On a cloudless, clear night, there is a time, right after sunset, when the sun still lights the sky even though it can no longer be seen, holding back the dark, making the sky a uniform texture, soft like felt, deep blue directly overhead and lightening to white way down on the edges. Lying on your back, you can look up a that sky and get lost, lose all your points of reference, coming unmoored on the soft surface of the blue above your head. There are no stars yet, the sun is too bright still, and so you have nothing to look at. Nothing to tell you that the universe continues on beyond the sky. It is as if you have entered a deep, blue fog, the thickest imaginable. You get lost instantly. Your eyes slide and skitter, unable to focus on anything, and soon your vision starts to swirl as your brain processes visuals that aren’t actually there. You are unmoored, unbound, unhinged. But then, suddenly, you see it. The first start, the brightest and strongest, has shone through the suns dying rays, and your whole vision changes. In an instant, you focus, you know where you are once more. That single star, a lone, comforting point of reference, brings you back to the world. You are no longer lost forever, drifting in the blue, but anchored once again, able to navigate, able to see, able to live.
I’ve been gone for a while I know. I’m going to take the easy way out and blame everything on filling out my secondary applications for medical school. Which is totally legitimate. Those things are not fast and easy, let me tell you.
I started writing this post in Santa Cruz, but Joseph was quicker off the mark with his post (no secondaries for him you understand), so I’ll be brief about it. Surfing was awesome, although I too would have liked those waves down on 41st Street. The boardwalk amusement park was shocking to my desert trained senses. I had to go sit in a darkened room with a book for an hour afterwards due to the neon and crowds. And I burned the strangest places on my face: my nose (not so strange), the skin above my upper lip but below my mustache (a little stranger), and the place under the eye where you usually see bags, except mine were red with white streaks through them where my skin folded while I was squinting on the water (strangest). Apparently I looked odd enough to be greatly amusing to an 8-year-old boy in an In-N-Out.
We left Santa Cruz at about 3 last Thursday. Joseph drove, and displayed an almost demon-like intensity in his desire to beat rush hour traffic in San Jose. I fed him Kettle chips to calm him down. We arrived in Yosemite that evening, set up our tent, and passed out. Apparently surfing is a tiring sport. Nobody told us this before we decided to go surf four days in a row.
The next day we rallied, managing an nice 4 or 5 mile hike in Mariposa Grove, which is full of redwoods. There is one called the Grizzly Giant that is 92 ft in circumference, with limbs larger than any other tree around, the California Tunnel Tree, which you can walk through, the fallen Wawona tunnel tree, which you used to be able to drive through, and my personal favorite, the Telescope Tree, which you can walk into, tilt your head back and look straight up to the sky. Somehow, maybe by fire, the entire inside of the tree got hollowed out into a tunnel, with the tree still living around the outside. It is very strange, and very awesome. (If you seem to have read this before, I apologize to you for my plagiarism and will make it up to you under a tree very soon.)Here we see the view from inside the Telescope Tree…
and a view of Joseph inside the Telescope Tree.
Oh yeah, and we saw a bobcat.
Yesterday, we powerized up the Four Mile trail in Yosemite Valley. Of course, first we had to stop and ogle El Capitan for a while, since it is probably the most famous rock wall to climbers in the world.
There are people up there, you just can’t see them!
Back on track, the trail is technically 4.6 miles, but I think they rounded since it is only the first four miles that go straight up the valley wall. That last six tenths of a mile is just a cool down. The view on the way up was spectacular, as you can see from this picture of Joseph.
So was the view at the top, only slightly lessened by the fact that you can drive up to the exact same place. We just looked around and felt superior, knowing in our hearts that WE had HIKED up to Glacier Point. Nobody noticed. Anyway, here’s a video.
I also decided to do a balancing act on the railing.
Just kidding. There’s a large ledge like three feet below me (it’s like a small meadow Mom, I swear!)
Today, we made a quick stop in Tuolumne Meadows on the way back east towards Bishop. Joseph was not feeling his best (we suspect altitude sickness), so I ran up to the top of a big dome like a small child, hopping and skipping most of the way.
Then my feet realized they were not longer attached to a child, and demanded that I bathe them in a cool lake.
I did so, and then skipped back to the car to rejoin poor Joseph.
Now we are back in a coffee shop in Bishop. Two more days of bouldering before we head back to San Francisco to part ways for a time. We’ve noticed recently that we are thinking the same things at the same time far too often to be healthy. It is time to regain our individuality. Individualities that is! See you soon!
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