Gloryland (27 page)

I
met God during the summer of ’03, a time when clouds like black anvils were stacked high over the mountains and a cold wind was coming down hard. I was in the country just east of the Minarets, high up along a creek where there’d been reports of herders grazing sheep, though there wasn’t much to chew on up here but rock. All that rock did make me feel sorry for the sheepherders. Most of them were Indian or Mexican or Basque, the kind of people who couldn’t run their sheep down in the Central Valley. They’d been run out, or run up would be closer to the truth.

Because I was close to timberline, it was a chilly night. Because I was sleeping so close to the sky, I knew the night wouldn’t be long. I was by myself this time. No patrol. Lieutenant Rubottom had asked me to take a new ledger to the patrol cabin near Devil’s Postpile. It was on the sunrise side of the range, and night caught me before I could get there. After taking care of my mule, I just spread my blanket on the ground and fell asleep with no dinner, cause I had no need for food just then.

I fully expected rain or snow to find me, but the clouds went away late in the night, leaving a hole big enough to fall into, if you could fall up instead of down. The stars were close enough that you could almost feel their heat, almost. I could feel the frost beginning, so after getting up to pee off in the bushes, I went back under my blanket. I remember feeling happy before falling back to sleep, happy cause I was by myself. No one to give orders to. No one giving me orders. No one complaining. Just me, Satan, and mountains.

Come to think of it, I was beyond happy. If Happy is a country you
can find on this earth, I’d already walked through it to the other side. That’s how I was feeling when I went back to sleep.

Sunrise in the Sierra is always pretty, but this one was different, or I was different. I recall how ice grew in the wool of my blanket right before sunup, and how that ice figured out a way to get into my right knee bout the same time it was dampening the blanket. I must’ve opened my eyes, cold and in a little bit of pain, to see the sky not getting brighter but losing a little blackness.

I wondered what that would be like, to lose a little blackness. I appreciate what God’s done for me, but I might not mind losing a little blackness, kind of how the sky was doing it. Sky don’t appear guilty for not being black no more. Guess I was feeling sort of tired from being black, and here was this black sky turning blue with a little red and then some yellow mixing in, till the whole world seemed colorful and a bit confused.

Lying there, I started remembering how the sun came up when I was a boy, watching how light filled the doorway of our cabin. That made me think of my grandmother, not Grandma Sara but Daddy’s mother, a Cherokee woman red as Georgia clay. Her name was Artana, and I only knew her when I was still little.

When someone you know dies when you’re real young, it’s hard to tell later on if you’re remembering a real person or someone you made up. But I thought I remembered how, when I was five or so, I’d wake and hear her getting up in the darkest part of the morning and walking out the front door. Every morning she’d stand there on the front porch, stand there in the cold singing, in that black squeezed outta the bellies of stones as they’re waiting for the world to end. She was like that, hunched over like a red fir sapling under the snow.

She’d sing softly at first, and then a wind would come up from somewhere close and far away, and the wind would blow more of her voice out of her throat, as if encouraging a whisper to be more, and as she sang louder the sky got lighter and lighter, like smoke in a stove slowly becoming fire.

As the bodies of trees got clearer, so did her voice. Her body rose up straight, and her song rose up and brought the sun with it. I thought it was her making the sun rise, making the light that filled everything. I didn’t know no better, still don’t, cause here I was now watching it happen all over again, and I could feel her song in me, like when you touch a piano someone’s playing and you can feel the music shaking in your fingers.

Who’s shaking this sky now? Who’s shaking me? Is it my grandma Artana singing? How can there be so much music in so much quiet? Those were the kinda thoughts I was having when I noticed what I might’ve missed.

Looking east toward the Sierra crest, I could see a ridgeline with a few trees along it and the sun slowly coming up behind them. Sunlight was growing round them, through every branch and twig, till it seemed like the trees were on fire. I think they were some sort of juniper, the kind that can take in so much of the morning light you’d expect them to shine even in the middle of the night. I couldn’t see the sun, but I could plainly see the sun’s influence on those trees. Day was still on the other side of the ridge, but it was coming out of the junipers, as if that was where the sun went at night.

Then the trees began to disappear. They got so bright with the sun that they must’ve caught fire, and they were hot with it. I wasn’t expecting wood to turn into glass, but I was looking clear through those trees and seeing the other side of where they were rooted. Trees had become windowpanes with sunrise just beyond, and I was alone with no one to point it out to.

That’s when I heard Artana’s song in me, singing like she used to when she was welcoming the sun.

Over and over, the words sounding in me like I was a church or open to the sky like these mountains. It kept going out and back, out and back, till I lost what was sound and what was echo.

Sunrise was taking so long to happen, I started thinking maybe this wasn’t sunrise, maybe it was still the middle of the night and God was dropping by. But I could tell by the feel of the air that it was just another day breaking, and as soon as I had that thought, everything began to change. The cloudfire on the ridge slowly melted back into trees, and the trees became only junipers, and the light became just sunlight again.

But for a moment or two, it was like cathedral doors swinging wide. Heaven was just beyond the doorway, God was holding up a lantern so bright it lit up all of paradise, and I was standing beside Satan, gaping on the doorstep. I was struck dumb by the light of God, right there at heaven’s gate, and I couldn’t open my mouth to pray or even whisper
thank you
, I swear, that’s what dawn was like on that day.

I don’t know what miracles are, but if you get a chance to glimpse heaven without having to die first, well, that’s a miracle if you ask me.

Lieutenant Resnick told me the Sierra Nevada are the tallest mountains in America. I knew I was high up, but never dreamt I was that high. I’d been riding long and hard for a few days before getting here, but I had no idea that a mule could take you most of the way to the next world, or that the next world was so close to Yosemite. I’d gone way beyond the blue, for sure.

God is everywhere, but I’m thinking he prefers some places more than others. I’m thinking he spends a lot of time in these mountains. That means my mama’s bound to be happy, cause I’m finally a churchgoing man. Every day in Yosemite is like Sunday, and I
don’t have to dress right or mind my manners. All I gotta do to be in church is open my eyes in the morning. Every day here is a kind of prayer, and every night the prayer is answered. I can hear a sermon in the leaves whenever the wind blows. I can hear an
amen
when the rivers answer. When it rains, the world is singing what was sung at the beginning of creation, and at night before I close my eyes again I can hear it sounding in the ground under my head, in the rocks, the trees, the creeks, and deep in my bones, the same thing sung softly all night long.

I can never quite make out the words, and I’m afraid I’ll have to leave Yosemite before I understand what God is saying to me, and what I should be saying back.

If we do finally talk, I think it’ll be a conversation about what happens to junipers at daybreak, and why I can never forget that ordinary things touched by God become miracles, and that absolutely everything at one time or another is touched by God.

Before sunrise ended, while the trees were still on fire, I found my voice. I crawled out of my blankets and went to the edge of my campsite, and I joined my grandmother’s song.

B
eing in Yosemite meant sky and mountains. So much sky, so much rock it was like the earth’s bones were sticking through, jutting up like a body that’s been laid to rest but keeps rising, rising, and after a time it don’t remember it’s dead.

But it’s cold enough to long for death or at least a fire. How many times I was on patrol in that stiff McClellan saddle, my butt aching like it’d been kicked since sunup and the back of my head feeling even worse, the insides of my thighs chafed to nothing, and my back aching, my knees, my ankles, my shoulders. After riding all day, every day, all you are is pieces of what you used to be, strung together with tendons and sinew.

At least twenty-five miles every day, or so it seemed in this country, miles of up and miles of down, and hardly ever flat country in between. All day looking at the butt of another horse or mule, and someone behind you doing the same, then bedding down on cold, hard ground with just a bit of wool between you and winter, and waking up just as cold and hard as the ground you were sleeping on. And it doesn’t matter if it’s raining, snowing, or just blowing pine needles and dirt, it’s all the same after a while, just something moving against you, most often something you can’t even see cause you’re blinded.

Did I mention my hands? Stiff enough to be talons a hawk or a vulture would envy. Have I complained enough, or do you want more? Yeah, this is how I’d be thinking, but no one heard it, cause if they heard Sergeant Yancy whining then they’d never find enough reasons to stop doing the same.

Eventually the sun would get tired, slumping into the west behind more mountains too distant to recall, and the horses and we got to rest. By then we’d be at a patrol post high in the Yosemite. My map showed the names of patrol posts surrounded by mountains, but not all the mountains had names. Sometimes I’d think about what that Indian woman said to me in Hetch Hetchy, that I didn’t know the real name of the country, that I was lost.

After we’d get the horses settled down and convinced the mules to do the same, we ate what was available, and there ain’t no hunger like the one mountains make inside you, a gnawing, emptied-out feeling like there’s no measure of food could ever fill you up.

Mountains must be hungry too. Everything here is so big and so empty that it echoes like Matterhorn Canyon when those big rocks come down. God was always trying to fill it up with snow, rain, wind, and sound, but no matter how much he tried, the country was just too big.

Sometimes the silence round there could be too much of a good thing. I like quiet as much as the next man, even the stillness inside our church back in Spartanburg, but there’s a limit. Yosemite was so big that things got lost inside all that silence, like a fog going through your fingers. Things got lost even when they was right in front of me and all around me. Maybe that’s why trees have roots, cause they need to hold on to something. And maybe that’s why we were always hearing trees, creaking cracking calling sighing, cause they don’t want to lose themselves either.