Big Dreams (33 page)

Le Conte and nine other men, the “university excursion party,” were embarking on a horseback trip to Yosemite Valley, which had been designated as a state park six years earlier. Although he made light of the journey, assigning all fears to sentimental women and innocent babes, there was some genuine concern beneath the jaunty surface of his prose.

Yosemite Valley had come to symbolize everything wild in California, every untamed natural force that could not be controlled. Its name was derived from an Awani Indian word that was presumed to mean “grizzly bear.” Even before the Southern Pacific began promoting tourism, J. M. Hutchings, an English writer, was carrying on in his
California Magazine
about the awesome dimensions of the valley, where he happened to own a hotel. Seven miles long, its rocky walls rose to a height of 4,800 feet in some spots.

In salons on Montgomery Street in San Francisco, passersby were moved to gasp at the mammoth-plate portraits of Half Dome and Bridalveil Falls, the work of such expeditionary photographers as Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge. Yosemite Valley was both compelling and disturbing. It outstripped the power of the brain to imagine it.

In Le Conte’s departure, too, you could see the origins of wilderness adventuring as a leisure activity, nascent backpacking and mountaineering, with Everyman and Everywoman cast as Natty Bumppo. The idea of risking pneumonia by sleeping in a bedroll on the ground held an increasing appeal to the stout of heart. If you survived, you’d be a better person, a more fully fleshed Californian.

Professor Le Conte had just turned forty-seven and hadn’t mounted a horse for ten years, but he was determined “not to be an encumbrance to the merry party,” whose goal was to cover about thirty miles on their first day, riding over Contra Costa Ridge and through Hayward Pass. The men got so excited, though, that they pressed on for an extra five miles to Laddsville before striking camp. That proved to be a miscalculation. Le Conte estimated that Laddsville had a mammalian population of about two hundred, one hundred and fifty of which were dogs that barked all night and kept the campers awake.

Laddsville was Livermore now, a town still on a main route to Yosemite National Park, in which the valley reposed. Livermore had a weapons lab, many replicating subdivisions, and some land planted
to vineyards. It had a Mobil station where I stopped to fill my tank on the way to the park. The owner-dealer was Pyung Jung.

It was a lovely, breezy morning, and the hills around Livermore had gone to their summer gold-brown. I thought of the country in Le Conte’s time, of the ranches, cattle, and rippling wheatfields. I saw the saddle-sore, dog-persecuted university crew waking up, the men coughing, farting, and peeing on the campfire embers after a breakfast of bacon, cheese, bread, and good tea, feeling refreshed and comforted.

Ahead of them lay the unknown mountains and their mysteries. The only mystery confronting me was whether or not I’d get a campsite without a reservation from Ticketron.

From Livermore, I climbed over Altamont Pass on Highway 580, where turbines spun with the ecstatic energy of pinwheels to harvest electricity from the wind, and then I- crossed the California Aqueduct, a conduit that brought water from the Sacramento Delta to the San Joaquin.

Turning southeast, I took Highway 99 into Modesto under a sky that was gray with dust, smoke, and chemical fumes. A Rotary Club sign pumped the virtues of Water, Wealth, Contentment, and Health. The town’s founder, William Ralston, a railroader, had refused to let it be named after him, but he hadn’t quite succeeded. “
Muy modesto
,” said his Spanish constituents, commenting on his humility and bestowing a backhanded tribute.

Turlock, Atwater, Merced. The plains of the San Joaquin, and the noon heat ablaze. There were no dams or aqueducts when Le Conte had galloped through. The land was still as arid and very nearly as treeless as the Sahara.

The university crew suffered from parched throats, baked lips, and bloody noses. They saw mirages and had fantasies about water. Their thighs ached and their butts hurt—“an exquisite tenderness of the sitting bones.” One rider, Everett Pomroy, known to the company as “Our Poet,” tried to ease his haunches by sitting side-saddle,
but his mount threw him. Pomroy, infuriated, set the beast right by punching it.

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!
”

A
T 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 were 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.