Day 5.2
A Gentle Hike to Violent Heights:Taft Point
Next on the agenda was a peaceful hike through landscape that looked like it was recovering from prescribed fires. The tall, sparsely limbed pines were sprinkled with bright green moss. Grey-white boulders lay scattered about like pebbles spilled on the forest floor.
“What movie setting does this look like to you?” B asked SonTwo, who was wielding a walking stick he had salvaged from the side of the trail.
“Um … maybe Star Wars. No, no. The movie with the wizard in it, with the staff …” SonTwo mused.
“Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings?”
“Yes, that one, where they are walking through the woods.”
“They walk through the woods a lot. You need to be more specific. I think it looks like one of the scenes in The Hobbit,” SonOne offered. “… where those big wolves were chasing them.” His comment set off a long, rambling debate about scenes from the Tolkien book-based movies, then to wizards, then to the specifications of wizards’ staffs.
As the boys argued and walked, miniscule black lizards criss-crossed the path in front of them, scurrying to shelter in the sparse underbrush. After struggling up a long incline, the hikers coasted down the other side to a flat area that promised easy walking.
AJ spied the danger when she was just a few yards away from it. Nature, in her rumblings and shakings had cut wide, infinitely deep funnel-like fissures into the sides of a cliff which emptied into the valley below. One look at the gaping holes had AJ fumbling for SonTwo’s hand.
“Walk directly in back of me, please,” she demanded as she concentrated on the path, giving the edge of the crevasse as wide a margin as possible.
These small glimpses into great heights and voids were trivial compared to what was at the end of the trail. The main attraction soon came into view: a vast visa of beauty hovering thousands of feet above the Yosemite Valley, an immeasurable void rivaling the Grand Canyon.
“Stay here, don’t move,” AJ said to SonOne and SonTwo as she cautiously followed B up to the edge of the cliff. There is something viscerally disturbing about expansive voids, especially when they occur suddenly, and in close proximity to the trail one is walking on.A few yards from the precipice, she bent down and crouched low to walk up to the edge. Her stomach shivered. The only safety precautions was a small u-shaped railing of pipe stuck fast at the very edge of a small part of the cliff. She squatted and waddled toward it, gripped the railing and stood up.
Everything behind her, in space and time; everything in her world, mind, consciousness and galaxy was blown away in a gust by the sheer devouring emptiness contained within the valley walls. It was so much air and nothingness, it was a jolting, violent contrast in gradient.
“This makes my stomach feel weird,” she said to B, still with a death-grip on the railing. “It’s so …” Beautiful was an ugly word compared to what she saw. “Indescribable” was more apt. “High” was approaching reality, in many senses of the word.
B and Tripod went off and began to click away, recording the view in more expressive media than pen and ink.
“You can come up here now, I’ll hold your hand,” AJ told SonTwo. “Be careful.”
With a little too much hubris, SonOne and SonTwo made their way up to grip the railing. After a brief gander, they both crab-walked back down for … of course, something to throw over edge. SonOne, true to his “Disturber of Nature” style, started toward the cliff with a coconut-sized rock.
“No, SonOne, not a rock. That might be dangerous. You could start a rock slide or something,” said AJ, before he could test the effects of gravity with it.He acquiesced with a chagrined smile and picked up a stone-sized piece of wood to throw over. SonTwo followed his example and threw a pebble-sized piece. The pieces flew over the side and were soon engulfed in the void and the riot of color of the valley below.
There, on one of the many spectacular edges of the earth, it seemed that the wind suddenly had noticed the hikers and found delight in playing with biped and winged creatures alike. It blew AJ’s hat rim up and fiddled with any loose article, strap or flap. The hearty gusts blew through the nearby forest in deafening whispers, the sound undulating like an ocean tide.
While waiting on B and Tripod to finish their work, AJ and SonTwo sat on a prostrate tree, soaking in the scenery.
A black beauty, Raven, glided into view and hovered a few yards away from the ledge, levitating in an updraft for moments at a time, as if it were a mobile attached to the ceiling of the sky somewhere. Then it flew around casually, watching the curious bipeds, trying to look detached and disinterested.
On their way back from the these spectacular cliffs of insanity, they passed a group of hikers coming the other way. An older woman with a walking stick stopped B with a question, “Were there any bears up there? Did you see any?”
“No, no bears,” B assured her.
“Good, then I continue,” she said with a smile, moving on with eager, shining eyes.
AJ’s Raven and Sentinel Dome
Their next stop was a short, steep hike to a small mountain of rock. B’s research and foresight had afforded them a shortcut up a service road, cutting the family’s thigh burn to a smolder. The family made the final hike to the top of the gigantic wind-whipped mountain of granite, the view opening to a 360 degree, un-interrupted view of the surrounding valleys. At the pinnacle, AJ turned, squinting into the distance against the sun and wind, trying to translate what she saw into words. The only descriptions that came to mind were trite and empty, like “beautiful” and “awe-inspiring,” so she stopped trying to understand the experience and just let it sink in, incomprehensible as it was.SonOne and SonTwo found shelter from the wind in pits in the rock and waited in their stony shelters until B coaxed them out for a family picture. The result was sent out to family and friends in December with Christmas greetings.
A few minutes after the obligatory family photo, AJ was once again graced with the presence of a Raven. And as most ravens look alike to humans, she resolved to treat it as if it were one raven, the same that had visited her at Taft Point. It was hers. It was AJ’s Raven. She watched it scope the area for what humans mean to scavenger birds: morsels left behind, scraps to feed on. At the pinnacle she watched as it hop, hop, hopped, then spread its wings to hover above the rock, let the wind hold it aloft.
AJ had been reading Mind of the Raven by Heinrich Berndt and learned a few things about the mysterious birds. One of which is that ravens are opportunists and ravens want to be fed. Ravens go where the humans go because humans have food or can get food easily. Humans flock to places of infinite natural beauty because these places have food for them, of an intangible kind. Humans want to be fed, too.Glacier Point Luck, and Stars
A short winding drive took the family to Glacier Point where, as the agenda prescribed, they would eat hotdogs from the snack shop and stay to watch the stars.
B had a way of quantifying luck into an almost-tangible entity, like snow. Some years had more luck than others. That day, luck was falling thick and heavy, blotting out the drab dullness of disappointment.
Seconds after the family walked into the snack shop, the manager announced that they were closing in five minutes and to “get out” (she used more polite words). B hurriedly chose some cold-cut sandwiches from the fridge as AJ scanned the shelves for something suitable. As they were checking out the manager offered SonOne and SonTwo free hotdogs.
The overlook was a terraced area full of boulders perfect for sitting and stone walls well-suited to keeping people from plummeting to their deaths. It provided a great view of the valley, facing the ever-popular Half-Dome. B claimed a prime spot among the boulders for Tripod and guarded his territory. Nearby, the boys ate their hotdogs and chips. AJ sat a few yards away on a stone wall eating an apple, pumpkin seeds, plantain chips and rice milk. The sun peaked over her shoulder as she sat and ate and wrote.
Ravens weren’t the only opportunist in the park. Little squirrels skiddered, criss-crossing the pavement in front of her; they smelled food.
A man and his two sons walked up the path. AJ watched as the young boys climbed onto a boulder to pose while the dad aimed a camera and tripod at them.
“Now, do you think I can do this in 10 seconds?” the man asked from behind the camera. It was a rhetorical question, though AJ didn’t know that yet.
“Can I push the button for you?” she asked, wanting to be of some help.
“No, thank you,” he said, with a tone pregnant with a tale, “it’s a kind of tradition. We take turns seeing if we can get into the picture after pushing the delay button on the camera. It makes for some fun pictures.”
The crowd at the lookout grew as the light dwindled. Putting the sun to sleep is a spectator sport at the park. The slight chill turned to outright cold that promised to become worse as the sun and it’s glorious end grew more beautiful.
The boulders were crawling with photographers looking for a sweet point of view of a sunset picture of Half Dome. Golden clouds floated behind the mountain range, highlighting the dark, dim of the valley. A park ranger arrived to give a talk and the crowd drew closer. He talked about how the park was controversial in many stages since its birth, including the original concept itself. When AJ stood to stretch she spied her raven circling the spot. The bird eventually landed on a solitary rock ledge towering over the valley. AJ’s Raven was looking for food, but she liked to think that it followed her and was there to feed her, to sate her hunger for wonder, awe and fuel for the imagination.
Eventually the sun took a bow, and disappeared behind the mountains, but left an enduring mark as dusk faded to dark blue. Slowly but surely, stars lit up the sky. The big ones came out first, then the smaller ones filled in the spaces between the constellations.
 |
| At Glacier Point, aimed away from Half-Dome |
The Milky Way pushed through the dark. In Travels With a Donkey, Robert Lewis Stevenson described it as a, “A faint, silvery vapour.” It was the purest night sky AJ had seen in decades. The crowd watched captivated, lying on their backs on the boulders and stone walls. Two shooting stars blinked across the sky.
“We have a moment to look up on the stars. And there is a special pleasure for some minds in the reflection that we share the impulse with all outdoor creatures in our neighborhood, that we have escaped out of the Bastille of civilization and are become, for the time being, a mere kindly animal and a sheep of Nature’s flock.” (RLS, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, Kindle location 737-739.)
TwoSon was balled up like an agitated pill bug with his hat and hoodie tight over his head, uncomfortable in the mysterious darkness.
“We never do this at home. We should. It would be nice, even though we won’t see as many stars.” AJ said. She regretted just a little the strict schedule she kept for the boys. A night with popcorn and lemonade watching the stars (in the sky, not on the screen) sounded like a good, fun and enriching family activity. Sounded like. It would probably play out much differently.
After hundreds of photos and millions of stars, it was time to go. They fumbled to gather their bags in the dark and left the lookout with their tiny, travel-sized flashlights lighting the path. TwoSon needed the assurance and comfort of carrying a light, never having become comfortable with the whole concept of being out of doors at night.
“Point it at the ground,” OneSon kept reminding him, trying to spare the eyesight of any oncoming walkers.
“I know, I know,” Two argued testily, the bright beam wavering wildly in his grip. The light beam caught something large in its beam, a few yards ahead. The family froze in their tracks. It was big and beige and didn’t seem to have a head.
The mystery was solved when a graceful neck and dainty deer head rose out of the shrubs and stared at the family with big, round innocent eyes. It was a doe foraging in the azaleas. She looked at gawkers as if they were strangers exchanging polite ‘how do you dos’ in the grocery store.
“Just having a little snack,” the doe seemed to say as she backed out of the shrubs slowly. She didn’t run away. She moved to another shrub, trying to get out of the light as the family tread softly past.
“Sorry to disturb you, Ma’m,” AJ said to the gentle thing as it pushed deeper into the landscaping.
Not I 
