Some time ago, after seeing photographs of the Cinque Terre, I decided to discover whether such a place could truly exist. Although I arrived with several other hikers, I set out alone most mornings to toddle along the narrow and often slippery coastal path which in places hangs precipitously above the hard surf. I’d arrive in a village, walk it top to bottom, find lunch, make notes, then hike on farther south before catching a local train back to an old villa turned into a hotel in Camogli, a settlement rightly called a town.
The Five Lands appear, in the words of an Englishwoman quoting Alice’s Dormouse, “much of a muchness,” yet they are distinct enough to create preferences among travelers. Do you like fettuccine or linguine? Barolo or Barbaresco? For me the answer is yes and yes, but that morning in Manarola an open-front café called me to idle until the sun broke through.
Dingy gray, spotted street-cats, half feral and half mean, got themselves into compact hunches on window ledges or under low eaves to escape a dripping that was neither rain nor mist but somewhere betwixt. The dampness carried down along the lane a heavy, vinous scent of a winepress just rinsed after crushing white grapes glazed with red like a tippler’s nose. When the weather changed, residents would again climb above Manarola to terraced vineyards like hanging gardens, where workers balanced burdens of picked grapes along narrow stone-walls that create plots, no more than ten to twenty feet wide, holding vines in a soil so scarce I couldn’t imagine what sustained them beyond sea mist and sunlight. Across the narrow via in front of me were results of the labor: wicker baskets of grapes ready to be partly dried before going to the press, a method that gives the indigenous wine some of its distinction.
Manarola, Italy
Down the via—hardly a street since it was so narrow a child’s afternoon shadow could reach across it and rise a couple of feet up the wall opposite—and just above the harborette, fishermen had drawn up their dories on wheeled cradles and parked them like automobiles, vehicles here as unexpected as donkeys in Hoboken. To get into the villages, you typically must walk, or take a local train along a route of cliffs and tunnels, or you may arrive by boat.
The harbor is a bit larger than a baseball infield, and lies protected by a short rock-mole almost capable of quieting waves then in considerable aggravation after two days of a libeccio, the wind out of North Africa which blows fine, desert sand onto terraces to feed the grapes. Perhaps Saharan dust is the engendering agent, the sapore (to lift a phrase from an Italian kitchen) that puts the distinctive taste in Ligurian wine and olives. To eat of Liguria is to eat of the African desert.
A small place needs small things, and Cinque olive “groves” often contain only a half-dozen diminutive trees producing dark fruits hardly bigger than swollen raisins. If their flesh is thin, the flavor is thick; like hot peppers, the olives are little but potent with taste, proving the precept apparent here in so many ways: To reduce is to intensify. In Corniglia a day earlier at lunch, following a hilly hike, I ate twenty-eight of them and stopped simply because I’d emptied the bowl and knew still to come was pasta mixed with potatoes, a Ligurian specialty. When the waiter collected the dish of pits, he congratulated, “Bene, bene! You eada moa?”
After lunch, I took a glass of the signature beverage of the Cinque Terre, sciacchetrà, a white dessert wine, something I usually ignore, but I figured then it would keep me from a big almond gelato. The lightly sweet sciacchetrà had such a fine bouquet of pears I ordered another. What’s better to a traveler than to have presumption knocked galley-west?
Although Italians usually drink down their little cups of coffee in a swallow or two, I lingered over mine that morning in Manarola in hopes the drizzle would stop. To ease the caffeine from a second cup and because the café specialized in panini, I ordered a sandwich of sliced tomatoes, fresh basil, and, according to the Englished menu, “olives sauces,” although what I really wanted was my lunch of a couple days earlier in Vernazza where I’d ordered a plate of another characteristic food—fresh anchovies. While it’s an exaggeration that I alone keep the little fish on the menu of two pizza parlors in my hometown, I do take to them as a Missouri farmer to Sunday fried-chicken. Expecting what Americans call anchovies, I was surprised to see set before me not minuscule brown slivers of over-salted fish but white fillets the length of my hand, seasoned with only olive oil, fresh basil, and a wedge of lemon. I should not have tasted them because now I’ll never be the same, and memory will vex any wish to find them again. Rule of the road: Think long before eating in Paradise.
My Manarola panino was good, but nothing I couldn’t assemble at home, and I paid more attention to the opening sky than the sandwich. A large man, florid of face, a white mustache dripping the last of the mist onto his chin, paused at my table and said, “Musica?” and, without waiting for answer, pulled a violin from beneath his jacket. Given the lingering dampness in his bow, the old tunes sounded more melancholy than artful.
When he finished, I lifted my “corrected” cup and asked, “Coffee?” In English, accented but mostly accurate, he said, “Your offer, signore, I”—pausing to recall the word—“accept,” and sat down. He was a Tuscan from over the hills, but he’d spent much time on streets of the Italian Riviera, even down to the Cinque Terre. Said he, “I’ve lived also in America. I went to Toronto, but after a year I moved south to get a softer winter.” That must be Florida. “Oh, signore, no, no! Detroit!”
His Christian name was Secondo. He leaned forward as if to confess: “I should be Terzo, Third, you see, but the first second boy, he died, so I got his number.”
Off came his jacket in the warming day. Beneath he wore a carmine vest and a green Gypsy blouse full in the sleeves. Gesturing toward his getup, Secondo said, “This for the theater of the street. You look the part, you make a buck.” I asked did he make good bucks as a strolling musician, and he said, “I do better now because I’m old. I don’t play as good, not so strong as I used to, but I earn more because an old man working a street makes tourists feel compassione. The tourists know they’re useless here except to spend a buck.” He stroked the violin with hands seemingly too big for it, fingers I’d foolishly thought too meaty to pizzicato.
Manarola roused with sun, and trains began the hourly disgorging of fair-weather sightseers and young trekkers and vagabonds, one of whom ambled by and thrust a listless palm at us for a handout. Secondo said, “Cerca lavoro!” Get work. The kid slumped off. “Useless young. What’s he good for? He’s driftwood. He goes nowhere till current carry him.”
I must have showed surprise at his response because he said, “In Detroit when they called me a useless drifter, I held up my violin to them, and I told them, ‘No! Here’s my rudder!’ ” With a single swallow, he finished his coffee more in annoyance than pleasure, and he said, “My father, Luca, music was his life—music was his death. He died with a fiddle in his hand. They had to pull it loose from his fingers. Gemma, his friend, she told me music of Tartini was too much for his age, but I know now he knew what he was doing. Today, signore, I tell you, just me to you, Tartini was his suicide. But no one knew, so he can get burial in the church.” He held up his violin. “If I can die with her in my arms, I am happy, and maybe I get full mass too.”
Secondo rose, thanked me for the cup corrected to enliven his bow, and he said, “Today, with your permission, no ‘Devil’s Trill Sonata.’ ” Why not? “For me, this isn’t the day. I’m still strong. But tomorrow, who can say?” and he went up toward the depot, and I went down to the path along the broken coast. Somewhere farther, there had to be more fresh anchovies—impossibly, fantastically good, as if from a dream. If not, maybe tomorrow. Who could say?
SOMETHING OF A FIREFALL
When “Wandering Yosemite” appeared, it drew down a shower of sparks like the now-outlawed firefall from Glacier Point. The complainants were those who—as if there were a shortage of places for amusement in the United States—see the great national park as a windfall opportunity to make corporate profits off of
preeminent public land. What is truly in short supply in America are unthreatened monumental mountains and valleys and their attendant natural realms. I have trouble imagining later generations castigating ours for failing to leave them enough commercial developments.
Wandering Yosemite
When I go in quest of place, my writer’s mantra comes from the title of a play based on Christopher Isherwood’s stories: I Am a Camera. With eyes for a lens, and memory and notebooks for film, I begin to record a locale like Yosemite.
BUTTERFLIES. So well hidden in the Sierra is this valley, Euro-Americans did not enter it until 1851 when James Savage, operator of a trading post along the Merced River in California, directed a militia band called the Mariposa Battalion to threaten or brutalize the native residents of the valley into submitting to the increasing incursions of gold miners and settlers. On their first night, Savage’s men camped near the meadow below Bridalveil Fall. The next morning the Indians, the Ahwahneechees, had disappeared but for an elderly woman who said, “I’m too old to climb the rocks.” When she refused to reveal where her people had gone, Savage (as if to fulfill his name) torched the bark homes and the food caches of the Indians, and thereby began a forced and merciless dispersal completed in less than two years. Mariposa means “butterfly” in Spanish and merced is “mercy,” but the name Yosemite is probably a corruption of yo-chee-ma-te or yo-hem-it-teh: “They are killers.”
THE DRINK BOX. At the middle of Yosemite Village in the deep valley of the upper Merced River is a soft-drink machine and on its front a large, posterized photo of a golfer about to tee up, his electric cart at the ready, and beneath, the imperative DISCOVER YOUR YOSEMITE. I had just come from talking with Ranger Scott Gediman, who told me, “National parks aren’t for entertainment.” Yet within the Yosemite boundaries are the golf course, a refrigerated ice-skating rink, a ski lift, ski-board runs, a campground television-parlor, kennel, pizza stand, and an annual costumed pageant reenacting an English Christmas dinner. As I tried to make note of the pop machine, I was jostled by a passing crowd bestrung with gadgets as rock climbers are ropes, clamps, and pitons: cell phones, MP3 players, pagers, cameras, camcorders (often operated from moving cars). I dodged baby-strollers hung with diaper bags, and moved aside for a tandem bicycle pulling a trailerette hauling two barking dogs the size of large rodents. The throng wore not hiking boots and field shirts but flip-flops and halter tops, and the faces licked ice-cream cones and munched tacos and talked of baseball and reality television shows. Was this a mall or a valley world-renowned for its natural wonders and its eight hundred miles of trails? Within an ace of the drink box were two hotels, a large superstore, jail, post office, ATM, parking spaces for five thousand cars, and enough asphalt to pave half of Fresno.
El Capitan, Yosemite Valley, California
HERCULES AS A PARSNIP. It’s for mountains and rock and water not grassy flats and cow parsnip that people presumably come to this oldest federally established park where the Merced River descends five thousand feet from a cluster of Sierra peaks into a deep trough; within seven miles are a half-dozen of the most celebrated natural features in America: El Capitan, Half Dome, Yosemite and Bridalveil falls, Glacier Point, Overhanging Rock. From where I walked near a verdant and spongy meadow, I could see only a couple of the sights because cow parsnip blocked the view. The genus name, Heracleum, derives from Herakles, the mythic Greek hero whom the Romans called Hercules. At more than seven-feet high, that mighty parsnip is a wild carrot with rhubarb-like leaves each of which could wrap a roast chicken. Later, when I told a botanist that the plump, aromatic stalks made me want to munch one as if it were celery, he said, “The Indians ate them, but snacking on wild plants in a national park is illegal.”
THE SUPPRESSED REPORT. In 1864, at another Yosemite Valley meadow—when they were more extensive—Frederick Law Olmsted camped while employed by a New York mining company that hired him away from his job designing Central Park. He was managing a large holding near present Mariposa, California, where the gold-rush bonanza was giving out. The father of American landscape design imagined wealth of another sort, a stunning cornucopia to enrich the work of artists and natural scientists and, as significantly, the spirits of those who would visit. By chance, the month before Olmsted’s stay in the meadow, President Lincoln signed a congressional act establishing a grant to preserve two areas of what today is Yosemite: the valley and a southerly grove of sequoias. After his expedition, Olmsted wrote a report for the California legislature then superintending the grant; the document is a landmark expression of the principle that a government should set aside places of signal natural magnificence for its citizens. Central to his reasoning is this sentence:
If we analyze the operation of scenes of beauty upon the mind, and consider the intimate relation of the mind upon the nervous system and the whole physical economy, the action and reaction which constantly occurs between bodily and mental conditions, the reinvigoration which results from such scenes is readily comprehended.
Olmsted’s report and its timeless guidelines never reached the legislature, and remained unpublished until 1952; all the while commercial endeavors arrived in Yosemite Valley and metastasized.
THREE-THOUSAND FEET OF AIR. Per square foot, it’s possibly the most famously photographed small rock in the West. About the size of a picnic table—for which it’s been used—Overhanging Rock at Glacier Point has also served as a “parking space” for a horseless carriage and, later, a Pierce-Arrow and a Studebaker. It’s been a stage for a pair of dancing ladies in hoop skirts, a veritable magnet to backflipping daredevils and to the simply foolhardy. The pointy ledge is famous, one could say, for nothing; that is, for what lies beneath it: some three-thousand feet of nothing but air unless you count at certain moments raindrops or snowflakes. The view from behind the railing near it looks into the valley and on toward the mountainous miles beyond and offers arguably the most spectacular vista in America. It’s an excellent place to try to comprehend the evolution of Yosemite from deep oceanic sediments into tectonic plates lifted, shifted, subducted, and melted into granite, then solidified, only to be raised once more and deformed, dissolved, deepened, and dislocated by water and ice. From Glacier Point one sees a grandly contorted display of the four elements of the ancient world—earth, air, fire, and water—where water is the chisel, gravity the hammer, and the sculptor your notion of the originator of all things.
Overhanging Rock at Glacier Point circa 1900
WHEN OWL HOOTS FAIL. Far from the crowded valley stands a tree trunk to match the photographic fame of Overhanging Rock. To attract tourists—and perhaps help them comprehend the immensity of a sequoia—a couple of sawyers in 1881 cut a huge notch through the base of one, a hole large enough to allow a triple-team stagecoach or a Stanley Steamer to pass through its heart. The gimmicked tree, the Wawona Tunnel Tree, more than two-thousand years old, indeed drew motorists with cameras—and pocketknives—and initiated a fad in California of cutting huge holes through large trees. The size of an upright sequoia, by volume the largest living organism on earth, is difficult to conceive, and one can argue that for the most mobile nation in history, driving a wheeled vehicle through is an effective illustration of size—and age—and is a somewhat better one than, say, felling the largest sequoia of all and turning it into 175 miles of two-by-fours. In Yosemite it’s almost axiomatic that an increase in elevation means a decrease in the crowd, but the legendary Wawona giant couldn’t go high enough to escape the fascination of tourists, and the tree is today only a stump; like an old outhouse wall, it’s carved with uncountable Kilroy Was Heres. Incidentally, the Ahwahneechee word for a sequoia is wawona, its pronunciation thought to imitate the hoot of an owl, the guardian spirit of the big trees.
Wawona Tunnel Tree, circa 1890
SAVING THE PARK. Although Euro-Americans were slow to find Yosemite Valley, it took tourists just four years to arrive following Savage’s expulsion of the native residents. Only months after the initial v
isitor, the first hotel, a ramshackle thing, went up at the foot of Yosemite Falls, and boulders were getting painted into billboards advertising patent medicines. Despite the area being in the hands of the national government, squatters—many of them failed gold prospectors—moved in to put up more facilities and begin farming the incomparable valley. Yosemite was on its way to the commercialism so evident around Niagara Falls or Stone Mountain in Georgia or Pigeon Forge in Tennessee. Valley businesses passed down from squatters are still in the park in various permutations even though some of their enterprises have been slowly curtailed: The Cadillac dealership is gone, as is one of the golf courses, and also the once-famous firefall wherein burning embers were shoveled off Glacier Point to create a three-thousand-foot shower of orange coals.
In the parking lot of the luxury hotel, the Ahwahnee, I saw a bumper sticker: SAVE YOSEMITE FROM THE PARK SERVICE. For the past two decades the National Park Service has laboriously created a plan laying out a future for Yosemite—particularly for the overrun valley—that seeks to balance tourism with sound conservation. The blueprint is sensible and thorough—2,300 pages and twenty-seven pounds. At its core are two changes: The first is moving facilities that do not need to be in the valley to just outside the park, thereby returning the deep heart of Yosemite into something closer to its native appearance before the arrival of Savage’s militia. The second may be more difficult: persuading tourists to use public transport instead of private autos to get around the narrow valley. Shuttles would reduce parking lots and eliminate not uncommon two-mile-long lines of stalled traffic. In the words of Superintendent Michael Tollefson, “Our goal is to have a smaller human footprint.”
Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories From the Road Page 24