Graphic the Valley (12 page)

I got her to the meadow in the middle of the night, and I knew I would bury her there, next to the lion. I lay with her until it was light. I didn’t sleep. And in the morning, I dug, breaking the ground with a green stick and scooping with my hands. When the hole was deep enough, I laid her in the bottom, her hair tangled around her face, full of sticks. I leaned into the grave and picked them out. Patted her hair behind her ears.

• • •

Lightning walked across the Valley in front of me. No rain, only the blue-bottomed clouds and the white hairs of electricity. White-stacked cumulus above. Light and dark at five o’clock in the evening as I stood on the rim, dark now to the Valley floor like a gray blanket strung in front of the sun. Then the inverted dark, the snow under, white to the river, and the river black as a line of charcoal after a forest fire.

Millions of years ago the surrounding domes were the underground magma chambers of active volcanoes waiting to cool. So this is the middle. The year before you are born
.

In June of 1976, the Jeffrey pine on the summit of Sentinel begins to wither. Park rangers and tourists carry buckets of water to the summit slab to bathe the trunk and roots. But the tree does not survive. After 400 years of living as a scrag penitent, the Jeffrey pine dies in the heat of the next summer, a summer of no water
.

The six spring streams underneath the Arches become one. Then none. Mirror Lake disappears. Finally the Great Yosemite Falls dries up, and there is no Lower or Upper Falls
.

Coyotes steal water from the Camp 4 bathrooms, edging past people like domesticated dogs. Nervous, they drink from the slew behind the lodges. Gulp algae and mosquito larvae, vomit on the Falls path. The coyotes weave the Loop Road and stagger through the campgrounds. They are labeled as “overly social.” Two coyotes per week are euthanized by Predation Control officers, and the population does not stabilize for twenty years
.

The blade of a knife. Flat water. I waited through the winter of the coyote, a male with a white patch on his left flank. I saw him in the gap down the Merced, under the El Cap slabs, the open woods beneath the talus. He was sitting on his haunches with his head tipped sideways.

I was hiking through and stopped to watch. He was only a hundred feet off the road, like the coyotes that hop into cars to steal food when drivers pull over to view wildlife. But no cars came, and he waited, sitting on a rise.

He was watching me too. His head cocked, his one eye turned. I sat down and we watched each other.

The wind came with the smell of snow, the vertical push down into the Valley, the smell of the wet cold, the inversion of the Valley, white on the cliffs above camp that morning, and now the cold air at the bottom of the U.

The coyote sat. I had another mile to go to my parents’ camp, my father sitting on the front seat of the old Plymouth, smoking, and my mother in the back with a book, leaning against the wall and side window, her legs crossed at the ankles.

They spent all day in the car in the fall, with the windows open, transitioning to winter when my father strung a wind barrier on the down-river hillside to protect against the up-Valley blow. December to March, they burned their campfire all afternoon and evening, ran through cords of wood that they’d built up behind the moss boulder. Needing ten cords, my father always stacked eleven going into season.

I told myself that I did not expect that life with Lucy. Not my parents’ life. I did not expect anything.

A pinecone fell near me and the coyote turned all the way around. Didn’t hide his watching me. I clicked my teeth at him, but he didn’t yelp either. I hiked past where he sat, and he let me go.

• • •

My father said, “I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either, but I can’t let that be. This thing,” I said, “other things too, I guess.”

My father was holding the newspaper I’d handed him. “What was it like?” he said.

I drew it in the dirt. “It burned straight out from the back three houses. Straight, straight out.”

“So you think it was arson?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And who lit it then?”

I drew a circle. Fire lines and an arrow. I said, “I don’t know. Who would?”

“Well,” my father said, “they’re going to think it was you.”

“Me?”

“Yes,” he said. He reached and touched the end of the paper to my knee. “If they suspected you on the Miwok forms fire, they’ll suspect you on this one too. That’s just simple logic.”

“But Lucy?” I said. I picked up a rock, stood, and threw it into the trees. “Fuck them.”

My father stood too. He said, “I’m just letting you know. That’s what they’ll think, so you’ve got to be real careful. I’m sure they’re looking for you already.”

“But what if I find out who really did it? What if I find out who actually lit the houses?”

“You can try,” he said, “and maybe you should try. But it won’t mean much. Whatever people think, that’s the truth.”

I went and got three pieces of wood and stacked them next to the fire circle.

My father said, “This is where we’re supposed to be, but no one wants us here. You understand that? We didn’t use to exist, but we do now. Or sort of. Because of all of this, you exist.” My father closed one nostril and blew snot out of the other side. “So you’re going to have to hide for a long time, right?”

• • •

November wet snow that didn’t stick, and I watched from the eaves of the Camp 4 bathroom, hat low over my face, snowflakes flecking and melting behind the Big Columbia Boulder on the worn path. Smelling the old dishes and the food slop in the bottom of the sink. I thought of Lucy. Her telling of rattlesnakes. The way she threw rocks at signs.

Then the big snows, two feet overnight to start December, and I dug a hole down into the Bachar Cracker cave, put a pad and sleeping bag there, decided to winter out the way the black bears and the 1970s Camp 4 drunks used to. Nobody would think of a man returning to this obvious a place.

No rangers came in. The tourists were gone as well, the Valley abandoned. Badger Pass was the only part of the park that was active, and the Yosemite store, but not here. A few scientists and small groups crossed the meadows on snowshoes. Herds of mule deer, sixty or more, stood before them steaming in the midday sun.

I sat on a downed log and watched a fox hunt for mice in the middle of Stoneman Meadow, creeping on his toes before leaping high in the air and turning nose down, plunging face first into the drifts, thrashing with his jaws, clacking at the mice.

I turned around and there was the coyote again. Same white flank, him sitting behind me in the woods on his haunches. He watched me as I watched the fox.

• • •

That was the day I first saw Carlos again. He got out of a park ranger patrol car at the recycling dumpsters past sites 4 and 6, shuffled on the crusty snow.

There was no mistaking his face. The new scar ran vertically from his left eyebrow to his jaw, like a worm stretched against his skin. I watched from the slack-line tree fifty feet away, saw his scar twitch as he checked the bear locks on the dumpsters. One of the steel links was loose and he went back to the patrol car to grab pliers. I watched as he tightened down the wire clasp, fixing gear while the bears hibernated.

• • •

I went south again and tried to see the burn line once more, but the snow obscured the evidence. I followed the banded trees, black to eight feet, touched the trunks, felt the crumble marking the pads of my fingers.

I built a quinzee on the fire line, heaped snow and dug out an upside-down L on the inside to crawl in. I wanted to sleep where the fire jumped the line, turned from a house burn to a big burn. In the middle of the night, I woke up and left the shelter. It was 10 degrees then and I watched the fog of my breath puff in front of me while I followed the moon over the snow. I walked up to the charred skeletons of the houses, back to Lucy’s and her father’s. The house was wrapped in yellow caution tape, the front door still open. I thought about going inside, but there was nothing else to see in there.

I’d read the newspaper report in the
San Francisco Chronicle
: “One Dead, One Missing in Mysterious Yosemite Fire.”

When it jumped the fire line, the fire had burned 10,000 acres to the southeast, wrapping around the Mariposa Grove, and exiting the park. I walked out to the last burned tree on the south side, above the road, a half-mile south of the houses. I leaned against the first healthy tree and looked back, watched the sun come up over the hill to my right, the sun burning the snow light-blue to white, and the burned tree bands staying dark even in the full glare.

• • •

That winter back in Camp 4, there were days when I did nothing. Never left the Bachar Cracker cave. Watched the midday melt refreeze on the inside of the crack along the ceiling, the lichen and granite behind like Coke-bottle glass, greenish, opaque with grit, and I touched it to see if it was as hard as it looked.

I saw the evidence of old warming fires in the bottom right corner of the cave, fifteen feet back, and I picked at the dirt to reveal the oldest fire stains. I wondered how many people had slept where I was. I knew this had been a hunting stop for hundreds of years.

• • •

My father told me about the disappearance of the Anasazi in the Southwest. He said, “They lived on the cliffs, hundreds of feet up. They had elaborate steps and ladders and rope systems.”

“How long did they live there?”

“Oh,” he said, “a long, long time. Maybe 2,000 years. Maybe more.”

“Then what happened?”

“No one knows,” he said. “They just disappeared. No evidence of a great war, nobody taking over and claiming their land. They just went away.”

“To where?”

“Like I said, nobody knows. Maybe they became dust. Maybe they became birds. Maybe they became the Colorado and Green Rivers.” He smiled and said, “They didn’t really become rivers.”

“I know,” I said.

He said, “Their petroglyphs could give clues to the disappearance though. Blowing out a candle on a ledge. Then they were no more.”

I thought of Lucy.

• • •

My parents and I used to read all winter, sitting in the car or around the fire at night. I read now too. In the mornings, when I couldn’t go back to sleep, I read books with my back to the opening of my cave for light. Two Louis L’Amour westerns I found abandoned on the Lodge porch in December. Then three books I found outside the store a couple of weeks later. A copy of
The Grapes of Wrath
, with pencil-written rhyming poems to a girl in the page margins,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, and
Indian Creek Chronicles
. I liked the last one, by Pete Fromm. An inexperienced college boy in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. I couldn’t imagine not knowing the land, not knowing how to tie a half hitch, leaving a coat behind in the cold.

I found a box of books left out in Curry while scoring free coffee in the registration hut. They were cheap paperbacks, mysteries and thrillers, and I took them back to my Bachar Cracker cave and read through the pile during the rest of the winter.

The Yosemite winter of deep snow, four-foot drifts November to March, and I ate little. There wasn’t much to scrounge, just the leftovers in the bear boxes from the late climber season in November: More Krusteaz pancake mix with water, Top Ramen, Nalley chili, and one huge tub of Adams peanut butter that I rationed, two tablespoons each day. I got thin.

In January, when only the peanut butter was left, I hiked past Church Bowl and opened kitchen bags behind the Ahwahnee Hotel, a place where tourists stayed all year for $400 a night.

I ate day-old fettuccini Alfredo out of the dumpster bags, frozen to white cream icicles, crunchy, and wondered if Lucy would’ve eaten this with me, wondered if she ever scrounged food in the park as a child, wondered if her parents sat up late by the fire and waited for her to come in.

Lucy and I would be in Mariposa now, in the fake longhouse with geothermal floor heating, weaving baskets for tourist entertainment. Or would we be in the high country, building our own hidden camp? Avoiding the rangers. A hut out of deadfall, then countersinking a true cabin in the ground, using the below-ground insulation to half-wall height that I’d read about in the LeConte Memorial Sierra books, the cabin I’d always planned.

I’d wanted my father to build a cabin like that, but he’d said, “No, as soon as those cabins are finished, the rangers find them. Those backcountry projects invite them in.”

I thought of our camp at Ribbon Creek and wondered what he was talking about. The rangers never came in. Rangers stayed where tourists stayed.

• • •

I sat at the turn of the Merced below Housekeeping, where the logs jam and the suckers swerve in schools of thirty at the bottom of the fifteen-foot-deep, green-black pools.

I used to come here when I was small, with my father, drop treble hooks baited with mice. Pull up the hand lines quivering. Big, bottom fish with no fight in them, and they lay on the ground gasping, not even flapping their tails at death.

We spent days away from camp the year I was seven, the year after my mother stopped talking, the silence with her like watching a rock grow.

My father told me the same stories over and over. Three times he told me the story of my conception. At first, I was too young to understand.

• • •

He said, “Summer and the heat. No rain July. Two thunderstorms of dry lightning over the Book Cliffs but no rain for a month.” He said, “The details matter.

“That was back when your mother still spoke. ‘Manoah?’ she asked me.

“I felt her there, close, but I did not try. When you are older, you will understand what I mean. I had not tried for a long time. I closed my eyes, pretending to be asleep.

“Ribbon Creek ran down the border of our camp, and I listened to the water. I could hear the individual notes of each boulder deflecting the flow of water from above. It was late summer and the mosquitoes were no longer hungry. I’d left the tent door open so I could see the stars as I lay sleepless next to your mother. Through the trees to the southeast, I looked at the three stars of Orion’s Belt just risen, the first constellation I’d ever learned as a child.