"This ain't Disneyland, partner"

The past few months, there has been one particular type of person that I've seen over and over and over and over...

Specifically, I'm referring to the person(s) that turn up in a (semi-) wilderness area, and then calmly proceed to act like they're just in a different kind of city park.

In Idaho, I met a small family that was out walking around well off the regular trail system and were about as unprepared and unequipped as they could be: the adults were in shorts and tank-tops, she was wearing freaking sandals, and they weren't paying a whole lot of attention to where their 4-year-old was (or what she was doing). Neither of them had any kind of pack or bag (she didn't even have her purse with her), no bear spray (despite warnings that there were plenty of bears around), a small bottle of water each, and not paying the slightest bit of attention to what was going on around them: I'd been standing propped up against a tree as I watched some critters, and the lot of them walked by within 3 feet of me without noticing I was there. My critter viewing was interrupted (ruined) when their little girl ran by, spotted an animal, and started screaming for mommy and daddy to come see. Scared the hell out of the animal, of course, and it was off like a shot - all mommy and daddy got to see was a distant look at its ass as it faded over the horizon.

Both adults nearly had heart failure when they turned around and saw me; after apologizing for scaring them (I wasn't sorry, really, but...), we got into a little bit of a conversation. Trying to clue them in, I casually mentioned the stuff that I carried in addition to the 2-qt canteen on my belt. They expressed wonder that I'd haul all that stuff around, since "it's just a park - it's not like we're out in the wilds, someplace!" (her words).

It was still early in my travels, and I felt a certain obligation to try and help them; I patiently and gently pointed out the lack of traffic, building, pavement, and other indications of city life - then emphasized that, yes, we were out in the wilds. The male half then tried to tell me that they had their cell phones with them, and could call 9-1-1. When I asked how many bars he had, he discovered that he didn't have ANY. Nor did she. I asked them how long they had to drive from the nearest town, and then suggested that even an emergency vehicle travelling TWICE as fast as they'd driven would still take a long time to get there - and that was only to the area, two hours away, that they'd PARKED. That's when I used the title for this blog post, telling him "This ain't Disneyland, partner. The critters here don't speak English, and they don't have ANY manners. All they know is how to survive, using whatever God gave them to do it with: teeth, claws, horns, hooves, or whatever. Any bears you see aren't related to Yogi, and the critters aren't out of some movie."

Both of them were offended and upset with me for pointing that out, and said something about having to get back. I asked if they could find their way, and after a fair amount of looking around (and discovering that trees have a lot of resemblance to each other), they admitted it might not be easy. I checked my map, and after giving them a cheap-ass keychain-type compass I'd bought on a whim, gave them directions on how to get back to where they'd parked - to their visible (but unspoken) relief. As a coup de grace, I told them that they should probably get someone to remove the ticks that had gotten attached to their legs.

The last I saw of them, they were in a tight group headed (generally, anyway) in the right direction.

Since then, I've seen other folks that weren't much (if any) better prepared for where they were and what they were doing; it didn't take me long to give up on trying to help them. Fact is, now I leave them be and move away from them - sooner or later, the problem will be solved, since Stupid is not a survival trait.