“Did you see that tarp?”
The woman’s voice is coming from the river!
Fuck!
I had just stuck my head out to do a solar path check* and saw on my side of the stream, upstream, the head of a blonde woman in a sunhat on one of those heavy plastic canoe, kayak hermaphrodites. Behind her, through the limbs of a fallen tree in the water, I saw only the broken outline of another paddler. That rear paddler had a double paddle as did she.
I see all this in an instant.
I had picked this spot by the river because no boats or swimmers would be here! Fucking idiots! They really had to work to get to this side of the river in one of those gods awful extruded plastic fat boats. They would have had to gotten out and dragged them a couple times to reach my spot! There was a path for watercraft on the other side of the bend. I had sat and studied the flows of people before I made my camp choice. It was a perfect spot!
But no.
She looked right at me. Even with the shattered glass and burned hole impressionist painting myopic astigmatism that passes for my vision in these years of gold, I saw her eyes lock with mine.
Spotted!
Out of bounds capping in Yosemite Valley. No. No, no, no! Big fine. Dignified reputation ruined too. They’ll fucking cuff you and haul your ass to jail.
That happened to my brother.
“The Fed don’ play nothin’ but hardball. No deals. No pleas. Full terms,” he said. He had some good stories! Later. But that groan, oh.
This was the tension of camping in the valley and what motivated me to get where it was legal to camp. I recommend the same. I do not recommend outlaw camping in the valley.
I hated that sneaky-rat vibe.
I understand the camping rules. The environment can take the hits of a few of us here and there, typically, we do way less damage than bears, but it cannot handle hundreds of us repeatedly in one unprotected spot without stress.
Up in the wilderness, it is only a few of us here and there, and we who wander the high country are especially careful!
But by that river down by El Capitan Meadow, no. Lots and lots of people. And they are newbies.
When the bus dropped me off, I was pretty much at the center of the human zone of the valley.
I had walked around the village for some time.**
Accidently, I caught the shuttle to the Ahwahnee Hotel. That road goes up the north side of the valley under the Royal Arches. It is a sunny place in winter. The driver’s announcements clued me in to the bus’s itinerary, and I thought it would be fun to just ride it.
It would go much further down the valley toward El Cap than the old shuttles of my era!
DING!
That’s the magic bell, rung.
El Capitan. “The Captain.”
It is a big boss rock, for sure. Did I hear it was the biggest exposed chunk of sold granite known? I doubt that. But it is fucking spectacular.
The shape of it is more like a reverse prowed ship to my eyes, ad the way the shape curls back lets the top catch light at dawn before many other rocks. They call it the, “Dawn Wall.”
I have seen some beautiful photos of the sunrise event on that lip. Stunning.
It was done. I would go to El Capitan Meadow and there spend my first night. Perhaps I would catch the good light at dawn!
Astonishingly, in one of many changes, I sought out tourist areas rather than avoid them as I did in my youth while working there.
You want riverside beaches?
Well, let me tell you!
Alongside the Merced River there at the end of the free shuttle bus valley loop you have some of the best beaches — of any kind — in the world.
And let me back up here. This is also California. We like guests. It is a non-judgmental state. You are safe with us in California, whoever you are, wherever you may be.
This state was named for a fantasy goddess, Califa, by the way. There are variant spellings. But it was a Spanish writer. I am rather fond of their literary traditions! It is difficult to tell where the world ends and the magic begins.
My dear departed brother, different though he was, also could whisper in and out of dreams like I. Once, I complimented him on his extraordinary patience with his wife and son.
He said that I was patient too.
“No,” I told him, “I am not patient, David. It is not a virtue. I do not even desire to be patient. I desire to be less patient!”
“But you are patient,” he said.
We were doing something at dusk in the grass by a river with our fishing gear. “You are patient when you are teaching. You are more patient than any teacher I ever knew!”
That was a nice thing to say, huh?
OK. I am a patient teacher. I have cultivated that because that gets results. But no, I am not patient. It is not a virtue. It is a useful machine sometimes.
I want it all, and I want it now, and that is the truth.
With many activities, however, it is patience that gets the results, so I have learned to pretend.
“One must be patient with words.”
Anne Rice, a treasured writer, said that. She was right, I learned. I learned patience with words. With patience could they sometimes spin up beautifully.
I learned patience with children.
I learned patience for other things too. Certainly not everything. Maybe even most things. But some things. yes.
I learned patience for tourists, evidently, finally! I sure did not have that in my younger days. I saw them as might a wild animal forced to share territory with a shunned enemy.
That woman in the sun bleached olive drab rent boat.
Her eyes were afraid!
How could anyone react with such fear so instantly to the sight of another human being like that? It bugged me. Fearful people are extremely dangerous. Of all the human plectrums of emotions, one must always be watchful of the fearful.
You are a threat to them. To one who fears, you are bad. If you are bad, then anything is permitted to destroy you.
That is the insidiousness of fear. Watch out for fearful people. They are especially dangerous to others because they will strike without warning and use constant deception even when there is no threat.
Honor, rules of combat, etiquette, bare civility — gone. They who habitually fear others are Death.
Being outside in natural conditions can bring out fear in some people.
But it might be that nature is here to help, not harm.
Here is a good example. I like to do this. When taking people out camping, dealing with people who are all, over and over, “What was that?” grows especially wearisome for me.
Rather than chide them, as I have done with poor success in the past, I developed a teaching method. It has proven useful to walk all around with them and do a kind of “noise identification drill.” Once they finally get tuned, they will know anything dangerous coming our way will be heard a long, long way off.
It is amusing. Sometimes little animals are noisy! Ground nesting birds can clatter up a racket if they are building big nests with dry material, for example. Once one gets those moments of recognition, the sounds separate out.
The genuinely dangerous sounds become distinct. You do not, for example, want a falling pine cone to hit your head. So where are they? Which ones are falling? Which are the big, head conking kind? Oh! These kinds of trees!
It is an ever more fine grained differentiation process, but one becomes factually safer and safer with each new perceptual unveiling.
New campers get calm then. Mainly, nature is peaceful.
This woman has not pierced the veil yet, evidently. She is agitated.
Behind my light green foliage matching tarp, I could hear muddled tones of alto and baritone, and then they were gone.
Who know? Perhaps they had hoped for a secret camp so they could fuck, and I dashed those hopes.
Nothing else happened
If she reported me for camping there, no ranger came for the next nine hours.
Before that, I had I outlasted a fly fisherman wading upstream with the light turning pink behind him. It looked more like he was practicing casting than actually fishing. Fine with me. I have done that too in similar waters. Perfect place!
He was a phony though!
He left about a half-hour before any trout in that water would start feeding. I do not know how many countless times I have seen that. That is a topic for another time.
There were not many fish in that part of the river as far as I had seen, and I had been looking. I know signs for assessing fish populations fast; that part of the river was damn near fish dead. I, personally, would not fish it out of mercy to the poor beleaguered to virtually extinct trout!
I had not set up my tarp up yet while the fisherman was wading upstream. I watched him and the areas all around on both banks from multiple cover positions before I settled on my night’s bed.
Downstream from my camp, on my side of the bank, the trees and brush were dense. No one would be coming at me that way. Upstream, the river had made a sandy broad delta area with lots of snapdragons. Sand bars had become six feet tall right where I was on a sort of big wrinkle on the high side. I had a high view of the river, yet I remained low under the path a hundred twenty feet behind me. It as all open woods there. Very nicely maintained forest with the right amount of burning done.
In case of light rain, I had pretty good temporary cover. I was close in behind a cedar tree on a super comfy natural mattress. I look for those! Indeed I do! I will spend a lot of time at it too.
If I sat down, I was invisible from all directions.
Ahhhhh….
The feeling of peace then.
That is why I came out.
No.
That is not “why,” but that is one of the adored effects.
I receive it then.
I do that this whole trip.
Sit.
Be.
Bask in nothingness, sun, moon, wind, rain, hot, cold, whatever is, experience it.
After I got my body comfortable though. And that is not new. My mother liked to tell stories of how when I was a baby, I was easy to handle because all she had to do was make sure my blanket kept me warm and my bottle remained within reach, and were I placed so that I could watch action, I would be a happy baby, quite content with the view.
I remember watching ocean waves for long periods this way. It fascinated me the way each wave was different, yet wave was similar to the one before it, and, if I tuned in truly, I could see the next wave before it happened!
It was extremely exciting!
I say this because I simply seem to be one of those people who can sit and be, letting the world be, not the slightest bit bored…
Sometimes.
Getting back up to Yosemite and getting to that outlaw campspot by the river, stringing a line for the tarp, arranging my gear, and sitting down… ***
Ahhhh.
Something released.
I cast my perceptions round and round.
In the bright afternoon light, the vehicles on the road across the river and far from the banks are difficult to see. I could hear hear the long sheeeeewwwwww sounds they made. I had the road echo-located. At that time of year in busy Yosemite July, it is a constant drone.
As a child, coming to Yosemite with my family, I remember many more cars. That has definitely changed. But there are still a lot of cars.
Dusk, and I can see, sadly, some headlights through the trees on the other side of the river.
I would need to get up into the cliff areas on either side if I wanted to get away from cars and all people, I saw then, definitively.
I set up camp not quite under the low set tarp. That was for ducking under if it rained, but left me pleasantly out otherwise. Making quintuple sure, I went out to the trail that at that part was far from the river and walked it up and down.
Hmmph. That white tyvek groundcloth showed up like it had a light on it.
I went back and rearranged my gear again to tuck it under everything and did the walk again. There was one spot where if you knew where to look, you could see my spot, but it blended right in. I went back, lay there, and got out my little telescope. Only one more hiking group went by. It was fun!
I was alone.
Carefully, I’d picked this bump with an accelerated wind because that alone will mitigate most mosquitos even in areas where there were many. There was some stagnant water upstream, and there were breeding pools there, but my position kept me in a breeze whether the wind was upcanyon or down.
Yosemite Valley is a whimsical place, windwise, all seasons. But in that area it was already a bit pinched off by cliffs on either side, so when it shifted, it would interspersed with periods of calm, like a mile wide sigh.
In those minutes, I would get mosquitos.
That is where my insect repellent was helpful. I forgot I had packed a headnet too. It was in a net, ditty bag. I do not think I opened that bag that night.
But I had enough deet stink to keep them off. It was enough. I had brought my fancy jim dandy screen tent with the aluminum arrow poles and had carried that cunt on my back to there, the most buggy camp of the whole trip, I did not set it up.
Haha.
I got sprinkled on in the night.
When those few drops hit my face, I awoke in alarm. Yet I saw stars through wispy low cumuli. Instead of immediately getting up and tossing everything under the tarp, I lay on my back to watch to see if the clouds were getting thinner or thicker. It was so warm and soft — that thick bed of dry pine needles under me — I did not want to move.
The next thing I knew, it was getting light out. If it had rained, and it smelled like it, it was not enough to wake me up.
I made myself a cup of my special blend of “Repugnant Coffee!”
You need a cup sized used peanut butter jar whose seal you have tested well, first. In that, a fat teaspoon or so of instant coffee, equal part sugar, and at least three tablespoons dried milk powder. Add water to taste. Shake. It is drunk cold.
That was breakfast, drank while I packed, cup/jar a penultimately packed item or carried as I walked; in this case, the latter.
i have not mentioned yet that I have not eaten since the day before yesterday at that time. That dried milk id my first food. It is good protein! It sends a signal to the body, “Relax. You are not starving. Plenty of food.”
I simply had no appetite. I figured I was carrying twenty pounds of predigested and stored food in he form of accumulated fat anyway. The body could eat that.
Haha. I went down one pant size as of yesterday, as to weight, that does not matter. Only inches matter.
But I digress.
Patience.
Patience with the words to explain all this.
Patience, Dear Reader, for this is a draft.
I share intimate moments roughly. It hits me in a flash, and I must sort the moments into jewels with whole universes in them. I must work quickly while it is fresh.
There is no editing in vocative forms!
I do rather emulate the cadence of talk in general. Fun? No? Yes?
Yes?
One jumps around a little or a lot.
(Yes. Fun. Technically, necessary for my style of spontaneous prose.)
Where were we? Ah. I awaken. It is light, but gray.
Uh oh!
===
* “Solar path check” is where I compare the position of the sun with a previous sighting and draw an imaginary arc in the sky to tell me where the sun will set or rise.
** Yosemite Village. It has lots of stuff. Post Office, library, Visitor’s Center, Museum, a native park, restaurant, deli, coffee, grocery store… It was always my favorite place to hang out as an employee. If you wanted to find someone in the valley, you went there and watched. The village was the social hub, particularly in summer.
*** With a swinging end, mind you, so I could handle wind shifts. Tied to a nine feet long heavy fallen branch forty feet out, low. I have this woven gold fishing line I use. It is, I do not know, at least hundred pound test? And stretchy. Doubled, my tarp line is still sixty feet. This is how minimalists luxuriate in “muchness.”