I said, “Honestly, Kenny, I don’t know that I didn’t miss some things being here. You know how lonely I was?”
Kenny looked straight up at the sky as if the blue was about to fall on us. He said, “Yeah, I bet you were.”
“No,” I said. “Really, really lonely. So many days of nothing, and I’d see kids my age in the camps in spring and summer and I’d wonder what their lives were like, what they did when they drove out of this Valley, if they were happier than me, having friends and schools and whatever else.”
“Well,” Kenny said, “I don’t think so. There’s this whole world of nothing out there. Completely valueless. Kids not really living, never being outside, hooked to wires, to computers and TVs and video games for hours every day. Kids who are afraid of bugs and spiders and wild animals, afraid of the dark and of camping, those who have never even been camping. And you had this Valley. This one.” Kenny made a circle with his finger. “You have no idea.”
I looked up at the black water streaks on the Arches above us, 1,500 feet up the granite wall. “I know I like what’s here,” I said. “I do love this Valley. But I had no people to be with. Or not enough people.”
Kenny laughed. He said, “People are the worst. That’s something I kept coming back to when I was alone out there for a month. People are selfish and wreck things. I’m selfish and wreck things. We don’t care about anything but ourselves. But you, living in this Valley? You made the best choice.”
“But I didn’t choose this,” I said. “I didn’t choose this at all.”
“Are you kidding?” Kenny said. “You’re choosing this right now.”
• • •
I stayed with the Valley, the park. I walked with Kenny as far as the Vernal Falls path. Then I stopped and watched him hike along the river.
He’d packed bread and some peanut butter I’d given him. A couple hundred feet away, he turned around and yelled, “Hang out in a few weeks?”
“Okay,” I yelled back. “Sure.”
He flipped around and hiked again, his head swinging back and forth looking at everything he was passing. He lifted a hand and waved.
I waved back, then walked back to camp. Filled my water bottle at the dish rinse station and slung it on a cord over my shoulder. Then I headed for the slabs, the west end of Swan Slabs, where the beginner rock routes led to loose, fourth-class climbing, loose but easy. I cruised a few hundred feet in the next half-hour, traversing across to Selaginella and the top-outs in the trees above the Books. I climbed this sometimes, west along the rim, looking back across the Valley at Sentinel.
When I found the in-cut, the shallow cave, I stopped and sat down at the corner where the cave met the open air. The cliff opened beneath my feet, at an overhang, then the wall dropped vertically for a few hundred feet. A thousand feet above the treetops, the trees didn’t look like trees at all but a dark-green mat, arcing in a half circle below.
I waited.
Nine years old, in a place I called the Moss Drop, a green gap in the ground near our camp. My eyes itched and the dry moss beneath me compressed. I slept there one night, sitting first, watching the dark until my head fell forward, and I lay down on my side, curled like a coyote pup.
Before I fell asleep, I could hear my father calling to me, his flashlight beam sweeping across the surface of the forest. But there was no way for him to see into this hole, and I didn’t reply. I sank deeper into the summer moss. The smell of old dirt around me. I hid. Then he went the other way and I fell asleep.
In the morning, the sunlight was above me. I sat up.
My mother was there. Ten feet away. She’d found me in the night, and she was leaning against the boulder to my left, sitting, eyes open, forearms across her knees. She was staring at me when I woke.
• • •
From the cave above the Books, the Valley was uninhabited. I saw the buildings abandoned, no one outside or in, no one in the store buying Popsicles or in the Ahwahnee Hotel watching television. Was this better? My father would say so. And Kenny maybe.
The white glints of motor-home tops and the silver curls of cars showed movement then. More trees from here though, the open meadows green and wide in the expanses, the animals hidden down there, deer and elk, bear and cougar, rattlesnakes lying on snags in the river, gathering sun, warming their cold blood.
I waited.
Kenny was off to Truckee, walking now. Lucy was in the ground, underneath the aging carcass of a lion, a layer from loam. The superintendent had waited six years with his eyes. I’d circled hundreds of times around that meadow, but I hadn’t crossed that boardwalk since.
My parents were up Ribbon Creek, stacking wood and cooking, forty years now.
I was not hungry. I would not let hunger come to me. There were times as a child when I realized that hunger was not something real but a thought that could be suppressed for a long, long time, for hours first, then days. From reading the San Francisco Chronicle, I knew that some people learn this when they’re young. I thought of stories I’d read about Central Africa and U.S. Indian reservations. Calcutta, India. Eastern Russia and rural China. None of those places sounding anything like my Valley. So maybe Kenny was right.
I flexed the muscles of my arms, my hands, let them relax, my body. Middle of the afternoon. More white and silver below, the traffic lines of the late afternoon, the Valley Loop Road filling with lines of painted metal.
Evening now, the sun passing the nose of El Capitan like a guard burning his watch. Then down. I sat in the late shadows on my ledge above the expanse. I did not pile sticks and brush. No shelter. I let the night come, and the cool. More than cool, the cold after. I pulled on my wool hat, the only extra clothing I’d brought, a hat that I’d stuffed in my pocket.
In the night, I began to shiver, but I flexed my stomach muscles and chest, pulled myself tight the way my father had taught me when I was little. Tightened away from the cave wall to hold my heat. And the cold went away.
In the morning, I woke up cramped. Slumped sideways, having slept against the wall, the granite pulling my heat, and I was cold again. The dew dropped, a little water, misty, and the sun followed, glancing off the white granite like sparks from an ax head hitting stone.
I stayed through the day. No other humans, nobody passing. I stood and stretched. Walked in a circle until I was warm, then waited again. Sat down. Waited through the day and it was long. Ants crawled a line over my bare right foot. I let them. They carried the body of a yellow jacket an hour later, the insect’s armor plates tilting as the ants climbed the side of my heel.
Ravens fought in front of me, a physical argument, not loud with squawking, not like the crows on the Valley floor. I saw one raven drop and slam the body of another from behind, the second one rolling.
Another night, and I argued with my stomach. Kept hunger away. Sipped water from my bottle. A second dark. I didn’t know what I was waiting for. Same as childhood. Alone, and that was enough.
My mother’s last words to me. To us:
• • •
“Go play,” she says.
We both stand.
“You two need to go play,” she says again. “Or go swim. I’ll be there in a little while.”
We walk away. I reach out my hands like wings, fly until I pass the bark of trees. I like the feel of them, each tree different to touch, varied patterns. I close my eyes and imagine that I am blind, and she follows the sightless me. When I pick up my foot, she sets her smaller foot in its place. I can hear her right behind me, the way she breathes through her nose.
The heat and then the cool. I can feel the change even with my eyes closed, the way the river holds cool air. I stop when my toes stub a rock. I open my eyes. We’re at the edge of the river and our father isn’t there yet.
That night, he whispers to me, “It is not your fault. I promise that. It’s not your fault.”
• • •
I walked a circle to get warm, then sat down and fell asleep again.
Fitful with no food. In and out of the dark.
Then the third day. Bright and too clear, as if a sheen of glass cut in the light before my eyes, a refraction of the daylight’s colors, the sun’s spectrum, elements splitting the world. I watched the sun move across the new sky, the slow swell of the arc and back down. The ants came again but carried no yellow jackets.
Evening of the third full day.
And the ravens. I thought they were vultures this time, circling a few hundred feet above me, in slow arcs like black charcoal etchings on the cave wall. But these birds moved like hawks, and their wings did not tilt on the turn as vultures’ wings do. No wavering tilt, and I saw that they were ravens once more, even before they came close.
They gathered on my ledge and did not squawk. Three of them. No noises but the dragging of their talons on the granite crystals. Their heads turned as they resettled their wings. Hopped and resettled again.
I said, “Hello,” and my voice cracked, not used to working after the last two days.
The ravens scraped their claws, moved away, flew off. Then they came back. Settled on the ledge with me, and when I fell asleep, they were still there. Scraping and watching.
This is true:
They brought me food. The ravens. In the morning, when I woke up, they were there once again, close to my hands, holding the meat like wet newspaper, the putrid gray-brown strands. Their black beaks gripping the fermented meat. I ate.
• • •
Teachers bring schoolchildren into the Valley from Merced, from Fresno, from Manteca, Sacramento, and San Francisco. They sit at the other end of the long picnic table. Four of them. Eating bacon and swinging their legs. Talking with their mouths full. Giggling.
CHAPTER 10
I have read that some animals wage war. I have also read that humans are animals, but I do not believe that lie. No animals are like us.
The army comes into the Valley for the first time. Not the whole army but a small part of the 36th Regiment. They are soft and pale, with heavy shoes, walking as if their feet have been burned in a fire.
We let them pass by twice. They have the Miwok scouts with them, the diggers who crawl on all fours like the bears they will become in the next life as penance. The Miwoks have given their own wives to the regiment’s leader like stringing meat for wolves.
Yes, in this war, the soldiers of the 36th Wisconsin will burn acorn stores, starve the young, torture and murder, attack women while they are sleeping. But this is nothing new. This is true of all wars.
The Yosemiti live in the Valley and the Valley is beautiful, and no people can live somewhere beautiful forever. It is like holding water in your hands.
I set three fish lines on short sticks and waited behind a tree. Treble hooks are illegal in the Valley, and the squirrel entrails I used as bait, but no one ever fished there and the rangers stayed in the campgrounds.
After an hour, I checked the lines. The first had a brown, the second nothing, and the third held a white. I killed both fish with a rock, gutted them, then looped my lines. I rolled the fish in the bottom of a plastic bag, tied the top, and stuffed it into my backpack. My mother would cook anything. Even the white.
I hid my fishing sticks in the usual spot between the split rocks.
• • •
I walked on the Merced side of the road until I got to Ribbon Creek. Then I crossed the road and headed up into the trees. It was early afternoon and hot. I followed the creek boulders, hopping from rock to rock to avoid wearing more of a path on the bank. My father told me that he had seen the rangers pass by twice that summer already. And one visit would end my parents’ camp forever.
When I got to their clearing, I saw the tent between the boulders, the fire ring, the clothesline to the left in the woods. But the car wasn’t in the gully. It was next to the rocks. The nose of the ’46 Plymouth stood out like a rusted grizzly. My father must have driven it up there somehow, not by the path, winding it slowly between the trees.
I walked over. He was in the car. My father’s face pressed against the rolled-up window, lips smeared down. His face like burned meat, bloodshot, dark bruises on his forehead between the streaks of red.
I pulled open the door and he fell against me, breathing through his teeth, making sss, sss sounds.
“No, no,” I said. “Fuck.”
I squatted down and held his weight against my shoulder, breathed into my ear, and I saw my mother then, over his shoulder, in the passenger seat, the glove box open like a throat. She held the scissors in her left hand, and she was cutting pieces of paper, putting them in her mouth, chewing and swallowing.
“Mom, what the…”
She was humming and cutting as my father was breathing those S-sounds into my shoulder, and I pulled him out, his armpits wet, a bad smell there, and I popped the seat forward, then pushed my father back into the car, slid him in, then picked up his feet and tucked them in.
I hopped into the driver’s seat, closed the door, and turned the key. The engine caught. My mother was still cutting.
I backed the car slowly between the boulders, backed it into the gap, turned, and drove downhill, weaving between trees. When I got to the Loop Road, I sped across the bridge and drove fast toward the Village. My father made scraping sounds through his teeth.
At the Meadows, I wove in and out of slow-moving cars, zigzagging through tourists gawking at their first views of the Valley. I almost hit a man who was standing in the road, staring at a waterfall. I pressed on the horn but it hadn’t worked for years, and he jumped as I swerved around him, my front end a foot from taking off his legs.
I turned at the bridge, cut back west, and pulled in at the clinic in the Village. I jumped out of the car and said, “I’ll be right back.”
I ran inside and found EMTs eating sandwiches. One of them stood up. He said, “Can we help you?”
The EMTs ran out with me.
Both car doors were open now, the one I’d left open and the passenger’s side door. My mother wasn’t in the car now. My father was still in the back. The first EMT saw my father’s face and ran for the ambulance. The other EMT put his head into the backseat.
They put an oxygen mask on my father’s face and he blinked a few times.
He said, “Tenaya?”
They were running an IV in one arm.
I grabbed his other hand. “Yes?”
He opened his mouth and struggled to make more words.
I said, “They’re taking you to a hospital.”
“Don’t,” he said.
“What?”
He said, “Don’t leave.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll stay with you.”
“No,” he said. He squeezed his eyes shut. Opened them. Breathed in and out on the oxygen. “Don’t leave the park. They want you to.” He closed his eyes.
The EMTs were hooking the fluids to the IV line.
“Who wants me to leave?”
He still had his eyes shut. He said, “Promise me.”
An EMT patted me on the back. He said, “We’ve got to go. In a situation like this, every minute counts. Are you coming?”
I looked at my father.
“No,” he said, “he’s not.”
I turned around to see if my mother was near the building, along the road, anywhere in sight. I said, “I don’t know.”
The EMT pushed my father forward, into the bay. He said, “We’ve got to go now, okay?”
“Okay,” I said. “You go ahead. I have to find my mother.”
He motioned to the driver. “We’ll do everything we can. Go back inside and fill out the paperwork. They can fax it over to the hospital in Merced.”
He closed the ambulance doors, and I took a step back. I watched the ambulance drive to the stop sign, then turn west on the Loop Road. I turned around. The Plymouth was still empty.
I closed the passenger-side door. Looked at the entrance of the clinic and thought about going in to fill out the paperwork, but I
didn’t know what I would write. Beyond my father’s first name, I didn’t know anything.
I drove across the street and slowly looped through the parking lot at the store. My mother wasn’t there. I drove past Church Bowl, up the Ahwahnee drive, looked in the trees. I pulled over and hopped out, hiking through the boulders. Then I went back to the car and drove to Curry. A few women looked like her from afar, but when I slowed down and passed them, they smiled at me with faces that were not my mother’s. I parked and walked through the tent cabins, out along the tiny run off next to the Lower Pines campground. I jogged through to the Merced, down its south bank, then back to the car.
I drove back to the El Cap bridge and parked. Then I got out and looked there, on foot. I searched the nearby woods, and down at the river too, through to the clearings, and up the other side. I walked in and out of the trees, all the way to Sentinel Beach. But by then it was evening, and I came across the paved meadow path as it got dark. I looked in the Lodge dining area, the laundry facility, and the bathrooms, but it was getting too late, too dark to see much of anything that wasn’t lit by bathroom lights.
The white sand of the Swan Slabs made it light enough to search there, but I didn’t think I’d find her in the slabs. And I didn’t.
• • •
When I was eleven, I followed my mother past El Cap meadow, followed her to the bridge where everyone was pointing up at the climbers on The Nose. We walked past binoculars and cameras, Japanese tourists, beyond the bridge, up the road into the trees. She’d motioned for me to follow.
I walked behind her as she hopped down onto a deer trail in the trees south of the bridge, and I followed her into the woods. I didn’t ask. It had been five years since the night at the river, and I didn’t think about her not talking anymore.
Graphic the Valley Page 15