Gloryland (34 page)

S
ometimes the ending you look for is not the one you get. I expected a long dusty good-bye, and I wondered how I could say good-bye to these mountains that had embraced me for nearly half a year.

It would be different from saying good-bye to a woman or someone else you love, cause you can’t hold mountains in your hands like you can a woman, you can’t look into mountains as if they were the eyes of someone you might never see again. And you couldn’t expect the mountains to say your name over and over again or to cry.

It could never be like that, but it was, I thought, a farewell that would hurt. I was anticipating that hurt when I got word that I’d been “volunteered” to spend the winter in Yosemite Valley. I would be assisting a Mr. Harlow, who was the guardian of Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees. Back then California controlled those lands, not the federal government. The assignment meant that I’d temporarily avoided having to leave the national park. But it still meant I had to leave the high country behind, at least for a little while, and that turned out to be hard.

The hurt began with the ride down into Yosemite Valley. I remember the jarring of the Big Oak Flat road, feeling as if both my mule and the ground were trying to buck me off, and the dust Satan kicked up covering everything behind me. Maybe even my mule was afraid of looking back and seeing all that beauty.

There was no one else on the trail that lonely afternoon. There was just the sun going down like I’d seen it thousands of times before, falling slow like it had all the time in creation to go away. One thing
Yosemite’s wilderness had taught me was never be in a hurry. Don’t rush, stop and consider your next move before you start down a trail you’ve never taken. So I pulled on the reins, eased back in the saddle, and straightened my legs till I could feel the stretch in my muscles and joints. I stopped Satan right in the middle of the cloud we’d been making out of the road and watched that cloud trail dust around us with sunlight in its wake. The road was busted up and on fire now.

The world kept moving. We seemed to be the only things that were still. Maybe this was all there ever was, this moment right there, right then. I can still feel the heat of that sun beating on me, except it was more a caress than a blow. It was like a woman holding on to someone she didn’t want to let go. It didn’t surprise me that such a country could give me that feeling of being held on to. I was going down to the valley, and the sun was going down, but it didn’t feel like the end of anything.

Only now, looking back, do I see the beginning of the road that led up to something bigger than myself, and then down to something even bigger. Led to who I would become. On that afternoon when a man and a mule were riding down into a valley, all I felt was good-bye, but the farther we went, the more it started to become a hello.

I thought of the soldiers that would leave me behind, and how maybe it would be a good thing to not have an officer looking over my shoulder when I wasn’t expecting it, at least for a few months. After all, I hadn’t left the army. I was just on a special assignment. But right then, as I peered ahead into my new duty, I thought about the night that was coming, and the nights after that when I’d be on my own, and all the days and nights that would follow.

Now it’s different, cause I can
remember
what came next. I can see the day after that ride into the valley and the day after that, and how all those days and nights overlap in layers, like leaves in the valley in fall after the dogwood and maple trees let go. When you put a shovel into the ground, those days and nights and years are still there, but they’ve become earth. Everything that once was so full of light, calling you to sit and drowse in it, has dropped to its own shadow, and
the world is sweeter after such a rain. There in the ground, with all the dead, those days and that light still burn, and there I see the world for the first time, see how I fit, how everything fits, all bound freely as clouds are bound to sky.

Now I knew my shadow as it fell to the earth, cooled it a bit before moving on. Now I knew you can never have too much quiet in your life, if it’s the quiet that finds you in mountains or forest. You can never have too much light if it’s the kind that falls out of the sky at dawn or dusk. You can never have too much darkness if it’s the blackness between the stars. You can put too much sugar in your coffee in the morning, but the sweetness that fills the air with every step of your mule under you as you amble through a meadow full of flowers, well, how can you have too much of that?

Before Yosemite, I knew a man needed air to breathe and food to eat and someone to love and a feeling that God was looking out for him. I thought that was it. But you also need something else that don’t often get mentioned. Anyone, man, woman, or mule, needs beauty. I’m calling it beauty cause I ain’t certain there’s a name for what I mean, but beauty comes closest.

When I look back over my shoulder at the life I’ve lived, things sometimes get clearer, as if a fog had lifted. Now I see I was riding that day down into the heart of a world people spend their lives trying to find, without even knowing they’re looking for it. And it was a place, a home, a heaven to me. Some folks pray for a sweet hereafter, but it’s already everywhere round us, the air we take in, the light that fills us, and the darkness. It’s where we hope to go at the end, and maybe where we come from at the beginning. It’s the dusty trail winding down to El Capitan, into the cool shadows of black oaks, the wet meadows their roots embrace, and a river, cold and bright, that never stops singing.

I’m struggling to close things up here, but some things never stop flowing, like rivers and creeks never stop pushing logs out of the way. Flowing water doesn’t want to stop. And some stories don’t have endings. A period ends a sentence, makes a thought complete,
but the life inside you is like water, like creeks and rivers, just getting stronger or weaker, and it doesn’t end until you do.

Yosemite doesn’t end until I do.

I could say that’s all there is to my story, but you can’t see my eyes and how they’re still filled with the fire of a sun long since set, can’t see how I’m still breathing in a wind that hasn’t touched the earth in more than forty years. The other day my wife told me I spend too much time living in the past, but I’m thinking, where else do we live? It’s all going away, and it’s all coming back.

I’m Elijah Yancy, a soldier who let go of a place that became part of him but now is held captive by a place that won’t let him go. I’ve been kidnapped by the Range of Light, stolen by the quiet of mountain paths. Somewhere my broken body is rocking a chair, my dear wife is sitting next to me, but my soul is on a mule walking down from a country that knew me long ago.

The reins are loose in my hands, cause that animal knows the path we’re following. We’re riding down into the deep shadows of Yosemite Valley, while all around us the sheer granite cliffs are remembering a day long forgotten, and their memories are like a fire burning on the edges of the world.

I
t would’ve been pretty to end like that, but not every ending is pretty. You’ve probably seen someone after a river or a creek got hold of them, yet they hadn’t been planning on going for a swim. They’re dripping with what they been through and what’s been through them, they’re cold and shaking, hair a mess, and they’re a mess inside, too.

When something you can’t forget gets hold of you, you ain’t pretty at the end of it, but you know one thing that’s true. You’re alive, and there’s beauty in that, God helped me see there’s beauty in that.

Now I’m standing and shivering beside what I just been through. I’m afraid to move and joyful that I ain’t got to if I don’t want to. So I’m just going to sit here rocking beside myself, watching what I’ve been and what I’m going to be flow on past, and do nothing at all. Cause at any moment the ground under me could decide not to be ground no more, could start getting thirsty for water, and that water’ll flow over me again, but different next time, always different.

Big Creek’s never the same from moment to moment, and maybe I’m not either, maybe I’m just as wild and hard to figure. All I know is you got to fight to keep from getting moved in this world, you got to struggle to find silence and be still, cause it’s always storming outside and inside. It’s all moving, and movement is all there ever was and will be.

That little boy I used to be is still lying beside a creek, cold as hell and wondering how he survived the swim. He got my name. He got my story. He got everything I had and everything I thought I lost.
I used to think I could never be that boy again, but all it takes is to be uncertain and afraid and human. Then it’s easy to lose your grip and fall into that creek, let it take you to anywhere you’ve been in your life.

The creek beside my family’s cabin is the same water as every creek anywhere. They all flow into the same place. Each drop of water’s trying to be different, but you can’t fool the clouds and you can’t trick a river. As for the ocean, well, it ain’t got a sense of humor at all, cause it’s felt too much to ever laugh again. It’s either whispering or roaring, and if you listen close to that big water you can hear the voices of everything that was ever put into it coming out of it again.

Water’s got a lot to say cause it’s been everywhere and over everything, maybe that’s why it’s never quiet. But now and then it slows down, gathers in a pool to reflect, and in that place I found enough quiet to know my own soul. And when pieces of me drifted to the bottom of that stream, the biggest piece, full of darkness and light, was Yosemite.

I’m going to stop now, and if I ever have more to say bout Elijah Yancy, I might start off by singing, let the music flow in and around my words like water, cause water is the language God knows best. That’s why tears are easy to understand, and sweat and blood. They’re all mostly water, and what’s left are just words meant to be whispered or sung.

Moving through and moving round, becoming this or that, it’s all the same to rain and to snow that becomes rain, falling on the land and the sea, giving back all that was given, taking away all that’s meant to be.

Big Creek singing and the Ohio River too, the Missouri, the Platte, the Pecos, the Red, the Gila, the Colorado, all singing through what was and will always be Indian country, the Tuolumne and the Merced singing through Yosemite, all that water flowing down the lush green of the Philippines, and the Big Water between here and there. All that water singing in me, all of it singing

The list of those I must thank for making this book possible begins with my whole family. I want to pay tribute especially to my dad and my brother, who both went to war, and to my mother for being the real warrior. I owe my father, James O. Johnson, Jr., gratitude beyond the power of any word or gift. He served in the U.S. armed forces in this country and overseas for more than twenty years, and he was the template in many ways for Elijah Yancy. After so much war, may he finally be at peace. I’m grateful to my brother, James, for surviving Kuwait and Iraq and coming home alive in body and mind, and to my mother, Shirley Johnson, for her love, strength, quiet grace, and inexhaustible kindness. I thank my grandparents, Anna Mae Yancy and Gilbert Nathaniel Yancy, for being the best that people can be; my Aunt Marna for reminding me how acts of generosity leave a sweetness like chocolate in the hands of children; and my son, Langston, for reminding me that miracles really happen, and to never take myself too seriously.