Graphic the Valley (23 page)

“Yeah. That’s fine,” I said. I didn’t have any money with me anyway, and I was hungry. I’d been planning on making an excuse not to eat, but I gave that up.

McKenzie bought four microwave burritos and a six-pack of Miller Genuine Draft cans. She said, “Look, it’s
Genuine
.”

“Whoa,” I said, and held up my hands.

We microwaved our burritos using coffee filters as plates, and took our lunch down to the Housekeeping beach. Tourists were gathered at the turn in the river there, taking pictures of a black bear. The bear was sitting on her backside in the sun, looking confused.

McKenzie set the food down and said, “I should get a picture of that bear. He’s huge.”

I took a bite of burrito and burned my tongue. I said, “She.”

“She?”

“The bear,” I said. “She’s a female.”

“Oh,” McKenzie said. “How do you know?”

“Narrow head,” I said, “and bigger ears.”

“Oh. Well, she’s pretty close to us.”

“Yeah,” I said. “If she came after someone, a social bear like that? What if she wanted our burritos? Have you ever seen a bear rip a car door off its hinges?”

“No,” she said.

“Well, it’s incredible. They’re three times as strong for their weight as humans, so that bear right there is like a 900-pound person who’s not obese. Just muscle strong.”

My burrito had cooled, and I took a bite without burning my mouth. McKenzie cracked two cans of beer and handed one to me. The bear walked off and the crowd dissipated.

We ate our burritos and drank our beers. We were at that turn of the river by Housekeeping, where the old floods stacked downed trees on the north side. The water cut on that far side, and the bottom fish congregated under the fallen logs.

McKenzie said, “Do you like it here?”

“Yeah,” I pointed at a swirl in the current. “See the bottom fish?”

McKenzie sighted down my arm. “Oh. I didn’t see the fish at all.”

I said, “I used to catch them right here in the fall.”

“Wait,” she said. “How long have you been here in the Valley?”

I took a swig of beer. I said, “A long time.”

“And always camping?” she said.

“Yep. Always camping.”

We watched that black-green pool for the flashes of the foot-long bottom fish, for the quick break from the school, then the drift to white and the return.

We drank our second and third beers, then went back to McKenzie’s room at the hotel.

• • •

We were in bed afterward. I was thinking about the protestors I’d read about in the
Chronicle
. I said, “Do you know about Multi-Corp?”

McKenzie lay on her side next to me in bed and she pulled the covers up to her throat.

I said, “The big corporation. They want to develop here in the Valley. Tie everything together.”

“Oh,” she said. She rolled onto her back and straightened the sheet. “Which company is that again?”

“The parent company to Thompson Food. Have you ever heard of it? I don’t know how much people talk about it away from the Valley.”

McKenzie said, “Yeah, yeah. Thompson Food. The new concessionaire. I’ve heard of that.”

I said, “They’re here in the Valley.”

She was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. “You read about a deal?”

“Yes. I’m just trying to remember what I read.”

She said, “I’ve heard that negotiations are going on.”

“Negotiations and protests,” I said.

“The protests in San Francisco?”

“Yes. And I think they’re pretty big now. Three thousand students and young people sleeping on Market Street. People bringing them food to support them. And that crowd is growing.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Sounds intense…and complicated.”

I said, “How so?”

“Well, these deals bring a lot of money into the Valley, fund a lot of conservation in a national park,” she said.

“But they destroy so they can conserve. It doesn’t make sense.”

She said, “Maybe they destroy 1 percent to save ninety-nine. Then it would make sense.”

“No,” I said, “it’s worse than that. You have to spend more time in this Valley. See the traffic jams. Watch animals get put down. See people throw candy wrappers in the river.”

She said, “So you agree with the protesters?”

I said, “I’m pretty sure they’re right.”

“Really?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Are you serious?”

She said, “But if Junior’s won the contract instead, it’d be worse.”

“Junior’s?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“If Junior’s and its motel chain won that contract, to put motels here in the Valley, it’d be much worse. There’d be branding everywhere. Junior’s signs. Renaming: The Junior’s LeConte Memorial Museum. Junior’s El Capitan. Junior’s Half Dome…”

“Wait,” I said, “I’ve never heard of Junior’s.”

“That’s the competition.”

“Multi-Corp’s competition?”

“Yes.”

“But what if nobody got the contract? What if everyone was told no?”

“Everyone?” She laughed. “That’s never going to happen. Progress will progress. Development will happen in this Valley. That’s inevitable.”

Wovoka waits in the Sierra Nevadas. People arrive from the east, representatives seeking the prophet. He was raised Jack Wilson, Bible-reading on a western Nevada ranch, but he is Wovoka now, the Paiute Messiah, and people will wait for weeks to hear him speak. He preaches the Ghost Dance, peace, and continental disappearance
.

A Sioux messenger rocks back and forth on his feet. He looks away, his attention captured by a coyote on a rise. Two coyotes. Then the way the wind sounds coming through the branches of a nearby juniper. The raven on a branch, cleaning its talons. The messenger does not hear all of Wovoka’s words. He hears only the Ghost Dance and the ghost shirts, and so he believes in invincibility, invincibility that is as good as truth
.

The Sioux messenger returns to South Dakota. Then his bands ride to violence, a frozen creek in December, bodies like twisted sticks
.

This is your end if you do not listen to every word
.

Greazy saw me in Camp 4 at the Pratt Boulder. He said, “Bro, you should lay low for a while. I had two troopers and an FBI dude visit me at the Bees. They asked a lot of questions about you.”

“What did they ask?”

He said, “Where you were. What you liked to do. Who you hung out with. Lots of shit like that.”

“Did they say anything else?”

Greazy rolled a cigarette, twisted each end. “Yeah,” he said, “I think they asked about the fires. Not sure what they meant though, and I said that. Plus I told them that you’d left the Valley.”

“You did?”

“Hell, yeah,” he said. “I got your back.” He pulled out a plastic Bic lighter. Flicked and lit his cigarette. Inhaled and exhaled. “Fuck the feds,” he said. “I told them you’d been gone a while, might never come back.”

“Did they believe you?”

“Not at first,” he said. “But then I said you’d left to chase a girl, and that this sort of shit can take a while. Those dudes seemed to get that. At least they wrote it down and didn’t ask me any questions after that.”

“Thanks, Greazy.”

“No problem, man. But stay low, okay?”

• • •

The rear Ahwahnee caves were less caves and more hollows in the jumble of the granite. The drop-off of the Arches. I moved to the most remote natural lean-to, where I’d never heard of anyone staying. There was no mattress moldering, no pine-needle bed arranged, no stove parts crushed into the dirt. I didn’t find any bottle caps or cigarette butts. There was a black drip on the west wall, a fungus growing at the seam of the rock.

Greazy gave me a mattress that was wintered. Folded over my head, it smelled like gin gone wrong. I hiked it up.

Early the next morning, I pulled a hat on low over my eyes and I snuck into the hotel bathroom to fill water. Scrubbed nickel faucets, hot water, free soap. Upstairs, six coffee urns silver as mercury. Cream in a mini-pitcher. I took a big gulp of cream straight out of the pitcher, before I poured myself a free coffee.

I walked past the Great Room on my way out, my ancestors hung as tapestries while 3 million visitors drove through the Valley. Men and women held bags of ice and Popsicles in store lines, ramen noodles and microbrews. People set up in campers, kids watching Disney movies on laptops in their tents.

• • •

I still had the nightmares but I didn’t wake up. I slept through. In the morning, I snagged coffee again from the hotel urns, got the rhythm of my day. I walked outside and scrambled up on a little boulder at Ahwahnee West, on the backside, careful not to spill my coffee. Faced away from the parking lot, the Arches above me.

“What are you up to?”

I turned around. McKenzie was at the base of the rock.

I said, “Drinking coffee.”

She held a cup too. “Mind if I join you?”

“Sure,” I said.

She scrambled up the slab and sat down next to me.

We both sipped and looked out at the rocks and the forest, the green trees and the red-brown of the loam.

“So you’re still around here?” She raised her eyebrows.

“Yep,” I said. “Living close.” I looked uphill toward my lean-to cave.

She touched her paper cup to mine like she was toasting me. “And I’m still here as well,” she said.

We sipped at our coffees.

McKenzie stuck her lips out and made different shapes with them, a duck bill, a fish mouth. I watched her in my peripheral vision.

She said, “Were you mad at me?”

“No,” I said, “not really.”

“So a little bit?”

I shook my head. Swallowed a gulp. “Not at you. Maybe at the people bringing in Twin Burgers and Motel 4.”

“Oh,” she said.

“But I don’t really know what I believe,” I said. “Some days I think that there’s all this bad stuff, all these forces working to wreck this place, Yosemite and the Valley, and then other days I just think there are people. Only people. And all of these people do people things. That’s all.”

“Huh,” she said. “That makes sense. And how do you feel about it right now?”

“I don’t know. Maybe that there are people that sometimes do bad things? Or often do bad things? And other people who do bad things less often? I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing half the time,” I said. “I don’t know where I want to go or what I want to do. Do you?”

McKenzie looked into her coffee cup. She said, “I don’t even know where to start. If you make mistakes, they’re probably no worse than anyone else’s.”

“No,” I said. “I’ve made horrible mistakes.”

“Well, I doubt that,” she said. “Do you do worse things than all of these people coming through this Valley? Do you really? Do you do worse things than me?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’d guess so.”

“No. You don’t. You don’t really know all of the mistakes that other people have made. The things we still do.”

“But you don’t know mine.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We make mistakes, but we move on. We try again next time. I don’t spend a lot of time with regret. Where will that get me?”

I said, “But what if a mistake can’t be fixed? What if it’s final?”

McKenzie didn’t answer right away. She sipped her coffee and thought about it. “Well,” she said, “maybe some mistakes can’t be fixed. But there’s nothing you can do about that afterward, right?”

I said, “There are things that can’t be undone.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe and maybe not.”

I said, “You know, I was born here.”

She was finishing her coffee and she swallowed quickly. “You were born in the national park?”

“In the Valley,” I said. “In a car.”

“What? Really?”

“Yes.”

Our feet were dangling off the edge of the boulder. The boulders around us looked like the boulders near my parents’ camp.

I said, “I don’t know if all of his stories were true.”

McKenzie said, “Whose stories?”

“My father’s,” I said. “I don’t know if they were true, but I think about them all the time.”

McKenzie bit a fingernail, clamped it between her teeth, and tore it off. I saw that all of her fingernails were jagged. She said, “What makes you question his stories?”

“A couple things. First, they’re long stories and old stories,” I said, “so they sound like myths.”

“Myths,” she said. She still had her fingers to her mouth, trying to find another nail to bite. She clicked her teeth together and spit out a corner. “Maybe myths are as real as anything else.”

“But one of his most important stories changed,” I said, “changed from a river to a lake, became something that wasn’t as far in the past, that had to do with my father’s own life. His time. But I don’t know.”

• • •

I found the tools as I was flattening the cave floor to make a space for my mattress. The line of black mold had grown along the cave wall, and I could smell it in my sleep, so I decided to move to the opposite wall. I turned the mattress so my head was farthest from the black.

The dirt was wet and thick underneath, claylike, and I scraped at it with a two-foot-long stick. That’s when I found the cache. Hollowed out and a foot deep, like a box inserted into the clay, the cache was half-full of stone implements: a pestle and mortar, three hand-sized blades, nineteen red obsidian arrowheads.

The obsidian was not from this Valley. I’d never found any red obsidian, and I wondered at the thin, maroon-colored glass flaked in half-circles on both front edges. All the arrowheads were similar in size.

My father told me that the Yosemiti had hidden up here in the rocks and caves along the wall when the 36th Wisconsin entered the Valley. They’d waited until the food stores ran out. Then the band had marched down to meet the soldiers. Arrows and spears against rifles. The soldiers had tied the mothers’ hands together. Little children crying. The Valley full of the smell of burning acorns.

• • •

We hadn’t set up another time to meet, but McKenzie was in the Ahwahnees the next day after finishing a run. She walked a cool down through the boulder weave, and found me as I was climbing a traverse. I dropped off when I saw her.