Graphic the Valley (13 page)

“I fell asleep. Woke to the sound of the creek once more and got up. I looked at your mother lying there, then left the tent.

“I made a fire and started coffee in the old kettle. I splashed cold water to make the grounds settle, then poured myself a cup. The mug was too hot to touch and I waited for it to cool. I hated to burn my tongue.

“The light expanded without the appearance of the sun, El Capitan softening the lines to the east. I walked to the creek and washed my face. When I got back to the fire, your mother was up. She was staring into the fire, her hair tangled. She said, ‘Good morning.’

“‘Good morning,’ I said.

“That was how it normally was. When your mother drank coffee, she never minded burning her tongue.

“Then we were away from camp the whole day. Your mother to the store and me to fish, and when I returned to camp, I found that a bear had torn a hole in the side of the tent.

“That night, I sat on top of the bedding in the dark.

“‘Manoah?’ she said, ‘you didn’t see the bear?’

“‘No,’ I said. ‘The bear was already gone.’

“She touched my hand. She said, ‘And there was no reason for it to come in?’

“‘No. Bears are bears,’ I said. I had my hands resting on my knees.

“Your mother slid over and touched my hair. ‘Manoah?’ she said. ‘Are you afraid?’

“I rocked forward and pushed on my knees with the palms of my hands. I began to say no but it would have been a lie.

“But your mother kissed me. She kissed my eyes, my cheeks, kissed my head until her mouth found mine and we touched for the first time in many, many months. We kissed each other like we were lapping cold water in summer.

“And that was the beginning of you.”

• • •

We were fishing browns the last time my father told me that story. I looked at him and wondered at the meaning of touching. My parents did not touch each other. They did not kiss each other. They were like closed links of two separate chains, chains that could never connect.

One time, when I was little, I drew their circles in camp, in the clearing, by scraping my heels in arcs of dirt and loam. Where the lines intersected I made deeper Xs with each heel, careful to show that their lines did touch, even if I never saw it.

I met the coyote again, and this time I called him Pete Fromm, after the character in the book, the author who had wintered alone.

Pete Fromm was sitting on a snow plane in a gap between the trees, his white flank toward me. He didn’t trust me, but he followed me, or so it seemed, because he was around me, many days, looking and waiting.

I tried sitting with him. I sat five or six feet away, sat next to him, and he turned his head but did not run away. I imagined that he was a domesticated dog then, and wondered if the national park had ruined him, wondered if other coyotes sat with humans and looked out on the expanse of the Valley’s white snowfields in front of them.

The snow sprinkled down on us, turning helixes with each gust of wind, and the day was cold, not more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit at two o’clock.

Finally, he left. Pete turned and ran. Someone up the Valley yelled, and he jumped at the sound. He turned and looked at me once from the trees, then jogged away, lowering his head the way coyotes do when they’re trotting through a gap.

• • •

Then it was February. A few days of bright sun and the snow melted off the tree branches. Dripping all around, then hard crust in the evenings, and colder than before. The wet hid in the cold like glass in the shallows, and I snuck a stick fire on the old remains in the corner of my Camp 4 cave. Dense, white smoke with the wet, and I worried about rangers seeing. But no one came and I burned three days in a row to keep warm.

• • •

Then the real snowmelt. The early spring rains splattered the road mud, and the foxes trotted through Camp 4 like small dogs. March rain, and I saw Pete Fromm at the falls creek, eyes turning as he lapped creek water. He was more skittish now, and he cut left when he saw me.

There was something on his side, across that white patch. I thought it was blood, at first, the mark, but it was graffiti. Somebody had caught him and spray-painted his side. Not the biologists’ yellow number tags, but bright red letters that said “MY DOG” on his flank.

I could see where Pete had bitten at the marks, chewed the fur. I saw the breaks in the letters, still wet with saliva. I knew then that he was too socialized, that he’d come in on other campers, begging for food. When the big groups visited over the next month, he’d be relocated by the Park Service, and at some point, he’d come back, Predation Control officers with rifles and metal litters waiting.

• • •

March. California Spring Break. More tourists in the Valley and the Park Service patrol vehicles wound the loop. I crossed the road and didn’t see two patrol cars pulled over at the turn. The officers were standing by the back bumper of the first car, and when I stepped out, they turned and saw me. One was Carlos.

I ran and they chased me. I’d crossed near the Lower Falls access, and I sprinted left toward Swan Slabs. Stayed along the wall there and tried to decide where I’d go. This was not the direction I wanted them to follow me, past my camp and toward my parents’. I ran through Camp 4 East, Central, and West. I hit the open oaks section, the wide gaps between the trees, and looked back over my shoulder. The two of them were still chasing me, but far back, slowed by their army boots and the bulletproof vests under their shirts.

When I got a gap of a hundred yards, I turned south, toward the river, hoping they wouldn’t follow me. By the time I reached the water, a mile later, they weren’t chasing anymore. I waited for them. Watched until dark, but never saw anyone.

I snuck back to Camp 4 around midnight. Then it was spring.

They hold a foot race to see which of the enlisted soldiers are most fit to hike into the Valley. Those who can run a hundred yards quickly will hike up the Merced River. Those who lose the sprint will stay and guard the existing camp. The losers of the foot race complain that a sprint does not take into account a man’s intelligence or experience. But that logic is disregarded. It is the quick who are chosen
.

Tenaya is with the 36th Wisconsin as a show of good faith. He is hiking up toward his own valley, following the Merced
.

But Tenaya’s men do not come to him. He waits with the soldiers, in the Merced narrows, but the Yosemiti are wise and know that they should not come to him. Even the Miwok scouts are afraid to enter the Valley where ambushes are so easy along the river
.

So the Yosemiti keep their advantage
.

And the soldiers wait among the boulders at the mouth of the Valley
.

I remember being seven years old. My parents in the meadow across the road. My mother hadn’t spoken in the past year, her eyes dull black like the mud on the banks of the Tuolumne.

I climbed over the Plymouth’s front seat on the passenger side, put my feet down in the bucket, slid up to the glove box, and hesitated. Looked both ways for my parents like checking for cars on the Merced road. I couldn’t see them out in the field, which meant they were lying down. The velvet grass was two feet tall that time of year. I looked once more, then I popped open the glove box.

Nine of the letters fell into the bucket where my feet were. I picked them up and organized them in my lap. Three from my mother. Big, looped handwriting. Six from my father. His short lines like broken grass stems.

There were fifty or sixty more letters in the glove box. Tight packed, reminding me of the saltine crackers we found in the Lower Pines bear boxes at the end of the summer.

I slid the first letter out of its envelope. From my mother. I read all the words I could make out. I did not put the words together because there were too many I could not decipher. Then I opened the next one. One of my father’s, the handwriting even more difficult. He wrote the letter to my mother, “Love” at the bottom, same as hers.

I looked up and saw my parents walking back toward me, the car. They were not holding hands now. Their hands were like two dried animals shrinking, skins curving and turning away from each other.

I stuffed all the letters back into the glove box, closed it, and climbed over the seat. Then I lay down on the bench and pretended to be asleep with my face turned away.

That was a year afterward.

My father read aloud to me in the tent that night.
The Old Man and the Sea
by Hemingway. An old man fishing alone through days and nights on the Gulf Stream off Cuba. I was piled in wool blankets against the cold. Seven years old and I couldn’t imagine an ocean or warm water.

My father put a snow-cracked finger in the book to hold his place. He said, “This is our story.”

I said, “What?” I was picturing the great marlin dragging the old man’s boat. And sharks. I didn’t know what they looked like other than the drawings my father had made on the brown paper grocery bags the night before.

“This is
our
story,” he said again.

The harpoon had gone down into the shark’s brain at the crisscross mark of the skull. There was the night and the darkness, the old man alone on an ocean. When I asked my father, he described it: “An ocean is endless water,” and to me, endless water sounded like innumerable drownings.

My father was holding the book. He pointed to me and then to himself. He made circles with his hands. “This is our story. Everyone’s. We’re all alone on the ocean.”

I pulled my blanket up to my ears.

He said, “That night at the river?” He never said her name. He pointed with that no-index-finger fist. Not pointing at all.

• • •

The winter of the acorns. The winter of the old ways. There is no food my seventh year. My mother pretends to find grind holes on the nearby boulder, but I know she’d found them years ago. She raises her eyebrows.

“Oh?” I force my voice into a question to play along.

We brush the wet pine needles off the top. Blow hard to clean out each of the dozen grinding holes, then dry them with the hems of our T-shirts. My mother pours out the acorns on top of the boulder. Sweeps them into the holes with the flats of her hands.

I’ve been playing pretend. My fingers are two men running across a granite sweep. Falling off a ledge.

My mother rolls her pestle and starts to crush the pile. Her flour always comes out even. She hands me the other pestle. I crush, then rock in the mortar hole to remove lumps. Rotate outside in like my mother has taught me.

We grind until our holes are half-full, then scoop with our hands to put the flour in the big bowl. My mother makes three times as much as me. I lick the dust on my hand. Bitter from the tannin. Unsoaked and unsalted. Not edible yet. My mother licks too, and smiles.

My father takes one deer late in the fall with a pit trap, a large doe. The venison and the acorn bread keep us through early March. But there is still snow on the ground up and down the creek.

My parents argue. My father says something and waits. My mother doesn’t make eye contact with him. My father says something else. “I have to. If I make a big deal, one deal, then that’s all, then we’ll be finished with it.”

My mother looks right at him.

“I don’t see any other way.” He picks at a callus on his palm. “I’ll go into the city for a couple days tops. Get it done, and come back. Then we’ll be set.”

I am supposed to be adding water to soak more meal, stirring the last of the grinds, but I am watching my mother’s eyes.

My father says, “It’s not right, I agree with you, but neither is this. In Camp 4, right now, two miles away, campers are eating hot dogs and washing their throats with Coca-Colas. They’re waiting for their coals to settle for s’mores. But we’re eating acorn bread and running out of three-month-old venison. So I’m going to sell the rest and be done with it. No little by little this time. One big deal and we’ll be set.”

My mother’s face drops and she turns to get something from the tent.

My father is gone five days. When he returns, we never eat acorn meal again. Whatever we need at the store, we buy.

• • •

My father made me study literature and history. I didn’t know that children studied math. I could only add things together and take things away. I had never done anything more than that, and until Lucy told me, I didn’t know that other math existed. But I read. Every book my father gave me, and every book I found abandoned by campers. I spoke to the characters I read about in books. I spoke to them on walks, while I hunted mushrooms, while I scrambled over rocks and climbed trees. Joe Hardy and Napolean Bonaparte. Leatherhand, Abraham Lincoln, and Robert Jordan.

I spoke to my sister too. I told her stories that I’d read, places I’d found, the baby squirrel I’d caught underneath a basket and hand-fed for a month until it ran away.

• • •

The August that I was eleven, my father handed me three new books. He held them out:
For Whom the Bell Tolls
,
At First Light
, and
La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West
. They were hardbacks with jacket covers, and I read the backs, starting with Hemingway because I already knew him from his book about the old man and the sea.

I read the Parkman jacket last. I said, “Discovery?” My father didn’t believe in that concept. He’d told me.

He said, “First you have to read what is best, the best writers, then worry about truth.”

I said, “But I already know the truth.”

My father laughed. He said, “You’re eleven years old.”

• • •

We were collecting wood two days later. Up the creek, west. My father said that his father hit him with that same copy of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, the one that he gave to me.

He said, “My father stole it, along with a Coleman stove, a lantern, two sleeping bags, and a case of beer from a campsite in Tuolumne Meadows. I remember him coming into our camp with that jumble in his arms.

“He drank the beer, and I fell asleep. Later, when he came into the tent, he threw the book and it hit me in the face.”