TUOLUMNE

The early morning sun shone on a puddle amid the grass, a sort of low-lying marshy patch inundated with the mountain spring that summer. The water gleamed reflecting the white of clouds above, as if it were trying to tell me something in a parable or lesson. At twenty-two I had never been hunting before, never held a shotgun like this, not too heavy or unwieldy. My arms had tanned from the summer outdoors working around a ski lodge over ten thousand feet above the valley and near where we stood in these western mountains, a long way from the mountains of New England. I hardly knew my brother-in-law, but felt grown up, trusted, with this rifle in my hands, more responsible, perhaps.

We trudged over a grassy trail; here the ground rested drier in the summer sun as it moved further up the sky.

Days before that hunting trip, my sister had driven me up the mountain to a fork in the road. She told me, “You can stand here and hitch a ride up the mountain; the loggers go up that way into the National Forest; there’s a trail to the hot springs.”

Later that day I rode beside a scraggly bearded brown-haired dude who kept talking of “’Nam and killing over there.” We sat high up in the truck cab as he pulled a half-empty flat bed of logs on his 18-wheeler.

Looking out the side window, I said, “The road is really narrow here, and it’s a long way down on this side of the road.”

“You got that right,” he said. “In the winter one ski tourist stopped alongside the road to put chains on his tires, and a truck ran over his legs when he was stretched out half under his car.”

As we sat high up with the long flatbed trailer stretching behind us, over 12 more wheels and tires of the 18-wheeler wending its way up the mountain, I could see out my side window the valley descending right at the edge of the road, and steep slopes down to open, sunlit grass far below in between the trees. The tall trees, the giant redwoods with their deep grooved trunks grew up beside the road, their trunks rooted far below beside those sunlit patches. Behind us, laying on their sides, giant trunks rested lashed and chained to the flatbed and ran beyond its entire length. When I saw the logging trucks on the road, I had no idea how those long trunks ended up on the flatbeds on the back of the trucks. Looking out the half open side window, I felt the cool mountain air as I looked out and down.

“I know your sister and Ryan too; they’re both good people, maybe not necessarily together,” he said matter-of-factly.

That first adventure, a few days back before this morning of hunting introduced me to the area. I kept quiet trying to enjoy that day’s sun in blue sky filtering down from above through the tall sequoias, redwoods, and pine trees.

Days later, Richey, the old manager of the ski lodge, said, “Back East? New England, isn’t that where the Kennedys live?”

I didn’t correct him; he seemed to think New England, which was small and distinct, made up the entire Northeast, but that place seemed worlds away, not only in distance, but in time too. When I lay under the ski lodge putting up insulation, I moved slowly in the dank dark, the radio my only companion; I heard at least once every afternoon, “Tangled Up in Blue,” and that made me think even more of a girl back east, in New England, in New Hampshire, up a mountain, back where I went to college in the spring.

When I took a break and crawled out from the tight crawl space under the lodge, I saw the owner’s daughter sunbathing with her long loose blonde locks on a bright white towel on a plot of green grass behind the lodge, with the mountain sun lighting her tan thighs and stomach, and her yellow bikini blinding me. I didn’t wear my glasses during those months and yet I could still tell she was taller than I, laying out like that, and her beauty burned struck me.

I heard later from Ryan, “Her boyfriend works driving heavy machinery; they make $50 an hour.” Back at their house later that evening my sister chimed in, “Oh, I’ve seen her around the lodge before; she can have any man she wants.”

One late morning he asked me to remove the loose branches from the roof of the lodge; as a Carpenter’s Helper, I climbed up a ladder already perched beside the long wood building and did what he asked, tossing the branches down beside a wood pile below. I noticed loose pieces of corrugated metal on the roof, and with my hammer, and a handful of nails I found on the picnic table below, began hammering the pieces in place. Exercising my arms in the sun high up by the roof’s peak and pounding those nails felt both good and useful.

Ryan heard me banging, and when I looked down, I could see him squinting up to me with his Vuarnet sunglasses propped across and above his broad forehead.

“Whatcha doing up there?” he asked.

“I’m hammering down these loose pieces of metal roofing material; I thought it a good thing to do.”

“There you go thinking again; I just removed those; they need to be replaced.”

“Oh, sorry.”

After spending so many hours under the lodge by myself, the best part of the day was its end, when we drove away from the lodge in Ryan’s old pickup truck, and slowly wound down the curving mountain road from the lodge back toward the mountain village of Shaver Lake. Ryan played the radio, and rock songs came into the cab of the truck; the windows were down, and the sun stood lower in the sky, but still shone bright. That was the best time of day. I heard “Hotel California” and asked him, “What band is this?”

“The Eagles,” he said.

“Oh, I had forgotten that.”

Then “Ventura Highway” came on, and I listened to the lilting voices and rhythm.

“Who did that?”

“America.”

“That’s a good one.”

“They’re singing about a stretch of Pacific Coast Highway north of LA but south of Santa Barbara.”

“We drove on that highway there one summer; it’s really beautiful,” I recalled.

We had awakened in the dark that morning, and he drove out on the dirt road then to the gravel road, then to the four-lane highway up toward the lake, then off on a smaller black macadam road that wound into the village and out the other end with the sky just lighting that morning. We had sandwiches in brown paper lunch bags, and he had his big thermos beside him and a small cooler in the back of the pickup, but he said very little in the early morning darkness. The afternoons seemed better when he seemed more relaxed. Some mornings he left before I did to drive down to the valley for supplies, and I walked the dirt road and gravel road in the morning darkness with their black lab, Sanyo for company. Then I hitched a ride from the edge of the four lane past the lake on the edge of the village, then up toward the ski lodge.

Some afternoons after work, Ryan dropped me off by the large mountain lake to swim and relax on the empty boulders by the edge of the lake and wash the fiberglass insulation from my body. He would drive off and pick up my sister at the restaurant where she served lunch, or at the post office, when she was working part time there. At the restaurant she wore a light, black and white waitress uniform and had her brown hair tied up in a loose unraveling bun and her hair tucked behind her ears. Her face lightly tanned still had the freckles we all had as kids.

As I sat on the warm, smooth rocks in bright sun the blueness of the lake below the sun-filled blue mostly clear sky astounded like a cerulean jewel, as did the quietness of the place. When I swam the cold water chilled me, the lake entirely to myself. As the lake water dried from my body in the sun I heard and saw far off and high above a small flock of geese flying over the sapphire lake and just above the tops of the deep green sequoias. I thought of jumping or diving from the top edge of the tallest boulder, but instead elected to just slide in for one more swim in the cold lake water. After, as I sat there alone on a smooth boulder in sun drying, the cool wind arose and chilled with the coming fall, though still late August and fall still months away.

The lake and village seemed abandoned with so few people around at mid-week; this lake was not far from the Summit ski center, but summer lingered. Beside a few old guys who hung out at the outdoor bar back in the center of the village, and those working at the hardware store, no one seemed around.

Days before, when we were not working, I hiked up in the mountains, and found the small square, wood-framed hot springs in the earth in the ground at my feet, and the small cabin bar which served bottles of Anchor Steam. I thought about having one, but I felt restless, and did not wish to spend cash for one bottle of beer. Further up the mountain, just off a trail, I came open an outcropping of three huge boulders, and with difficulty, climbed up, as if to feel closer to God, and to pray, but once up there I realized how dangerous and precarious my perch felt, and questioned whether God thought my climb wise. Death seemed closer there atop a rock, rather than life, and climbing back down, precarious, I felt my arms straining against the dry grainy hardness of the rock, against my bare elbows, and when I slid the last few feet down, relief. But the sky appeared so empty up there and the wind whistled. I thought later that if I fell from up there no one might find me ever, and I knew of no one up here in this National Forest for miles and miles around.

All this stood days behind me as we walked through the free morning air hearing the twittering of birds.

“We’re hunting doves,” my brother-in-law whispered in hushed tones. He walked twelve feet before me and I heard him fire into a brown bush; the crack of the rifle resounded in the peaceful morning air, and I saw a few remaining brown birds from the flushed covey flutter off. He bent down beside the bush and pulled out three roundish, small doves, brown and tan. He waved me over and showed them to me; they seemed smaller than pigeons, and less gray, with paler tan feathers at the edges below small heads with delicate beaks. Their light brown roundness just larger than a baseball and shapeliness lent a Christmas motif to these small plain motley birds. They looked like small mourning doves or the turtle doves on illustrations.

“They’re good eating,” he said.

The day before back by the house, as we drove up the gravel hill after all day at the ski lodge, I thought to myself, ‘some people make a life out here, forever. Just as carpenters did in the woods of New Hampshire,’ and those thoughts half returned now.

As we hiked further down a level trail, sometimes sloping down, other times sloping up a bit, I felt curious about how sensitive the trigger of the rifle was as I held it loosely in my left hand. I also wondered what sort of kick a shot gun had when fired. I had never held a real gun, just a bb rifle, which had no kick at all, and its steel didn’t have the bluish burnish this barrel had.

My brother-in-law slowed from his walk ahead of me, and waved me beside him, then pointed toward a bush, and seemed to whisper, “You try. Take a shot.”

I stood still and lifted the rifle to my shoulder and looked down the sight toward a blurry bunch of feathers half concealed by small green leaves moving like petals in the low part of the bush. I heard a muffled chortling. My finger lightly grazing the trigger, I pulled back and “bang!” the rifle suddenly fired, hitting the lower part of the bush twenty feet ahead. Two dove flew off. I had missed.

“That’s enough hunting for me,” I said.

Years later, when I recalled all this, I found a photo back home of my older brother holding a big fish and smiling near the same lake in the mountains out west where I sometimes swam at afternoon. The fish shone wet and green speckled: a large, beautiful rainbow trout anyone would dream of catching and feel proud and blessed or lucky to have caught. My brother was skinnier then with dark hair and wore an old t shirt that summer fishing with my brother-in-law, and seeing that photo then, I wished he had taken me fishing too, instead of hunting, when I was as young as my older brother was then, and as young as when we went hunting. Now, all that rests long ago and in memory.

But back that summer, back outside the house, as the summer sun still burned in the afternoon, I swung an ax, then a hammer into a maul, and split stacks of “rounds” and tossed split logs, creating a mountain of wood, taller than I for the woodstove that winter. When my sister’s husband drove up the mountain in his pickup with his buddy, who lived down the slope, through the trees, and down a bluff, the buddy said, “I wish somebody would split my pile of wood.”

My brother-in-law, Ryan said, “But you gotta feed him three squares a day.”

I kept thinking as I finished the last few logs, I’ve got to get back to New Hampshire. But I recalled a remark my professor’s wife said to me when I visited there home above an open pasture with their one chestnut horse out in the sun grazing below, “You should see the world after graduation.” Later she remarked, “I love the songbirds every day.”

Back beside the pile of wood, standing over blonde earth, with pine trees up and down the slope the house stood on, I thought Yosemite was just hours from here, and that was the place to see.

One early morning, Ryan drove us toward the lodge in the usual half-darkness, and I knew this day would be different. I had to drive his older truck down to the valley below for more supplies, more big round rolls of pink fiberglass insulation and lumber.

“They already have the order; just let them put it in the back of the pickup and drive back up.”

He handed me a hand-drawn map in the cab of the older truck, not his usual one, which my sister would sometimes drive late in the day.

When we arrived at the lodge the sky had lightened a bit, and he sat beside me and pointed to the map with his hand-written directions: “Take this back road down and up; there’s no traffic at all, but when you get to this small town follow along the Southern Pacific tracks toward Fresno and follow these directions. It’s just a few turns onto the boulevard to the building supply store.”

He handed me a white business envelope, “Give them this; there’s a check inside. We have an account. They are expecting you to pick up the materials. You can drive a manual transmission, right?” I could see his brow furrowed above his brown eyes in the morning light, and his big bare forearm hovered over the center shifter of the old Ford truck.

I nodded.

That morning I set out driving alone down the windy mountain road down the mountain, the road a light gray ribbon beside pale brown dusty slopes on one shoulder, and the valley far below the opposite shoulder spreading out in sun.

When I arrived back down in the valley it seemed so strange to see many low buildings and so much traffic and traffic lights, I had been in the mountains for a long slow month. But after a few turns I found the supply store and parked right by a loading dock. A few men were standing around in blue jeans, and I walked up to one in a light blue shirt, with a patch sewn above the pocket: “Saroyan Lumber.”

With the paper directions in my hand holding the envelope with the order # scrawled on it,

I said, “I’m here to pick up an order for Richey at Sierra Peaks Lodge. Here’s the number,” and I pointed to the envelope.

“We’ve got it all ready for you. It’s all right here.”

He pointed to the back door where I saw it piled.

“Can you back the truck up right to there,” and he pointed to the raised concrete ledge outside the back loading area.

“I can try.” But I thought to myself, I had not put this truck in reverse, but I thought I could find the gear on the shifter, but worried I would not let the clutch out smoothly enough, nor give it just the right amount of gas, so it didn’t stall.

I managed to back out of the parking spot across the lot and back up into the loading platform.

“OK, fine. Stop there,” he shouted behind me.

I stood beside the truck as they loaded it. When one skinny, sweaty guy, who seemed about 35 slammed the tailgate shut, he said, “You’re all set. Drive out slow.”

“Thanks. I’m supposed to give you this.”

I handed him the business envelope with the Order # on it and the logo for Sierra Peaks Lodge. He handed me a yellow copy receipt with all the items for the order listed, and a check mark to the right of each row which listed the supplies.

Out on the now busier road I managed to find the right highway back out past the railyards and over the tracks, and I imagined Kerouac hunched in the shadows by the train tracks, and I realized this indeed was the same back route, but I saw the mountain looming before me and thought ok, at least it’s broad daylight still; at night, I’d never wish to drive up that mountain; it looked so tall, so ominous.

As I drove up, the road became quieter and emptier as the foothills had abandoned the foothills before and the mid-day sun stood high up, hot, and blinding. I heard a loud clunk in the back of the truck and slowed and thought I should pull over, but with no shoulder on the right; there was a narrow one on the left across the other lane and beside the rocky, tan dust of the mountain side. I pulled across there. The broken yellow line of the road had long worn away from the pale grey macadam. I got out of the cab and looked into the back of the truck bed while standing on the back bumper, and it looked like some 2 x 4’s had shifted, but that they probably wouldn’t move again as they rested against a bale of insulation. When I got back in the cab and slammed the door shut, I could see ahead of me open empty paved road and not a car in sight for as far as I could see. The sky stood still and pale and lit by the high noon sun. I drove at an angle across to the right lane and continued the journey. I drove ahead straight and just as fast as I thought this road required, not any faster than thirty-five miles an hour as I wound up the mountain.

Two weeks later, once the ski lodge job had finished my sister dropped me off down at the bottom of the “four lane” near a sign which pointed north and said “Yosemite.” I think I still recall now, who I hitched a ride with right up to the main gate: a family of two parents and two boys around eight and nine, and we got there in the evening, in time for me to purchase a “Backwoods Pass” good for seven days. After the obligatory exchange with a park ranger, I then hiked into a dark cluster of trees with my backpack and minimal food: a jar of jelly and another of peanut butter, some bread, and a canteen, toothbrush, soap in dish, matches, flashlight, lighter, pocketknife, wallet, cash. My sleeping bag tightly rolled.

That night I heard, far from the campsites, an animal stirring by me in the pitch dark; still to this day, I thought it was a bear, but it could have been something smaller, that just rustled the grass and twigs near me, sniffed, and walked away. The next morning, early, I walked around the just-awaking valley; I didn’t see many people, just one couple, far in the wooded distance, in the cool of the morning, off in the trees, blurry with the white light slanting down between the branches.

Later that morning I climbed Half Dome, and even though summer read on the calendar, the sky had turned a cold grey and brought misting rain, then harder rain pelted me as I climbed up the sloping, steep, hard rock side near the sheer face. After the sky cleared, I could see below the Yosemite Valley and the shape of things, and realized yes, this indeed seemed a special place. For a bit I missed John Muir and wished somebody to talk with; but that feeling passed, and I was pleased to have the world to myself.

A week later, as I hiked out in sun on a trail, near the northern end of the park, satisfied, and probably fifty miles from where I entered, a buxom blonde in gold t-shirt and tan shorts with a giant frame backpack towering over her shoulders, walked toward me and she asked, “Do you want to walk with me?”

I hesitated a moment, then did a 180 and walked beside her and said “Sure,” as my voice cracked. I was lean and tan, shirtless then, twenty-two, in a different time and place. After walking a few miles, she said in a light, soft Slavic accent, “Let’s rest and eat.”

She pulled from her grey-green nylon pack a big cantaloupe and began slicing it with a knife. I could not believe she carried so much, and even fresh cantaloupe. “You must share this with me,” she insisted. “I cannot carry all this anymore.” We sat so close our bare knees touching, right on the edge of the trail, bushes right behind our shoulders, taller trees above us with the sunlight filtering down to her blonde hair, tied up but loose behind and below her ears and her fair brow and flushed cheeks and pale blue eyes right beside me; “My name is Ewa,” she added. “It’s like Eva in English.”

“I’m Billy,” I added.

I had consumed the last of my fresh grapes days before, so succulent fruit appealed to me as did she, just about my age, and travelling from Europe. “I’m from Poland,” she continued. “I brought too much food; it’s heavy.”

Over an hour later, in late afternoon dusk, we strolled into an open, pale green alpine meadow; earlier, we had ventured by a rushing stream, with shallow rocky flats where people cavorted, but we had not seen any hikers since then. Now waist-high wildflowers of pale orange and yellow-white waved in a light breeze before us, the meadow a broad expanse spread out ahead, but also swarms of small dragonfly-like bugs darted near us; they did not bother so much if we kept walking. We came upon a clearing in the far woods beyond the edge of the meadow and I could tell the sun had moved further down the sky beyond the distant treetops. We seemed to be somewhere near Tuolumne Meadows I thought, from my recollection of my backcountry map.

“Eva, this is beautiful, isn’t it?”

“It is except for the bugs.”

“I should say your name like Eva in English, right?”

“Sure,” she said.

Where we stopped and swung off our packs, and I had become used to walking with her; at a short distance we seemed fine together; when we first crouched by the trail hours back and sat so close she seemed to beautiful. We noticed that two young guys had leaned their packs against rocks under trees nearby. The earth was firm here and the grass worn away. They were gathering firewood and tossing it in a pile near a circle of rocks.

“Let’s camp here. Oh, call me Eva; I love how you say it like Ava,” she said as she stood close to me.

We had hiked together for some time, maybe ten-twelve miles altogether, before we came upon this other smaller, yet similar meadow, and off to the edge rested a slight slope and a wooded area with this clearing. She walked off toward the edge of the clearing near where she took of her pack and began unpacking it, then began setting up a small grey tent with great efficiency. The sky darkened to a grey dusk and the bugs quieted and I helped and joined the other guys in gathering kindling for the fire. But I said very little, just nodding. It grew cooler.

“I think we are near 11,000 feet here,” one guy said.

“That high?” I asked incredulously.

“That’s what my map said.”

“Where are you guys from?” I asked.

“Hours north of Fresno,” one guy said. “This is our last night here.”

“Hey maybe I could hitch a ride out with you back toward Mariposa?”

“We thought you were with her?” the older, taller guy said.

“Well, I was, but I have to get back, and I’m hitching back out from the park. My Backcountry Pass will expire soon,” I said. I felt like I was abandoning Eva.

“Well, we have a classic VW bug parked well beyond Tuolumne Meadows. We could give you a lift to outside Mariposa.”

“That would be great.”

Soon we had the fire crackling and the sky had grown deep blue-grey and we unrolled our sleeping bags around the edge of the fire. They did not have a tent either, and Ewa and her tent seemed inviting. With her big pack propped by a rock near her tent ten yards from the edge of the fire, she brought over another cantaloupe and a small knife and some paper towels in squares.

“Have some boys, please; I can’t carry anymore.”

We all smiled and ate as we sat on rocks near the fire. The heat of the orange flames felt good.

When she went over to her bag to put the knife back, I saw she even had camping pans of a dull tin.

One of the guys said to me, “We used to go to church near Mariposa, at Valley Bible Church. Are you from near there?”

“No, I’m from back east, New England really. My sister and her husband and brother too, all live out here. My little brother’s really into church.”

Ewa came over to me and asked, “Can you help me unpack?”

I walked with her back toward her tent. “What do you think?” she asked, holding open her front tent screen.

“It’s a nice tent, but it’s a lot warmer closer to the fire. These guys offered me a ride in the morning.” I thought to myself, while kneeling so close to her in the tent, so much had gone wrong already for me this summer.

“Oh. You maybe stay with me?” she said.

I leaned forward and kissed her.

“That’s nice,” she said.

“I’d like that maybe, to stay with you in your tent, but it’s cold. Let’s hang out by the fire awhile. OK?”

She walked over by the fire with me and we stood close warming ourselves. Then a few minutes later we heard rustling in the brush off back behind near Ewa’s tent, and suddenly a large bear, its fur deep brown, near black glistening in the distant firelight, moved quickly like a dark boulder, walking on all fours, then standing up on its hind legs as he moved out of the woods and pulled Ewa’s pack with him, holding it, then swiping with a big long-clawed paw at one of the protruding side pockets, and releasing a big plastic bag of gorp, a bag of trail mix softball size, in Ziploc bag; we sat stunned with mouths agape; the bear dropped the backpack to hold the prized bag of gorp before moving off. One of the taller guys grabbed a kettle off the fire and started clanging a metal spoon against it. Ewa retrieved her bag, saw the ripped side pouch, and set the backpack down next to her tent, and walked back up to the fire with a metal pot and spatula and started banging too.

“Do you have anymore unsealed food in your bag?” I asked. “Maybe you should put it in a stuff sack and tie it up in a tree; I think that is what you’re supposed to do.” As I said this my heart still pounded in my chest from the bear. I could feel my heart thudding below my throat.

“I don’t have anything else; just stuff sealed in jars. But I could put that in a bag and my pack in a tree. Do you have a long rope?”

“I think I do, about 10 feet. I’ll help you.”

When she stood near me, at a distance from the two guys, I looked down into her face just by mine, and her pale blue eyes shone in the far firelight and from the far up stars high up over the tops of the trees. And my heart pounded from something else.

I tied a knot around her stuff sack after she slid her jelly jars and peanut butter in there.

“I’ve eaten all my rolls,” she added.

“That’s good.”

I flung the rope over a tall branch and pulled the rope down and tied it to a low branch.

“That should do it. Stay up by the fire. That bear won’t come back. Plus, it’s warmer.”

We stood near each other and the tall guy, Luke, kept clanging his pasta pot every three minutes.

“My sleeping bag is lightweight; It’s not very warm. I’m gonna stay up by the fire.”

“OK,” she said.

The next morning, we three guys awoke around the same time. I walked over behind a bush and peed and then changed my jeans and put my shorts back on. The sun felt warm and Luke’s younger friend, said, “We need to hike out soon.”

Soon the three of us were on the trail headed down toward the edge of the backcountry. As we crossed that alpine meadow lit by early morning sun, I could see the black craggy rocks and white, snow filled peaks of the Minarets not so far off. Beside the trail about three miles from the camp a small clearing opened slightly to a dark, small, heavily wooded lake. Luke’s friend Gus, said, “We swam here last year; it’s really deep. Check it out.”

“It looks like a deep, dark brown well.”

He pulled off his boots, socks, and t-shirt as he sat on a felled log beside the trail and dove in headfirst from a wet bank. Lean trees with jutting thin branches crowded the dank bank. I stood beside the soft bank and waited for him to come back up from the dark water. His friend moved closer and stood beside me looking down.

“He should have surfaced by now? Where is he?”

“It does seem like a long time; maybe he got tangled or cramped up?”

Then an explosion of water came up and his pale face broke the water and he laughed and spouted water like a very pale, adolescent seal. We smiled, relieved.

Then I dove in and followed his lead of what seemed ten minutes before; I did just the same, diving headfirst into dark deep water. The water soon grew darker and deeper and colder the further I plunged. When I got back to the surface and pulled myself out we both laughed, but the older, taller friend had gone and hiked out toward his car I guessed.

“God! That’s cold!” I exclaimed.

“I knew you’d say that!” Gus said as he laughed. “It’s cold as hell!”

I dried off and pulled my shirt and socks and hiking shoes back on. Later, at the edge of the parking lot, I tossed my bag in the back seat of their orange VW bug. Luke drove and Gus sat up front.

“Where you from?” Luke asked.

I could see him pulling his fingers over his short, brown mustache. As he leaned forward in the driver’s seat, I noticed a dark cross tattooed from the bottom of his hair in the back to the top of his t-shirt collar. This surprised me and made him seem older and different from the clean-cut guy he seemed earlier.

“Well, I was in college last year in New England.”

“Whereabout? Which one?”

“At a small college in New Hampshire; it’s called Franklin Pearce.”

“Like the guy on MASH, Benjamin Franklin Pearce. Where you headed?”

“Well, I’m supposed to call my sister from a McDonald’s in the valley, outside and a little south of the park entrance, near Mariposa I think, so she’d pick me up.”

“Oh, hold on for a second,” and with the engine running he undid a silver latch above the front windshield, and said, “Let me open the sunroof.” And reached up and slid it back. Then he got out and reached over the open top to check it.

“This is a cool car,” I said. “What year is it?”

“’74, they did not make many with sunroofs that year; this is a classic.”

“Well, eventually I’m supposed to meet my brother in the Bay Area, in Berkeley, before I fly back east. He’s working for the engineering department this summer at the university there.”

“Well, we could drive you there; that’s where we’re headed. My sister studies Theology at the Seminary there.”

“Really? That would be cool. I’ve never been over The Golden Gate, and I really want to explore that area. I just read Jack London’s Martin Eden; I know he lived in Oakland and then had a ranch in Sonoma later.”

“Jack was an ‘oyster pirate’ on the Bay, I think,” Gus chimed in.

“We’ll take you right over the Bay,” Luke said, “all the way back to Berkeley, but you better call your sister in the valley to let her know what you’re doing.”

“That’s a good idea,” I said.

In a few hours we were wending over the hilly streets of San Francisco, then descending through the green forest of The Presidio. The sky had moved closer toward late afternoon.

“My dad was stationed here ‘back in the war,’” Luke said.

Then we came out into a clearing and the road rose from all the green and wound up toward the Bay. Gus fiddled with the radio in the center of the black dash panel and was pressing small, silver rectangular buttons. Then we all heard “Heart of Gold” in Neil Young’s high-pitched voice come over the radio; it was ending and on the last refrain.

“Let me,” Luke said to Gus and leaned over, “Let me take over. KFOG’s the best station. But jazz might be cool.”

He pressed another button as he slowed the VW with the traffic and said, “There’s a toll headed north on this side. Time for some jazz; let me try this station.”

Then, the lilting saxophone sounds of “My One and Only Love” came on the radio as we drove over The Golden Gate Bridge in bright sun, shining above the deep grey-blue clouds stretched across just above the orange-red towers and the tan hills beyond. I could not help but think back to Ewa’s face by the campfire last night and her face close to mine on the trail earlier that day and in her tent that last night. I wondered whether I should have stayed with her.

As the jazz song ended, Gus said; “I’m tired of this old stuff.”

He turned the silver knob, then hit a rectangular button beside the others on the small radio.

“O Mexico . . . ” sang out from the speakers.

Later that fall, in early October, back in New England, in the morning, in a hikers’ cabin I awoke as the sky just started to light, but with the sky still deep grey, I lay awake on a lumpy mattress alone, thinking back to the end of the summer. Fall stood above in the cool air here with the trees turned to orange and red, and gold, though some still held a shade of green. I was glad to be back in the these mountains, but in the misty-grey light of morn, I could not tell all colors of the trees still, as I saw yesterday in sun; just a small square of half grey light lit outside the window and in part of the room by my bed, and I thought back to the last early morning in Yosemite, and how I could feel the dry soot on my face from sleeping by the fire, and how cold I felt all night from the waist down. As we quietly broke camp, no one speaking, except the occasional murmur of one guy to the other, five yards away, the older one quietly admonishing to not forget to “pack this,” or “throw water on the embers of the fire.” I thought for a moment, back to what an old man from my brother’s church, had said to me earlier in the summer: “God hunts us,” and I knew things had not gone as I hoped. Now that summer with the Polish girl and the bear in Yosemite had passed. And this college girl back here seemed so busy with school and a new friend.

I remembered again, back in the summer, as we began walking the trail out, I saw in my mind Ewa’s face so close to mine by the fire and in the starlight the night before, and I realized I’d never see her again; even though we were from two different worlds, we had been so close in this same big one.

Nonfiction by Daniel Picker has appeared in The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, The Sewanee Review, The East Hampton Star, Middlebury Magazine, The Copperfield Review, A New Ulster, The Stanford Daily, and more, including short prose works in Poetry(Chicago) and Harvard magazine(online). Fiction by Daniel Picker appears in The Abington Review, The Kelsey Review, The 67th Street Scribe/ Scribe(CUNY), A New Ulster, and several more. Daniel Picker won The Dudley Review Poetry Prize at Harvard University, and received a fellowship from The Dodge Foundation and The Fine Arts Work Center. Daniel's book of poems is "Steep Stony Road"(Viral Cat Press of SF). Previously, several of Daniel's short stories, works of fiction, appeared in The Adelaide Literary Magazine of NYC.