Graphic the Valley (2 page)

I lay in the dark of my debris shelter and pulled the needles closer, slid piles over me, insulating inside the stick frame, the bear walking around outside, and the black above me staying black, but my eyes open.

Two faces came to me then. His eyes, the superintendent’s, blank eyes over his shoulder at the turn of his neck. That expression like new burn. Then her eyes like waking up. Not dead at all.

During the day in Tuolumne, I worried about food. What my father said: “There is always water here in the Yosemite. So eat. Always think about what you will eat next.” He patted my head. “You’re stronger than you know,” he said. “So think about the next meal, and you’ll be fine.”

And I was fine. Never too hungry. I found half of a bag of Krusteaz just-add-water pancake batter in a campsite box, mixed a cup each morning, and drank the batter. Then I found jam and a few slices of bread. Some crackers.

I spent a week checking campsites after people left, running food over the ridge to my tarp bundle, and my bundle grew. When it was full, I stopped foraging for food and began to hike during the daytime.

I found a group of climbers in the woods near Fairview Dome. They’d circled twelve camp chairs, five tents. Standard-issue backcountry bear canisters in the middle like an iron campfire for a story circle.

One of them said, “We have enough cheese and peanut butter for the apocalypse. Have at it, man. Stay as long as you like.”

So I joined them in their camp. I hiked my food over to their location and added it to their group stash.

One of them said, “Whoa, that’s a random assortment.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I found all of it.”

They were on a climbing road trip, all of them in their early twenties, and they liked that I was fourteen. They called me “Young Jedi,” and took me climbing with them each day.

I built a new debris shelter next to one of their North Face tents, and they asked me all about its construction, the low entrance, the woven door, insulation, and outer debris. Two of them abandoned their tents by the third night, and we all slept in our new shelters in the clearing, improving them each evening until they were sleeping warm enough.

One of them said, “Jedi, how long have you been living like this?”

I didn’t know how to answer that because I wasn’t sure of what he was asking. In a shelter? In Tuolumne? In the Valley? So I said, “A while?”

He laughed and handed me my first beer. “Good enough, son. Good enough.”

After a week, the mosquitoes were less active and I could leave the shelter thatch open at night. The days were long and hot, and we swam in the creek after climbing.

The guys taught me how to lead climb with trad gear, how to build anchors, how to avoid losing gear in retreat when afternoon lightning storms came in, the air turning first like wet wool, then static iron, a taste on the tongue.

My tongue healed with one little knotted scar where I’d bitten through, and when I gritted my teeth there, it felt like a piece of bone lodged on top of the muscle.

The climbers were impressed with my climbing barefoot, so I taught them how to jam cracks without shoes. I said, “Keep the toes together and slot straight in. Then drop your heel.” One of them climbed barefoot with me after that.

At night, I listened to them tell stories about high school and college, parties and girls, failed sex attempts, and I laughed frantically, wondering about that other world beyond camping and fishing and climbing in this park. I wondered about a world full of girls.

One of them said, “Jedi, where’d you go to middle school?”

“Middle school?” I said.

“Yeah, you know, sixth to eighth grade.”

I said, “I guess I didn’t do that.” I’d had two beers. I wasn’t hiding anything.

They all looked at me. The first climber said, “Then what did you do for school?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I didn’t go to a school. I just read a lot of books. Hundreds that my father gave me.”

“Hundreds of books?”

“Maybe two hundred? Two-fifty? I don’t know,” I said. “My father’s read a lot more than that. Everything he can find or buy for cheap. He reads a book a day.”

“Awesome,” the first one said. “Just books. That’s way better than school. And trust me, you didn’t miss much in sixth to eighth grade.”

But I did wonder.

I stayed a month with the climbers, sharing my food––running over the ridge to scrounge more from abandoned Tuolumne sites––eating their peanut butter and cheese. And at night, they gave me cans of beer.

It was late summer, then early fall. The first night of frost warning, at 8,000 feet, and the climbers left the high country the next day to return to jobs in Mountain View and San Jose. They all hugged me, left their food and beer at the door of my shelter. One of them said, “We love you, Jedi,” then he hopped in his VW van and drove away.

I slept one night alone in their clearing, but all I could think of was returning to the Valley. Seeing my parents. So I hitchhiked down in the morning, put my thumb out on the Tioga road.

When I arrived at my parents’ camp on the west side, Ribbon Creek, in August, my mother ran to me so hard that she stumbled and fell down. I helped her up, and she buried her face into my neck. I hugged her hair and cried with her.

My father walked up, his hands in his pockets, his head down. He kicked a cedar cone with the toe of his boot. “We thought you were gone,” he said.

I wiped my face with the back of my forearm. “No. I’m sorry. Some things happened.”

“Things?”

“Nothing really,” I said. “Not important.” I didn’t explain more. I wouldn’t tell them. I’d decided never to tell them about that morning on the boardwalk.

He tried again. He said, “What things?”

I said, “I just had to go for a while.” I shook my head.

He nodded. For him, it was still 150 years ago, 1851, sleeping with the shadow of the 36th on the trail below, snow on their blue coats. I’ve read that some animals have the instinctual memory of their ancestors.

My mother kept hugging me and petting my hair. She picked pine needles out of my tangles.

I said, “I was hiking and climbing.”

My father nodded and waited as my mother scanned back and forth across my eyes. She put her head down and wiped her nose. I kissed her on top of her head, smelling the oil on her scalp.

• • •

One evening, I watched my mother braille the grass, her eyes closed as she dropped into the V, dragonflies looping above the nests, landing blue on her head and shoulders.

I was running a trout line, fifty feet and trebles every five on a bite, eleven in all, with a grasshopper floating each. I’d tied no weights so the bugs struggled circles on the surface to make the fish rise as the day cooled to blue.

But I was watching my mother, down in the drop. I saw her closed eyes, and her hands the colors of shooting stars, pink to white, a palm-down dance like holding gravity against the top of the grass, the dragonflies landing, stay-winged prehistoric bugs on her shoulders.

Her mouth moved but she wasn’t talking.

• • •

For five more years I lived in that camp with my parents, the camp of my childhood. We went back to our old jobs, my mother cooking and washing clothes, my father collecting wood and tending fires, me bringing back any food I could find.

We read books.

I went down to fish the eddies on the Merced. The dead pull of the whites and the quick slashes of rainbows at the turn, in the new day’s light. I fished underneath the trees, away from the bridges and roads, where the rangers didn’t go.

I cut firewood and collected deadfall for kindling to help my father. Built up the cord piles. Stitched holes in the tent with dental floss.

When there was nothing to do, I read books scored from the Curry lost-and-found or hiked above El Cap along the north rim and down the slabs descent. I slept sometimes in Camp 4, but always came back, always bringing fish when I returned to my parents’ clearing.

I never heard any more about the superintendent. Nothing at all. And a year later, I often wondered if that morning had happened, if a man in a suit had ever smoked a cigar, if his suit compressed against my hands as I pushed him over. I carried that moment in a box in front of me, the rope digging into the back of my neck, the nylon frays like small wires cutting my skin.

I saw his face in the reeds. Saw his face on the body of a man at Curry, in the face of a man in a Merced rental raft. And then he was alive again.

• • •

I climbed the freestanding boulders on the Valley floor, rocks to thirty feet, gaining confidence in my climbing, my hands strong, my shoulders and arms building. I bouldered some evenings until my forearms gave out and my finger pads wore down. The granite edges cut flappers, and I sucked the iron from the slits in my fingers.

Then I hiked back in the dark along the Northside Drive, startling black-tail or peanut-butter-and-jelly coyotes with the thin fur even in winter, their fur like grease hair.

I tried not to think of the superintendent. I put his box on my shoulder. Tied him on my back. Bent with him. Bent as he breathed smoke into my ear.

Sometimes when I watched the rain, leaning against a pine tree, under its cover as the water came down around me, I wondered if he was watching me. Sometimes I turned around to look for him. And she was there too then, anytime I smelled the wet. Leaning at the granite as I bent over to land a fish, in the eddy swirl, the riffle, the turn like a water’s exhale.

• • •

In camp, there were the three of us and little talk. My mother hummed as she ladled food into our blue aluminum bowls, and I recognized all her songs. But we ate to the sound of the wind gusting up-river in the evening, the cold air meeting the warm, the scrape of the low branches, and the tic tic tic of pinecones falling through.

Sometimes, after dinner, my father told stories, the two of us sitting side by side against the set log, watching the meteorites burn through the gaps in the trees. My mother walked away with the pot, toward the grit at the edge of the creek where she sand-cleaned dishes, and my father told me about Old Tenaya, The Prophet Wovoka, Captain John, everyone he’d read about. I chewed grass stalks, poking between teeth with the hard stems, memorizing what my father said.

“Sometimes we’re stupid,” he said. “Foolish. But even at our worst, there can be acts of honor.”

I nodded. I wanted to ask if the superintendent was an act of honor. I said, “Have you ever done something in the moment and not known what was going to happen?”

My father picked up a flat chip of granite and spun it out in front of us as if he were skipping a rock on the river. He said, “We all do.”

“But,” I said, “do we all do bad things?”

He picked up another rock. Flipped it in the air above him and caught it with his other hand. He said, “They wanted everything. They burned people out, caught the last few hiding, made this a plastic and gasoline world.”

I said, “The soldiers made Old Tenaya lead them back up the Merced, right?”

“Yes,” my father said. “But after that, they murdered his son. Even after that.”

• • •

I was a teenage boy and it was just the tourist girls until Lucy. Girls with swimsuits like peach skins wet on their flesh, and I watched them at the El Cap bridge in summer, me coming down from the wall, and them standing at the bridge railing trying to decide whether or not to jump.

When I saw them, I didn’t know what to do with my hands.

The bridge was not tall, never more than fifteen feet even at low water in August, but some people stood, waited, looked down at the height.

I heard a girl say, “Can’t they regulate the flow out of the dam? The water’s too low today.” But this wasn’t Hetch Hetchy. I watched the girl wait and wait, and never jump.

Another time, two girls in matching red suits and braids, and they were beautiful. I could see the wet pricking at the end of their swells.

I was at the end of the bridge. I wanted to do a back flip off the railing next to them. But somehow I couldn’t make myself walk up there, and the girls in those suits the same red, thin and tight, and the legs and arms coming out of the red making me think of all of the skin on a girl’s body.

There was no way for me to say hello. And what I would say after that? If they spoke to me?

A loud tourist boy yelled, “You afraid?” and shook his hips. He was down on the sandbank. He said, “Don’t be scaredy little bitches, huh?”

I wanted to hold his throat for that. Shatter his teeth with my fist. But the girls jumped, first one, then the next, and swam over to him. They both kissed him on the mouth, one after the other as they stood up and walked onto the bank, and they smiled then and covered their shoulders with towels.

• • •

A tourist girl did kiss me once. When I was seventeen. Walking on the path near the bridge, she grabbed my forearm. Said, “Hey,” and I turned. Then she kissed me on the mouth, smelling like beer cans warming in the sun. Her tongue touched my bottom lip, licking across.

I didn’t do anything. It was my first kiss, and I didn’t know what I could do.

The girl was gripping my forearm with her fingernails. Pink. I saw her nails as she pulled back. I looked at her, her smeared black lashes and blue eyes, flakes of chapped skin on her bottom lip like coconut.

Her friend said, “Whoa, slut,” and pulled her away by her hair. “What were you thinking there?”

She tilted, leaning into her friend. I heard her say, “I had to. He just looked so wild.”

In my tent that night, I thought of everything. Her eyes blinking. Her water-smeared mascara. The arch of her back and the bare expanse between the two pieces of her bikini. I wished I’d put my arms around her, put my hands on her skin, felt her hips, her rib cage, felt the droplets of water dripping down. I wished that I’d kissed her longer, asked her to come swim with me. I wished I’d done any of the things I’d read about in books.

I didn’t sleep. I lay awake thinking about teenage girls I’d seen at the water. The bridge. Their bathing suits and bodies. I tried to remember each girl I’d ever seen. Then I wondered about hallways full of girls in the high schools in books. Beautiful girls sitting at desks, listening to teachers. I wanted to trade homework answers, help girls cheat on tests, ask girls to dances.