by Bill Barich
The men rode on across the plains and came in the late afternoon to the San Joaquin River, a real stream then but now a churlish, brown murk in July, and they took a swim and ate some peaches. The wind kept blowing, a wind from a blast furnace tearing at their faces and peeling away their skin. In the village of Grayson, Le Conte paused briefly to mail a letter to his wife, assuring her that he was still alive.
Highway 140 broke off to the east of Highway 99, a ribbon unfurling to a gate of Yosemite at El Portal. There were big, broad, western-looking valleys until the road started its ascent.
Le Conte, the geologist: “Country beginning to be quite hilly; first, only denudation hills of drift, finely and horizontally stratified; then, round hills with sharp toothlike jags of perpendicularly cleaved slates, standing out thickly on their sides.”
The men reached Mariposa on the seventh day of their journey, riding smoothly through town in double file, in a military procession. They did not have to contend with overheated cars stalled and tangled in knots or have to listen to shouting matches between irate parents and overwrought kids. They rode on into the forest, higher and higher, and it brought them a welcome relief. They basked in the cooling shade of the yellow pines, the sugar pines, and the Douglas firs.
“No moon,” Le Conte wrote that night. “Only starlight.”
The university crew was close to their destination and teased themselves by taking a rest. They turned out their horses and napped in a meadow and smoked tobacco and sang songs as the spirit moved them. They washed their filthy clothes in the Merced River, squatting like squaws on the rocks, soaping and scrubbing and wringing, a moment of unconscious baptism, of cleansing, before entering the valley.
Then they rode on through Big Trees, a redwood grove, in the morning and later met another touring party among whose members was a rather pretty (though stout) young woman in a very short bloomer costume that showed “a considerable portion of her two fat legs.” To the men, she became Miss Bloomer.
“The captain, I think, is struck,” said Le Conte, “but he worships, as yet, at a distance.”
Then, in the afternoon, a first glimpse of Yosemite Valley from Ostrander’s Rocks. The men on horseback, the horses pawing and whinnying—“magnificent.” They rode on until early evening, dismounted, and hiked up Sentinel Dome to a point some 8,500 feet above sea level for a twilight look at the valley.
Le Conte: “To the left stands El Capitan’s massive perpendicular wall; directly in front, and distant about one mile, Yosemite Falls, like a gauzy veil … to the right the mighty granite mass of Half Dome lifts itself in solitary grandeur … in the distance, innumerable peaks of the High Sierra … such a sunset, combined with such view, I had never imagined.”
Two days later, the men rode into the valley proper. Le Conte exclaimed to his journal, “Yosemite today!”
AT THE ARCH ROCK GATE, just beyond El Portal, I paid a ranger five dollars for a weekly pass, thinking that Yosemite National Park must be the bargain of the century. The road in traced the course of the Merced River, still high and slightly discolored from the spring runoff. Whenever the dark shadows cast by the pines, firs, and broadleaf maples broke apart, I looked up at a keenly blue sky piled with clouds in puffy columns, a sight common in the Sierra Nevada through all seasons.
Though I had been to the park many times, the crowding around the Visitor Center in Yosemite Valley never failed to astound me. As if in some crackpot corollary to the fact of nature being raised to its highest power, the sheer thronging of people and machines surpassed any version of the ordinary.
The minute you got near the center, you had to start circling for a parking spot, on your guard not to run down any children or stray pets or crash into any of the tour buses whose drivers seemed to be in training for the Indy 500. Vehicles from the Corporation Yard cut across the grain of traffic at odd angles, like free radicals tossed into the pot to test your already overburdened reflexes.
I had to remind myself that things were not that bad, not yet—in August, the valley succumbed to absolute gridlock.
Yosemite Valley had been ceded to the automobile long ago. There was a picture in one of the books in my traveling library that showed a big-bellied man in a white shirt and a bow tie motoring along a dirt path in his locomobile exactly thirty years after Le Conte’s trip on horseback. Cars were not officially permitted into the park until 1913, when the U.S. secretary of the interior, under the urging of such groups as the Motor Car Dealers Association and, implausibly, the Sierra Club, lifted a ban against them.
James Bryce, the British ambassador to the United States, was a sage dissenter in the debate and invoked the specter of Old Nick for the sake of comparison.
“If Adam had known what harm the serpent was going to work,” Bryce advised, “he would have tried to prevent him from finding lodging in Eden.”
Smog, traffic, and noise. The Visitor Center was obviously best avoided, but it had a way of getting to you in the end. You’d have to buy the coffee that you had forgot, or a postcard for Aunt Emily, or a Yosemite sweatshirt for a sniffling, bee-stung child. Or you had to drop in, as I did, to see what sort of accommodations were available, if any.
Everything in the park was booked. Everything.
“You should have used Ticketron,” said a lad whose nametag identified him as Dwayne from Pocatello, Idaho.
How to explain to Dwayne that I was in foolhardy rebellion against such procedures, trying to strike a balance between the modern world and a precomputer, Le Contian ideal of wilderness adventuring? No matter—I would go back and arrange something in El Portal, the court of last resort, but again I got bad news. Every motel was sold out and all the decent campgrounds were filled. With the light beginning to fade, I had to settle for Indian Flat Campground right off the highway. It won’t be so bad, I thought. At least the river is close by.
As I pitched my tent, kicking myself for not getting to the park early enough to hike into the backcountry, a superbly tanned, gorgeously built woman in a red mini-dress came sashaying down a path. She held the hand of a brutish surfer, who was slugging at a Mickey’s Big Mouth and booting away the twigs and the empty cans that might endanger her bare feet. They were Indian Camp campers, too, three tents down.
I smacked at the metal tent pegs with a rock and asked myself, What is this about? I mean, what is this about?
And the Merced River answered, I have no idea.
The aboutness of things—there was an earnest theme for a sleepless night. Waking fifty times to nocturnal ramblings, raccoons in the underbrush, sweeping headlights, radios and tapedecks and Aretha Franklin singing “Respect”—waking, I say, fifty times to a single pebble, pointed, that refused to be dislodged from under my sleeping bag, and to the haunting image of the babe in red, imagining her in dishabille, in opera hose, in a top hat patting the pinecones with a walking stick, I nodded off at last only to wake again in minutes to the revving of a motorcycle.
Five in the morning. I fetched the leaves from my hair, drank a lukewarm soda, and lay in my straggly kip for a while reading a biography of John Muir by flashlight.
At six-thirty, I broke camp and drove into the park, stopping to count the incoming cars. They entered at the rate of about four a minute. Almost 3.5 million tourists visited Yosemite every year, and I saw what a job it must be just to keep the restrooms clean.
Running the whole Yosemite show amounted to a triage situation, with environmental concerns sometimes secondary. You could count on the tourists to trample the meadow grasses and give rise to giardia in streams. They didn’t do it on purpose. The ecosystem didn’t look fragile, not when the park was so vast and sturdy and beyond apparent injury. Yosemite Valley projected a weary benignity. It seemed kind, tolerant of human foibles, and that brought a sort of peace, although at the park’s expense.
I felt this peace as the morning went on. Cars kept pouring through, Arch Rock, but everywhere people were having their private Yosemite experience, and so w
ere the creatures of the valley, blacktail deer searching for berries and gray squirrels jumping from branch to branch.
Near El Capitan, an artist on holiday had put up her easel to paint the great hunk of granite, and as she applied colors to her canvas in vulvic shades, three coyotes loped right past her, but she never looked up. The coyotes resembled German shepherds, although they were leaner and stringier and had a proud and cagey aspect, ignoring the Sunday painter just as she had ignored them.
I walked toward Ribbon Meadow and soon was alone, my lack of sleep no longer of consequence and the sun beginning to make its presence known to the knotted muscles of my back. On the Merced I found a glassy stretch of water that the light had not yet struck, and I fished it for a while, falling into a hypnotic state that momentarily relieved me of any burdens.
Then I had some company. Three little girls had snuck up behind me. They were towing a freckled boy in a red sweatsuit, who immediately started throwing pebbles into the stream, unable to stand the calm. He was made of sticks and stones and so on, and I wanted to reinstitute the now-forbidden practice of spanking.
The girls were cousins. They lived in Chino, California, and in Las Vegas, Nevada. The boldest of them, Laura, who at nine or ten had the disconcertingly adult face of a chorine, told me that they’d been coming to Yosemite since they were two for family reunions. They were camped by a waterfall.
“How is it?”
“Beautiful,” they all sighed at once.
“Is Nevada different from California?” I asked.
“Nevada is desert,” Laura said, with certainty. She’d just got her first fishing rod, but fishing perplexed her. “One thing I want to know?”
“Yes?” said I, the aged angler-muse.
“How come only boys can catch a fish?”
THE PATRON SAINT OF Yosemite National Park, John Muir, had set sail for San Francisco from New York in 1868. On the docks in Manhattan, he bought a dozen large maps from a dealer who convinced him that they could be sold for twice the price in California, where everything was scarce.
Muir was a Scot from Glasgow. His father had brought him to the United States when he was eleven and had raised him on a Wisconsin farm. At the university in Madison, he studied chemistry, botany, and geology, and became in his youth a tireless hiker and explorer, once walking from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico and keeping a journal that was inscribed with his name and address—John Muir, Earth-Planet, Universe.
His fascination with Yosemite Valley began while he was recuperating from an accident in an Indianapolis hospital. He’d been employed at a factory where carriage wheels were made and had nearly blinded himself with a file. Machines were his nemesis from early on. An illustrated brochure about the valley caught his fancy, and he started for it as soon as his ship had landed, trekking into the Sierra Nevada on foot.
Muir was as captivated by Yosemite Valley in reality as he had been by images of it. He took up residence on its fringes and supported himself with short-term jobs. He broke horses, harvested grain, ran a ferry from Mariposa to Stockton, and sheared sheep. Throughout the fall and the winter, he tended a flock for Smoky Jack Connel and hired on as a shepherd for Pat Delany in the spring. Come summer, he took Delany’s sheep into the High Sierra to graze.
“We are in the mountains and they are in us,” he wrote of his journey, “kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.”
In the Sierra, Muir hiked and kept notebooks and listened to the sounds around him. He lay in green meadows and slept on a rock in the middle of a creek and knew in those moments out of ordinary time the true character of his calling, simply to exist and to pay attention to existence, close attention, although he did not quite know how he could make it happen.
In the crispness of September, first leaf fall, Muir returned with the sheep to the San Joaquin, but he was back in the valley a few months later and signed on as a jack-of-all-trades to J. M. Hutchings, who, faced with abundant customers, was upgrading his hotel and actually putting wood partitions between the rooms instead of just dividing them with a blanket.
Muir cared for the livestock, pounded nails, led guided tours, and ran a sawmill where, on August 5, 1870, Professor Joseph Le Conte stopped by accident to ask directions to Yosemite Falls.
Le Conte: “Here found a man in rough miller’s garb, whose intelligent face and earnest, clear blue eyes excited my interest.”
He had heard about Muir from his fellow academics, but he was still impressed with Muir’s scientific knowledge, particularly of botany.
Le Conte: “A man of such intelligence tending a sawmill!—not for himself, but for Mr. Hutchings. This in California!”
Muir agreed to hike to Mono Lake with the university crew later in the week. He had his reasons. He believed that Le Conte, as a pupil of Agassiz, the world’s foremost expert in glaciation, might be open to his theory that glaciers had helped to form Yosemite Valley. The theory went against the conventional wisdom. Professor Josiah Whitney, for instance, considered it to be claptrap, in spite of some evidence that his survey team had dredged up.
William Brewer: “We have found so much of interest here [in Yosemite], among the rest finding enormous glaciers here in earlier times, first found on the Pacific slope, that we have been detained much longer than we expected.”
Whitney still held that the work of glaciers was incidental. The primary cause, he said, was violent faulting, the earth uplifted and tilted. Le Conte, in five days of wandering with Muir, accepted the importance of glaciers, though with some reservations, citing in his journal the equal importance of preglacial forces.
Not until Muir located an actual glacier at Red Mountain did he receive his satisfaction. He sent an article about it to the New York Tribune, and it was published in 1871 and rocketed him into the public arena. The author got two hundred dollars, no mean sum for a man who lived on beans and bread.
Ralph Waldo Emerson came to call that year, seeing in Muir the same independent spirit as he had in Henry Thoreau. Though Emerson declined an invitation to camp out—his minders were afraid that he might catch cold—the two men became friends and corresponded with each other. Muir always included, not surprisingly, “Self Reliance” among his favorite essays. His favorite books were the poems of Robert Burns, the New Testament, and Paradise host.
Muir spent the winter of 1873 in Oakland writing stories for the Overland Monthly, but he wasn’t happy. Cities tore at him. He hated the concrete, the poverty, the filth, and the absence of plant life. What city dwellers missed were the seeds of freedom sewn in nature, he thought, but he was troubled by what people did to the wilderness once they’d discovered it. Sheep and cattle were decimating the meadows in Yosemite, and timbermen were topping its virgin stands of trees.
Muir began traveling widely to pursue his botanical studies. He went to Mount Shasta, to Utah and Alaska. In 1880, during a thunderstorm that thrilled him, he was wed to Louie Wanda Strentzel. He was forty-two, and she was thirty-one. Her father, a dentist, had a home in Martinez, in Contra Costa County, where he grew pears and table grapes, and his new son-in-law gradually assumed the management of the farm.
Evidently, Muir felt he had to prove himself to Dr. Strentzel, putting the lie to any notion that he was merely a dreamy mountaineer. The archetypal loner strapped himself into the harness of the Good Provider and threw himself so vehemently into marketing his crops, hassling with brokers and other middlemen, that his health deteriorated. He looked drawn and sickly as he delivered his profits to the bank in laundry sacks. One of his sole pleasures was taking his two little daughters on nature walks.
Muir was ultimately forced by his conscience to rejoin the fray. In 1889, Robert Underwood Johnson, the editor of Century Magazine, visited California to solicit some writing and went to Yosemite Valley with Muir, who was appalled at the continued devastation there—corrals and pigsties, more meadows gone, more trees felled, the landscape altered and looking artificial.
Muir’s defense of the valley would prove to be his last big victory, and out of it would come the Sierra Club, formed in 1892 with Muir as its first president. By then, too, he had knitted a final version of himself as a bearded, lanky, roughhewn proponent of the wilderness, who was cordial and garrulous and affected a Scot’s burr when he had to lay something on thickly.
Although Muir had strong ties to the wealthy and the powerful, such as Teddy Roosevelt, he couldn’t stop San Francisco politicians from flooding and damming Hetch Hetchy Valley, the park’s other jewel. It was located some twenty miles northwest of Yosemite Valley, between Lake Eleanor and the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River. The deal was so firmly in place when a public outcry occurred that it couldn’t be derailed. Along with many others, Muir argued that there were alternative sources of water available, but the press portrayed him as an irascible old coot out of step with the times.
O’Shaughnessy Dam was built in 1923, impounding the river behind a curvilinear concrete arc. Hikers still go to the valley for picnics or to fish, sometimes on the same trails that the Awani and the Pauites used when they gathered acorns to grind in mortars for atch atchie, an edible mixture of grains, grasses, and seeds.
Muir did not live long enough to see the dam. He died of pneumonia at his daughter Helen’s house in the Mojave Desert, in 1914, passing from the earth into the universe with his memories of an unspoiled Hetch Hetchy Valley still intact.