• • •
In the morning, Greazy told me about Kenny, but I already knew. I’d seen his face against the wall in my sleep, seen it blue and hard, and I didn’t want to hear about the helicopter and the YOSAR crews rappelling. I didn’t want to hear about the portaledge ripped in half, Kenny’s hands stuck to the chains, white-blue and hard.
I was sitting against the back wall of my cave, on the old mattress, my sleeping bag wrapped around my shoulders.
Greazy said, “I’m real fucking sorry, man.”
“Yeah,” I said, “me too.”
Greazy said, “He was a good guy, a great guy. I’m real, real sorry. You know that, right?”
I felt the back of my head against the granite of the boulder. The cool. The slick of the rock. “Yeah, I know,” I said.
Greazy kicked one of my water bottles left to right with his foot. Rolled it over. He said, “Kenny was…” but he didn’t know how to finish the sentence.
I said, “Yeah,” again. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“I know,” Greazy said. He rolled the water bottle back with his toe. “Hey, man, I was thinking…I mean, some of us saw you come in last night all upset looking. Before all of this. You know?”
I had been trying to read all morning, but I hadn’t gotten anywhere in the book. It was folded closed next to me, and I realized that I’d made up my mind. I knew what I had to do.
“You know,” Greazy said, “no offense or anything, right? Just hoping you’re okay, you know?”
“Right,” I said.
“Okay then. If you need anything,” Greazy waved. Then he left.
I called Carlos from the pay phone in the Ahwahnee because I wanted them to trace the call there later.
• • •
I went to the Curry deck and collected newspapers. Read all I could, memorized the names of everyone and everything. I ate pizza leftovers while I read, ate without tasting, food as a reflex, a habit. The CEOs, presidents, and the superintendent were meeting at the Ahwahnee, in the Great Room. The next meeting would bring them all together to form a “plan of conduct,” a future for the Valley. They were meeting in ten days.
I had never done much of anything that I’d planned. I looked at my hands for a mark of the superintendent’s blood.
• • •
The wet mattress. Mist. The drip at the north corner of the cave making a sound like two marbles kissing. The night-quiet of the middle hours, nocturnal animals in bed now, and diurnal animals still asleep. I heard him scream.
I rolled over onto the wet patch of the mattress and soaked my shirt at the shoulder. Sat up. Heard him again. Then the muffled scraping sounds, leather against granite. A rasping. I stood up and left the cave.
He was up in the talus fifty yards away. I found him wedged between two boulders shaped like obtuse triangles. The hole in his head was half the size of my fist. He stopped thrashing. Rolled and looked at me.
I said his name. My own name.
He looked like a darted bear. Didn’t blink. His eyes were open and watery, twitching at the corners.
I knew this story, his death at the pass in the high country. Trying to cut through the mountains after the invasion, the ambush came from above, and the rock broke a hole through his skull.
I put my hand on his chest and felt his breathing, the suck of his lungs. I leaned down next to the hole, hearing his soul’s whistling as it came through the skull.
• • •
A middle-aged man brought in the truck full of fertilizer two days later. The truck was an old silver Nissan with a tinted-windowed canopy. The bales were wrapped in the back, wound in dark plastic, only visible if I leaned in and looked with my hands cupped around my eyes.
The man said, “This stuff has sat for a week now. But you’ve got to let it sit for a few days more. After that, it’s volatile. Timing is everything, right?” He looked like a university botanist on a Valley hike. He had leather patches on the elbows of his tweed sports coat, long, gray hair, an enormous mustache.
I paid him with the money Carlos had given me in an envelope marked “Food.” The man didn’t count the money, but slid it in the pocket of his coat.
We got in the truck and he went over the remote. He said, “Don’t mess around with this. Only flip this lock when you’re ready to go. The caps are all in place. They’re set. So you make a mistake here, and you go with it. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said.
“All right then. You take care now,” he said. “Big boom.”
He got out of the truck and closed the door behind him. Then he walked up the road and put his thumb out to hitchhike.
I started the truck and drove it across the road into the overflow parking lot. I nearly stalled the vehicle twice in a hundred yards, my driving skills not good enough to captain any other car than my father’s.
• • •
I went to see my mother. There was no wet bag coated in solvent, no glue underneath her nostrils, but it didn’t matter. She stumbled around camp, tripping over the bench log each time she passed as if that log hadn’t been there for twenty years.
“Are you okay?” I said.
She smiled at me with her eyes closed. She teetered, fell again, and I caught her.
I said, “I think you need some food, some water, then sleep.”
I fried fish for her. Cooked thin slices of potatoes that I found on the backseat of the car. They were growing roots but they still smelled good. I fed her one bite at a time.
Then I put her to bed in her tent. She insisted on sleeping in my father’s sleeping bag. I lay down right outside the tent, guarding the door, guarding her escape.
In the morning, I made her drink more water. Then I boiled coffee. Sprinkled cold water on top to settle the grounds. Gave her a mug full with a teaspoon of sugar.
I drank a cup too. We sat on the bench log.
My mother’s eyes opened all the way. I said, “We should go visit the hospital today. He would want that.”
My mother shook her head, no.
“You don’t think so?”
My mother looked at me and didn’t blink. She didn’t say anything.
• • •
The rains started the next day, on the Fourth of July, the most populated camping and visitation weekend of the year. People crawled through the Valley like wet locusts, hands and heads bent over cell phones to protect them against the sky.
The rain came down, clouds piled low, black and roiling, one storm stacking the next from the southwest, none passing the buttresses of North Dome. The air thickened in the Valley, pressed against the points of the pines, everything wet.
In the afternoon, the rains turned harder still. Drops the size of hail, but nothing frozen, the sky pounding stone-size warm water, and I laughed as I saw it splatting against the Park Service’s tin roofs, the storm making the sound of a snowplow throwing gravel against a windshield.
People hid in tents, the Lodge, bathrooms, kiosks, the Village Store, at Curry, the LeConte Memorial, Housekeeping, and at the Buffet. Visitors waited all day for the storm to end.
When the evening came, people ran for their cars and hid, the sandy mud three inches high on their shoes and socks. They scraped the mud onto their floorboards, took off their shoes, and curled their feet up underneath them. Some slept in their cars that night with the rain pelting rhythms on their rooftops. Tents were no longer waterproof. The cement doorways of the bathrooms deflected rain inside, stall floors flecked with the spray.
And it rained.
It was only the second day of the rain when people started to leave. I went to check on the fertilizer truck and saw people packing their tents in Camp 4, across the road. At the ranger’s box, the ten-day forecast from the National Weather Service predicted ten days straight of rain, a summertime record for the Valley. I saw climbers shaking their heads. Two-thousand-mile destination road trips ending here in the rain. No chance to climb for more than a week.
• • •
I focused on the truck. The meeting. What I would do. I went over my plan. Drive the truck up and leave it in one of the front parking spaces. Walk away. Get to the Village. Walk behind the store complex to the midsize boulder. Flip the lock on the remote and press the button, then slide behind the boulder as the blast wave moved out.
The smell of cologne and cigar smoke. My fist inside the mountain lion. The green bottle in my hand. My hand on a remote.
• • •
On the third day of rain, the Merced River rose suddenly like an opened dam. Tenaya Creek fed from the east, joining the melt from Vernal and Nevada. The Arches’ streams became three runners, then five, then seven. The explosions of water off Bridalveil Falls could be seen from Northside Drive. And the Merced rose above its banks like a man stepping over a fence.
I saw the Merced at North Pines, where the river floods first, at the long bank, the water circling around campsites before dropping into the flats. The rangers sandbagged at the first sign of overflow, yelling to each other and throwing bags in the rain. But the river snuck behind the wall and moved on. Then it took the south side, at the Lower Pines, slashing a line to the watershed across, spreading to create a backwater up and down behind the camp.
Campers packed wet everything. Stuffed the backs of their cars with soaked gear.
The river took the first of the meadows next, below Housekeeping and up, rising across the southeast beach, collapsing muddy banks on the northwest. This was the highest I had ever seen the river, bigger than the two huge snowmelts, April floods, but this was not April, and the rains would not stop.
• • •
I went to get my mother, but she wasn’t in camp. I looked in all her usual places near the creek, the clearing, down on the trail by the road. I yelled for her in the rain but the wet ate the sound.
I walked back up the hill and got into the car. Reached under the seat for the keys. Turned the ignition and heard the engine catch. I blasted the air to clear the condensation, then I drove downhill, the car sliding at each turn, sliding sideways on the rained-out ground. The third turn proved too tight. The car skidded sideways, caught for a moment, then skidded some more. I pulled the wheel, but the car followed the slope, sliding downhill sideways until it crushed against a tree, the left side rear door denting in against the tree trunk.
I couldn’t get out on my side. The door wouldn’t open. So I crawled across, opened the passenger-side door, and slid out. Then I walked back down to the Loop Road. The north side. Put my thumb out in the rain.
A car pulled over in front of me. The driver rolled down his window. He said, “Where are you headed?”
“Merced. The hospital there.”
He said, “Are you hurt?”
“No,” I said. “I need to visit someone.”
“Well…shoot. We’re not really going that way. We’re headed up out of the other park exit, not going through El Portal at all, and nowhere near Merced.”
I said, “That’s okay. I can flag down another car.”
“Sounds good,” he said. “Good luck.”
I waved and he pulled back onto the road in front of me, driving west. I put my thumb out once again.
Car after car passed, trying to leave the Valley before the flooding covered the road. But it was too late. I saw the return cars first, then I walked up on the traffic jam an hour later. The river had crested, spreading a lake at the west end of the loop before the 120 split. One car at a time was trying to turn around and head back east. I didn’t see the car that had pulled over for me. It was somewhere up in that traffic line, sitting in the rising water, now partway buried.
• • •
I was standing at the Book Cliffs, looking up the Valley, the waves of the Merced light, but the river coming north now, licking and extending, four times its normal width.
The fifth day of rain.
Water wedging and the rockfall starting. Rockfall off the Nose of El Capitan first, to the west, the collapse sounding like dynamite in spring to clear slides on the Tioga Road. I hiked down into Camp 4 and heard dirtbags discussing the rockfall in the bathroom.
One said, “I think that’s off the Great Roof, huh?”
“Yeah,” the other said. “Just sucks. That route is gone, bro.”
The first climber shook his head while brushing his teeth at the sink. There weren’t many climbers left in the campground now. Camp 4 held ten people at the most.
The same day saw a piece of Sentinel come down. Black rockfall at the lichen smear, a buttress on the west side of the north face heaving into the trees below, and the rangers warned all hikers and climbers back from the cliffs. They wrote on the signboard, “Don’t scout climbs.” “Don’t even look up from below.” “Wear helmets.” “Stay near the river.” The climbing ranger circulated through the sites, yelling and smiling. But his smile looked like he was sipping turned milk.
And the river crept toward us on the Lodge footpath, moving like a rattlesnake over the asphalt.
• • •
Day six. The Arches heaved, trembling like an earthquaked building. I’d cleared my gear from the cave, and was standing near the hotel dumpsters with the arrowhead collection in my hands and my soaked sleeping bag around my neck. Then the first slide came down, and the roaring followed.
Three men were getting into a red Cadillac in the parking lot. It was morning, a malignant gray under the rain, and the three men looked like hikers, wearing new, Day-Glo, waterproof gear.
The rockfall rushed the trees, turned pines like broken saplings, huge boulders hurtling fifty feet off the ground. A boulder hit the Cadillac from above, landed on the roof, a boulder weighing four or five tons, exploding three of the Cadillac’s doors all the way off, and the men were crushed inside. Only one of them screamed. The other two never made any noise at all.
That was the small rockfall.
• • •
The hotel was evacuated. As people walked out along the entrance road, a ranger yelled, “The Village is okay, but stay away from the river! Don’t go to Curry! Do not go to Curry!”
The hotel had been evacuated only an hour when the second and third rockfalls came down off the Arches, washing through the abandoned structure.
I heard it, an avalanche of loose rock against the set stone of the walls, the grating and collisions reverberating through the Valley even in the rain. Nothing could stop that sound as the two rockfalls, ten minutes apart, took the boulders, the caves, the parking lot, and the hotel itself. The great Ahwahnee that had stood for nine decades in the Valley was gone.
There was no job for me then, the hotel gone. I couldn’t destroy what the rockfall had already taken, and the meeting wouldn’t happen. I’d left the fertilizer truck to sit in the rain in the Camp 4 overflow parking lot. The river was licking at its wheels now, rising little by little up its black tires.
I recovered the remote and dropped it in the dumpster.
• • •
People massed at the Village store, crowded like elk against winter, yelling into their cell phones.
I saw her against the wall, hunched over her phone, reading.
I said, “McKenzie.”
“Oh my god,” she said. “I’ve spent six days trying to find you. I’ve been everywhere. Seriously. I thought you might have left.”
I pointed to the sky. “Crazy, huh?”
“Yes,” she said. “Have you seen it like this before?”
“No,” I said. “Never.”
“But weren’t there floods before?”
“Not like this one. Not even the big flood. Nothing like this. I don’t even know what I’d call this.”
“Evil?” she said. “Deadly?”
“Deadly maybe.”
McKenzie said, “And angry.”
We watched the sky drop its wet. Listened to the pounding on the corrugated metal roof above us. The people near us kept walking out to the edge of the awning, checking to see if i
t could still be raining as hard.
McKenzie said, “They’re going to re-evaluate, my boss and the others. They’re going to wait a while on everything. This storm’s supposed to stay, to wreck a lot of things. Everyone is freaking out.”
“Yeah,” I said. “This flood might do some lasting damage to structures.”
“Are you kidding?” she said. “Do you know what it’s done already?”
“Yes. The rockfall at the Ahwahnee was incredible. I saw it.”
McKenzie looked at her watch. “I’ve got to go call them. Give a report. Will you still be here in a while?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
She was holding her phone. She put it to her lips. “Where will you be?”
“I don’t know. I have to find my mother.”
“Your mother? Is she here? And is she out in this?”
“Somewhere,” I said.
“Okay, wow,” McKenzie said. “I didn’t even know that she lived here. Where do you think she is?”
“I’m not sure. But she’s somewhere in the Valley. I have a few ideas. Might not be that hard to find her.”
McKenzie flipped her phone open. Checked for messages. Then she closed it. She said, “I guess you better go find her.”
“I will,” I said. “I’m going.”
McKenzie kissed me quickly. She said, “What is it that the Spanish climbers say in Camp 4?”
“A la muerte?”
“Yeah, that’s it. A la muerte, Tenaya.”
• • •
It wasn’t a long search. My mother was back on the Little Columbia Boulder again, where I’d found her before. She had no glue bag this time. She huddled underneath my father’s green rain poncho, sitting on top of the boulder, looking out at the abandoned west end of camp, oriented toward the Search and Rescue tents.
I helped her slide down the ramp-side of the boulder, made her jump to me at the short end.
“We’ve got to get up and out of here, okay?” I said. “I’ve packed food and blankets for us, so we can hike right out of camp.”
We hiked in the white sludge, the high granite mud. The Falls Trail ran rivulets down past our feet, no summer acorn dust as my mother kept slipping.
I said, “Do you remember when we used the grind holes to make acorn flour? How you taught me?”
Graphic the Valley Page 23