’m in the middle of nowhere!”
I guess I should explain that Queenabelle, a native French woman, learned English when she lived in London for 3 years. She didn’t really say “freaking” – I just put that in there for your tender ears. Some woman at her kids’ school befriended her and took it upon herself to teach her English. Unfortunately, she cussed like a dock worker. Therefore, the English that flows out of beautiful, petite Queenabelle is sometimes enough to knock you over. Especially when she’s mad.
Eventually we all found our way to our assigned rendezvous spot, where the beginning of the hike has us meandering through the village.
This is such a benign looking little scene. If only you had been there! There was a dog behind that blue gate, who was barking ferociously, just wishing he could take off Barney’s head. Barney was not the least bit concerned.
One tiny café had its tables being warmed by cats. Lots and lots of cats. There were cats everywhere.
I took a picture of a particularly nicely posed cat perched next to a flower pot on a little table. The kitty was facing away from me so I took advantage of that, thinking he might run away if he saw me.
As I came around to the front of the cat, I saw he was missing an eye. And he wasn’t running anywhere! He wanted all the loving he could get. I obliged him, took more pictures of him, and generally got some good kitty lovin’.
Barney, busy leading the 20 or so hikers in our group, missed all this kitty action. By now, I’d hiked enough with this group that they were used to me lagging behind, taking pictures. Queenabelle had come to depend on my pictures and expected that I would have them ready for her the next day, delivered on a cd so that she could put them on the hiking website.
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Notice the mountain in back!
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Towering over the village was a mountain (you do see the mountain, don’t you?) and we proceeded to spend the next hour and a half climbing the towering devil. The scenery was spectacular.
The fall foliage was in its glory – lots of reds and yellows to be seen everywhere.
The rock formations were breathtaking.
Every time I saw a cave I exclaimed, “Look, a cave! I can just imagine Indians camping here.” Everyone else said they could only imagine bats. I, of course, could only observe these things if I came to a complete stop, since I am such a klutz and would have broken a leg had I tried to sight-see and walk at the same time.
The trail was quite hazardous, with broken shale-type rock, large boulders, rock slides – plenty of things to force me to watch the ground every step of the way.
Queenabelle obviously wasn’t watching where she was walking! Luckily no one was following me with a camera to catch my every misstep, like I caught hers. I crack me up.
At one point we actually had to do a bit of rock climbing. We even had to help push the dogs up the face of the rocks because they were unable to climb or jump that high. They were scrambling like bugs on the rocks. Tell me again, Queenabelle, how your arrived at a rating of 6 for this hike?
Part of the time the trail was on a narrow ledge hanging on the side of the mountain. I did not dare look down or I would have thrown up – heights are not my favorite thing. Notice there are no pictures of this part of the hike! I just looked straight out at the gorgeous view over the canyon and on to the valley and tried not to think about the sheer drop over the side. All of this time the trail was climbing up, up, up – pretty strenuous.
So far, all of this sounds pretty good, right? Well, there were a few little problems. First of all, Queenabelle was sick. I picked up on this pretty early into the hike, so I dropped back when I saw that she was lagging. She is normally a leader and very perky. When I saw her keep stopping and bending over, I knew something was wrong. She finally ‘fessed up and told me she felt very sick and very tired. But, since she was the one who had “scouted the hike” she felt obligated to lead the hike. I pointed out she wasn’t doing a very good job of that, here at the back of pack. She wasn’t amused. But I was. I asked her if she wanted to turn back, but she said no, that she thought she could make it.
Another hiker, a lady from Australia, was not quite prepared for the hike. We had been warned that this hike was a 6 on a scale of 1 to 10, and that the first half was mostly uphill, but apparently she thought she could do it. Well, guess what? She thought she was gonna die! The told me at one point that it felt like her heart was going to pound right out of her chest.
Well, this was just great. Here I had two sickos on my hand, one who kept bending over and groaning, and another who was clutching her chest, looking like she might have a heart attack at any moment. I decided to hang back and make sure they didn’t keel over where no one would ever find them. I had my cell phone and was getting spots of reception, so I knew I could contact one of the other hikers in an emergency. We lagged about 20 minutes behind the rest of the group (and Barney). Any time we caught up to them taking a rest break, they would leap up and take off, leaving me with the laggards, who would desperately need a rest stop. I told the two of them to just rest as they needed to – that it wasn’t a race and it was most important to listen to their bodies.
During all of this, Barney was happily running at the head of the pack and playing with a black lab, as is his M.O. He doesn’t even think about me in these situations, knowing he’ll see me at the rest stops and at lunch time.
We finally reached the top of the mountain.
We found the rest of the group well into their lunches.
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One of many dogs on the hike
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I saw 5 or 6 dogs running around, but no Barney.
I jokingly said, as we walked up to the group, “Gee, I’m so glad that Barney worries about me and comes back to check up on me!”
They all looked at me and somebody said, “Actually, we don’t know where he is. We thought he was with you.”
My heart sank. I got the most awful feeling in the pit of my stomach. I did not need this. Here we are, in the middle of absolutely freaking NOWHERE, and my beloved, goofy dog, who is dumb as a post, is MISSING!
My heart completely plummeted and I tried not to panic. “Think, think, think,” I said to myself. To everyone else I appeared calm, cool and collected (they told me later) but inside my mind was going a hundred miles an hour as I tried to figure out what to do.
Try to picture that we are on this little ridge top with a 360-degree view. Straight down in all directions all you see are canyons and more mountains and trails, endlessly. Where can Barney be? First I walked back and forth across the top of the ridge calling his name in all direction, watching to see if I could spot him running on any of the trails. I spent about 10 minutes doing that, with no luck.
I felt like time was slipping away as I tried not to panic. I knew that when this group was finished with their lunch break, they would pack up and move on. Fewer than half of them were animal lovers, so I was not going to get a lot of empathy from this group. I was desperately trying to think of what to do, because I was not abandoning dear, sweet Barney to that wilderness. Why had I ever let him out of my sight?
Another dog owner (the one with the black lab) jumped up and started talking through the possibilities and walking with me. By that time I could not even think about sitting and eating lunch. She had once lost this dog (and obviously found it) and had another dog disappear from her front yard here in France (never to be seen again) so she could appreciate what I was feeling.
We all discussed where Barney had last been seen. Pretty much everyone agreed that they had seen someone pushing his butt up the rocks where we had all had to scramble like bugs. This was not too far from the top of the mountain, so I found this somewhat encouraging. Some folks thought he might have taken a fork in the trail, but I doubted that. I had never seen Barney leave people and go off by himself. He might go off for a short distance, but he always returns to people.
We finally decided on a plan of action. A small group of us (the few diehard dog lovers) were going to backtrack and return on the trail we had just covered – not a fun way to go, but we were afraid that if Barney had gotten lost, he might go back that way looking for me. The rest of the group would continue on the planned route, the easier way, and we would maintain contact via our cell phones. When/if someone found Barney, we would let the other group know.
The teensy-weensy little thing that was nagging in the back of my mind was the fact that on Barney’s name tag was our home number and Electric Horseman’s cell phone number. I could just imagine him being in some important business meeting in Germany, where he’d gone to work for the day, and getting a call about Barney. He’s going to kill me, I thought to myself. This will be right up there with the 2am phone call from the cat! But that’s a story for another day.
Just as we were ready to split up and go our separate ways, someone blithely remarks, “Maybe that group of German hikers ahead of will have seen Barney.”
I whirled around and snapped, “What group of German hikers??!!” My eyes must have been bugging out of my face.
They all looked at me as if I’d lost my mind and started to back away. A few put their hands up and started to approach me slowly, as though they were going to try to calm me down.
“No, no, don’t you get it?!” I protested. Right about then I wanted to kill somebody for not having mentioned the German hikers right at the start of this nightmare. “That’s where Barney is! If there’s a group ahead of us, that’s where he is! He just goes with the legs in front! He doesn’t know whose legs they are … he just goes! Why didn’t somebody say something sooner??!!!”
I explained to them that Barney always wants to be with the lead hikers and that to him, a bunch of legs is just a bunch of legs. I was 99% certain that what happened is he saw people ahead of him and he just took off to “lead” them.
I started to just about shake, I was so relieved. I felt like now I had a solution to my missing dog problem. But I had to get out of there. I had to catch the German hiking group, before we lost them. What if they took another trail? The trails were like spider webs, going every which way. “I’ll be back, I’m just going to run up the trail a ways and see if I can see them.”
I ran quite a ways, stopping and calling for Barney, listening for voices, finding nothing. I came back to my group, dejected, but at least encouraged that I now had a lead. The only problem now was to determine where this group might be hiking? Paris?
At this point, one of the men in my group asked, “Is your name on his tag, because I thought I heard someone yelling ‘Tammy’”.
I just looked at him, trying not to convey that I thought he’d lost his mind, and said, “No, it just has Barney’s name and two phone numbers.” What I thought but didn’t say is that this guy must be hallucinating! As if anyone out in this wilderness is going to be yelling my name! Yeah, right!
The entire group started hiking on, now that I was certain Barney was ahead of us. Three of us took the lead, jogging in an attempt to catch the German group, to see if they really do have the brain-dead Barney in tow.
We weren’t on the trail more than 10 minutes, when coming from the other direction were some people we knew who were regular members of our hiking group. They had chosen to do the trail in the reverse direction. Trotting along happily with them, tongue hanging out one side of his mouth, was Barney! And yes, they had been yelling my name – that guy had not been hearing things. I was so glad I hadn’t called him an idiot.
“Barney!” I shouted as I simply melted to the ground, in tears and utter exhaustion and relief. It was like seeing him coming back from the dead.
Barney burst into a gallop (and this in itself is an amazing thing to see). He leaped on me and licked me and whined and barked and we had a perfectly delicious reunion.
My group looked at me in awe.
“Wow,” they said, “we had no idea you were so upset. You seemed so calm and acted like you knew exactly what to do.”
“Fooled you,” I sniffled.
His rescuers had come upon the German group, with Barney trotting along with them, sporting his red bandana, the one he always wore when out in public in France. They recognized Barney and wondered what he was doing with these strangers, so they asked, in broken German, “Is that your dog?” The Germans replied, “No and we have no idea where he came from!”
They checked his name tag to be sure it was Barney and then put two and two together. They realized we must be on the trail behind the Germans, so offered to take Barney off the Germans’ hands, who were quite happy to be rid of him. Then, once they started on the trail, they were yelling my name to let me know they had Barney. They knew I was probably in a panic, because they knew how much I love Barney. Probably in a panic – now there’s the understatement of the century.
After the reunion, I wanted to do nothing more than sit, have lunch, a bottle of wine, and a long nap. Perhaps go into a coma. I had pumped enough adrenalin to knock out a horse. Did this dog have any idea he had just taken 10 years off my life?
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Trail back to the village
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I was in a daze and barely remember the rest of the hike. I took an hour and a half. I just stumbled through it, never letting Barney out of my sight.
When we returned to the village we took time to poke around and see the sights.
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same chapel, another angle
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I love the little face by the window
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We could have meandered for days
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Barney loved all the sightseeing and lollygagging.
It gave him the perfect opportunities to catch up on his much needed beauty sleep.
