Graphic the Valley (24 page)

She pointed above us to the wall, 1,500 feet tall. “Has that ever been climbed?”

“Yes,” I said. I pointed to the line on the right side of the Arches. “Royal Robbins climbed up through there in 1956. Thousands of others have since.”

“And you’ve always climbed too?”

“Me?” I said. “Yes.”

“Is it part of living here?” she said. “Part of living in the Valley?”

“I guess that’s probably true.”

She tucked my hair behind my ear. “I like you, Tenaya. Will you take me climbing again?”

“Climbing?” I said.

“Just climbing.” She held up her hands. “I’m so innocent.”

“Right,” I said.

“Come on…”

“Okay,” I said. “Meet here tomorrow at 6:30.”

She gave me a hug and walked back toward the hotel. I smelled the coconut of her sunscreen all day.

• • •

I’d reburied the tools and dragged my mattress over the top of the cache. I didn’t want anyone else to find them. In the afternoon, I lifted my mattress and dug the ground open again to make sure everything was still there.

I was holding one of the obsidian pieces when I heard someone say, “Hey.”

I set it down and spun around. It was Kenny.

He said, “A little jumpy, huh?”

I said, “I didn’t know it was you.”

Kenny stepped over and hugged me. “I just got back,” he said.

“From Whitney?”

“Yep.”

Kenny looked thin and dirty. I said, “Did you take enough food?”

“Oh yeah. The day before I left, I went through three campgrounds: the Curry tent cabins, Lower Pines, and Upper Pines. And every abandoned bear box item went into my 70-liter pack. Then I stuffed backup socks, a hat, and my sleeping bag on top, and good to go. I ate the whole time.”

“Nice,” I said. “I’m glad.”

“And the snow,” he said, “that was intense. Got an ice ax from a PCT free box and I needed it for probably fifty miles.”

“But you made it to the summit?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “You can do anything if you want to. You know that.”

Kenny was still wearing that orange down jacket, even though it was hot in the Valley. The jacket was filthy now, one huge red stain smeared down the front on the right side.

He saw me looking at it. He said, “My coat might need a dip in the river. That’s sweet and sour sauce from packets. Found thirty of them in Curry. I’d suck on them as I walked. Instant energy.”

We talked for a while. He told me about weathering a windstorm in a debris shelter, about crossing a corniced ridge, about sun so bright that he pulled his hat over his eyes and walked blind up a snowfield. I showed him the cache of stone tools I’d found.

Kenny examined the mortar and pestle. “These are amazing,” he said.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“But why are they here?” He held up one of the thinnest obsidian arrowheads.

I said, “Maybe someone buried them when the army came in 150 years ago.”

We looked at each tool carefully. I kept coming back to this one symmetrical arrowhead. I held it up. It was so thin at the blades that the sun almost glowed through it.

Kenny said, “It’s so beautiful.”

I handed it to him and he examined it. He said, “Are you going up on the wall with me?”

“The wall?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Go up on El Cap and just chill for a long, long time?”

• • •

We hit up the Curry pizza deck, scoring half-glasses of beer and soda, half-eaten pieces of pizza. Kenny found a whole slice of sausage and mushroom, and I found a slice of pepperoni with only one bite out of the crust. We toasted his return.

The place was so crowded in the evening that people didn’t seem to notice us trolling through the tables. Kenny piled scraps in his coat pocket. I collected food in my left hand, piled up until the food got to the point of tipping.

Kenny said, “Let’s play Chicken Wing Friday. First person to find one wins.”

I said, “We’ll never find one, you know.”

“I know,” Kenny said. “First person to find a wing––at any time tonight––gets free coffee deliveries to the cave for a week. Other person has to hit the urns, add cream, sugar, whatever he wants. Bring it to his sleeping bag.”

“Okay,” I said.

We played for an hour. I drank a dozen half-finished beers, and Kenny did the same. We ate at least a medium pizza’s worth of food. But we didn’t find any chicken wings.

Kenny said, “To be continued,” and snagged a quarter-beer from an abandoned table. He swigged it down. “Maybe I’ll go to the Curry showers and shower in my clothes. Got to clean this coat somehow.”

• • •

I wasn’t tired. Beer-buzzed and awake.

The night expanded with clouds and I hiked down the Valley past the hotel, the Village, the Falls Trail, Swan Slabs.

No moon or stars, and the white granite patterns of the Camp 4 boulders were elephantine, unpronounced as snowdrifts. I could feel the strength in my legs, but I was moving slowly. Awake. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Past Arizona Avenue.

I stumbled around a low oak, then across the Falls Trail. I hit the signpost there, in the dark, knocking it loose. The post was rotten at the bottom and I felt it teeter as I hit it. I turned and walked up the other trail past King Cobra. Wound through the blocks toward the Energy Boulder. The night closed with clouds over the moon.

I caught the smell of wet dog again, another bear. I smelled him even though I couldn’t see him, and I stopped. The bear was close, too close, his smell everywhere around me. I rubbed my eyes but couldn’t see anything. I stood and waited. Listened to a sound like gravel turning underneath truck tires. Wetter. Of mud and gravel, wet suck and grinding, the breaking of small sticks.

I didn’t move. I closed my eyes and opened them to find the differences in the shades of gray. I couldn’t see the bear, but I could see my mother. She was hunched in the front seat of my parents’ car, cutting rectangles of paper with shears. Letters in her lap, scissors in her left hand. Chewing on her hair. She had a twisted lock running across her cheek, dividing her face, wedged in the corner of her mouth. Chewing again. Cutting letters. She sucked her hair and worked her scissors
swick-swick
through the papers held in her right hand. I watched her cut, turn the letter, cut again. Left-handed and the scissors backward, flipped upside down.

I waited because I knew bears, and I knew this bear.

My fingertips tingled and a numbness went up my arm. I blinked again to see him. He was ten feet from me, in front of my eyes, appearing like the black growth of a 600-pound mushroom.

A young male, a grizzly, and grizzlies did not exist in Yosemite, not anymore. This bear could not be here, but he was here, next to the Lower Falls Trail, out of Camp 4, in the Valley, and the grizzly was sitting on his backside, eating and chewing.

Both my arms were numb to my shoulders now and I crouched, dropping down onto my heels, letting my arms fall useless to my sides, fingertips dragging the ground, no feeling in my hands.

I didn’t know what this bear was eating, but then he shifted and I saw the outline, the fir, the silver and light-brown of the coyote, the grizzly tearing at it with his claws. Holding up a paw and looking at that paw as if he were learning shapes.

And he ate.

I saw the bear and the coyote, and then the glow, odd on the side fur of the coyote. I blinked and that fur was painted orange, spray-painted, and I knew this coyote then too.

I could hear my mother and her scissors again. Behind me now. I turned around but saw nothing.

I sat on the dirt, in the middle of the trail, ten feet from the grizzly, and my arms were numb all the way to my neck, behind my ears, like worms crawling on the back of my scalp. I could hear my father explaining the bear’s life. “The betrayer becomes the greatest bear, spends his next life in this form,” he says. And so this bear is Vowchester, Chief Bautista, who helped Savage capture Tenaya in the Valley. Allowed the murder of Tenaya’s son. And now, the first grizzly in the Valley since 1925.

• • •

I’d promised to meet McKenzie, to climb the Grack on the south side. I never slept late and this morning was no different.

The nightmares woke me early. Day just begun.

We were going to meet at 6:30 in the morning to get a head start, to avoid waiting in line behind other climbing groups at the first pitch.

I’d slept two hours. My eyes itched like springtime and I felt like throwing up. I pounded a quart of water. Brushed my teeth with my fingers and a dab of Greazy’s toothpaste.

McKenzie had breakfast burritos and coffee waiting for me at the parking lot at 6:30. She pointed to the food. “Because you won’t let me pay you for a climbing lesson.”

I swigged water. “Thank you.”

“No big deal,” she said. “It’s just a friend buying a friend some breakfast.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

We ate our burritos. Sausage and potatoes, beans and cheese, and the sounds of the grizzly were still with me. I could hear the crunch of wet bones.

We hiked over to the Grack and were the first people on. But the climb was too easy. McKenzie floated the climb.

My hands were not numb now but strong again, and the cool insides of the rock smoothed me, took the bear and the coyote away. Took away my mother and her scissors.

McKenzie smelled the same as ever, better than good, as we huddled at the hanging belays, her hair and skin and sweat and sun lotion. Nothing I didn’t like.

We were climbing in the daylight and then we were not climbing. She was coconut sun lotion underneath me, and the dark hair smelling of clean and her breathing like the sweep of trees back and forth in summer. The wind rushed upriver in catching gusts and the tops of the trees swayed green and smooth and rhythmic, back and forth, up and back, and then the wind stopped and everything waited in the bright sunlight glaring white, in that moment, that single wait, thinking about the wind that came before, and I wondered if a tree ever makes any choice at all.

• • •

I woke up to McKenzie making a noise. I didn’t know what it was.

I rolled over.

She was looking right at me.

I said, “Are you okay?”

She didn’t say anything.

I said, “What is it?”

“I didn’t tell you everything the other day when we had that long talk.”

“What’s everything?” I said. “What do you mean?”

She said, “I work for Thompson.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Thompson,” she said. “I’m here in Yosemite doing PR work for Thompson, Multi-Corp, the parent company. That’s why I’m here in the Valley. That’s what I meant when I said I work in PR.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I know,” she said, “it’s bad. I didn’t tell you before, when we talked, because I didn’t know what you’d think about it. Or I knew, and I didn’t want it to be like that.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You should’ve told me.”

She said, “But I really like you. And I didn’t want you to know what I do.”

I said, “Do you think it’s wrong then? Your job? Is that why you don’t talk about it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She lay back on her pillow. “I don’t know anything. I feel like you do sometimes, like sometimes you know. Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Do you think my job is wrong?” she said.

I nodded. “Probably,” I said. “Probably, yes.”

She said, “I’ve thought about that, about it being wrong. But I don’t know what’s right and wrong here. Not anymore. Or not really ever. I mean, my mom used to tell me not to smoke when I was little. She said it all the time. Told me that smoking could kill me, that it cost a lot of money, that it was a stupid habit. Then, one night I came out of my bedroom––I was maybe nine or ten––and my mom was smoking a cigarette right there in the kitchen. We had a little slide-up window and she was leaning forward and blowing the smoke out the window, and I stood there and watched her for a minute before I said anything.”

“And what did she say when you caught her?”

“She said it was the first time she’d ever tried smoking, that she didn’t think she’d ever do it again. And I believed her until the next time I caught her a few weeks later.”

I said, “They’re really putting a motel here?”

“Yes,” she said. “They’re really putting a Motel 4 in the Valley. It’s going to happen. I should have told you.”

“Yeah,” I said, “you should have told me.”

• • •

Kenny asked me to go up on the portaledge with him again. “We’ll be flying above it all, man. Hang out for days and days.”

I said, “I don’t think so.”

“But I really want you to come,” he said. “Remember what I told you about last time?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You said you suffered. Called it ‘long-term suffering.’ Then you said that lightning came in one day and scared you to death.”

“Right,” he said. “Exactly. We need that long-term suffering in our lives. That struggle. That abject fear. We need the carabiners humming with electricity against the anchor bolts, bright blue and shaking. Remember that I had to crouch in a fetal position for more than four hours?”

“Yeah,” I said, “you told me.”

Kenny said, “You don’t understand, man. It was great.”

“I don’t know, Kenny.”

He said, “I like to think about the orbit of the sun. You know? How it’s moving too, a lot faster than we can imagine. It’s not just us moving out here. Everything’s expanding. Have you ever thought about the universe?”

• • •

August snow at 4,000 feet on the Valley floor. The only time ever.

My father wakes me up. “Tenaya, come out here.”

It’s early morning. Not yet light.

He says, “Come on. Get out of the tent.”

I see his bright teeth in the dark. I pull my blanket around my shoulders. Get to my feet. Step out.

White dropping all around me. Huge, wet flakes piling, the ground already covered.

My father says. “It’s an inversion. Cold air stuck down in the Valley.”

“An inversion?”

My father laughs. He holds out his hands and opens his mouth to the sky. He says, “Tourists are going to drive out of here so fast today. This is the Valley’s way of saying ‘Leave. Just get out.’ Sometimes the Valley gets its way.”