A Glimpse

April 3, 2016

“I wanted to get going early today, so we could get into the Mauna Kea Beach because there are a limited amount of parking spots and it fills up fast,” B said as AJ came from the bathroom, still-pajamaed and un-showered.

“I didn’t know,” AJ said, bleary-eyed from sleeping in longer than usual. She shifted into rush-gear, getting ready, urging the boys to hurry. When they finally drove up to the Mauna Kea guard station, they were turned away, disappointed, so they settled on Hapuna Beach.

After lugging towels, boogie boards and beach necessities out to the white shining sand, they camped in front of the blue-green, whitecapped water and collectively sighed. B shooed the boys off into the water for boogie boarding. Exhausted from her morning rush, AJ lay back, covered herself with a towel, put a hat over her face and tried to rest.

Prone to chill even in the summer, she lay graciously soaking up the heat, trying to get her mind to calm down, but it wanted to fight. Her thoughts, troubled and exhausted for no discernible reason, climbed and struggled, bustled and pushed their way over a mountain of tangled obstructions blocking visual and thoughtful connections to the lush environment around her.

After half an hour of still body and turbulent thoughts, she sat up to see the boys fighting with weak currents and boogie boards. The scene seemed brighter than before she lay down, the colors hit her eyes in an almost electric intensity, the sweet blue sky and clouds making a surreal picture. Maybe it was her polarizing sunglasses, maybe it was glimpse of what she\’d been searching for.

After some time, the boys trudged back from the ocean, dripping water on the blankets and inadvertently kicking sand on her and B.

“Are you done?” B asked the boys.

“For a little,” TwoSon said.

“Let’s go over there,” B blurted, pointing to a spot at one end of the beach where an outcropping of rocks jutted into the ocean. While AJ had been “resting,” he had been looking for photographic opportunities.

The family picked up and trudged past the group of young men who had built a tarp-covered water slide, past sunning bodies, sand-eating babies, and people-watching people relaxing in beach chairs, over to a sight near the rocks.

B waded out, shielding his dear Camera from the assaulting ocean, to get shots of waves against a background of black lava rock. He was careful, as if shielding meat from ravenous dogs, but the risk was greater than he calculated, the ocean hungrier for destruction than he thought.

The family left Hapuna Beach content and tired, all sporting new red streaks and patches where the sunscreen failed. They drove to a more commercial area of shops, stores and people. At Whale of a Crepe, a food truck parked near a series of farmer’s market-type booths, AJ had an espresso which helped lift spirits. Then Miss GPS guided them to a Target, where AJ bought aloe for sunburns, Cheerios and apples before visiting their next ocean-side adventure.

Kiholo Bay sat at the end of a very rough, car-bottom-scraping road. In the parking lot, high sitting 4WD trucks showed off their prowess by parking on impossibly rocky spots. On the other side of a shallow woods, the beach, more rock than sand, sat pummeled with waves splashing over to fill pools with little skittering aquatic creatures.

There’s not much to do here, so I don’t know what we’ll find,” B warned.

AJ looked up and down the stretch of rocky beach, curiosity mumbling indefinite directions.

“Let’s just walk, see what we can find,” she said.

Before getting too far, B gasped, disappointment frozen on his face.

“I might have broken the camera,” he said in a strangely calm voice considering the event. “All the screen says is ‘camera error.’”

“What happened?”

“Water happened.”

“I need a bag of rice, and may need to buy a beater-camera. I don’t have the lenses I need for my back-up camera.”

While B and the boys walked on the sandy part of the beach, AJ wandered out onto the rocks, preferring the solid, though wet surface. Further inland, tents and campsites sat under shady trees. In the ocean near the beach, a turtle bobbed up to the surface of the water.

On the way to the other side of the beach, they stopped at the parking lot so B could get his back-up camera, and walked on in the other direction.

A strange geologic anomaly, a hole in the rocks filled with ocean water, where a few intrepid souls were taking a dip caught there attention for a while. They walked on, to an expensive-looking house, complete with security. The stringent rules posted about walking only on the shoreline discouraged TwoSon from wanting to explore further.

The next beach, Kua Bay, had a nicer road to it, but the high trucks still showed off by parking with one or more wheels propped up on boulders.

“I win 5$!” AJ exclaimed as they were walking toward the beach. She pointed enthusiastically at a California license plate on one of the vehicles.

It was high tide, the sandy part of the beach was under water, people clung to the rocks, spreading their blankets like sea birds making nests in the cliffs. The family found a spot in the rocks and sat watching people against a back-drop of surreal blue ocean.

Mommas with babies braved what looked to the land-lubber family as an aggressive surf, of aqua blue, almost glowing water. Groups of young men conspicuously watched young women as they lay tanning. Unfazed by his ruined camera, B climbed down close to the water with his back-up camera.

Patricio’s Taquiera provided water, nachos and tacos for dinner a decent price. They scooped and munched in silence. The family was tired and sunburned and OneSon was getting a very sore throat. But there was one more stop, worth pushing through the fatigue to experience.

The last beach on the list was Wowaoli Beach, for the obligatory sunset pictures. At high tide the beach was non-existent, the water rushed up, crashing violently against a cliff of lava rock. As B and Tripod and Camera did their best to record the experience, the boys and AJ wandered around the rocks, eyes on the ground for footing and on the lookout for wildlife, like sea cucumbers and crabs.

On the way home they stopped for a bag of rice. Although most groceries were two to three times more expensive than on the mainland, rice was actually cheaper. AJ picked up five pounds, which B poured over the water-injured camera into a gallon bag.

Black Sand Eden, Lunch With a Gecko, and the Copper-Eyed Cat

April 2, 2016

Sunday morning drew forth gentler than the day before.

“No beach shoes, just hiking today,” B said.

The family started out on a scenic drive through ever greener and steeper landscape, past ranches and stables hidden behind huge dark trees and tropical hedges, tracing winding roads and passing through tiny villages to stop at Pololu Valley Look-Out.

They started down a rock-lined, steep switch-back trail that made AJ’s thigh muscles shake as she descended, pondering every path of her foot. At the bottom, a black-sand beach edged a marshy valley protected by steep-sided mountains, all of it covered in green vegetation. From the beach, ocean water made its way into the valley where a pair of ducks roamed the shores and little fish plopped in and out of the water.

The black-sand beach was flanked by two almost-caves; they looked like the mouths of caves from the beach, but when OneSon explored them, they turned out to be mere indentations.

As the family fanned out on the rocky shore to explore, the wind and surf whispered wickedly, pushing and pulling the ocean in large waves.

The spot was a veritable Eden, the experience difficult to convey. Two-dimensional photographs weren’t enough. AJ, once again overwhelmed with her lack of skill to faithfully describe the place, sat and let the roar of the tide work on her senses, dulling them to any other noise, keeping her attention far out on the endless ocean as she tried to turn the experience into ink.

On their way out of Eden, AJ found a plant she recognized. After growing acres of them in her past life in KY, she could spot them anywhere: a pumpkin (or some large cucurbit-type plant), next to something she’d never seen before: a giant snail the size of lemon.

Giant Snail

The family stopped at the Barbecue Chuck Wagon in the small town of Hawi for lunch, watching a green lizard/gecko thing flit and skitter around the fence as they ate.

Back at the Waikoloa Village Ohana, they rested and checked directions to the next event: Mauna Kea.

Mauna Kea, measured from its base underwater, is over 33,000 feet tall, taller than Mt. Everest. At the peak, it stands 13,800 feet above sea level. Because the oxygen level is so low at the top, only healthy people over 16 years old are allowed up, so AJ and TwoSon were left out of the adventure, only to live it vicariously through pictures and stories. The bus that took B and OneSon and all the photographic trimmings stopped halfway up the mountain where they were provided with a dinner and time to acclimate their bodies to the thin atmosphere. At the top, as evidenced in pictures, they literally stood looking down on clouds.

After dropping B and OneSon off at the pickup point for their Mauna Kea adventure, AJ and TwoSon drove to the Kona region of the island for a tour of Mountain Thunder Coffee Farm.

The coffee farm was tucked away up in the hills crowded with wild exotic plants, mist and thick jungle. Their basic tour offered a peek into the facility where they sorted and roasted the precious unique organic coffee, but all TwoSon was interested in was the farm cats.

Coffee Farm Cat

Coffee Plant

The tour guide seemed tired and bored, and didn’t want to be there, but he picked up a little steam and put a little pep into the tour as tourists plied him with questions. In a gesture of supporting small farms, AJ bought holy-cow-expensive coffee as gifts and some weird Hawaiian tea.

Too pleased with herself for navigating new and exotic territory, while driving away, she stopped at what would have been a STOP in Michigan but was just a YIELD in Hawaii and earned the arms-up-in-ire sign of a resort woman in a white Mini car. Racing to catch up with and learn the traffic patterns (and to redeem herself in the eyes of the white Mini) she sped off to the Mauna Lani resort where they were promised a short hike featuring petroglyphs, pictures carved on rocks. But it wasn\’t what held their curiosity at the place.

Pulling in, the creatures weren’t immediately visible, but after she parked the car, they seemed to be everywhere: cats, lounging on sidewalks, parking spots and underneath bushes, along with weird little red-eyed weasel-like animals darting here and there amongst them.

The Copper-Eyed Cat

“I wonder why the cats don’t eat those little rodents?” AJ wondered. Later, when she found out that the rodents were mongoose, she understood. The cats aren’t stupid. They knew what they could eat, and what would eat them.

A Petroglyph

With a little confusion, AJ and TwoSon found the trailhead to the petroglyphs, where an orange cat with dark-orange burning eyes befriended them, snatching leg-rubs as they walked. The trail was overgrown with curiously spooky trees. The low, angled, twisted branches of the ancient trees gave it an eerie feel and the little burnt-orange feline companion who followed with unflinching devotion added to the strangeness, especially when he looked up at AJ, meowing for affection, seeming to urge the hikers on, deeper into the aged wood.

The Petroglyph Trail

After fifteen minutes of the creepy, close, rocky trail and at the insistence of TwoSon, they turned back, hurried to the car, the sweet orange cat following, meowing in protest. The sad fact of the unowned cats lounging under trees, and the one rubbing against their legs, all culminated in a numinous discomfort they were glad to leave in the forest.

On their way back, they stopped at the grocery store for some dinner items then waited to pick up B and OneSon from their mountain adventure.

The first two days in Hawaii had been nice, but something was missing. In 2014 on their trip to CA, AJ was bathed in wonder and awe, sparked by differences, big and small, from her usual life and environment. Where was it now? It hadn’t made itself known, yet differences, gradients of the grandest scale were all around her. Exotic tropical plants made up all the vegetation she saw, the beaches were lined with black volcanic rock sand. It took mere minutes of driving for landscapes to change from verdant lush forest to flat prairie to ocean fronts to lava-paved wastelands. These things were all within her eyes’ view and mind’s grasp, but came sterile and fruitless to her thoughts.

Maybe it was because she was so accustomed to beaches in the Michigan summer, that the Hawaiian ones didn’t feel right. Maybe she hadn’t acclimated to the heat. But no, it was something more nagging. It seemed as if she unwittingly packed worry, fatigue and the cares and concerns of home and carried them around HI where they didn’t fit in. These dreary weights came between her and awe. The heavy grey veil they made was difficult to move.

But hope lay ahead in time and space; they still had a few days left, and the eastern half of Hawaii Island. It was too soon to grieve for awe, but the void left an unexplainable pain.

Thanks for reading!

Ponder the Path of Your Feet

April 1, 2016

The morning came slowly to the Eastern Standard Time Zone family as they soaked up sleep confusedly to wake at 6 AM Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time.

Showers, breakfast, and imperfect preparations filled the hours before their first Hawaii beach experience. AJ collected water bottles, Agenda, maps and sunblock and stuffed them in her bag.

“Did you pack spray sunblock?” asked B.

“No. I saw you packed lotion and thought we didn’t need it.” AJ said.

“Do we have spray sunblock?” asked OneSon, coming out of the bathroom.

“Aargh! No. I didn’t want to overpack and thought one bottle of lotion would be enough,” AJ explained, exasperated as she saw the flaw in her thinking. OneSon is a biggish person and it would take a lot of greasy lotion to cover his paper-white back.

“Lotion will have to do for now … if we’re near Costco, that’s the best place to get it,” AJ said, trying to problem solve fast.

On their way out, B grabbed a boogie board and beach towels which their host, graciously provided, along with Tripod, camera, bags and a dozen more “we might need this” things.

The family left their basement Ohana with the unlockable screen doors open, unsure whether to close them or not, a fact that sat stubbornly, sparking in the back of AJ’s mind, ready to explode into a blazing regret upon their return.

B drove the rental south on highway 89 (Queen Ka’ahumanu Highway) while AJ played navigator to get them to Kekaha Kai State Park** . “Between mile marker 90 and 91 take the rough road …”

The road to Bodie, CA (See entry for 2014 Trip to Bodie, CA) was civil compared to this wild exotic path. The road to Bodie was predictable, like a washboard, all the way to the ghost town. The road to Kekaha Kai State Park stumbled through acres of a’a (jagged and brownish lava) and pahoehoe (smooth and black lava), the path ground down and smoothed out enough to designate it a road, but leaving crevices, gullies, cracks and ridges appearing at random. The white Hyundai crept along the lroad, fields of rough sharp lava threatening from both sides.

“Oh, look, there’s a min-van behind us,” B said, craning his neck to see the rear-view mirror.

“Maybe it’s a SUV or a cross over?” AJ asked incredulously.

“Nope. Minivan.”

“Good for them,” she said, cringing against the sound of the car scraping against a jagged rock in the road.

Once parked amongst 4WD, high-sitting vehicles, they loaded up with essentials, then walked along a trail, the dry heat and burnt smell radiating from the lava fields surrounding them. The family paused at a pleasant beach with a few abandoned structures, but didn’t stop at the picturesque place. A copse of elegant palms held their attention as the boys crawled over larger lava rocks. A black goat made an appearance, coming in and out of view as they walked. Past the trees, the trail opened to a rough path of slightly smoothed lava rock for 1/4 mile of ankle turning, hot, but not dusty hiking. The lava rocks rattled like broken pieces of crockery beneath their feet.

“Ponder the path of your feet, then all your ways will be sure.” Proverbs 4:26

There was no better advice for hiking Hawaii. This was the first of many hikes where one was forced, because of the unevenness of the trail and the dire consequences of tripping and falling , to step cautiously, head down with eyes ever-searching for a firm spot to land one’s foot. To take a picture or take in a sight, it was best and most safe to stop or face the prospect of falling onto sharp lava rock, which guaranteed blood loss.

The family paused at Makalawena Beach**, but passed the tropical oasis in search of an even more secluded spot.

They passed over another rockier 1/4 mile through a barren plain of lava.

“Could I see the directions?” B asked AJ.

AJ’s mute expression spoke for her, “You want me to take my backpack off, swing it around on my knee, open it, rifle around for the Agenda, then when you’re done with it, I’ll have to stuff it back in, close up the pack (so nothing falls out), then hoist it back onto my back. I’ve done this forty times since getting out of the car and you want me, in this hot weather, to do it again?”

“Okay, maybe not,” B rethought his request, looking as if he’d disturbed a mother bear and her cubs.

“Okay, okay, sorry,” AJ acquiesced, and went through the awkward motions of getting out the Agenda, then turned to the specific directions for the trail they were on. “Can I rip out the page and just give it to you?” she asked.

“No.” B said, glanced at the directions then handed it back to AJ.

B finally stopped under a tree to sit and rest at Kahoiawa Bay. It is a secluded beach of aqua marine blue water, capped with the frothing white fury of the waves, which hit piles of lava and sand, kicking up pieces of white coral to dot the black lava rocks. There were only 4 other people on the beach.

OneSon and TwoSon took to the water, B to his camera and the watery waves, while AJ stayed under the tree,writing notes in the cool breeze, wild goats chomping a few yards off. To eyes accustomed to the din grey of naked trees, cold grey skies and dead brown grass landscapes of early spring in Michigan, the colors of the beach seemed unreal and almost freakish in the strong sunlight.

Grand Mere State Park, Michigan, March 2016

“We found Saucy Craboo!” TwoSon ran up AJ, announcing the discovery of a crab. (See We Bare Bears cartoon for reference). Only a Michigander would be so enthralled at the discovery of a crab on the beach.

After a few hours of lulling under the palm tree, watching goats, strange little birds and aqua waves crash against a black shore, they trudged back to the black lava trail, across the lonely rocky fields to the car. B drove carefully over the rough lava road (which, the instructions said, used to be a lot worse) and followed Miss GPS Lady’s instructions to Costco to buy spray sunblock, macadamia nuts and lunch.

Kahoiawa Bay, Hawaii Island, April 2016

It takes some time to awaken a Michigan body used to 20 and 30 degrees to let loose on a Hawaiian beach with the strong sun, salty water, crabs and wild goats looking on.

And this family was no different. It was a slow start. After lunch, they wandered to Beach 69 (Waialea Beach), which was once a military training ground, apparent by signs warning them there may be “undetonated ordnances” and if found, do please call 911 immediately. The beach was a sprawling stretch of sand, lined with huge trees stretching their thick limbs toward the ocean, serving as the perfect protection from the strong sun.

“What’s up with the naked kids?” AJ mumbled to B as they settled between the branches of a lanky old tree. She counted three happily nude toddlers on her way in.

“It’s Hawaii. That’s what they do here,” B said.

OneSon tried to make the boogie board work, but his goggles broke. He tried to snorkel, but the water wasn’t calm enough.

Frustrated at the slow start to fun, B sat disappointed under the shade. He thought that when presented with a beach the family would automatically jump and frolic maniacally while he took pictures. It didn’t seem to be happening.

A mild regret pricked at AJ. She didn’t wear her swimming suit.

“Maybe if we move to the other side of the beach … the waves look stronger there,” AJ suggested.

At the new location, AJ watched the infinite pull and push of the aqua water from her perch on a sagging tree limb. It took OneSon a few tries at the boogie board until things started to look more like vacation fun. OneSon managed to ride a few decent waves onto the shore, then TwoSon tried his hand at it with some success.

Hunger called them away from the sand and surf to The Seafood Bar in Kawaihae, to eat amongst noise and bar conversations drifting over to the dining room where the family sat.

They made it back to Beach 69 (named so for a utility pole that stands in the parking lot with the number 69 on it), to catch the sun go down, then drove the dusky road back to the basement Ohana in Waikoloa Village, salty and sunburned every one.

A Note on Beaches and the Fair-Skinned: The family lives in Michigan, within a five minute drive of sandy Lake Michigan beaches. In popular thought, beaches represent relaxation, vacation and fun. Although often a nice change of scenery and a rich source of geological curiosities, AJ did’t see them as such. Because of a long history of working in the sun and being a redhead, her beach garb was a layer of the highest SPF sunscreen available, a wide-brimmed hat, a light, long sleeve shirt, a towel over her legs, and sunglasses. With the threat of sunburn and subsequent melanoma ever-present in her mind, it was hard to peal off the protections and breath easy, to relax and get her feet wet in the warm water (and there were jelly fish and turtles and salt and sharks in the ocean–additional threats that are unknown on MI beaches).

**The author can be generally certain about the locations of large areas on Hawaii Island, but as to the specific beaches they visited, with the beautifully native names and the seeming endlessness of the beaches, one spanning into another, she can’t be entirely certain of the accuracy of the smaller beach names, especially in Kekaha Kai State Park.

Thanks for reading!

Reviving Wonder

March 30, 2016

Four steps to Hawaii Island from Michigan:

1. Drive to Chicago, stay one night in a hotel.

2. Park car, take shuttle to the airport, get on an early morning flight to Honolulu.

3. From Honolulu get on a plane to Hilo, Hawaii Island.

4. Get rental car, drive to rented house in Waikoloa Village.

Step one started out dreary and grey, the highway to Chicago lay drenched in rain, the skies veiled in ominous grey. AJ sat quiet in the passenger seat of the family car, sighing at times, mumbling roadside observances, eyes closed, waiting for the next step. The start of the family’s great adventure felt burdensome with exhaustion leaning so heavily on her mind and body. Experience told her that the tired sluggishness was not permanent, that her presence of mind and anticipation of the marvels and wonders that lay before her would be restored with rest. With rest, she would be able to see again, to anticipate awe, to smile at the smallest things.

She had pushed too hard that day. After fulfilling commitments in the morning, she spent hours packing and preparing so when it was time to get in the car, she was spent, foggy and too tired to think straight.

A minute after the family settled into the chilled hotel room, she changed, crawled under unfamiliar, clean-smelling sheets and fell asleep.

March 31, 2016

Dreariness persevered through the night to greet them in the morning, darkening the cold wet Chicago skies, whetting everyone’s appetite for sunshine. Rain tapped on the windows as she had tea and oatmeal with TwoSon in the hotel lobby.

Leaving their car on the roof of a nearby parking garage, they rode a swaying shuttle to the airport to wait and shuffle in long lines only to fumble with shoes and jackets through security. It took only a few minutes sitting at the gate before they queued up again to await boarding their plane.

The plane sat a few minutes longer than usual at the gate, waiting for a lightening storm to pass. The night’s sleep wasn\’t enough to bring her curiosity back, she needed more, but knew it was futile to try in the noisy, uncomfortable seat. The longest part of step two lay before her, 9 hours and 29 minutes of searching for inspiration and wonder in a stale airplane cabin full of restless, sun-starved travelers.

Unable to find distraction or rest in anything around her, wonder and curiosity blotted out by a thick sheet of exhaustion, she let an audio recording of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped play in her ears, and dozed for short moments, the words drifting in and out of comprehension.

By the end of the first four hours of flight, AJ’s mind had scrimped, saved and conserved energy gleaned from sitting and closing her eyes, added it to the small drifting sleeps to resurrect her actively awe-seeking mind. With the help of a cup of coffee, observation, anticipation and love of travel came into view on the mental horizon. But her physical eyes couldn’t see it yet, all that was in front of her was a seat-back screen and jaded magazines. To fill the time, she nibbled an orange, apple and some nuts, then opened a bad print-on-demand copy of Reflections on the Psalms by CS Lewis.

A woman a few seats away coughed hard, not a throat-clearing, but a sick cough. Sneezes punctuated the cabin’s hushed rush of noise. The man across the aisle blew his nose loud, wadded up the tissue and stuffed it into the seat back pocket. AJ resisted cringing at the diseased sights and sounds. Beside her in the seat, OneSon slept, his head against the closed window.

A couple nearby traveled with a small child, maybe 4 years old. For the first few hours, they sat together, the child napping on his mom’s lap. Then they split up, the husband/Daddy moving to an empty seat a few aisles away, to wherever his son wasn’t. The toddler was too much for the 90’s-music-video-watching (he watched them on a large screen laptop, so everyone around him, whether they wanted to or not, could enjoy them too), loud-nose-blowing man, leaving the Mom to do the heavy lifting. The little boy kept seeking out his daddy. His daddy kept changing seats to get away from him.

The little passive-aggressive game of “Stay Away From the Annoying Toddler” played out for hours until the plane landed. AJ looked at B, sitting in front of her with TwoSon at his side, and her heart filled with appreciation and gratitude. Although the boys were older now and didn’t need much help, when they were young, B always paid special attention to them on long trips, making sure they had plenty to do on airplane rides.

Confusion reigned when they landed at Honolulu Airport. Repeated announcements told the family they had to take a shuttle to another part of the airport to catch the flight to Hilo, but in order to catch the shuttle, it looked like they had to leave the airport. B walked on, AJ questioning whether leaving the building would require them to trudge though security again.

But the Midwestern family didn’t realize that they were in Hawaii. Things like airport terminals were outside–there was no snow or freezing temperatures to keep out, but not a lot of cheap power, so no air conditioning to keep in. They did have to go outside the airport to catch a shuttle. Finally, after asking fragmented questions like, “Wiki-wiki shuttle?” of uniformed employees, they got on the right bus that took them to the right gate so they could wait, again.

A puddle jumper, the interior decorated in aqua and pink made a quick trip to Hilo airport. AJ sat in a light-drenched seat and watched the sun disappear into heavy grey haze as they flew by a mountain island surrounded by mist.

The air at Hilo Airport had a woodsy, burnt smell. The skies were overcast and dim, but nothing–rental car desks, gate check-ins–was enclosed, everything open, with just roofs to keep the misty rain off.

The family hopped into a white Hyundai after documenting scratches on the body, and headed down the road.

“I’ll give 5$ to anyone who spots an out-of-state license,” AJ said as they pulled up behind a jacked up Toyota truck, the rainbow on the the white background license plate right at their eye level.

As they thread their way through what looked like small town Northeast USA (except tropical), AJ reveled in the sights. Palm trees and house plants grew happily outside. Neat little stilted houses lined the roads: sprawling ones, just-holding-together ones, ones that showcased their stuff on the lawns. The neighborly streets turned into Saddle Road, a deserted highway covered thick with fog for the first 20 miles, lacing lazily through small hills and seemingly random piles of rock.

But they weren\’t random piles of rock. The road ventured bravely through the middle of fields of rough lava–irregular, brown, dirt-like clods piled up, chunks here and there, punctuated by small patches of smooth, black-obsidian-like swirled rock.

The car climbed steadily up an incline, a few impatient Jeeps zoomed past. Probably islanders sick of following tourists.

Miss GPS’s directions led them to a house–the family’s first AirBnB experience. As they pulled in, the host, Shane, greeted them and showed them their Ohana–or home–for the next 4 days. It was the basement of his house: 3 big bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a spacious living room and a kitchen.

“We’re staying at a house for vacation. It seems not so vacation-like to cook and do laundry,” AJ had complained a few days before. The minute she entered the basement space, she regretted the spoiled-brat, whiny bad-attitude it betrayed. No, now, in the tired warm light, the kitchen and laundry were absolute God-sends. Laundry, dishes and cooking in Hawaii, even if that is one’s never-ending job at home in MI, was an amazing opportunity and privilege. “We’ll only need breakfast, we’ll be out for lunch and dinner,” B said. Spoiled brat AJ.

After unloading the car, they went to the nearby grocery for a few breakfast things, at twice the price they were used to.

Irrigation sprayed every morning, a banana patch grew behind the house, tall palm trees lined the property. An elementary school was just a few blocks away. Early Monday morning, plodding little voices drifted in their open windows, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

A Disney End

Day 9

Just a few steps into Disneyland a humbling realization overcame AJ’s cool attitude toward the amusement parks: Disney loved story. Disney had been “bringing the story to life” all around her in California Adventure the day before, but she was too busy trying to ‘get fun’ and adjust her overloaded senses to pay attention to it. AJ loved stories too, the older the better. However reluctant she was to side with the thrill-hocking media giant, she could not deny that Disney was brilliant with stories.

Once in Disneyland, after passing under Cinderella’s diminutive castle, the first story the family experienced was Peter Pan. J. M. Barrie created Peter Pan in 1902, as a character in the novel The Little White Bird. Two years later, he wrote him into a stage play called Peter Pan, or The Little Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. The ride at Disneyland pulled the family in small cars over tracks through darkened spaces flanked by dioramas depicting scenes from the 1953 Disney movie, Peter Pan.

Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride was next. AJ sat with TwoSon in a small car that rode on tracks through darkened spaces with scenes adapted from Mr. Toad’s character in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.

AJ’s mind and mood had to switch gears with every story through which she rode. Star Tours put her on a space transport a long, long time ago in a galaxy far away. In Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters, she was in a moving, talking-toy infested carnival game. Then she was a cruise patron sailing down the Amazon, witness to poachers and wild animal antics on The Jungle Cruise ride. In the Enchanted Tiki Room, she enjoyed a cool place to sit and rest while birds of all kinds literally sang songs. AJ was plunged into a wild drive through the darkened tunnels of an archeological dig, trying to get away from hostile thieves in Indiana Jones Adventure. Then bobsledding.

Mickey\’s Clothes Washer

After being bumped and bruised by the Matterhorn Bobsleds, AJ realized she was getting old or sick, because the more thrilling rides hurt more than delighted or thrilled.

Every ride or attraction presented the park guest with a fiction story: nothing was real. The rapidity of the story presentation was sometimes jarring and disappointing to AJ, who loved the slow portioning of detail and minutiae found in the tomes of Dickens and Tolstoy.

The cartoon-come-to-life village of Mickey’s Toon Town tickled her fancy. The buildings and homes were built as they appeared in cartoons. She walked through Mickey’s house, Minnie’s house and Donald’s boat with child-like wonder.

“it’s a small world” had no jarring jerking bumping aspects, but was a gentle boat ride through a white and gold castle full of doll-puppets singing “It’s a Small World” ad infinitum.

“That was creepy,” TwoSon said as their little boat came out into the sun at the end of the ride. Chanting dolls protesting cheerily for shrinking the size of the world: yes, that is a little creepy.

The family had lunch at a restaurant that was modeled after a hoe-down barbeque: all-you-can-eat ribs and chicken with live music and singing.

“I heard a quote by someone saying that dinner music was a nuisance,” AJ said as they settled at their picnic table covered in red and white gingham. “I think it was Orson Wells or H.G. Wells or …” her words were drown out with country music. There was a man playing the fiddle and a woman playing the guitar and singing on the stage nearby. “In some aspects, I agree. Not to be mean, but you can’t really talk, the music is so loud. It’s hard to have a normal conversation,” she said. A few minutes later, the singer and player left the stage.

“Well, now it’s quiet,” B said, in offense against her position, “talk about something.”

Silence.

“Well, talk.”

“It doesn’t work like that, she said laughing. It has to be organic … like this.”

After a slow trudging walk through Innovations, a showcase of past and future technology, the family split up. AJ, OneSon and TwoSon went back to the hotel, and rested for a few hours while B and Tripod shot more pictures (“It’s only a few blocks from Disney … we can walk there!” B said when they first arrived.”)

Once at the hotel, AJ crashed. Sometimes one doesn’t know how tired one really is until a chair is presented. She sat by the hotel pool, watching TwoSon splash and play, while OneSon stayed in the hotel watching American Pickers.

Once back in the park, they waded through crowds waiting to see fireworks and met up with B. They were whizzed through the air on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad roller coaster as fireworks sparkled in the sky overhead. On one of the thrilling turns and twists of the ride, B lost his hat.

Time in the park was running down, concession stands were closing, a few employees had brooms and dustpans out, getting a head start on the nightly clean-up. The family hurried through a sea of people toward the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, but were delayed by a rope across their path. This was where the thrill-seeking raging rivers of humanity became a stagnant stinking pool.

Two Disney cast members (employees) stood in front of the blockade, explaining the delay. It was “to give the people down the way time to clear out from the fireworks show.” Traffic control. An older Asian man attempted to make our wait more pleasant by asking some tidbit-based trivia question. It was a classic Disney tactic, an effort to help make the many “waits” in the park less unpleasant. A boorish young man intent on getting instant gratification cupped his hands to his mouth and yells, “Who cares?” in response to a friendly factoid put forth from the Disney cast member.

Snickers from a nearby couple (childless, of course). A few childish adults joined in the heckle-fest. The young brute, spurred on by his verbal supporters yelled, “Let us through, you (racist epithet)!”

AJ who was standing next to him looked over and said, “Whoa!”

The father of the boorish mini-brute stared down at the boy with an iron glare. “What did you say?” he growled.

“Is this what we want to teach out kids?” a woman’s voice of reason and patience asked, but she was drowned out by complaints and anonymous verbal hostilities.

“I have pitchforks and lit torches for sale,” AJ mumbled, alluding to the strange, lynch-mob like mentality that the Happiest-Place-on-Earth visitors suddenly displayed.

AJ’s experience soured at the sudden turn in attitude of the crowd. It felt as if she were in the most impatient and kinda mean oasis on earth, inside the happiest place on earth at the moment. Disney\’s panoply of stories took a dark turn from happy, thrilling fantasy to grungy realism.

At Disney, customer desire wins, and before a verbal rude vs. patient conflagration could get going, the rope was lifted and Boorish boy and father ran off, with Boorish boys’ mom far behind, no doubt.

Go, go, go, get there first, get the most, get more than anyone else, be the winner: it polluted every human being in some disguise or another. It is the competitive ‘survival of the fittest’ seed, deep down in our broken humanity. It was especially ugly when the stakes were so shallow.

AJ was disgusted by Boorish Boy’s attitude and disrespect, but she also knew that the same flaw was in her. She might rarely speak or act on it, and never in reference to Disney rides and jollies, but she knew it was there.

Day 10 The Last day

They were supposed to sleep late, but AJ couldn’t seem to make her body rest. At six in the morning she stared at the ceiling thinking about the most important event of the day: getting to the airport on time. Untimely scenarios ran through her mind, flowing forth as a small underground stream of anxiety that ran underneath every hour of that morning. Home awaited her at the end of the day, but between her and MI was :

Two hours in the Downtown Disney shopping area with breakfast and Lego and small gift shop purchases.

A walk back to the hotel.

An expensive cab ride to the airport, while towing one huge suitcase, two regular sized ones, and various bags.

A three and a half hour long plane ride.

The uncomfortable airplane ride went by quickly while AJ relived the vacation by adding to and editing her notes from the previous days. There was no time for pensive sweeps of the airplane cabin, people watching, audio books or analyzing advertising messages, she had to fill in the spaces in her notes, in ink, on paper before they faded in her mind.

The family arrived at and left Chicago airport, were Uber-ed back to their car, made a short stop at TacoBell/KFC on the highway, then arrived home, and stayed there. They greeted their bleary eye-ed fur family (the cats had been sleeping when they arrived at home), and dropped wearily and happily into familiarity.

Another adventure of a much sobering and different kind loomed in the family’s near future: school started in two days.

This concludes the Not I series Travels with a Family in the Sierra Nevadas. Thank you for reading.

California Adventure: The Disney Version

Day 8

“I don’t hate Disneyland … for long. It takes me an hour or two to get used to it,” AJ said to B as they were waiting in the first line of the day at the gates of California Adventure along with thousands of other fun-seekers. Coming from the relative peace and subdued attractions of the national park trails to the rush, rush, “get all the fun you can” of Disney jarred her obnoxiously the moment they set out from their hotel that morning.

B was trying to instruct her, using football play-like words, the strategy for getting on the first and most popular ride of the day, Radiator Springs Racers. “We’ll execute the wide right strategy. You follow the crowds to the left, but stay to the right of the crowd, and I’ll go get a FastPass* so we can ride again without waiting,” he said. But when OneSon and TwoSon were debriefed, TwoSon chimed in to say that he wouldn’t want to go on the ride again, so the FastPass ticket option was dropped.

The ride consisted of cars based on vehicles from the movie Cars zooming around a track in a make-believe race. In the end, the ride was a little disappointing compared to the many winding car rides they had been on through Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks.

Toy Story’s Midway Mania ride was next. After a pleasant, fun-filled ride and game where passengers shot lights at targets, but before the family got out, the ride stopped. And it didn’t start again. They were stuck, prisoners in their seats for twenty minutes until the apologetic staff came and unlocked the lap bars. In exchange for their unamusement, they were compensated with Fast Passes to any ride they wanted.

B, OneSon and TwoSon rode Luigi’s Flying Tires next. They were bumper cars that looked like giant wheels. AJ watched from a thin slice of shade on the sidelines.

Next, they roamed through air-conditioned gift shops hiding from the ever-oppressive heat. AJ and TwoSon boarded The Golden Zephyr, suspended rockets, and twirled in the scorching sun. Then Goofy’s Sky School, a roller coaster, then Churros.

For lunch the family sat in the cool of an Italian restaurant where AJ ate a dry salad, then another dry salad, this one with cannelloni beans, then a bowl of blackberries for dessert.

After getting splashed and cooled on the water ride, Grizzly River Run, they sought refuge from the heat in a theater and watched a theatrical rendering of Aladdin.

Grizzly River Run

TwoSon enjoyed being splashed so much that they headed for the water ride again, but it had broken down.

The heat and fun had secretly been sapping their energy all day, and when they sat down to rest, it pounced outright. At this comma in the day, B went off to take pictures and AJ and the boys stopped at a cool little food shop for dessert. The family met up with B on a deck like structure by the lake and waited for the sun to disappear for the nightly World of Color show.

Throughout the water and light show all AJ could a think of was sinking her teeth into a slab of meat. Her noon-day salads hadn\’t lasted. The light show was amusing and colorful. Scenes of movies were projected on screens of water, with colored lights and fountains. But AJ wanted protein.

As AJ watched the show, trying not to bump into the people breathing down her neck, a sense of numbness came over her, and it wasn’t because of the lack of protein. She started weighing and measuring the differences between the last seven days of real California adventure and the one Disney reconstructed for her.

She experienced more wonder, awe and pure joy in walking among the real giant redwoods than in wandering in the sweltering heat over pavement, through pleasure-seeking mobs to be bombarded by amusement dosed in short-lived flashing lights, colors and sounds. It was as if it were all partitioned displays of fun, like capsules; pills of amusement set before your eyes, ears and senses.

If you look closely, you can see that even the dust on this
wire is artificial.

In her more cynical musings, it seemed as if Disney set traps for one’s sensibilities and leashed them, directing them what to do: when to be happy, when to be scared, when to be amused. None of it was authentic, all of it ‘pretend.’ It seemed artificial and manipulative, because … it was. And it was a big business. People wanted their sensibilities to be manipulated. To her, that seemed not necessarily wrong, but inferior in light of the days the family had spent roaming Muir Woods, Yosemite and Sequoia National Park.

At the end of the day, after getting OneSon and TwoSon safely to the hotel that night, AJ went out to a nearby restaurant for roast beef and broccoli, and ate some of it for an evening snack, the other half for breakfast the next day.

*A FastPass is a ticket that assigns the park-goer a specific time to come back to a ride and “skip the line” to the front, with no appreciable wait time.

Appendix T for Trees

AJ’s horticultural background would not allow her to go through the world without putting names to and classifying the plants around her. However far from home she went, foreign lands never seemed too strange or frightening if she could name a few plants on the trail or roadside. On the trip to the Sierra Nevadas, this impulse was frustrated more than once. She was in a place where most of the plants were unfamiliar to her: she was just another botanically unaware visitor.

Coastal Redwoods

Her sense of place was disoriented on the hillside stop in Day 2, where she smelled and beheld the silver-leafed yellow-flowered artemisia. Based on the flowers, she could clump it in with the sunflower family, the leaves and scent hinted at the genus Artemisia, but the exact name eluded her. She knew the licorice-smelling bronzish-green tall clumps along the road were fennel, from the Carrot family. The names of the towering, spreading trees with grey-cream mottled trunks and thin, lanceolate leaves eluded her.

She encountered more mysterious trees and plants in Yosemite, like the tall, straight pine with brown bark outlined with darker brown, whose trunk seemed to shoot straight from the ground with no hint that it had roots holding it up. More than once, she flipped through a botanical guide book in the many gift shops they visited, but though the frustration of not knowing the names and familial places of these plants tortured her horticultural sense, she abstained from buying the books, and resolved to remain ignorant. This would also spare her family the botanical themed lectures and tidbits she was so often known to give.

But when one is in the presence of the tallest, largest and oldest organisms in the world, it is hard to pass them by without wanting to know all about them. She wondered what makes them different and where they fit into the plant world, she wanted to understand how these giants could possibly be plants at all.

Giant Sequoias

And she didn’t want these majestic trees to live on in an undifferentiated clump in her mind because, like people, though most of us look and act alike in the general sense, there is so much that makes us different, and a person could spend a lifetime (and they do, in the fields of medicine, psychology, psychiatry, etc) studying those differences and how that information can help humanity.

In this impulse to study and appreciate the uniqueness of each member of this grand dendrological subfamily, she found the element that makes most families interesting and beautiful: differences. AJ’s gradient theory (end of Day 2) turned her mind to thanksgiving for differences, for the tall and skinny, for the thick and hefty, for puny and ancient.

With a little digging, here is what she discovered:

The Coastal Redwoods and Sequoia trees are brothers, in the family Cupressaceae (think arborvitae, juniper, and cypress landscape shrubs), subfamily Sequoioideae. There are only three plants in this subfamily.

One family member is the Coastal Redwood, Sequoia sempervirens, who is the tall, skinny basketball player (Muir Woods National Monument, Day 3). They grow up to 380 feet tall and up to 30 feet in diameter at breast height.

The Foot of a Sequoia

Next is the Sequoia, Sequoiadendron giganteum, who is the extremely big-boned, line-backer of the family (Sequoia National Park, Day 7). They grow up to 311 feet tall and 56 feet in diameter.

Last, and least in terms of size, is the Dawn Redwood, Metasequoia glyptostroboides, who is the puny, ancient family member they thought had been lost millions of years ago when dinosaurs walked the earth. It was recently (1943) found roaming aimlessly and incoherent in a forest in Asia. These triangular-shaped deciduous fossils are available as landscape trees. They grow up to a modest 115 feet tall and to an inconsequential diameter compared to their brothers. AJ has a specimen of the Dawn Redwood in her backyard, in Michigan.

Dawn Redwood in Fall

Dawn Redwood in Summer

Long Trails and Tall Trees

Day 7

The family started day seven of their Sierra Nevada travels by eating breakfast outside in the gentle morning sunlight, shooing bees away from their food as they watched a flock of wild turkeys strut by. They were at We Three Bakery, a sweet little restaurant along the road leading into Sequoia National Park.

The journey to Sequoia National Park began with a steep, serpentine road that was flanked by the same dry, tired landscape of the valleys below. As the altitude increased, the forest thickened, the turns tightened and car sickness suggested itself in more than one passenger in the car. The road was wilder than some roller coasters. Halfway up the mountain, B stopped the car so OneSon could take motion sickness medicine and switch to the front seat.

The Road into Sequoia National Park

The family watched eagerly for glimpses of the famous sylvan giants, but as they passed the gate into the park, the only trees they saw were of plebeian dimensions. It wasn’t until they threaded their way through a few more hair-pin turns that they were finally blessed with the terrific sight. It was like coming across a lumbering dinosaur in an ordinary forest. Giant trees.

Outside the visitor center, they stopped at a plaque introducing The Sentinel, a tree that was 2200 years old. It had been a seedling before Christ walked the earth. AJ lay a hand flat on the mortal bark, touching the outside edge of living, breathing millennia.

“This is what history looks like when it’s recorded in wood,” AJ muttered to herself.

The trees were the court recorders of the world, ticking off time and dates in squiggles and lines only partly comprehensible to us.

After a short mosey through the informative visitor center, they headed to the Big Tree Trail. It was a short trail that looped around a swampy area, surrounded by a high density of big trees. The trees dip their toes in the marshy wet indentation, but never ventured out deeper, because to have water pooling around their roots would kill them. Proof of the fact lay with a horizontal carcass of a humbled giant that had succumbed to water-logged roots.

The lofty, thick trees overwhelmed AJ’s sense of being. They were the superlative-est things on the earth. They were the oldest living organisms, one of the tallest, and the largest living organisms on earth. It would have taken a hard bitten or infinitely ignorant person to walk amongst them and not be awed. The trees had withstood thousands of years unshaken, licked by flames but undaunted. They were monuments to perseverance.

The family wandered around the short loop, stopping to bend their necks back to gaze to the top of the behemoths. B sighed and gasped, frustrated as he tried to get a complete tree in frame of his camera.

Next, they took a park shuttle to one of the many trails in the park, that she later dubbed, The Deceptively Long Trail. The trail started with General Sherman, the name given to a 2200 year old, 275 feet tall, 1385 ton tree. It was not the oldest, nor the tallest tree, but it did get the prize for being the most massive. In human terms, it was big-boned.

As they walked down the dusty trails, AJ tried to absorb the experience. First and foremost, her sense of smell was piqued. Every forest had a specific smell depending on the kind of plants it contained.

“Can you smell it?” she asked anyone who would listen. “In Muir Woods, the odor was sweet and cedar-like. Here, it’s similar, but with a darker, muskier tone. And with a little burnt ash, a faint dairy smell. Probably because of the burnt wood.” Her observations brought nods, but no real answers.

Boulder vs. Tree

After visiting the popular General Sherman, The President and The Senate tree displays, the family marched on into the sparse, but shaded forest, stopping sometimes to admire particular specimens or to wait for B and Tripod to take pictures. The longer they walked the fewer people they saw, the more huge trees they encountered.

As mentioned in a previous entry, walking long distances enhances word recall, invigorating the mind in a way that makes conversation and moods on the trail particularly pleasant.

During hikes in the past week, the conversations involved Star Wars and Lego and movies. B would have TwoSon consider his surroundings and then ask him, “What planet in Star Wars would this be?” or “What movie does this setting remind you of?” This hike was not different, but after the first few miles, TwoSon started asking his own questions.

“I wonder who the first person in the whole world to have six toes on each foot was?” he asked, jogging a little to catch up with AJ. His mind was busy working on eight-year-old mysteries, which slowed his legs.

“Jesus,” B piped in.

“No, he did not have six toes … well, actually I can’t confirm that he didn’t, but if he did, he wasn’t the first. I think Goliath in the Bible had a cousin who had six toes on each foot.”

“It’d be funny if it were George Washington,” TwoSon said with a laugh. AJ smiled.

AJ loved the silly questions. She encouraged them, because they were easier than the not-so-silly ones like, “Why do people die?” and “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

“Can you pour pine sap on pancakes?” was the next question to come from behind her. See? Easy.

“Pine sap isn’t really like Maple tree sap. Pines and Maples are two different kinds of trees and the saps are made up of different things.”

AJ made a point to walk behind the daydreaming TwoSon so he wouldn’t be left behind as B, OneSon and Tripod plodded ahead at a brisker pace. The wake of the plodding feet kicked up sparkly clouds of dirt. There was probably silica in the soil that twinkled in the sun. These sparkly dust clouds increased as TwoSon started to drag his feet.

“I hope I am that decrepitly beautiful when I’m 1/2 dead,” AJ said when she came upon B and Tripod photographing a 1/2 burned tree covered with moss.

AJ walked along, notebook and pen in hand, ready to jot down a few words whenever B stopped for photos.

“What are you writing?” asked the patriarch of a family that had been hop-frogging them along the trail.

“It’s so I can remember everything we did when I get home. I always forget by then,” AJ said. She wanted to remember, to be able to relive these rare, beautiful moments.

\”Oh! what hours of transport we shall spend! And when we return it shall not be like other travelers without being able to give on accurate idea of anything. We will know where we have gone-we will recollect what we have seen. Lakes, mountains, rivers shall not be jumbled together in our imaginations nor, when we attempt to describe any particular scene, will we begin quarreling about its relative situation. Let our first effusions be less insupportable than those of the generality of travelers!\” Volume 2, Chapter 4 of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

The man nodded. “That’s a good idea.”

As they walked away from the place where B and Tripod had been working, the quizzitive patriarch’s daughter stood up and said something (English was not their native language), as she pointed into the woods. But she didn’t need to speak English for everyone to understand. The awe on the little girl’s face had AJ, B, OneSon and TwoSon looking as well. In the distance, a medium-sized black bear lumbered in and out of view behind trees, stopping to dig in the ground every so often. The girl’s little brother suddenly ran after it, camera in hand.

“No, no, don’t go up to it,” AJ whispered under her breath, then sighed in relief when the bold boy stopped and took a picture.

The trail led the family up steep slopes, down into valleys, past curious boulder formations and thousands of beautiful gigantic sequoias, and through one unfortunate felled tree. As the miles piled up behind them and the hour grew late, B and AJ were pricked with concern. Being lost in the unfamiliar forest wasn’t what they had planned. The Agenda had them leaving the park before evening.

Well before the sun started its western bow, they descended yet another wooded hill and spied a golden prairie below through the trees. It was a sign that the end of the trail was near. In all, they had hiked seven miles through the land of the mighty sylvan giants. With sore legs and dusty feet, they climbed on the shuttle bus back to the parking lot, sitting in the last few open seats, with no pity for the people who had to stand.

“That was the best hike of the whole trip, I think,” AJ said as they got into the car. “It was my favorite. But I feel as if I haven\’t appreciated those trees enough. They deserve more admiration … somehow.”

“It was longer than I expected,” B said in a sigh. “It puts us a little behind schedule.”

“Too long,” TwoSon chimed in from the backseat. He did well on the hike despite a few complaints toward the end.

OneSon shrugged.

“Can I take off my shoes?” TwoSon asked from the back seat.

After stopping at a sub shop for dinner on the road, TwoSon shed his dusty, worn shoes and turned on his video game.

The road to Anaheim took them by Los Angeles, through five lanes of highway each way. AJ looked out the window, watching as the trees along the road thinned and gave way to scorched hills, oil fields and thirsty orchards. The contentment and wonder the awe-inducing trees had knitted around AJ as she walked through Sequoia National Park was fading, as if there were a string attached to the dear giants, and moving away from them was unraveling it from around her heart.

The landscape flanking the highway tried to replace her contentment with bright lights, crowded cities and long strips of stores, but it only brought more longing. That night they pulled into the Howard Johnson Hotel, a few blocks from DisneyLand in Anaheim, CA. In a somber daze, glazed over with fatigue, AJ helped roll the luggage in and up to the hotel room, then helped the boys settle in while B bravely returned the rental car.

Defeat at Vernal Falls and Goodbye for Now

Day 6

After breakfasting at the lodge food court, the family packed up their belongings and checked out of their woodsy room at 3434 Hemlock Building, Yosemite Lodge, Yosemite National Park. They drove to the same parking lot they had discovered the day before, then waited patiently at a shuttle stop for a ride to the Vernal Falls Trailhead.

Saying goodbye to the hotel room view.

“Oh, look, my Raven,” AJ exclaimed as the big black bird alighted across the road. It hopped into the shade of the trees, looking around intelligently. Another stately charcoal bird alighted nearby. “And my other Raven … and another.” The shuttle stop was across from a large camp site. The ravens knew where to get their breakfast.

Hope came roaring down the road in the form of the park shuttle bus, but promptly passed them by, full to the gills with people. The family then decided to walk the half mile to trailhead, gathering sticky pine sap and needles on their shoes as they went.

Vernal Falls Trail was a very popular spot that morning. AJ had always thought of hiking as a solitary family activity, but that day it was going to be communal hiking, with long lines of people walking together, passing each other, never out of sight of another person. It meant learning to share the scenery and even rejoicing with people who were having too much fun to care about manners or the injudicious disposal cigarette butts.

The beginning of the trail was marked with repeated warnings about proper hydration. It should have been a clue: if they were warning people, people needed to be warned.

The trail started out as a steep, paved walk for about a mile. Because of minor health hiccups, AJ had not been able to do her usual aerobic exercise in the months prior to the trip. The previous days’ hikes of substantial length (and altitude) had not spent her energy as she had expected so she was optimistic at being able to reach the heights and see where Vernal Falls was born.

After stopping for a brief bathroom break at a water station at a bridge, the family had a decision to make.

“We can go up a smooth, inclined path with a lot of switchbacks, or we can take the slightly shorter, steep path with lots of steps,” B announced.

“What?” TwoSon asked. AJ repeated the options to him.

“I suggest the switchbacks,” B voted.

“I guess it doesn’t matter to me, really, but if you need a decision, I suppose I’ll go switchbacks,” AJ said.

OneSon shrugged, “I don’t care.”

“The steps!” TwoSon said with happy enthusiasm. The most vocal and insistent opinion, (which counts for something) won out. The family headed up the trail of steps.

The many stoney steps were prefaced with another steep paved path through thick woods, then steps.

AJ’s tactic for tackling the mountain was to take it slow and steady. B’s, OneSon’s and TwoSon’s tactic consisted of short bursts of fast walking, punctuated with many breaks. B and the boys would quickly outpace AJ, disappearing into the huffing and puffing crowds, past people sitting, sucking down water every fifty feet. But as she came upon B and the boys resting, sitting, she waved, “See you later … and later … and later.”

Halfway up the stairs, AJ the slow and steady, did give in and sat down for a lonely rest at a spot a few yards off the trail. After a few gulps of water, she popped a handful of pumpkin seeds into her mouth, then sealed them up and zipped them in her bag. But it was too late.

Scurrying creatures whose sense of smell was sharpened from stark survival in the wilderness, had detected the food. Little grey squirrels with not-so-fluffy tails and subtle white spots came scrambling out of holes in the rocks, looking for the source of the delectable aroma. One little guy, nose sniffing, eyes darting erratically, crawled furtively around her, then sat on a rock nearby. That day AJ found out that she couldn’t win a staring contest with a hungry squirrel. She flinched first.

Uneven, steep steps lay ahead of her, going up, presumably to infinity. The one advantage of taking the stepping path was that it passed by Vernal Falls. Hikers on the trail could look over the precipice and see the deluge roaring into a small pond at the bottom of the height, with rainbows at its knees.

The waterfall was noisy, overwhelming the sound of aerobically challenged lungs. At times a breeze would find its way up the mountain and blow the falls a certain way, making a booming noise.

Though AJ’s body hated her for the hiking she had done that week, it was civil and didn’t complain too much. But about a hundred steps past the waterfall, AJ’s body started to make its displeasure known. It suddenly and significantly turned its back on her. Her legs started to shake, she had to take more frequent breaks, but no matter how long she sat, she was unable to recover. Oxygen wasn’t working anymore.

Walking is said to be good for word recall. Most of the great writers in history were also great walkers. But on this walk, at that point the only words AJ could think of were, “I’m going to die from this … they’re going to have to get a helicopter to take my body off this mountain.”

AJ stopped along a queasy steep stretch of steps and waited for B, who had spent his time more leisurely while taking pictures on the way up. When he finally caught up to her, they counseled each other on the terms of defeat.

The race postings were as follows: First Place: OneSon. He went quickly, with breaks, but in the end, he went the furthest and was perfectly ready, willing and able to go to the top, mind and body. He had trained steadily before the vacation by walking on the treadmill with flip-flops. Huh.

Wind blowing the Vernal Falls.

Second Place: TwoSon. TwoSon served as message bearer between OneSon and AJ, so OneSon wouldn’t go too far ahead.

Tie for Third Place: AJ and B. AJ was fearful of having to be taken off the mountain by helicopter. She was the first to speak of defeat, consulting B and Tripod, who acquiesced. Technically, B was last, busy taking pictures of Vernal Falls and beautiful rocks.

It was their first trail hike fail. But the journey was still full of worthy sights, with many impressions taken, mostly from tripod and Camera.

On the way down, AJ saw a man taking a smoking break, “He is so not going to make it to the top,” she thought, as he already looked spent.

The family lunched in Curry Village where B and the boys had pizza and ice cream. AJ had a salad and an orange.

Then they left Yosemite through serpentine tree-shaded roads.

From the back seat of the cramped rented Ford Focus (she had given up her privileged position in the front seat to OneSon who was having trouble with motion sickness) AJ watched the roads straighten and the tree-crowded hills flatten and fall away into stark plains. Leaving Yosemite made her heart hurt a little. Yosemite was 2,021 miles from her home in Michigan and she wasn’t sure if she’d ever be back again. The parting wanted more pomp and ceremony to match the sharp pull at her senses, but the separation was more like a sigh than bang.

The road before them lay through orchards of pistachios and oranges, tiny scorched towns with small businesses in pole-barns, convenience stores with barred windows, dry sheep and goat hills. It ended at Lazy J Motel in Three Rivers, CA. It had a kidney-shaped, clean pool, little buildings with tidy rooms that were comfortable, worn, but provided all they needed, and wifi. There were goats and sheep in the pens in back of the office.

That night they ate at the Gateway Restaurant, a fancier-than-expected place that looked over a once fervent Kaweah River situated just outside Sequoia National Park.

Violent Heights, Fed by Ravens and Lucky Stars

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.