is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Yosemite. AKA Love Letter to Evany, Jeff and Caroleen.
I woke up this morning (just now, it is 8am, I guess I have switched to east coast time somehow because otherwise there is no explaining my early rising this week. Colleen is mystified. It might also have something to do with how my VCB (very comfortable bed) is in Pennsylvania and here I have only a futon that seems to have been in existence since before the earth cooled), thinking about how I have not yet written of Yosemite and White Wolf and the great adventures had therein and thereabouts by Jill, Evany, Caroleen and Jeff aka Candypants.
Poor Jeff got honey all over his pants on Day 1 and from then on there was no rest for him from our teasing. We would take the walkie-talkies that my dad gave us to use in case we got separated and say things like, �Candypants. Come in Candypants. Do you read me?� He would not answer, but we would persist nonetheless. He will never admit how much he loved it. We would also say things like, �Evany Thomas, I can see your ass from here, and it looks good! Do you copy?� Of course the one time we really needed to use the walkie-talkies I could hear Evany but she could not hear me�. I was on North Dome and Jeff, Caroleen and Evany were on some other dome-like substance across the way. I could see their tiny bodies in their tiny outfits. I was waving at them maniacally and telling them that it really wasn�t as far as it looked to get to where I was, and that it was well worth it, do not despair (the day, like every other day we were there, was a day of getting lost and having 8 mile hikes turn into 12 mile hikes, etc., all good). They made it to North Dome nonetheless.
I made it to North Dome an hour or more before they got there because for some reason I was all uppity about getting there, but also worried about my asthma that day, so I didn�t want to take the sidetrip to the granite arch, even though I knew it would be a good sidetrip. I was going to make it to the top of North Dome, I was! So I went off on my own with a walkie-talkie, got lost twice, fell down a scaly granite surface and gave myself stigmata and a huge ass-bruise, radio�d back to inform the crew of how to find the real path instead of the fake stigmata-granting path, and made it to North Dome just in time to see the sun disappear behind some clouds, making for some impressive god rays. The god rays prompted three large birds to engage in a lovely flight dance that I watched for like half an hour. The sun reappeared, and things got HOTT and BRIGHTT. So I found my semi-famous sunglasses, and ate an apple and the rest of my sandwich. Then I took photos. We were just across from Half Dome and higher than the top of Nevada Falls, which we could see across the valley.
That day I got perfect top of the world feeling. The moment that I made it to the top of North Dome, the whole world opened up before me and I had a moment of absolute overwhelming ecstasy, like I would lose my legs and maybe fall and it wouldn�t even matter. So lovely it was, the world all spread out before me was the world as it should be rather than the world that we really do live in. Moments like those are good to have sometimes.
At night there are so many stars. We forget we have them here, too, because we can�t see them. There are many things we can�t see that we sometimes forget we have.
I didn�t read anything in Yosemite this year. Didn�t even bring Nietzsche with me, even though he almost always climbs mountains with me. He was still there. As was Lloyd.
One day during Jeff�s Man Trek, Evany, Caroleen and I drove outside the park to the Hoover Wilderness, to a thing called the Saddlebag resort. Resort should be in ironic quotations marks but is not. We drove up a long gravel road that occasionally would have about 500 feet of pavement. It was a very long road. At one point we saw a falconer. We had no choice but to stop and observe the falconer, because he was talking to a park ranger and the two of them had parked their cars parallel to each other for a conversation even though the falconer wasn�t in his vehicle. They had parked their cars in the to and fro lanes of the two-lane highway so we had no choice but to stop, wait, and observe them. Here is what we observed:, the falconer had on the most amazing outfit. He had on pants. They might have been shorts, but that�s not the part that matters. What matters is that he was wearing one of those multi-pocketed vests that photographers sometimes wear. It was stuffed full, and tight on him, and zipped up. Fine. But then, hanging out under the bottom of the vest, was about six to eight inches of his manbelly. We could not for the life of us all figure out why he didn�t get a larger size vest, or wear a tshirt underneath, or a go-between, or something. I hypothesized that it was like when there is a stain on your shirt below the breast-line, so you can�t see it, and thus it�s like it isn�t there. Plus, this way he gets the breezes. I think Caroleen suggested that he was rocking the muffin-top look now that low pants are in. In any case, he looked CRAZY.
Saddlebag resort is not a resort. It is like a white trash campground. Or maybe it isn�t like a white trash campground, but just is one. The people who work there are very very nice, and they made us barbequed foods, and we had two pieces of very very good chocolate layer cake. The environs were uninspiring, just a man-made lake surrounded by red chipped shale and very pink white people sitting in chairs looking at the lake. After lunch we took a pleasant boat-ride across the lake which landed us in Twenty Lakes Basin.
Just a few steps into our hike we knew we had found a magical place because it was so beautiful that it seemed as if maybe it couldn�t really exist here in this world. It was like someone�s claymation rendering of their imagination of an idyllic Swiss Alps scene. Over and over again, high peaks tipped with snow against relentless blue skies that found themselves reflected in the many lakes, which in turn were surrounded by the greenest grasses ever dreamt up by any creator of beauty. Around every turn, some new unbelievably beautiful sight! And the weather perfect, with warm sun and cool breeze. At one point on our way back out from the hike, Caroleen and I stopped to admire a particularly (criminally) cute scene, and she said, �Man, wish I had my Watchman right now.� Ha. Oh, Caroleen, you and your damned ironic brilliance. You were part of the obscene cuteness of the surroundings and it makes me want to SMASH YOU. With love. Like that puppy at the lunch place during the bachelorette weekend. You, too, are part of the greenest grasses ever dreamt up by any creator of beauty.
Jeff and Caroleen are getting married on Saturday!
On day two of Man Trek, cut to Jeff, who is miserable and hot. And this time I�m not talking about how handsome he is. Or how he is tall and funny and quirky and just the right combination of sardonic and kind. I�m talking about how he is in the valley where it is 90 degrees while we are up at the highest elevations, where it is cool and beautiful. Evany, Caroleen and I hiked up to May Lake (which we arrived at successfully only after following the wrong path for two miles first, due to the terrible terrible choice we made to listen to directions given by a man none of us liked the look of. We had to backtrack and start over. Oh well). May Lake is beautiful, but they don�t let you swim in it because it is the water supply for all the High Sierra camps, including White Wolf. We wanted to swim. But, truth be told, I doubt any of us would have succeeded in immersing ourselves entirely in the snow-melt waters. They was coldish! But we wanted to have the option. We are Americans, and so we think freedom is important.
My plan had been to take the hike to May Lake, rest and eat lunch, and then continue the extra 1.5 miles up to the top of Mt. Hoffman. Mt. Hoffman is in the geographical center of the park, plus it is also the highest peak. So the views from up there are supposed to be fantastic. I was going to get some more top of the world feeling. But Evany was reading Harry Potter, and enjoying the sun, and was resistant to more exertion. This shocked me because usually Evany is the one most keen on conquering a hike. She Will Make It. And she will tell you how many steps it took to get there, because she is pedometer-mad. This is the day on which I had the Emotional Outburst. The one that made Caroleen say, �So what really is going on here?� Indeed.
At first I tried to make the hike alone. But it was really isolated, no people around at all, and we were deep in bear country, and I got scared. I radioed back to E and C to see if they would come join me, and we miscommunicated.
Now, if I had just said to Evany and Caroleen what I just now wrote, about how this hike was important to me and also we were only 1.5 miles from the highest peak in the geographical center of the park so how could we not continue on, I�m sure they would have jumped up and started walking. But for some reason I could not do that. I�m not sure why. It has to do with being thrown by Evany�s unwillingness, hurt by my realization that she would rather read Harry Potter than climb a mountain on our �last day in Yosemite� (which, truth be told, was operating in my psyche on a level of High Importance because I am Moving, but I had not yet realized that this was what was happening), and my age-old inability to ask people for things. That�s right. I cannot ask people for things. It is a problem. I have been working on this defect of my person, but sometimes the headway I have made leaves no evidence, or recedes into the background. So I gave up and cried all the way down the mountain like a girl. A crazy girl. It was no one�s fault. Except maybe my own.
Evany and Caroleen tried to fix it by proposing we do some other things on our way home but in my pathetic state I could only perceive that as insult to injury, meaning that we could do other hikes but not the important one. (Sometimes I am still four years old, too.) So I went back to the tent to brood on my own defects while E and C went off to bathe in a cute stream, because they knew I�d recover with some alone-time and in any case I had left them no ways of helping. Then Jeff returned from Man Trek and he and I sat on a bench and ate cheese and laughed at our two separate adventures of the day. We were a perfect couple because he was stinky and I was congested, so I couldn�t smell him.
We all took showers. We all went to dinner at the White Wolf Lodge. All was fine again.
Mt. Hoffman will be there next year. It is good to have something not yet achieved to look forward to. And that is not only a consolation prize. I have often put off reading the last unread work of a dead author for long periods of time so that I would have something new of his or her work to see at some later moment. In any case I�m sure you perceive that what matters about the week in White Wolf is not which mountains we conquered but the time we spent together there.
11:33 a.m. - August 24, 2005
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