Gloryland (25 page)

Fear is the next town over to Anger, and I spent a lot of time there too, but no longer.

When I got to Yosemite, I found the country of Truth. I’m not afraid here, cause there ain’t no lies to catch me unawares. There’s only what I can see and hear and smell and feel. God don’t make lies, he only makes truth. He made this his country, and this is the place where I finally built me another house, in the heart of Truth.

Trees don’t lie bout how they feel bout air. Trees don’t care that you’re colored. A bear or a river or a canyon or a bird don’t care that you’re colored. It don’t even matter to a rattlesnake that you’re colored. I just don’t matter to Yosemite, and that’s Truth. It’s not about hate here or love, it’s only bout how long and how hard you can hold on, and that’s Truth. Though it’s a hard country, Truth is a place you can live in and die in and have some peace.

There ain’t no niggers allowed in Truth, but all
people
can move to Truth and settle and live and raise families there, and grow old and go to sleep forever. Truth is the country I patrol, and my job is to keep out lies. If I find them in Yosemite, I am to escort them to the border and push them back over into their own country.

Mountains can fill your dreams all night long, but they can’t hold a lie for even a minute. Have you ever heard a redtail cry in the Sierra on the bluest day in a country of stone? That cry is picked up by the rock, made louder, and the mountains hold on to it and sound it back longer than the hawk could ever do. These mountains hold snow all year long, they grip the roots of trees and feel the feet of every living thing that walks this country, but most of all they hold something that can’t melt away or rot or die, and that’s Truth.

I will leave Yosemite one day. I will saddle up my mule and follow an order on a piece of paper that don’t even have my name written on it, but I will do my duty. That day I will not be happy. It will be a hard thing to leave this country, to let go of what holds me so close, to abandon what was so hard to find.

The long ride back to wherever it says on that paper will be hard enough cause of distance and bad roads, but harder still cause I won’t be going home.

S
ome places you live in, but there’re some that live in you, settle in you the way sediment gathers under a stream that’s slowed down. As long as you ain’t moving too fast, the feel of that place builds up in the dark of you, under your heart while the blood flows over. All you got to do is slow down so it can drop out of the sky and collect.

Hetch Hetchy is a place like that, a place that slows you down to a speed proper for a human being. When you’ve been in that kind of place for a while, you start moving at the speed of grass coming up or snow falling down, you ain’t going no faster than a leaf budding out in the spring, and it just feels right.

It happened to me on my first patrol through that valley in the fall of ’03, with Corporal Bingham and Private McAllister. The three of us from Troop K had ridden over on a patrol from the post at Rogers Lake, in the high country north of Mount Hoffman, with orders to check into a report of illegal sheepherders in Hetch Hetchy. As usual, we’d be looking for poachers and other livestock too. It was a long day’s ride from Rogers Lake, and by the time we came over the last ridge before Hetch Hetchy, we weren’t talking much.

All of us were daydreaming as we rode down from a high ridge on that winding rocky trail, almost as bad as the one into Bloody Canyon, the sort of trail where, when you glance over, you don’t see the ground moving under you. All you see is what’s a long ways below.

I was in front when we rounded a bend that brought the valley into proper view. It looked like Yosemite Valley but smaller. You could see high granite cliffs rising up on both sides, and on one
side was a rock face that looked like El Capitan, only smaller. I say smaller, but it must’ve been two thousand feet high, with a face God had cut in half, like he’d been using lightning as a saber. On the maps it was called Hetch Hetchy Dome. Opposite, on the southern wall, was Kolana Rock, which on a different map was called Sugar Loaf. I didn’t quite understand that name, except maybe meaning a loaf big enough for angels. Anyway, it was enough to stop your thoughts and leave you gaping.

That’s what the country was like all over.

In general, we didn’t talk much on patrols, cause the mountains and valleys and meadows kept shutting us up. It seemed like God was usually talking in a big voice here and over there and round the bend yonder, and when God’s talking, you shut up. So we were quiet as we came down the trail and round the last switchback, into a bit of a draw and then the meadows of Hetch Hetchy.

Yellow pines were growing round the edges of the meadows, and alder and cottonwood along the banks of the Tuolumne River, but like always it was the oaks that drew my eye, standing tall and strong and black without a hope of bending. Lying under them were broken branches from storms that got the upper hand, making me think of bones all busted up under a body that didn’t care if the sky was trying to break it in two.

Those oaks reminded me of my daddy. Yeah, Daddy would’ve felt at home in this country.

Before we even got fully into the meadow, I could already feel that this place had me, like the quiet was a hook and I was a fish dangling from it, grinning, happy to be caught and laid out under the blue of heaven. My mule seemed to like it, too. He kept moving his head from side to side and grabbing mouthfuls of Hetch Hetchy growing on both sides of the trail. After a while there was so much grass hanging from his mouth that Satan looked like he had a long green beard.

Yeah, my mule was named Satan, but he was all right. He didn’t much care for people, but he had a hunger for meadows, particularly
this one in Hetch Hetchy. Sometimes I had the feeling that where I ended up was mostly bout my mule’s appetite, and the fact that we were supposed to be looking for sheepherders or timber thieves or poachers, well, that was secondary.

We were there cause I was following orders, and I was on this exact path through the meadow cause I was following my mule. But when I was out on patrol, I was also following my own heart, and most of the time it wanted to be in someplace like Hetch Hetchy. I’d been hearing about this valley since I got to Yosemite. There weren’t any officers around, and who’s to say how long it would take us to do our job here properly? So I gave my men to understand that we wouldn’t be hurrying back. We had supplies enough to camp for a few days, and I already had my eye on a spot by the river near the welcoming shade of some large black oaks.

I mean, what’s wrong with granite rising up like gray church walls thousands of feet high, a ceiling of blue sky and clouds, and a floor covered with wildflowers? Nothing wrong that I could see, so what if we lingered a bit longer than we should have? Seems to me it should be a crime if you’re in a hurry to get away from a place like this. Sundays back in Spartanburg, I remember how if anyone in the congregation got up too quick after the service ended, the deacon would give that person a meaningful look. God don’t take it too kindly when people he’s spending time with just get up all of a sudden and leave.

Hetch Hetchy was a church too, and the deacon was the Almighty himself. In Yosemite I was in church every day, and I didn’t want to offend the Creator by being in too much of a hurry. So that was why, three mornings after coming into the Hetch Hetchy meadows, we were still there and had only just gotten packed up to head back, having found no sheepherders. We hadn’t seen another human soul in the valley all that time, but I couldn’t consider the time wasted.

One thing bout slowing down is you start seeing things you otherwise might’ve missed. Unless we were on an urgent mission where speed was required, I always encouraged my men to move no faster
than the country round them. That way they were more likely to see what was there in front of them.

Maybe that was how I saw those two figures in a distant grove of oaks, south of the river on the other side of the valley. They were so small in the valley’s bigness, at first I wasn’t sure I’d seen them at all. Just two little specks in a big green space with oaks standing alongside them and blackness under the trees, as if shadows that had lost their way in the world had finally found a safe place to rest. Then I thought the specks might be deer, hunched over like they were, until they moved in a way that set them apart from the land round them.

We changed our course, riding toward the Tuolumne River and toward them, and as we got closer, I saw they were Indians, an old woman and a girl around ten or eleven. They were bent over because they were picking up acorns off the ground and putting them in baskets. I looked around again but still saw just the two women, which was surprising. I was used to coming across Indians in Yosemite Valley, members of a tribe called Ahwahneechee who lived in cedar cabins, the children peering out when soldiers rode by or playing outside near the chukkas, raised wooden structures where the Indians stored acorns. Close by would be a roundhouse where they held ceremonies, a low building that was bigger inside than outside on account of it being mostly a hole in the ground with earth and cedar for walls.

But there were no cabins here, and no other people I could see. I wondered if these two were living here all on their own, at the heart of clouds and sky, granite cliffs and tall grass. They seemed so alone in a valley big enough to hold a city.

They saw us too, and didn’t seem happy at the sight. I couldn’t blame them much. I’ve seen very few Indians who enjoyed the company of soldiers, particularly soldiers in the U.S. Cavalry.

As we crossed the river I could feel Satan tense and then ease into the coldness. It was already a hot day, and not yet past noon. We gained the opposite bank and wheeled to the left, but not too sudden. I signaled to Bingham and McAllister to fall into single file instead
of three abreast. I was really working on not presenting myself as an enemy, but then again, it’s just like an enemy to not act like one when they’re closing in.

The woman and the girl stopped their gathering as we came up, and the girl began to cringe and cry a little. Both of them watched us the way you eye a rattlesnake that’s about to strike. I heard the girl say something to the woman, but the only words I could make out sounded like
suntati
and
tuma’ asi.
She kept repeating those words while pointing at my uniform and gesturing at me.

About ten feet from them we halted our mules. The old woman slowly backed away, and the little girl screamed and ran off a bit, but stopped and edged back when the old woman shouted at her. They were both wearing long calico dresses, which seemed out of place in the wilderness of Hetch Hetchy. Like they were wearing their Sunday best, only they were in church all the time, so why dress up for it?

Then I remembered what First Lieutenant Resnick told me about the Indians that lived in Yosemite back before the settlers and the army came, and what happened to them. There were a bunch of tribes with names like Miwok, Ahwahneechee, Paiute, Chukchansi, Yokut, Mono, and Karuk. Most of them just traveled through the mountains to hunt or trade, and some lived here. But around fifty years ago, the Gold Rush brought so many new people into the Sierra foothills that game got scarce. It got harder and harder for the Indians to find food, so they got desperate, and some of them began to raid the mining camps. The miners fought back, mustering up a battalion to hunt down the Indians. They found them, all right, and found Yosemite Valley at the same time, and there was a skirmish. The troops burned the Ahwahneechee homes and graneries, and the Indians got sent to a reservation but eventually scattered in the mountains without food or shelter.