Graphic the Valley (29 page)

People hid in tents, the Lodge, bathrooms, kiosks, the Village Store, at Curry, the LeConte Memorial, Housekeeping, and at the Buffet. Visitors waited all day for the storm to end.

When the evening came, people ran for their cars and hid, the sandy mud three inches high on their shoes and socks. They scraped the mud onto their floorboards, took off their shoes, and curled their feet up underneath them. Some slept in their cars that night with the rain pelting rhythms on their rooftops. Tents were no longer waterproof. The cement doorways of the bathrooms deflected rain inside, stall floors flecked with the spray.

And it rained.

It was only the second day of the rain when people started to leave. I went to check on the fertilizer truck and saw people packing their tents in Camp 4, across the road. At the ranger’s box, the ten-day forecast from the National Weather Service predicted ten days straight of rain, a summertime record for the Valley. I saw climbers shaking their heads. Two-thousand-mile destination road trips ending here in the rain. No chance to climb for more than a week.

• • •

I focused on the truck. The meeting. What I would do. I went over my plan. Drive the truck up and leave it in one of the front parking spaces. Walk away. Get to the Village. Walk behind the store complex to the midsize boulder. Flip the lock on the remote and press the button, then slide behind the boulder as the blast wave moved out.

The smell of cologne and cigar smoke. My fist inside the mountain lion. The green bottle in my hand. My hand on a remote.

• • •

On the third day of rain, the Merced River rose suddenly like an opened dam. Tenaya Creek fed from the east, joining the melt from Vernal and Nevada. The Arches’ streams became three runners, then five, then seven. The explosions of water off Bridalveil Falls could be seen from Northside Drive. And the Merced rose above its banks like a man stepping over a fence.

I saw the Merced at North Pines, where the river floods first, at the long bank, the water circling around campsites before dropping into the flats. The rangers sandbagged at the first sign of overflow, yelling to each other and throwing bags in the rain. But the river snuck behind the wall and moved on. Then it took the south side, at the Lower Pines, slashing a line to the watershed across, spreading to create a backwater up and down behind the camp.

Campers packed wet everything. Stuffed the backs of their cars with soaked gear.

The river took the first of the meadows next, below Housekeeping and up, rising across the southeast beach, collapsing muddy banks on the northwest. This was the highest I had ever seen the river, bigger than the two huge snowmelts, April floods, but this was not April, and the rains would not stop.

• • •

I went to get my mother, but she wasn’t in camp. I looked in all her usual places near the creek, the clearing, down on the trail by the road. I yelled for her in the rain but the wet ate the sound.

I walked back up the hill and got into the car. Reached under the seat for the keys. Turned the ignition and heard the engine catch. I blasted the air to clear the condensation, then I drove downhill, the car sliding at each turn, sliding sideways on the rained-out ground. The third turn proved too tight. The car skidded sideways, caught for a moment, then skidded some more. I pulled the wheel, but the car followed the slope, sliding downhill sideways until it crushed against a tree, the left side rear door denting in against the tree trunk.

I couldn’t get out on my side. The door wouldn’t open. So I crawled across, opened the passenger-side door, and slid out. Then I walked back down to the Loop Road. The north side. Put my thumb out in the rain.

A car pulled over in front of me. The driver rolled down his window. He said, “Where are you headed?”

“Merced. The hospital there.”

He said, “Are you hurt?”

“No,” I said. “I need to visit someone.”

“Well…shoot. We’re not really going that way. We’re headed up out of the other park exit, not going through El Portal at all, and nowhere near Merced.”

I said, “That’s okay. I can flag down another car.”

“Sounds good,” he said. “Good luck.”

I waved and he pulled back onto the road in front of me, driving west. I put my thumb out once again.

Car after car passed, trying to leave the Valley before the flooding covered the road. But it was too late. I saw the return cars first, then I walked up on the traffic jam an hour later. The river had crested, spreading a lake at the west end of the loop before the 120 split. One car at a time was trying to turn around and head back east. I didn’t see the car that had pulled over for me. It was somewhere up in that traffic line, sitting in the rising water, now partway buried.

• • •

I was standing at the Book Cliffs, looking up the Valley, the waves of the Merced light, but the river coming north now, licking and extending, four times its normal width.

The fifth day of rain.

Water wedging and the rockfall starting. Rockfall off the Nose of El Capitan first, to the west, the collapse sounding like dynamite in spring to clear slides on the Tioga Road. I hiked down into Camp 4 and heard dirtbags discussing the rockfall in the bathroom.

One said, “I think that’s off the Great Roof, huh?”

“Yeah,” the other said. “Just sucks. That route is gone, bro.”

The first climber shook his head while brushing his teeth at the sink. There weren’t many climbers left in the campground now. Camp 4 held ten people at the most.

The same day saw a piece of Sentinel come down. Black rockfall at the lichen smear, a buttress on the west side of the north face heaving into the trees below, and the rangers warned all hikers and climbers back from the cliffs. They wrote on the signboard, “Don’t scout climbs.” “Don’t even look up from below.” “Wear helmets.” “Stay near the river.” The climbing ranger circulated through the sites, yelling and smiling. But his smile looked like he was sipping turned milk.

And the river crept toward us on the Lodge footpath, moving like a rattlesnake over the asphalt.

• • •

Day six. The Arches heaved, trembling like an earthquaked building. I’d cleared my gear from the cave, and was standing near the hotel dumpsters with the arrowhead collection in my hands and my soaked sleeping bag around my neck. Then the first slide came down, and the roaring followed.

Three men were getting into a red Cadillac in the parking lot. It was morning, a malignant gray under the rain, and the three men looked like hikers, wearing new, Day-Glo, waterproof gear.

The rockfall rushed the trees, turned pines like broken saplings, huge boulders hurtling fifty feet off the ground. A boulder hit the Cadillac from above, landed on the roof, a boulder weighing four or five tons, exploding three of the Cadillac’s doors all the way off, and the men were crushed inside. Only one of them screamed. The other two never made any noise at all.

That was the small rockfall.

• • •

The hotel was evacuated. As people walked out along the entrance road, a ranger yelled, “The Village is okay, but stay away from the river! Don’t go to Curry! Do not go to Curry!”

The hotel had been evacuated only an hour when the second and third rockfalls came down off the Arches, washing through the abandoned structure.

I heard it, an avalanche of loose rock against the set stone of the walls, the grating and collisions reverberating through the Valley even in the rain. Nothing could stop that sound as the two rockfalls, ten minutes apart, took the boulders, the caves, the parking lot, and the hotel itself. The great Ahwahnee that had stood for nine decades in the Valley was gone.

There was no job for me then, the hotel gone. I couldn’t destroy what the rockfall had already taken, and the meeting wouldn’t happen. I’d left the fertilizer truck to sit in the rain in the Camp 4 overflow parking lot. The river was licking at its wheels now, rising little by little up its black tires.

I recovered the remote and dropped it in the dumpster.

• • •

People massed at the Village store, crowded like elk against winter, yelling into their cell phones.

I saw her against the wall, hunched over her phone, reading.

I said, “McKenzie.”

“Oh my god,” she said. “I’ve spent six days trying to find you. I’ve been everywhere. Seriously. I thought you might have left.”

I pointed to the sky. “Crazy, huh?”

“Yes,” she said. “Have you seen it like this before?”

“No,” I said. “Never.”

“But weren’t there floods before?”

“Not like this one. Not even the big flood. Nothing like this. I don’t even know what I’d call this.”

“Evil?” she said. “Deadly?”

“Deadly maybe.”

McKenzie said, “And angry.”

We watched the sky drop its wet. Listened to the pounding on the corrugated metal roof above us. The people near us kept walking out to the edge of the awning, checking to see if it could still be raining as hard.

McKenzie said, “They’re going to re-evaluate, my boss and the others. They’re going to wait a while on everything. This storm’s supposed to stay, to wreck a lot of things. Everyone is freaking out.”

“Yeah,” I said. “This flood might do some lasting damage to structures.”

“Are you kidding?” she said. “Do you know what it’s done already?”

“Yes. The rockfall at the Ahwahnee was incredible. I saw it.”

McKenzie looked at her watch. “I’ve got to go call them. Give a report. Will you still be here in a while?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

She was holding her phone. She put it to her lips. “Where will you be?”

“I don’t know. I have to find my mother.”

“Your mother? Is she here? And is she out in this?”

“Somewhere,” I said.

“Okay, wow,” McKenzie said. “I didn’t even know that she lived here. Where do you think she is?”

“I’m not sure. But she’s somewhere in the Valley. I have a few ideas. Might not be that hard to find her.”

McKenzie flipped her phone open. Checked for messages. Then she closed it. She said, “I guess you better go find her.”

“I will,” I said. “I’m going.”

McKenzie kissed me quickly. She said, “What is it that the Spanish climbers say in Camp 4?”

“
A la muerte?
”

“Yeah, that’s it.
A la muerte
, Tenaya.”

• • •

It wasn’t a long search. My mother was back on the Little Columbia Boulder again, where I’d found her before. She had no glue bag this time. She huddled underneath my father’s green rain poncho, sitting on top of the boulder, looking out at the abandoned west end of camp, oriented toward the Search and Rescue tents.

I helped her slide down the ramp-side of the boulder, made her jump to me at the short end.

“We’ve got to get up and out of here, okay?” I said. “I’ve packed food and blankets for us, so we can hike right out of camp.”

We hiked in the white sludge, the high granite mud. The Falls Trail ran rivulets down past our feet, no summer acorn dust as my mother kept slipping.

I said, “Do you remember when we used the grind holes to make acorn flour? How you taught me?”

My mother stopped. I put my arms around her and hugged her. She hugged me back, then turned and kept walking. I looked over my shoulder but I couldn’t see anything yet. We were still in the oak forest, low on the switchbacks.

After a while, my mother stopped again. Looked back over the Valley and Camp 4. We were halfway up to the rim, at the midway switchback, the one little iron rail for the overlook. I gave her water, then drank some myself.

Underneath us, we saw the lakes of brown water, the green trees spiking, and the white gray of the big boulders still above the waterline. The flood lapped the edges of Camp 4 now.

My mother looked shriveled next to me in her poncho, the outline of her small shoulders, and the rain pressing everything tight.

I said, “I don’t think this is rain anymore.”

My mother held out her hands, palms up, and caught the splats.

I said, “I’ve seen it rain here thousands of times, and you have too. But this isn’t rain. This is something else.” I could feel the lakes in the Valley rising up to meet the water falling from the sky. Water to water.

My mother licked at the rain running down her face. She held her palms still and turned her face upward, into the heavy drops. She closed her eyes.

I did the same. Tilted my face and let the rain welt my eyelids. It was not softening. We stood like that, together with our eyes closed, standing above the Valley lakes.

After a while, I said, “Should we keep hiking?”

My mother dropped her palms and started walking uphill again. I followed her. She was not fast or slow, but steady, walking at the same pace regardless of the pitch, no matter how steep. When she lifted a foot, I set mine down in its place. I watched her feet dent the trail, and I stepped in those dents.

I’d loaded my pack at the bear boxes, more food abandoned in the camp than I could ever eat. If the boxes didn’t flood, we’d have food stores forever when we went back down.

We didn’t need to bring extra water. Water was everywhere around us. I knew of three natural cisterns that would be full and overflowing above us.

My mother and I sloshed through the traverse at the girdle of trees above midway, then up the steep switchbacks again. The incline was difficult in the slick. The Upper Falls crushed next to us, in the void between the cliffs, the sound of the falls concussing. I had never heard it like this before, not even at a quick snowmelt in April. The sound of a new Valley being born.

Then we were on top of the rim, hiking along the iron-wired edge and looking out, wondering at the water everywhere, pools in each hole at our feet, rivulets running down stone, splatting at every flat.

The storm kept on, and the clouds massed. Electric and grating, they stacked above us. In the south. Then to the west, like dark cars filling a lot, people wedging into spaces between. Filtered light growing dim.

Sideways lightning started behind Glacier Point, on the high plateau behind the Valley, behind the Cathedrals, crackling like magnesium-dipped yarn. White illumination of the dark. The three spires light and dark above the water.