On Dread and Evanescence

　

　

1.

For my father, the son of a Lutheran minister, vacations were more a matter of duty than pleasure. We traveled on road trips cross country as a family in a smelly oblong sedan. Someone always had to go to the bathroom and siblings feuded over seat space. Travel involved risk, car trouble, and helplessly spending money. These were things that appalled and frightened my father. He became even more ill-tempered than normal, agitated, and bitter. The traffic was always burdensome, prices too high and distances between attractions too hot and barren. It was all an ordeal.

The template for these vacations was set early, when I was nine or ten. We drove to Yellowstone National Park. On Sylvan Pass, a steep switchbacked road leading into the park, traffic was stalled. Bears were begging among the cars and everyone had stopped to photograph them or hand-feed the big pathetic-looking beasts twinkies and Oreo cookies. After the bear traffic jam, the road rose to another stall, lines of vehicles backed up behind a place were some bison were blocking the highway. Again, the tourists put their cars in park and ventured out onto the roadway to tease the big, shaggy buffalo. After another couple hundred yards, the traffic stopped again and the switchback became a parking lot: some mule deer were standing in the woods and the procession of cars was again stalled on the upgrade as people took pictures – an elaborate process in those days involving removing the camera from its leather case, focusing, checking f-stop, refocusing and checking f-stop again before pushing the button for a picture, then, repeating the process. (Cameras were labor-intensive – you didn’t just point and shoot.) Our car was a Rambler, equipped with clutch and manual transmission, and the long stalls in gear on steep inclines began to burn out the clutch. We could smell the car’s transmission burning and my father became increasingly enraged because he was afraid – he weren’t well-to-do in those days and a ruined car side-lined on a Wyoming highway in the big mountains would have been ruinous to us. So my father became more angry and my mother was silent, beckoning us to be silent also. We went by stops and starts up the mountain, my father almost weeping in his fury and terror.

Somehow, we escaped disaster. The park horrified my father with its crowds of tourists blocking all the highways as they fed and teased the wildlife. We fled, driving to a cowboy town somewhere under the Wind River range. It was Saturday night and the streets were explosive and hilarious with drunk cowboys. A cold wind blew from a nearby river roaring through the narrow gorge where the town was built.

Such things are educational. After all vacations are meant to be educational.

　

2.

Just before a long-planned trip to California, a family member became very ill unexpectedly and was hospitalized in intensive care. My first impulse was to cancel the trip, but my daughter had been eagerly anticipating the vacation and, of course, she was not to blame for the illness of her brother, and, so, I was uncertain what to do. I consulted with my mother who suggested that I not go on the trip. But others counseled that I travel. After all, what was good of staying at home. On the day before the trip, I drove with my wife to the hospital forty-five miles away where my son was in intensive care. The hospital cast a pall over the afternoon – a close friend had died there a few years ago. The patient that we had come to visit was asleep and, when roused, said that he didn’t want to see us. So we went home. It was a grey day, ice filling the streets and the trenches between filthy drifts where the sidewalks were. I hadn’t made a decision about the trip yet – indeed, I had taken refuge in not making a decision but it was pretty clear to me what I would do.

The next day, I flew to California. The plane was filled to capacity, oversold, really, and the airborne toilet was flooded with urine. At the rental counter at the San Francisco airport, the Assyrian agent wondered aloud how many people were in my party and, when I told him that it was just myself and my daughter, he glared at me – "The car seats seven," he said. "Seven?" I asked. "Seven," the Assyrian said, shaking his head sadly at my folly. "It is a big car," he said. "I don’t need such a huge car," I said. He asked me if I wanted to upgrade to an Infiniti or Lexis. "No," I said. "Where are you going?" he asked. "Yosemite," I said. "Oh, then, you will need a jeep, a big jeep with four-wheel drive," he said. "I don’t want a jeep," I replied. "Well, what do you want?" he asked insistently.

Here is an aside: when you travel, people pressure you to act quickly, impulsively, or, at least, with a degree of efficiency inimical to the fact that you are a stranger and don’t really know the way. You are urged to act quickly because the people around you generally know where they are and have errands to fulfill and the highways that are strange and alarming to you are merely instrumental to them, familiar paths well worn with their travels and there is always a line behind you, people waiting to reach the counter, cars pressing you forward, mobs urging you in one direction or another and, so, you must always make haste, or, at least, you perceive that you must make haste, but to make haste in an unfamiliar place among strangers is to risk calamity, to risk losing something, leaving some article behind at a counter or in a concourse or skyway – travel exposes you to circumstances in which you are impelled to rush forward, or make rash decisions, and this can be disastrous, can lead to the equivalent of your clutch and gears burning up in a smear of blue smoke on a mountain pass...

And, so, I said that I would take the big vehicle, suitable for seven passengers – a red Buick Escalade as it turned out. The Escalade was parked in an adjacent garage and the attendants there were fiercely urging the rental car customers to leave the ramp and get out on the freeway although this was difficult for me because the vehicle had a gear-shift that I didn’t understand, a weird transvese rod that required that I press buttons to make the vehicle shift, and the edges of the Escalade were obscure to me, I was agnostic as to its exact limits and edges, something that is a fearful problem when driving in dense, fast-moving traffic — simply stated, my sense for proprioception with regard to Buick’s sides and front and back bumpers was all out-of-whack and, when I looked in the rear-view mirror, the car seemed to simply extend back and back and back all the way to the horizon.

Then, I went on the freeway along the Bay, bumper-to-bumper traffic and cars honking at me when I made imprudent lane-shifts and honking as well when I slowed to try to better grasp where I was driving and, as it happened, of course, I was always in the wrong lane to make the required turn and, then, had to make u-turns in rush-hour traffic or navigate networks of one-way streets getting ever farther and farther afield and, all the time, I could feel (figuratively speaking) the car’s clutch catching fire and spilling out greasy, rubber-smelling smoke and my dread was growing, seizing my mind and paralyzing my reflexes...

The hotel was in Chinatown, accessed through a narrow dragon gate that I could scarcely navigate and located on a steep incline, this being San Francisco, of course, and, after some horrific maneuvering on the steep, traffic-jammed streets I found a curb by which to park and, then, turned the wheels as you are supposed to do in the City by the Bay, turning the wheels into the curb or out away from the curb – I couldn’t recall which was the way to keep the car from rolling runaway down the 27% grade – and so I, finally, decided to turn the wheels out and, then, grope for the parking brake, but there was no parking brake (or, if there was one, I never did find it) and so I had the car parked, illegally, I think on a steep hill in the twilight in San Francisco in the filthy wilderness of Chinatown, and, when I stepped out of the car, I stumbled, half-fell over a pair of aluminum crutches lying discarded by the parking meter, a sight that, for some obscure reason, horrified me.

I hiked down to the hotel lobby, checked in, and, then, asked the attendant, a surly Asian guy who spoke almost no English where I could park my car and, all the while my dread was increasing. The man looked at me without comprehension and, then, shook his head, muttered something in heavily accented words that I didn’t understand, and, then, handed me a sheet, what once would have been called a mimeograph, a slippery, greasy sheet and showed a few blocks and a parking garage marked with a funereal cross, most of the words in Chinese except for some numbers – "39.95 a night." So I went back to big Buick where Angelica was standing on the dirty sidewalk looking up a narrow street with red Chinese lanterns suspended over the sidewalk and the discarded crutches under foot and, then, I put the big car in gear and tried to find the parking ramp but the streets were too congested and the one-ways too confusing and, at the place where the map told me to turn left, left turns were forbidden and, furthermore, the traffic patterns, buried in herds of bucking and honking cars, were intricate because of a tunnel, a dark mouth cut into the hillside, and, at last, I simply settled for a garage accessible to the lane where I happened to be driving, pulled in, took a ticket, and, then, went to the third level where there were plenty of spaces, but, of course, I didn’t know where the edges of the car were located, wasn’t familiar with the size of the beast that I was wrestling, and so, somehow, I caught the car between another vehicle and concrete pillar – I have always thought that if you can get the front of a car through a gap, the rear wheels will follow (an old truckdriver told me once: if you can get through with the front, the rear will necessarily follow, but I’m sorry to say that this is manifestly untrue, it doesn’t take into account all sorts of vagaries of geometry) and, so, following this fallacious principal, I pulled through an opening too tight and caught the passenger side on the pillar, a gentle sort of caress, that, nonetheless, stripped some of the paint from the passenger side rear-door, leaving a white scuff mark, and, now, I was panicked, truly and completely afraid – so now what? Now what?

The parking lot, of course, was not the right place – it was an hourly ramp with no in-and-out privileges – and, when I reported my location to the Chinese guy at the desk, he just shook his head in dismay at my stupidity and handed us the key-card to the room, an airless den on the sixth floor, without air-conditioning – this being San Francisco the City by the Bay, of course – and, so, we had to open the windows and this made the room roar and vibrate with the sounds of huge vehicles crawling up the 17% grade outside, engines howling as if about to explode under the pressure of the ascent, and the sound of voices on the street, happy people, even gleeful whose merriment tormented me because I felt as if I should just put my head down and cry, weep with sorrow because the vehicle in the parking ramp was scuffed now and too big for me to safely drive and the streets were all wild with frenzies of cars and pedestrians, the big city and I am not from a big city, I am from a small town, and all of this was simply too much for me –

In the dawn, I forced myself to leave the hotel room, found the parking lot, and put the car in the right place, all of this accomplished without incident, but, still laboring under a sense of impending doom, calamity, a feeling that something awful was about to occur. The streets were so steep that I could scarcely climb them, grim ladders of asphalt, to find the dingy hotel where we were staying, the room like a place where someone might commit suicide, and, later, when my daughter and I ventured out again – the effort of sallying forth taking up all my energy and courage – we went to a McDonalds where I was distracted, took my cup for the Diet Coke that I intended to drink, and filled it up with ketchup, squirts of ketchup like blood and my eyes filling with tears and, when I went back to the counter, to ask for another cup, the counter-man says "you don’t get another cup for free, you have to pay for a cup," something that I refuse to do.

We walk all day because I’m afraid to drive and become very footsore and irritable and so it occurs to me that we should use Uber to shorten some of the distances between places but who knows how that works, what sort of driver would come to pick us up, what sort of travails the use of this service would entail, and, so, it’s best just to stay afoot, walking alongside the interminable St. Patrick’s Day parade that wends its way along the relatively level streets around Sansom and the Moscone Center. Everyone is wearing green with big floppy Cat-in-the-Hat tophats decorated with shamrocks and there are topless girls with green bead necklaces between their breasts, people sitting precariously atop high walls, skateboarders zooming in and out of the marchers, the Silicon Valley bagpipers playing "On Raglan Road" while cops direct traffic and people scoot between floats to cross the street and there is one old bum, teeter-tottering drunk atop the iron ramparts of a huge dumpster and, at any moment, I expect the man to fall backward into the garbage bin. Exhausted, we reach our room where the air is hot and stagnant and the trucks climbing the 27% grade under the window are loudly stripping their gears and, because I am seriously spooked, I go to bed at about 7:30 pm, legs twitching under the sheets and my mind filled with all sorts of dire thoughts that I can’t control: the smell of a clutch burning and, before my eyes, squirts of blood-redcatsup on ice in my McDonald’s cup.

The next morning our travels require that we remove the car from the ramp, something that I accomplish gingerly – it’s Sunday and the roads are clear in the early morning, no traffic, except an occasional early jogger slipping across the right-of-way. I want to see the Monet and Gauguin exhibitions at the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park and I have carefully studied guidebooks and brochures and know that it is best to park at the windswept Ocean Beach on the Pacific where a shuttle bus will pick up visitors and take them the 2.3 miles inland to the museum. And, so, I implement this plan, driving down the Great Highway from the ruins of Sutro baths and the Cliff House, the sea all turbulent with mighty waves, huge white serpents slithering ashore and the wind howling off the water. I find a completely empty part of the parking lot and carefully maneuver the Escalade into a spot so that it is facing outward – I should be able to maneuver the vehicle with reasonable ease from this isolated location – and, then, we walk along the sidewalk overlooking the beach. The air is skunky with marijuana smoke and the surfers have pulled up to the edge of the sand in smashed-up cars with beach towels veiling the windows so that they can smoke dope in their vehicles before venturing out onto the windy sand and icy sea and I can see a few surfer dudes down at the place where the beach is hard and glistening with the foam of the waves repeated packing things down – the men are wearing wet-suits and have abnormally long torsos and they are peering sea-ward as if to read messages written in the roaring water and, far out at the horizon, there is pack of clouds like rolled-up scrolls white and feathery over the ocean.

It takes the bus a long time to arrive, almost 30 minutes, although the shuttle is supposed to operate at 15 minute intervals and there are only a couple of lady art-lovers in the first few seats conversing with the Filipino driver who looks across the beach to the sea and announces in a ruminative voice that "so many have drowned here." We see the exhibition and return to the parking lot via the bus and, now, everything has changed – the long lot facing the sea is completely filled and cars are prowling waiting for people to leave so that they can hawk down on their parking spots. The Escalade is closely hemmed on all sides and it takes me ten minutes to extricate the car, laboriously backing, triangulating to move forward, reversing again, a long process that causes the vehicles queued up to fight for my spot to honk and scoff and mock me since I am a very poor driver, I suppose, at least by local standards – somehow, I escape the parking lot without damage, drive through the city now wild with weekend traffic that capriciously stops and starts and switches lanes for no apparent reason, the equivalent of an old farmer taking out his Buick on a Sunday to survey the state of crops in the fields, traffic that follows no real rules and that seizes up unpredictably and fails to yield. At Fort Point, the parking spaces are few and close together and, when I pull in to put the car in place, my daughter squeals because I am so close to the side of the parked car next to her window. I stop the car against the brick wall overlooking the bay and there are a couple of people sitting on the hood of their vehicle next to me, looking out toward Alcatraz and passing a joint back and forth and they assure me that I’m parked okay, that this is just fine with them, that everything is mellow, and I say: "It’s a rental and too big for me" and the girl smiles obligingly and I say: "Even if it were tiny, I probably would have the same problem parking." They shrug and, when I come back from climbing the ramparts of the old fort, the parking lot is a little better, more empty and I can escape without too much hassle. Then, I drive to the Mission San Francisco de Assis on Dolores Street and, again, it’s impossible to park – some kind of anti-Trump rally is underway at a steep green hillside with sidewalks all banked in roses and flowering rhododendron and the people are streaming to and from the park in all directions so that it’s almost impossible to drive on the adjacent streets, men and women crossing the roads at unpredictable angles and the crosswalks filled-up with indignant crowds and so, I go around the block, around seven blocks, and, suddenly, there is a parking spot right in front of me, along the sidewalk, without meters and next to a body modification parlor. I say: God wants me to park here and so I pull in and get the Escalade pretty reasonably located for a quick escape and so we set off to the Mission and, suddenly, it occurs to me that this was too easy, something dreadful is about to occur, when I come back to where the vehicle was parked, it will have been towed or stuck in a Denver Boot and, therefore, immobilized. The Mission is calm and quiet and there is a sliver of a bone from the thigh of Saint Junipero Serra in a reliquary under the altar and the carved Jesus bleeds and bleeds and bleeds and the cemetery is full of flowering shrubs and, somehow, completely silent notwithstanding the busy road a hundred feet away and the anti-Trump demonstration at the park near the end of the block. We return to the body modification parlor and no one has tampered with the Escalade and I pull the huge vehicle back into traffic – really the car isn’t that big at all; there are much larger vehicles on the road, but it’s enormous to me – and I travel uphill toward Chinatown in traffic that is astonishing for a Sunday, bumper to bumper traffic that is sometimes invaded by emergency vehicles, ambulances flashing their lights and screaming at you to move aside except that there is no place into which you can move...

The next day, a Monday, I get up long before dawn because I know I will have to park along the Embarcadero and this will certainly be tricky, a real challenge with the huge Escalade. We hustle to the ramp and drive to the Embarcardero and I follow signs showing the way to parking, but, somehow, I make a mistake and find myself on a lonely avenue, six blocks from the waterfront where there is a single parking lot, a small empty trapezoid of asphalt under a building improbably mounted on sea-rusted iron stilts. Surely, this place is far enough from the waterfront to be a safe and isolated place to park and so I put the car under the hovering structure – it’s some kind of art institute – pay at a scarred, marred, scratched-up pay station and, then, we hike down to the harbor and I worry that there’s something wrong with this parking lot, it’s too remote or too abandoned or too good to be true, something will go wrong and I will return to find the car towed or booted, a palpable sense of dread that afflicts me all day long, at the dank cells at Alcatraz, during lunch on Pier 39, among the wax freaks at Ripley’s Odditorium. Mid-afternoon, we walk back to the car and it is still where I parked it six hours earlier, but now completely surrounded on all sides by other cars, hemmed in and blocked. A surly Honduran attendant is squatting in the shack on-site and he takes some car keys and rearranges the Rubik’s cube of cars surrounding the Escalade, backing them with surprising speed and efficiency, and cutting a path through the parked vehicles that I can navigate, although just barely.

The traffic out of San Francisco is bumper-to-bumper all the way to Dublin and, then, over the surreal green hills, so smooth that you can almost see the sky reflected in their mirror-surfaces, several car crashes up at Altamont Pass blocking the lanes and, then, more crashes on the long downgrade to Livermore. Then, suddenly, there is no traffic at all – I am on a rural road that arrows through endless groves of almond and pistachio trees, flat terrain, with thunderclouds roiling up overhead and 85 degrees.

The next day, we are in Yosemite. The great granite cliffs have thrown bus-sized boulders down onto the floor of the valley and waterfalls fountain off the precipices and the streams are ferocious with violent white currents clawing at the rocks in the gorges. There are a lot of ways to die here.

I can’t shake my dread. One night I call my wife: "I’m scared." "Why are you scared?" "It’s a sense of terrible dread, almost panic." "But why?" "I don’t know," I say. "Well, you have to get control of your fear," my wife says, "or your trip will be spoiled." "It’s already spoiled," I say. "What are you afraid of," my wife asks. "I have a sense of impending doom," I tell her. "I think that something terrible is going to happen." My wife replies: "But something terrible did happen. It already happened. Your son almost died. But he is getting better now."

I forget things. I leave some clothing behind at Yosemite and, then, my bag of toiletries is lost, left on a table somewhere. At Mariposa, I leave behind my Moleskin, the little black notebook in which I have written the notes for this very essay. We get 28 miles before I recognize that I have lost the notebook and, then, turn around – the way back to Mariposa rises from the almond groves in the hot San Joaquin Valley up into the foothills, over a green pass overlooking miles and miles of rolling hills and narrow, green valleys. I find the notebook in the toilet, sitting atop a toilet paper dispenser.

Loss of the notebook and its recapture delays us and we drive into San Francisco across the San Mateo bridge. Predictably, the traffic is terrible. I have to fill out a report on the scuff to the Escalade. In the car rental ramp, I can smell a clutch burning, gaskets on fire, hot metal on metal.


3.

The Indians who lived in the Yosemite Valley told stories about the waterfalls. In the mist under Bridalveil Falls, people would sometimes see huts low to the ground, standing among the boulders, and the pools made by the fog falling from the waterfall. Strange women lived in those huts and they lured young men into their makeshift village so that they could kill and cook and eat them. People were always vanishing in the boulder-clogged gorge made by the river beneath the falls. Even today, it’s a dangerous place, full of slippery stone and howling vortices of water – a misstep will kill you. I suppose the story was invented to deter children and youths from venturing too close to the ferocious river. Fear is an instrument.

The Indians called the high fall of the Yosemite Cho’lok, words meaning: "It creates its own wind." According to legend, a woman more than eight months pregnant, climbed up the switchback trail to the churning whirlpools under the falls. She carried a wicker basket so tightly woven from marsh reeds that water could be transported in that vessel. At the first whirlpool under the jet of falling water, the woman filled her basket, lifted it to her shoulder, and, then, felt that something was wrong. When she lifted the top of the basket and looked inside, she saw a humid tangle of green and brown serpents. She spilled the serpents onto the rocks and climbed a little higher. The way was precarious and the boulders underfoot slippery. She stooped over another whirling pool of ice-cold water, again filling the wicker basket. Once more, she felt movement in the basket as soon as she lifted it to her shoulder and discovered that it was again full of snakes. This happened a third time as well and, then, the woman was overcome with labor pains. She crawled under a tree just beyond the plummet of the waters from high above – sometimes, clouds covered the top of the enormous waterfall, although on this day the sky was clear and blue and the air was warm and perfumed with pine sap. After her baby was born, the woman wrapped the child in her blanket, lifted the empty wicker basket and slowly staggered downhill to the village. When she reached her lodge, her husband and mother approached and asked to see the child. The woman opened the blanket, but it was empty except for a tremendous wind that spun outward and knocked down the incense-bark wickiups and put out the campfires and knocked over the chuckahs in which the people stored acorns and old people and small children were lifted off their feet by the gale and, then, knocked over.

　

4.

At his Giverny garden, Claude Monet purchased a farm house and, later, a swampy meadow. He corralled the waters in the swamp into a series of pools and planted them with white water-lilies from France as well as water-lilies imported from Brazil and Japan. He spent the last fifteen years of his life painting the water-lilies. After World War I, he sometimes painted the lilies under weeping willows. The weeping willows were a reminder that millions of young Frenchmen had died in the Great War, Monet’s son among them.

Monet’s paintings of these water-lilies were his way of studying the most evanescent of all phenomena – the play of light and reflected sky on a still pool congested with glistening flowers. Discipline is necessary to systematically study evanescence. Each day, Monet’s crew of gardeners skimmed the water-lily pools to remove algae and insect larvae – nothing could be permitted to cloud the water. The water-lilies themselves were each dunked under the surface of the ponds on which they were floated – this measure was to clean the lily-pads, remove any dust that had accumulated on them, and make the flowers against their great floating pads glisten brightly. Monet even paid for public roads around the garden to be paved so that passing vehicles would not raise dust that might obscure the pools and their burden of brilliant flowers.

Someone said that "Monet is just an eye, but what an eye!" I find Monet’s late paintings just a wee bit monotonous and daunting. They are, in effect, invisible to me – no matter how hard I look at them I can’t quite bring the project or the image into meaningful focus. An element of the obsessive haunts the canvases, although they are luminous and serene. I wonder what fear afflicted Monet to the extent that he withdrew into these monastic labors painting the lily-pads. Perhaps, he was afraid that his son would die in the Great War. When this fear turned to grief, perhaps, he assuaged these emotions in these paintings. Although I have used the word "obsessive" to describe these paintings, I think that they are, in fact, supremely rational – they comport themselves with the otherworldly dignity of some of Wallace Stevens’ great poems: they are supreme fictions. The water-lilies show that life is light and change, reflection and shadow: Be not afraid, the paintings whisper to those who have come to see them, be not afraid.

　

5.

Viewed in the light of the ages, even the mountains flow like rivers, rising and, then, subsiding. Everything changes, even the landscape that seems immutable to our mortal eyes. Once, the Sierra Nevada were thirty-thousand feet high, colossal towers of sandstone atop a core of impenetrably hard granite. Eons shoveled the sandstone toward the ocean exposing the hard, crystalline monoliths and creating the immense, slightly inclined ramp of foothills to the west of that ridge of towering granite spires, ancient magma plutons, that form the spine of the mountain range. Over a few million years, the mountains shook themselves like a wet dog emerging from the surf.

On July 13, 2018, a fire started along the eastbound lanes of Highway 140, one of the main access roads to Yosemite. The fire burned in the roadway ditch on the south side of the Merced River. The river dances downhill over rocks and boulders, spawning rapids in its shallows, and it has cut a deep and narrow gorge between the steeply sloping, dry hillsides. The fire clambered up the hill and hid itself for a few hours in a side ravine, boring its way to the canyon rim comprised of a series of rounded ridges about 800 feet above the river. From that high-point, the fire exploded, caught by the wind and carried in a thousand orange plumes down into the adjacent valleys, burning in the dry timber. This was the Ferguson wild-fire, a blaze that ultimately shut-down Yosemite Valley for several weeks. The blaze jumped the Merced River to imperil the lodges and boutiques in Yosemite Valley and scorched 950,000 acres. Pictures show Half-Dome and El Capitan hazy in dense, yellow smoke and, before it was over, two firefighters had died, a bulldozer operators whose rig rolled down a steep slope and a hot-shot killed when a flaming tree fell on him. The fire was contained on August 19, but in its blackened core flames re-ignited periodically until the rains and snow came in November. Investigators found fragments of a burst catalytic converter near the area where the fire was first reported. Traffic can be congested on the narrow winding road that runs parallel to the Merced River – there is a long and complex detour about ten or twelve miles from El Portal near the entrance to the park and, perhaps, a car idling in congestion under the hot sun blew its catalytic converter, scattering molten shards in the combustible ditch-weed.

As I drove to Yosemite on 140, the road dips sharply downward from a height called Mid Pines, a hamlet centrally located between Mariposa and Yosemite’s southeast entrance – this is the descent from the canyon rim, really just a succession of barren-looking hills, into the Merced Valley. At the valley floor, a curious optical illusion occurs: the Merced River flows steeply downhill, glistening with rapids, but the road alongside the river, bound upward to the Merced’s origins in the Yosemite high country, rises steadily if imperceptibly. The effect, at first, is that the river seems to be forcefully and vehemently (white rapids and water gushing over submerged boulders) flowing uphill. The sides of the gorge are covered with blackened trees, none of them more than twelve feet high, the spread of charred branches bigger in circumference than height. The trees burned in 2018's Ferguson fire look like ungainly tarantulas squatting on the hillsides. The grass under the trees glistens with an acid green. In the heart of the gorge, a construction worker holding a flag signals traffic to stop – there’s a long detour and, on the morning when I pulled into the queue of waiting cars, we were told to get out and stretch our legs because the delay would be more than 20 minutes.

In that portion of the Merced canyon, the steep slopes, pocked with big tilted boulders, were orange. The orange was intense and almost iridescent, like the color you glimpse in an insect’s compound eyes or the wings of a dragon fly. In the chilly ice-box of the canyon bottom, shadows fell across the river roaring in its stony sluice beside the road but if you looked upward the sky was struggling to become blue and the grassy hillsides were splendid with tiny orange wild-flowers. The orange of the wild flowers sometimes was submerged and only faintly visible in the steep green walls of the canyon, sometimes rode the green like a vividly colored froth, and, sometimes, entirely dominated the high hill-tops making them shimmer with an orange that seemed some kind of vegetal parody of the fire that had raged here a year before. I took some pictures of the display of wild flowers and, then, the pilot truck came around the bend with its line of traffic in tow and we set forth again. A half-mile from where we had stopped, the pilot truck led us over a temporary-looking steel bridge onto a narrow one-lane asphalt track winding along the north side of the river, so close to the toppling currents that the spray rose up to decorate my windshield. On the north side of the river, there is a narrow terrace that flanks the stream – I now know this is the right-of-way on which the old Yosemite tourist trains were operated. The detour slid along the side of the river on the old right-of-way for another winding mile and, then, crossed back over the white rapids to the main road on the south side. Across the river from the detour, 140 simply vanishes into huge landslide. The landslide seems mature and stable, with saplings rooted in its chaotic folds and house-sized boulders peeping out of its base like the feet of a giant buried on the hillside. This is the Ferguson slide, a collapse of the hillside that has buried over the 600 feet of the highway.

The slide isn’t a scar any more. It’s being reabsorbed into the general texture of the landscape and, when I was on 140, the green ragged slopes of the slide were glowing with tiny orange flowers. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the slide happened 13 years ago, in 2006, and the two temporary steel bridges spanning the Merced River have been in place for, at least, ten years. At first, the highway crews planned to clear the slide as quickly as possible and restore the roadway on the south side of the river. But, then, nature intervened. A four-inch amphibian, the Limestone Salamander (Hydromantes brunus) was found to be living in considerable numbers in the vertical debris left by the landslide. The Limestone Salamander is a profoundly endangered species – it’s range is limited to the Merced River valley at altitudes between 300 and 765 meters. Furthermore, the creature can flourish only on hillsides that are 35 degrees or steeper – the salamander lives in fissures and crevices between fallen rocks. Lungless, it breathes through its skin and, so, is intensely susceptible to toxins in the air and water. When Hydromantes brunus was found to have colonized the Ferguson Slide, work to remove the rock fall stopped. Instead the road was re-routed around the rock slide and the California Highway Department is now working to devise a rock-shed that would pierce the slide without disturbing the surface habitat where the endangered salamander now flourishes.

Two days later, I returned along 140, this time west-bound toward the Bay area. The detour at the Ferguson Slide was less lengthy, apparently-- my timing was better in reaching the site. It’s hard to notice an absence, but I had been looking forward to seeing the bright plumage of the orange wild flowers unfurled on the hillsides above the river, and was surprised to see that the little blossoms were almost entirely gone. The orange flowers had bloomed profusely for a couple days but were now withered and invisible. The high crowns of the hilltops were now impenetrably green. I was startled and wondered whether I had hallucinated the brilliance of the orange bloom on the hills. During the stop waiting for the pilot truck, I took out my phone and looked at the pictures that I had made on Tuesday morning – it was now Thursday morning. The pictures assured me that my memories were accurate – in the cell-phone photographs, I saw the hillside all glorious with vast meadows of glowing orange. But all of this had faded two days later and the faint veins of orange that I seemed to perceive on the high hilltops were illusory – the harder you looked at them, the harder they were to see.

　

 6.

Of course, there’s another way to see things: what if a man born crippled climbed the 27% grade above the hotel in Chinatown where I stayed? What if he set his crutches on the steep sidewalk, and pulled himself up the hill by main force and, then, suddenly, felt a fresh, new power inspiring his feet and calves, felt an unfamiliar strength infusing his knees and the sinews of his thighs? What if he could suddenly walk freely and as other men and, so, in an excess of exuberance and joy abandoned his crutches, leaving them on the sidewalk next to the parking meter where I put my Escalade on that first night in San Francisco?