Collected Essays (82 page)

So Thursday night, Rudy and I are a little worried about how we are going to get four miles off the road before the dusk of 8-9 PM, and also which way we, um, are actually going to be going. “Which trailhead?” the ranger-girl asks. “Do you have any recommendations?” “We’re not allowed to recommend.” “Which is less crowded?” “This is Yosemite in August.” So first we say Cathedral Lake south of Tuolomne and towards Yosemite Valley, and then we change our minds and go back and get the Pass changed to Glen Aulin north of Tuolomne, and then as we hike towards Glen Aulin we find the path too used-looking, deep and padded with sand, and what-the-hey, branch off towards the Young Lakes six miles north and 2000 feet up.

The Young Lakes trail is deliciously deserted, but there is no way we are going to make it up there before it finishes getting dark. We spot a stream on the map and hike that far, then head up the stream a few hundred yards into genuine wilderness. Reassuringly, there is a fire-ring back in the woods near the stream, we pitch camp there, rapidly and anxiously, as night falls fast. There’s a gibbous moon making silvery shadows in the empty woods around us. In the dark, the complicated alcohol stove won’t work, but we get a campfire going—it keeps away the spooky moonshadows—heat up some water, mix it with dried Wild Tyme turkey dinner, the water isn’t very hot but we are very hungry, we eat dry food mix in puddled spicy water, the fire dies down, we get the food hung from a tree branch with a counter-balance in the prescribed Yosemite bear-bag method (described in detail in our Yosemite guide). We sleep peacefully and wake up alone in the woods, with beautiful riffles of water sliding down the granite bed of the stream.

That day we make it up to Young Lakes, we find an isolated campground with another stream all to ourselves. Reading some info in our Yosemite guidebook, I find that the giant domes of granite that make up these mountains are called “plutons” after Pluto, not the dog but the god of the underworld. The plutons are immense balls of magma that froze up far beneath the surface of the Earth and eventually got pushed upwards. What makes the Yosemite granite so remarkable is that its filled with big chunks of quartz, scattered in like pineapple cubes in a fruitcake.

That night the bears hit us. I knew it was coming, sort of, as I’d hung the food rather low on a comic-book-silhouette of a pine-tree right behind the tent. At 4 AM or so I hear the bag hit the ground and give out a great yell of warding-off and sheer terror. I get my shoes on, run outside, the white bag of the food is on the ground, but it’s too dark to see the bear, I’m terrified, I yell—obscenities are inadequate in this situation, instead I yell things like YAH—grub up a rock and throw it towards the grunting or gobbling sound of the bear over there in the dark. Rudy comes out with our candle lantern and extra candles. He lights a candle on the rock under the bent Donald Duck dead sapling pine that I’d tied the Barks bag to. The candle on the Yosemite pluton looks like something from
The Exorcist
. This is very creepy. I feel at the torn food bag, “The salami is gone,” I cry, “The salami is all gone!” But I hoist the remaining food up to the tip of the sapling again. Meanwhile there is frost on everything. Pup is sagging down to touch us, stiff with ice. In the dark, one waits for the Sun to return as one would wait for a returning god. Blessed sleep doth knit up the raveled sleeve of care. At seven AM the first ray of Sun strikes me getting out of the tent. Not only is Rudy’s salami safe in the bag, the clean tail end of my half of the salami is in the grass, not dented by bear tooth. Next to it is Rudy’s Powerbar and his bag of gorp, gorp chewed open, all chocolate gone, then another Powerbar. The two remaining freeze-dried dinners are intact, and so are the dried eggs. Victory! We won! We kept our meat! Actually Rudy cared more about the Powerbars than he did about the salami, the salami was just my obsession.

After salami and eggs for breakfast, we left the packs in our camp and did an amazing tour of Ragged Peak Saddle, the Teeth of Death, Quartz Pipe, Hyper Young Lake Above Upper Young Lake, Fresh Bear Shit, Wrong Valley, Compass Reading, Home, The Fort, all quite incredibly Alpine, more Alpine than the Zermatt of today (lacking,
il faut dire
) the Matterhorn and the 15,000 foot peaks. On our map and compass tour, Rudy and I peaked at 11,200 feet, on a level with northeastward-stretching sea of High Sierras and with the Cathedral Range to the south. The peak was of plutonic granite that had weathered into spars and disks. Each of us climbed a separate tooth, instead of having to perhaps muscle the other one aside, both of us wanting to beat the other one, but loving and wanting to defer, but really wanting to beat…We each climbed our own fins. Getting down, I said to Rudy, “It was nice that we each had our own peak to be on. Of course mine was just a bit higher, but—”

“
Mine
was higher!”

That night we made our dehydrated Shrimp Cantonese just right with the now highly effective alcohol stove. We had a tiny cooking pan, a flat eating pan and two spoons. Plus two salamis and the baggies of gorp and the Powerbars. Our filter-pumper has several pieces: an oddjob porcelain filter that’s inside a blue polystyrene barrel, a white syringe-like pump, and three soft rubber hoses that run from stream to pump, from pump to filter, and from filter to water-bottle, the removable hoses wedged onto ridged nipples. It’s so unwieldy that it takes both of us to use it, but it’s a thrill to confidently drink the water from a stream.

We bear-bag the food really well this time, in a position nearly matching the Yosemite Guide mandated dimensions of
12’ off the ground, 10’ from the trunk, 5’ from the branch
. The night before on our Donald Duck tree it had been 7’ from the ground with the bent dead pine too spiny to mount. So the bear had reached 7’ up in the air and I’d been yelling at him in my T-shirt, glasses, and sandals? Not this night, no thanks, we hung the food high, and the frost didn’t even come down and we slept like babies.

Sunday morning at 7 AM I’m up to greet the dear Sun. I get dressed in my short-sleeved thick cotton dark-blue-with-snaky-paisley shirt, my tan wool V-neck sweater, my mole-colored knickers with the Velcro fastenings, my cotton-lined nylon defective Polo windbreaker from on sale at N.Y. Macy’s, my blue cotton socks and my mountain boots from Zermatt like 20 years ago, 1972, the year Rudy was born. He’s still fast asleep, I wake him for a second to tell him I’ll be back in an hour, like he cares, and I head cross-country up the stream that leads from Lower Young Lake to Middle Young Lake, and then up a grassy ramp to Upper Young Lake. I see one bear-bag on a tree up here, I skirt around it, around another fold in the Valley and here I am alone alone alone, not a sound in the sky, I am here at the shore of a beautiful glacial lake. “Take off your clothes and swim,” says a mind voice. I wade in, delicately rupturing virgin sediment, then slump forward into the breast-stroke. The water was acceptably tepid. I rubbed my pits, butt and hair in the water, got into the depth, swam underwater 10 feet deep then surged up in terror tic of potential tentacled death-monster beneath the world of air.

I was born again in that water. I got out and looking at a feldspar-chunked granitic pluton I realized
Rocks Are Alive
. I’d always drawn a line in the past, sort of a time-scale chauvinist, right, with only plants and animals alive. But now after the Ragged Peaks hike with Rudy, where he found an amazing crystal well, a disk that was the surface cross-section of an ancient volcanic heat-tube vent on the side of the plutonic exfoliating granite we’d clumb, and after all the amazing chunky knobs in the speened surfaces, look dude,
Rocks Are Alive
.

So now I fully had the web vision of Nature. In the past, like everyone, I’d learned to see the plant/animal ecology as a web. And on my own I’d come to think of the air as alive since it is eternally performing a programmable analog vortex computation. But I’d never thought of rock as alive, and now looking at these rocks, these rocks are as alive as college-student Green Party solicitors at your door, these rocks are like down with the program.

I’ve always known
All Is One
in a bloodless intellectual’s way but now, bathed in the live pellucid waters of Upper Young Lake, drying off on the cotton lining of my red coat, I saw how very wonderfully and precisely our web of Life doth adorn the curves of Mother Earth. Everything reaching out to each other—the plants the water the rocks the animals the air and even humankind—us not as spoilers but as thinkers, as pattern makers. The plants are pattern makers, too, the rodents peeping and darting are pattern makers…but why and wherefore? What causes and what senses the patterns? I scan and reject my beloved tricks of physics and math—these ideas aren’t everything, they’re only human beauty, only the ferns and flowers that grow, no, math isn’t the answer, math is part of the pattern that is the question:
Why?

I ponder this down the boulder-rodent-stag-water-air-moss-shrub-grass-soil-filled ramp towards The Fort and our campsite. Here is all this fabulously interlaced organic God-like beauty of Nature and why? I turn and stare at the Sun, close my eyes, raise my hands, and

Love

Love is the force that grows the world. Love and beauty. Everything is beautiful because everything loves to be beautiful. All of us in the web of Life love each other, we love to churn out better patterns for the others in the web to love.

God Is Love

Rudy and I hiked cross-country around Ragged Peak and over the hoof-lands to Dog Dome and the car, I thought I’d lost my keys and then had the joy of finding them in a recess of my pack. We hadn’t seen ourselves in mirrors for three days and each of us thought his own self looked terrible in the car mirror but that the other one looked fine. Like you only really criticize your
own
appearance. We drove a quarter-mile to the Curry Tuolomne Grill, Rudy ordered two cheeseburgers and salads, I called Sylvia, then went back to eat the gnarly burger with my beautiful son.

Next to us is a table of hiker-bums, two women and two men, drinking beer and for some reason selling shoes. Rudy and I go to the Men’s Room, a concrete hutch that’s cheek-by-jowl with the grubby patio. As I use the urinal I notice on the floor of the closest stall a man’s shorts, underwear and T-shirt. The man’s foot is visible with a corn plaster on the pinkie and an alarmingly distended vein. Rhythmic grunting. Rudy has peed and is washing hands, I say to him, “Don’t you think it’s pretty unusual to take off all your clothes to take a shit,” and laugh, and point at the suspect stall. And now from this angle we can see pink cotton women’s panties on the concrete floor as well. It’s like a punch line:
All Is Love
.

Note on “Vision in Yosemite”

Written 1992.

Appeared as “Zip.2: All is Love” in
bOING bOING
#10, Fall, 1992.

I wrote this memoir up the night after Rudy and I returned from our Yosemite trip. And eventually I placed it in Marc Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair’s early print zine,
bOING bOING.
I was writing a series of columns for the print zine
bOING bOING
with the running title “Zip,” taken from a then-popular compressed file format—this felt very modernistic. Later the zine evolved into the the hugely successful online blog,
Boing Boing
.

The Mondo Edge

When my family and I moved to California, one of the first things I did was to visit the City Lights bookstore on Columbus Avenue in San Francisco’s North Beach, right across Jack Kerouac Alley from the funky old beatnik bar/cafe called Vesuvio’s. I got so excited seeing all the cool books and magazines that I could barely even breathe. One particular magazine that caught my eye on this visit was a huge pink thing with a Ben-Day dot picture that seemed to be a cross between Tim Leary and Art Linkletter. Art Linkletter was the host of a 50’s candid-camera TV show called
People Are Funny
, and he authored the book
Kids Say the Darndest Things
. Linkletter’s daughter had a mental illness which was compounded by the use of LSD, and she ended up committing suicide by jumping out a window, so Art Linkletter became a prominent spokesperson against psychedelia. So now here’s these California weirdos putting out this big pink magazine—which is called
High Frontiers
—and they have Linkletter’s face merged with Leary’s, and out of the mouth is coming a shaky speech-balloon saying, “Kids do the darndest drugs!” And if that weren’t enough, walking across the top of the picture is a drooling three-eared Mickey Mouse holding out the logo of the Central Intelligence Agency. The magazine
High Frontiers
became
Reality Hackers
, which became the magazine
Mondo 2000
, and now I’m co-editing the
Mondo 2000
User’s Guide
To The New Edge
. Software packages always come with a book that says
User’s Guide
on it, even though in the rest of culture, a “user” is usually using drugs. Are people who buy software the same as the people who buy drugs? People are funny!

At first California was hard to get used to. My family and I were coming from a small town in central Virginia, you understand, a place called Lynchburg, the home of that notorious God-pig, Jerry Falwell, always on TV, preaching fear and asking for money. The main thing you notice first about California is how much you have to drive. At first I’d see all these little shopping centers along the highways and I’d be thinking, “Oh, I better come back here sometime and check out those nice stores.” It took me awhile to realize that the little shopping centers, the strip malls, were all the same, and that there was no point in going into one except for an instantaneous purchase. In this great American urban mega-suburb, shopping is a parallel, distributed process. Shopping for ordinary things, that is. For special things you need special, non-mall sources.