Graphic the Valley

by Peter Brown Hoffmeister

  My father stood too. He said, “I’m just letting you know. That’s what they’ll think, so you’ve got to be real careful. I’m sure they’re looking for you already.”

  “But what if I find out who really did it? What if I find out who actually lit the houses?”

  “You can try,” he said, “and maybe you should try. But it won’t mean much. Whatever people think, that’s the truth.”

  I went and got three pieces of wood and stacked them next to the fire circle.

  My father said, “This is where we’re supposed to be, but no one wants us here. You understand that? We didn’t use to exist, but we do now. Or sort of. Because of all of this, you exist.” My father closed one nostril and blew snot out of the other side. “So you’re going to have to hide for a long time, right?”

  • • •

  November wet snow that didn’t stick, and I watched from the eaves of the Camp 4 bathroom, hat low over my face, snowflakes flecking and melting behind the Big Columbia Boulder on the worn path. Smelling the old dishes and the food slop in the bottom of the sink. I thought of Lucy. Her telling of rattlesnakes. The way she threw rocks at signs.

  Then the big snows, two feet overnight to start December, and I dug a hole down into the Bachar Cracker cave, put a pad and sleeping bag there, decided to winter out the way the black bears and the 1970s Camp 4 drunks used to. Nobody would think of a man returning to this obvious a place.

  No rangers came in. The tourists were gone as well, the Valley abandoned. Badger Pass was the only part of the park that was active, and the Yosemite store, but not here. A few scientists and small groups crossed the meadows on snowshoes. Herds of mule deer, sixty or more, stood before them steaming in the midday sun.

  I sat on a downed log and watched a fox hunt for mice in the middle of Stoneman Meadow, creeping on his toes before leaping high in the air and turning nose down, plunging face first into the drifts, thrashing with his jaws, clacking at the mice.

  I turned around and there was the coyote again. Same white flank, him sitting behind me in the woods on his haunches. He watched me as I watched the fox.

  • • •

  That was the day I first saw Carlos again. He got out of a park ranger patrol car at the recycling dumpsters past sites 4 and 6, shuffled on the crusty snow.

  There was no mistaking his face. The new scar ran vertically from his left eyebrow to his jaw, like a worm stretched against his skin. I watched from the slack-line tree fifty feet away, saw his scar twitch as he checked the bear locks on the dumpsters. One of the steel links was loose and he went back to the patrol car to grab pliers. I watched as he tightened down the wire clasp, fixing gear while the bears hibernated.

  • • •

  I went south again and tried to see the burn line once more, but the snow obscured the evidence. I followed the banded trees, black to eight feet, touched the trunks, felt the crumble marking the pads of my fingers.

  I built a quinzee on the fire line, heaped snow and dug out an upside-down L on the inside to crawl in. I wanted to sleep where the fire jumped the line, turned from a house burn to a big burn. In the middle of the night, I woke up and left the shelter. It was 10 degrees then and I watched the fog of my breath puff in front of me while I followed the moon over the snow. I walked up to the charred skeletons of the houses, back to Lucy’s and her father’s. The house was wrapped in yellow caution tape, the front door still open. I thought about going inside, but there was nothing else to see in there.

  I’d read the newspaper report in the San Francisco Chronicle: “One Dead, One Missing in Mysterious Yosemite Fire.”

  When it jumped the fire line, the fire had burned 10,000 acres to the southeast, wrapping around the Mariposa Grove, and exiting the park. I walked out to the last burned tree on the south side, above the road, a half-mile south of the houses. I leaned against the first healthy tree and looked back, watched the sun come up over the hill to my right, the sun burning the snow light-blue to white, and the burned tree bands staying dark even in the full glare.

  • • •

  That winter back in Camp 4, there were days when I did nothing. Never left the Bachar Cracker cave. Watched the midday melt refreeze on the inside of the crack along the ceiling, the lichen and granite behind like Coke-bottle glass, greenish, opaque with grit, and I touched it to see if it was as hard as it looked.

  I saw the evidence of old warming fires in the bottom right corner of the cave, fifteen feet back, and I picked at the dirt to reveal the oldest fire stains. I wondered how many people had slept where I was. I knew this had been a hunting stop for hundreds of years.

  • • •

  My father told me about the disappearance of the Anasazi in the Southwest. He said, “They lived on the cliffs, hundreds of feet up. They had elaborate steps and ladders and rope systems.”

  “How long did they live there?”

  “Oh,” he said, “a long, long time. Maybe 2,000 years. Maybe more.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “No one knows,” he said. “They just disappeared. No evidence of a great war, nobody taking over and claiming their land. They just went away.”

  “To where?”

  “Like I said, nobody knows. Maybe they became dust. Maybe they became birds. Maybe they became the Colorado and Green Rivers.” He smiled and said, “They didn’t really become rivers.”

  “I know,” I said.

  He said, “Their petroglyphs could give clues to the disappearance though. Blowing out a candle on a ledge. Then they were no more.”

  I thought of Lucy.

  • • •

  My parents and I used to read all winter, sitting in the car or around the fire at night. I read now too. In the mornings, when I couldn’t go back to sleep, I read books with my back to the opening of my cave for light. Two Louis L’Amour westerns I found abandoned on the Lodge porch in December. Then three books I found outside the store a couple of weeks later. A copy of The Grapes of Wrath, with pencil-written rhyming poems to a girl in the page margins, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Indian Creek Chronicles. I liked the last one, by Pete Fromm. An inexperienced college boy in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. I couldn’t imagine not knowing the land, not knowing how to tie a half hitch, leaving a coat behind in the cold.

  I found a box of books left out in Curry while scoring free coffee in the registration hut. They were cheap paperbacks, mysteries and thrillers, and I took them back to my Bachar Cracker cave and read through the pile during the rest of the winter.

  The Yosemite winter of deep snow, four-foot drifts November to March, and I ate little. There wasn’t much to scrounge, just the leftovers in the bear boxes from the late climber season in November: More Krusteaz pancake mix with water, Top Ramen, Nalley chili, and one huge tub of Adams peanut butter that I rationed, two tablespoons each day. I got thin.

  In January, when only the peanut butter was left, I hiked past Church Bowl and opened kitchen bags behind the Ahwahnee Hotel, a place where tourists stayed all year for $400 a night.

  I ate day-old fettuccini Alfredo out of the dumpster bags, frozen to white cream icicles, crunchy, and wondered if Lucy would’ve eaten this with me, wondered if she ever scrounged food in the park as a child, wondered if her parents sat up late by the fire and waited for her to come in.

  Lucy and I would be in Mariposa now, in the fake longhouse with geothermal floor heating, weaving baskets for tourist entertainment. Or would we be in the high country, building our own hidden camp? Avoiding the rangers. A hut out of deadfall, then countersinking a true cabin in the ground, using the below-ground insulation to half-wall height that I’d read about in the LeConte Memorial Sierra books, the cabin I’d always planned.

  I’d wanted my father to build a cabin like that, but he’d said, “No, as soon as those cabins are finished, the rangers find them. Those backcountry projects invite them in.”

  I thought of our camp at Ribbon Creek and wondered what he was talking about.
The rangers never came in. Rangers stayed where tourists stayed.

  • • •

  I sat at the turn of the Merced below Housekeeping, where the logs jam and the suckers swerve in schools of thirty at the bottom of the fifteen-foot-deep, green-black pools.

  I used to come here when I was small, with my father, drop treble hooks baited with mice. Pull up the hand lines quivering. Big, bottom fish with no fight in them, and they lay on the ground gasping, not even flapping their tails at death.

  We spent days away from camp the year I was seven, the year after my mother stopped talking, the silence with her like watching a rock grow.

  My father told me the same stories over and over. Three times he told me the story of my conception. At first, I was too young to understand.

  • • •

  He said, “Summer and the heat. No rain July. Two thunderstorms of dry lightning over the Book Cliffs but no rain for a month.” He said, “The details matter.

  “That was back when your mother still spoke. ‘Manoah?’ she asked me.

  “I felt her there, close, but I did not try. When you are older, you will understand what I mean. I had not tried for a long time. I closed my eyes, pretending to be asleep.

  “Ribbon Creek ran down the border of our camp, and I listened to the water. I could hear the individual notes of each boulder deflecting the flow of water from above. It was late summer and the mosquitoes were no longer hungry. I’d left the tent door open so I could see the stars as I lay sleepless next to your mother. Through the trees to the southeast, I looked at the three stars of Orion’s Belt just risen, the first constellation I’d ever learned as a child.

  “I fell asleep. Woke to the sound of the creek once more and got up. I looked at your mother lying there, then left the tent.

  “I made a fire and started coffee in the old kettle. I splashed cold water to make the grounds settle, then poured myself a cup. The mug was too hot to touch and I waited for it to cool. I hated to burn my tongue.

  “The light expanded without the appearance of the sun, El Capitan softening the lines to the east. I walked to the creek and washed my face. When I got back to the fire, your mother was up. She was staring into the fire, her hair tangled. She said, ‘Good morning.’

  “‘Good morning,’ I said.

  “That was how it normally was. When your mother drank coffee, she never minded burning her tongue.

  “Then we were away from camp the whole day. Your mother to the store and me to fish, and when I returned to camp, I found that a bear had torn a hole in the side of the tent.

  “That night, I sat on top of the bedding in the dark.

  “‘Manoah?’ she said, ‘you didn’t see the bear?’

  “‘No,’ I said. ‘The bear was already gone.’

  “She touched my hand. She said, ‘And there was no reason for it to come in?’

  “‘No. Bears are bears,’ I said. I had my hands resting on my knees.

  “Your mother slid over and touched my hair. ‘Manoah?’ she said. ‘Are you afraid?’

  “I rocked forward and pushed on my knees with the palms of my hands. I began to say no but it would have been a lie.

  “But your mother kissed me. She kissed my eyes, my cheeks, kissed my head until her mouth found mine and we touched for the first time in many, many months. We kissed each other like we were lapping cold water in summer.

  “And that was the beginning of you.”

  • • •

  We were fishing browns the last time my father told me that story. I looked at him and wondered at the meaning of touching. My parents did not touch each other. They did not kiss each other. They were like closed links of two separate chains, chains that could never connect.

  One time, when I was little, I drew their circles in camp, in the clearing, by scraping my heels in arcs of dirt and loam. Where the lines intersected I made deeper Xs with each heel, careful to show that their lines did touch, even if I never saw it.

  I met the coyote again, and this time I called him Pete Fromm, after the character in the book, the author who had wintered alone.

  Pete Fromm was sitting on a snow plane in a gap between the trees, his white flank toward me. He didn’t trust me, but he followed me, or so it seemed, because he was around me, many days, looking and waiting.

  I tried sitting with him. I sat five or six feet away, sat next to him, and he turned his head but did not run away. I imagined that he was a domesticated dog then, and wondered if the national park had ruined him, wondered if other coyotes sat with humans and looked out on the expanse of the Valley’s white snowfields in front of them.

  The snow sprinkled down on us, turning helixes with each gust of wind, and the day was cold, not more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit at two o’clock.

  Finally, he left. Pete turned and ran. Someone up the Valley yelled, and he jumped at the sound. He turned and looked at me once from the trees, then jogged away, lowering his head the way coyotes do when they’re trotting through a gap.

  • • •

  Then it was February. A few days of bright sun and the snow melted off the tree branches. Dripping all around, then hard crust in the evenings, and colder than before. The wet hid in the cold like glass in the shallows, and I snuck a stick fire on the old remains in the corner of my Camp 4 cave. Dense, white smoke with the wet, and I worried about rangers seeing. But no one came and I burned three days in a row to keep warm.

  • • •

  Then the real snowmelt. The early spring rains splattered the road mud, and the foxes trotted through Camp 4 like small dogs. March rain, and I saw Pete Fromm at the falls creek, eyes turning as he lapped creek water. He was more skittish now, and he cut left when he saw me.

  There was something on his side, across that white patch. I thought it was blood, at first, the mark, but it was graffiti. Somebody had caught him and spray-painted his side. Not the biologists’ yellow number tags, but bright red letters that said “MY DOG” on his flank.

  I could see where Pete had bitten at the marks, chewed the fur. I saw the breaks in the letters, still wet with saliva. I knew then that he was too socialized, that he’d come in on other campers, begging for food. When the big groups visited over the next month, he’d be relocated by the Park Service, and at some point, he’d come back, Predation Control officers with rifles and metal litters waiting.

  • • •

  March. California Spring Break. More tourists in the Valley and the Park Service patrol vehicles wound the loop. I crossed the road and didn’t see two patrol cars pulled over at the turn. The officers were standing by the back bumper of the first car, and when I stepped out, they turned and saw me. One was Carlos.

  I ran and they chased me. I’d crossed near the Lower Falls access, and I sprinted left toward Swan Slabs. Stayed along the wall there and tried to decide where I’d go. This was not the direction I wanted them to follow me, past my camp and toward my parents’. I ran through Camp 4 East, Central, and West. I hit the open oaks section, the wide gaps between the trees, and looked back over my shoulder. The two of them were still chasing me, but far back, slowed by their army boots and the bulletproof vests under their shirts.

  When I got a gap of a hundred yards, I turned south, toward the river, hoping they wouldn’t follow me. By the time I reached the water, a mile later, they weren’t chasing anymore. I waited for them. Watched until dark, but never saw anyone.

  I snuck back to Camp 4 around midnight. Then it was spring.

  CHAPTER 7

  They hold a foot race to see which of the enlisted soldiers are most fit to hike into the Valley. Those who can run a hundred yards quickly will hike up the Merced River. Those who lose the sprint will stay and guard the existing camp. The losers of the foot race complain that a sprint does not take into account a man’s intelligence or experience. But that logic is disregarded. It is the quick who are chosen.

  Tenaya is with the 36th Wisconsin as a show of good faith. He is hiking up toward his own v
alley, following the Merced.

  But Tenaya’s men do not come to him. He waits with the soldiers, in the Merced narrows, but the Yosemiti are wise and know that they should not come to him. Even the Miwok scouts are afraid to enter the Valley where ambushes are so easy along the river.

  So the Yosemiti keep their advantage.

  And the soldiers wait among the boulders at the mouth of the Valley.

  I remember being seven years old. My parents in the meadow across the road. My mother hadn’t spoken in the past year, her eyes dull black like the mud on the banks of the Tuolumne.

  I climbed over the Plymouth’s front seat on the passenger side, put my feet down in the bucket, slid up to the glove box, and hesitated. Looked both ways for my parents like checking for cars on the Merced road. I couldn’t see them out in the field, which meant they were lying down. The velvet grass was two feet tall that time of year. I looked once more, then I popped open the glove box.

  Nine of the letters fell into the bucket where my feet were. I picked them up and organized them in my lap. Three from my mother. Big, looped handwriting. Six from my father. His short lines like broken grass stems.

  There were fifty or sixty more letters in the glove box. Tight packed, reminding me of the saltine crackers we found in the Lower Pines bear boxes at the end of the summer.

  I slid the first letter out of its envelope. From my mother. I read all the words I could make out. I did not put the words together because there were too many I could not decipher. Then I opened the next one. One of my father’s, the handwriting even more difficult. He wrote the letter to my mother, “Love” at the bottom, same as hers.

  I looked up and saw my parents walking back toward me, the car. They were not holding hands now. Their hands were like two dried animals shrinking, skins curving and turning away from each other.

  I stuffed all the letters back into the glove box, closed it, and climbed over the seat. Then I lay down on the bench and pretended to be asleep with my face turned away.

  That was a year afterward.

  My father read aloud to me in the tent that night. The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway. An old man fishing alone through days and nights on the Gulf Stream off Cuba. I was piled in wool blankets against the cold. Seven years old and I couldn’t imagine an ocean or warm water.