I Am Not the Dog

A collection of memories.

[iamnotthedog]

YOSEMITE: JUNE 18, 2001

During my second summer in Yosemite, I was fired from the Delaware North Corporation for stealing a bag of groceries from the Village Store.1 I was working that summer at a bike and raft rental center in Curry Village—a small town of sorts in the middle of that immense wilderness that stretches from Reno all the way down to Bakersfield in central California. Curry Village is right in the middle of Yosemite Valley, and has expanded over the past hundred years from twelve tents and a common dining area to include a network of campgrounds, complete with a stable, pizza patio, taqueria, bar, lounge, snack stand, mountaineering supply store, post office, grocery store, gift shop, amphitheater, and the bike and raft rental center where I worked. The Curry Village Recreation Center—as it is called—is a small building not unlike most of the other buildings in the valley, with grayish-brown shingled walls and a sloping roof covered in pine needles. I spent my afternoons standing in an open window facing the door of a large bicycle garage, renting bicycles to tourists and telling them that the Delaware North Corporation was not to be held responsible if they rolled off a cliff, or if their fat little kid was attacked by a mountain lion back in the woods somewhere.

I knew Yosemite National Park quite well by then, and had settled into a comfortable routine. My entire life consisted of pumping up bicycle tires, socializing with tourists and like-minded park employees, hiking through the high country, and sleeping in a cabin tent, or in a sleeping bag under the stars. But while my body resided in rapture—this summer-long immersion in the warm bath of John Muir’s “Range of Light”—my mind was boiling with restlessness. Rather than just being happy living a life that most twenty year-olds fantasize about while squatting in their office cubicles plastered with photographs of the irretrievable freedom of their pasts, I chose to spend most of my mental energy that summer on questions of what to do NEXT.

But more on all of that later.

The day I was fired from the Delaware North Corporation, I punched out for a half-hour lunch break, grabbed a Schwinn cruiser emblazoned with the Yosemite Concession Services logo, and biked over to the Village Store in Yosemite Village to get some lunch. Under the stern gaze of Yosemite Point—towering above the valley through the pines above me, Yosemite Creek plunging over the tallest waterfall in the country just to its left—I cruised down a two-lane bike path under the pines. I crossed the Merced River on a stone bridge, and had a moment of solitude under the trees just before coming out into a large meadow—dozens of tourists standing on the shoulder of the road, craning their necks to gaze in awe at Yosemite Falls, Yosemite Point, the Royal Arches, North Dome, Washington Column, and Half Dome—all naked from the knees up. Then I plunged back into the pines as I hit Village Drive, which splits north off the bike path and steers into a parking lot, with the Village Auto Garage on the right and the back side of the Village Store, Village Grill, and Sport Shop on the left.

I landed the Schwinn behind some benches by a ramp up to the Village Store, and glanced around at the scene. A teenager assembling a large camping stove on the roof of his Subaru. A woman in a sweat suit stuffing a grocery bag full of marshmallows, Golden Grahams, and Hershey’s bars into a backpack. Washington Column and North Dome, standing thousands of feet above the valley floor. And me—lanky, awkward me—twenty years old and six foot three inches tall, all bones, pale skin, and thin, shoulder-length blonde hair—standing next to an information kiosk under a big brown Village Store sign and an American flag—standing on a wooden plank, no less—fitting, since I was about to walk to the end of my life in this paradise of the American spirit.2

There are two exits and two separate rows of cash registers in the relatively large Village Store, which makes stealing from the place pretty easy for anyone with steady hands, clear eyes, and good nerves. One simply walks one’s merchandise out of one end of the store briskly and confidently, as if one has just purchased said merchandise at the other end of the store. I grabbed a brown paper bag from behind one of the cash registers, nodding and smiling at the female cashier standing there as I did so. She was short—five-foot-nothing—and had immaculate skin. She was picking something out from under one of her fingernails with a pen cap while watching a video of Yosemite Falls that was playing on the far wall, above a shelf of books and bumper stickers. She smelled like bubble gum, and said nothing.

I whistled a little ditty and walked through the store’s three aisles, keeping an eye out for any management types while filling my bag with rye bread and jack cheese and oatmeal and almonds and cans of soup. None of the tourists in the store paid me any mind since I was wearing the dark green, itchy polo shirt and pleated khakis that signified that I was a certified employee of the Delaware North Corporation. I was just another eccentric to them—just another of the strange people who actually lived in their vacation—another of the strange people who they made small talk with while they reserved a ridiculously expensive room in a lodge or rented a raft or bought hot dogs and Styrofoam cups full of soft serve ice cream for their kids. It was probably strange to all of them that I shopped for groceries by putting them directly into a brown paper bag, but everything about my existence in their vacation was strange, so what did it matter? They smiled politely as I scooted by them, just as they would smile at a janitor in the hallway of their children’s elementary school. I was only in their direct line of sight for a brief moment, then I was invisible again. Out of mind as quickly as I was in it.

But as I emerged from the aisles and walked briskly and confidently towards the north end of the store, past the strategically-placed islands packed on all four sides with the various superfluous trappings of tourism—more bumper stickers, pocket knives, t-shirts, paper flags, magnets, stamps, postcards, coffee mugs, snow globes, etcetera—I caught a strange and frightened look in the alcoholic eyes of an acquaintance of mine working another one of the cash registers, and I knew I was in trouble.

The thing was, though, that I didn’t stop. At that point, I couldn’t stop. Shoplifting is sort of like a dive into a pool, or the pitch of a baseball: once your muscles start to go in a certain direction, you aren’t going to stop them until the deed is done. So I pretended, for a second, to look at the newspapers piled up next to the doors—standard, run-of-the-mill USA Today garbage—hoping that a security geek would run up on me before I actually exited the building so I could say that I was just getting a newspaper and make him look like an asshole. Whoever was on to me was smarter than that, though. He was probably a managerial type—having grown tired of making people’s lives a living hell out in some Wal-Mart in the Central Valley, he had purchased himself some hiking boots and moved out to the pristine wilderness so he could make people’s lives a living hell where he at least had something other than pornography to look at in his off hours.

If he was going to grab me, he was going to do it outside, where I would be “caught red-handed,” as they say, and any argument I made would be futile.

My acquaintance at the cash register was no longer looking at me. His blushing face had turned down to his register, where he rang in a cardboard box of firewood and a package of diapers for a tan, broad-shouldered man in a tank top and a Panama hat. No one else seemed to be paying me any mind, either. So I stepped over the threshold back out onto my wooden plank. I looked up at the pine-covered slopes just beyond the parking lot, their shaded and rocky confines leading off to freedom. If I made a break for it, I could cut up into the pines and circle around back to the Valley Floor Loop Trail, back around the Ahwahnee Meadow and over to Curry Village and the bike rental stand. Unless whoever was on to me cared enough to search the entire valley for me, I’d be off scot-free. As I considered this, however, a vigorous tap on my shoulder broke my concentration.

“Going somewhere with all that, bud?”

I turned to face a tall, pale, bespectacled man with a hairless head and a bunch of pens and various other pointy objects in his shirt pocket.

“I was just coming out here for my wallet,” I said, motioning towards the lot.

The man’s lips curled into a tight little frown and he led me back inside the store by my collar, where he snatched the bag of food from me and tossed it on a counter. I was then led back outside, around the side of the building, and into a horrid little room labeled “Employee Services”—the room just big enough for a Formica desk, a tall file cabinet, and a couple of creaky chairs on wheels. My captor shoved me into the chair in the corner of the room and ripped my nametag off my shirt as if it were a badge. He sat on the desk and picked up the phone, punching a couple of numbers as he read my name.

“Dan Duffy,” he said—his voice high-pitched and nasally, his bald head shining in the fluorescent light. “Duffy, Duffy, Duffy.” His breath smelled like bologna. “Where do you work, Dan Duffy? Don’t they pay you enough over there?”

“I work at the bike and raft rental stand,” I said. “But I don’t get paid for another week. I’m completely out of money.” I wiped my palms on my khakis. “Honestly, my parents just died. I had to fly back to Illinois for their funeral. It wiped me out.”

I don’t remember what he said to that, but he didn’t believe me for a second. Good for him, I guess, because it was a blatant lie. I kept with it, though—trying to make him feel bad for me, telling him I was all alone in the world and didn’t know what to do. I went on like that for a while, staring at the dusty floor, feeling that old creep’s eyes on me until a real police officer showed up with a stupid smirk on his round, pockmarked face and I realized I was cooked. I stopped talking. Charges were pressed. My employment was terminated. There was no going back.

As the Delaware North Corporation was not only my sole provider of income at the time, but also the sole proprietor of all the lodging in Yosemite National Park, I found myself in a bit of a pickle. I was well-versed in the ways of living in the wilderness by that point, and I could have hiked up to the high country and camped out on my favorite slab of granite—a wide ridge by Mount Hoffman, above the May Lake High Sierra Camp—until the end of the summer season.3 I could have lived up there in my own personal paradise, hiking around the high country every afternoon, and hitching rides down to the valley on the weekends to visit my friends. Come September, a friend would have come up to my pristine ridge in the sky and told me that the summer was over and that it was time for us to go to some city somewhere and find work, and I would have spent the most peaceful summer of my life in the best way possible.

But that wasn’t the way I did things back then. I was in the middle of something—what, I wasn’t exactly sure—but I was determined to turn myself into some sort of wandering monk of the West or something, and in order to do so, I was determined to keep letting things go, to keep moving on, to never look back. So rather than looking at my situation rationally and seeing the loss of my job in Yosemite as a setback, I took it as a blessing.

I had other shit to do.

There are basically two employers in Yosemite National Park: the National Park Service and the Delaware North Corporation. The Delaware North Corporation (DNC), a multibillion-dollar corporation that runs the concessions at dog tracks and casinos and airports and various professional sports venues, also runs the concessions in several of the National Parks: the lodges, campgrounds, gift shops, gas stations, restaurants, bars, etcetera. When I lived in Yosemite—first during the summer of 2000, and then again in the summer of 2001—almost all of the employees of the DNC that I knew stole from their employer in one way or another, and few of them had any moral qualms in doing so. I believe this is because although the DNC offers people of all walks of life the chance to work in the National Parks, it also treats them like children once they get there. Pay is minimal, benefits are few, and there are curfews, as well as tent searches and random “check-ins” which are performed frequently. All this does is encourage more misbehavior. When employees aren’t out enjoying the fruits of the pristine wilderness surrounding them, they are trapped in disgusting little bastions of corporate America that have been set up in the middle of it all, and they are drunk and stoned and stealing whatever they can get their hands on, simply biding their time until they can get back out into the wilderness again. It’s a beautiful thing, really: the strong community formed within the bizarre example of corporate America at work, and all of that surrounded by the antithesis of everything that corporate America stands for. ↩︎

It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t seen Yosemite Valley exactly what it looks like. Few photographs can actually capture the immensity of everything, and no photographs can capture that light, the scent that floods your entire being, the feeling that the place puts in your bones. After seeing all of that awe-inspiring nature—breathing in that alpine air; trying, but always failing, to take it all in with your two ripe little eyeballs; trying to process it all with a mind all-too-conditioned to process only the process-able—it makes walking into a place like the Village Store all that much more unbearable for anyone with half a brain. There, in all its stupid, limp-dicked glory, is another of mankind’s lame attempts at coping with the unknowable—using our sickly ingrained desire to produce and consume to attempt to conquer the wilderness by wrapping it in plastic, or selling an image of it on a t-shirt. None of this gets to you at first, but after a few humbling experiences out in the wilderness, you’ll find that a queue of ten or twelve people listening to pop radio while waiting to purchase a slice of pepperoni pizza can really, really get your goat. ↩︎

Though most of the 3.7 million people who visit Yosemite each year spend the majority of their time in the seven square miles of Yosemite Valley, there is a vast amount of space outside the valley to explore, including over 720,000 acres of designated wilderness and a network of five High Sierra Camps—May Lake, Glen Aulin, Merced Lake, Vogelsang, and Sunrise. The High Sierra Camps are only accessible by foot or saddle, and lie about six to ten miles apart along a loop trail that takes tourists through some of the most scenic areas of the park. Delaware North employees live in the camps and cook and clean for the visitors. ↩︎

[iamnotthedog]

MORRISON: WINTER 1983

I grew up in Morrison, Illinois—a rural little swallow of a town about ten miles east of the Mississippi River—one of those places with several churches and a few bars and little else.1  My mother, Jacqueline Donalds, went through a pretty nasty split from her husband, Jack Duffy, when I was just a babe. Jack Duffy was there at my birth, and my last name was Duffy from the start, and that was pretty much all I knew about all that. Then Jack moved up to the north woods of Wisconsin—up to a paper manufacturing town on the Wisconsin River called Wausau—and he was up there cleaning himself up, getting off the drink, and training himself to be a better man and father. At least that’s what I always assumed. We never really talked about it.

I was far too young to remember much of the actual divorce. My older siblings have told me stories of late-night suitcase packing and frightening car chases through the frozen countryside, but I don’t remember any of that. My first memory of the whole ordeal is of walking into our kitchen late one night, long after I was supposed to be asleep, and seeing my mother sitting at the kitchen table, her elbows on her slender knees, one hand pressing the telephone up to the side of her head and the other over her eyes. She had all her usual things there with her on the kitchen table—all the things that would later become ingrained in my childhood memories of my mother forever: an ice pack, a small towel, a green bottle of Excedrin. A loaf of bread was open on the table next to a stick of butter on a plate with a knife balanced on the side of the plate just so.

The only light in the room came from the single bulb over the stove, which threw a yellow rectangle over her shoulders like a blanket as she was crying and saying into the phone, over and over, “You’re moving further north?”

I remember standing there watching her for a while, then creeping back upstairs to my room, deciding that being scared by whatever was going on in my head was way better than watching my mother cry.2

 Morrison is a small Illinois farm town not unlike most other small Illinois farm towns. It’s surrounded by flat land—cornfields, mostly—with a few wooded hills on the western outskirts of town serving as the only real elevation change within town limits. Entering Morrison from the east on the Lincoln Highway, one will see nothing but corn for miles in every direction—a few trees here and there, along with the occasional farmhouse, grain silo, or feed barn. There’s a large landfill full of garbage from Chicago, then the buildings gradually become closer together: a Farmers National Bank, more aluminum-sided barns, an auto parts store and garage. Then, on the left, a few businesses appear. A Dollar General. A Dairy Queen. A bowling alley. A car dealership. On the right, a seedy, two-story motel. Some houses are thrown into the mix. They are no longer farmhouses, but quaint little two-or-three-story jobs with siding and shutters and curtains and driveways with large rubber garbage cans in them. A newish McDonalds and another gas station and a stoplight at a cross street, and for the first time it actually feels as though someone has arrived somewhere. To the right, a long, sloping hill leads up past a large red brick hospital and a small church and nursing home. To the left, houses face each other across a narrow road leading to a railroad crossing. Through the stoplight, one passes several more residences, each growing considerably more drab than the last, before another auto parts store, a Family Dollar, a Subway, a funeral home, and a grocery store seem to signify the beginning of a business district. A left at the stoplight by the abandoned church with the large stained glass window that has lost all its color. A right at the next corner, and Main Street is noticeable for its streetlights and connected, rectangular buildings with flat fronts, aluminum awnings, and weathered facades. ↩︎

 My wild imagination as a child worked against me in the evenings, when I would refuse to go to bed, knowing that when I fell asleep it would be to nightmares of being kidnapped in the night by a skeleton. The skeleton had a faint green glow to him. He would come to my bed and scoop me into his arms, throw me over his shoulder, and run down the stairs past the living room, where my parents and their friends would be sitting in a circle sipping cocktails and playing Trivial Pursuit. I’d scream, but they could never hear me. This was the most terrifying part of the dream: having Mom right there, Mom who I knew loved her kids more than anything in the world, and she would do nothing. She wouldn’t even look at me, slung over that skeleton’s shoulder like a sack of grain, bawling and screaming my head off. The skeleton would take me outside, where he would lay me in the bed of a pick-up truck and drive off down the dark, moonlit street. I’d be screaming and staring at lights on in the house as we drove away. Then I’d wake up. I had that nightmare every night for a while—enough so that I never wanted to go to bed. Eventually, Mom got worried and had me meet with the church counselor, a sweet lady in pastels with a lisp and a bowl cut who told me I was having the nightmare because of my parents’ divorce. Even at that young age, I had the sense that that was an easy answer to a much more complicated problem. But I smiled and nodded and left the office with the opinion that psychiatry was bullshit. ↩︎

[iamnotthedog]

YOSEMITE: JUNE 20-21, 2001

The United States District Court for the Eastern District of California has a courthouse in a quaint wooded area of Yosemite Valley that is used to hear misdemeanors and petty crimes for Yosemite National Park. If I had to wager a guess, I would say that the majority of the cases heard in the courthouse are probably for public intoxication, possession of marijuana, and petty thievery.

I sat in that courtroom on a sunny Wednesday morning two days after being fired from my job, and I told a bulbous, stern-eyed man in a black robe that yes, I had entered the Village Store, filled a brown paper bag with groceries, and had then left the store with the intention of consuming said groceries and never paying a goddamned dime for any of them. I was then sentenced to pay a fine of $347, and I was given two paradoxical orders: 1. As I was no longer employed by the Delaware North Corporation, I needed to leave the park immediately, and 2. I was to stay within the court’s jurisdiction until the payment of my fine was received and processed, and if I attempted to flee before my payment was received and processed, there would be a warrant out for my arrest.

“Your honor,” I said, “with all due respect, I don’t have any money, and I won’t have any money until I receive my last paycheck.”

The judge smiled. “Well, I guess we’re going to have to throw you in jail, then!” he said. This really cracked him up. He laughed out loud and rocked in his chair and slapped his knee for a good minute or so. Then he said, “Mr. Duffy, you may pick up your paycheck at the Human Resources office tomorrow, after which you should promptly pay your fine and exit the park. Is that clear?”

Approximately twenty-four hours later, I had still not picked up my final paycheck, and I found myself ten miles away from the law and a thousand feet up from the valley floor, walking through a dense forest of pine trees with a young woman who had recently become a close friend and concubine. Her name was Chloe, and though I was originally drawn to her swimming pool blue eyes and mop of twisted blonde hair, what I found most attractive about her was her willingness to hike off into the wilderness for days with nothing but food, water, and a map on her back. She was a meat-and-potatoes Michigan girl, born and raised up there in the Upper Peninsula, and a quiet and powerful sense of that godforsaken finger of land emanated from her bones.

Chloe and I had abandoned the well-maintained and sparsely populated ten-mile trail up to the delicate natural arch known as Indian Rock, instead opting to hike up a route that was passed down to us through word-of-mouth: an overgrown trail up Indian Canyon and Lehamite Creek, on which we climbed ladders and traversed old cable-routes planted into the granite walls decades ago.1

Once we made it up the canyon, we came out into a pure stand of Jeffrey Pine with very little underbrush. After walking for about a mile, expecting to run back into the trail that led up the final few miles to Indian Rock, I realized that it was possible that we had no idea where we were going. As I was thinking this, Chloe turned around to look at me with those eyes of hers. “I have no idea where we’re going,” she said.

We split up, wandering in opposite directions to look for the trail, which could have been a dirt path as thin as a garden hose for all we knew. After a few minutes, I walked back over to where she squatted by a fallen pine, pissing. Her jeans were down around her thighs, and her underwear was unflattering: white and frumpy.

“Are we really lost?” I asked, as though she would know any better than I. Neither of us even knew what “lost” was by that point. We had been “lost” all day; the experience was just far more intimidating now that we didn’t have a canyon to follow.

“I don’t think so,” Chloe said, shaking her ass at the ground. She pulled up her underwear and jeans, and buckled her Boy Scout belt. “We can hike back to the canyon.”

I looked around us. The sun was high overhead, and coming down through the pines in thin streams of white, splashing on the ground in small evergreen puddles. Every direction I faced looked the same to me. I had no idea where we had come from, or which way we were headed. For a moment, I pictured us wandering in circles until we either starved to death or were eaten by mountain lions. I remembered a story I had read in the newspaper while home in Morrison for Christmas that past December—a news brief about a 69 year-old North Dakota man who had been lost in Minnesota’s remote Northwest Angle for eight days in a t-shirt and jeans. He had survived by covering himself with bark at night, and eating lily pads.

Glancing at Chloe, I had the ridiculous feeling that it was time for me to toughen up. I couldn’t have her thinking that the man who took her virginity would allow his girl to eat a lily pad. We wanted to be out here, after all—to be in the wilderness, away from everyone.

“This is pretty great, when you really think about it,” I said.

Chloe looked at me like I had just shit myself. She had no time to entertain my ridiculous optimism; she had to return to civilization the following day to sell coffee mugs and ugly sweatshirts to tourists on Glacier Point.2 

She got out her map and compass and set to work.

“I’m not very good at this,” she said, turning the map around in clockwise and counter-clockwise circles. “But I’ll give it a try.” Chloe had apparently taught herself at some point how to orient a map to the north. I had no idea how to do that sort of thing, even though it was a fairly important skill for any hiker to have. So I watched her work. Turning the map, setting down the compass, licking her lips. This young woman, knelt down in a soft bed of pine needles in front of me, was quite possibly about to save my life. Then I was going to leave her.

Chloe and I had been together for about a month at that point, and though I kept telling myself that everything had been great—better than great, even—I had made it a point not to ask her to be my girlfriend. I had promised myself that I would never tie myself down to anything, or to any concept of anything, ever again—not a career, not a formal education, not love. I was to remain what I referred to as “fiercely independent,” and to never allow my devotion to a life of utter honesty—no matter how brutal—to be compromised for the sake of either a personal or professional promotion of any kind. Then I had met Chloe in Curry Village one day, sitting under a tree with a girlfriend from Marquette. She was wearing a pair of short shorts and a weathered t-shirt, and was rubbing her bare feet together and smoking a joint. I was instantly hot for her, and my “fierce independence” ended abruptly following a night camping by the Yosemite River and a rendezvous on a plastic mattress.

But even the sex, the hikes into the wilderness, the similar tastes in music and books, and the shared love for the mighty marijuana had not been able to keep me from my primal desire to remain free and alone—free to roam the United States like one of the coyotes I frequently saw trotting alongside the road on my early evening walks. And one month later, having been fired from the corporation I had never really wanted to work for in the first place, I wanted to leave, and I wanted to leave alone.

My last check from the Delaware North Corporation would pay the $347 fine for my crime and leave me very little more. I would have no money for gas, but at that point I didn’t even think I needed gas. I wanted to leave my Oldsmobile ’88 in the Curry Village parking lot in Yosemite Valley and hike off into the wilderness.

My infatuation at that moment was with a tiny little unincorporated mountain community called June Lake, which sits just east of the park, right before the steep eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada falls into the Great Basin. I pictured myself hiking all the way out to June Lake and getting a job as a cook in some diner where grizzled old men sat on cracked wooden stools and talked about the original Sierra Railway over their coffee and eggs and corned beef hash. I would get to know the locals, and hike off into the mountains like Hanshan on the weekends—scribbling poetry on cave walls and finding solitude in the clouds.3

“I really did make a stupid mistake in getting arrested,” I said to Chloe, suddenly. She had stopped rotating the map and had it lain out on the ground with the compass set gently on top of it, it’s needle pointed north. She bit her lip and squinted her eyes and looked like she knew where we were headed.

“I could have had all this at my fingertips plus a steady paycheck,” I continued.

I was completely self-absorbed.

Chloe looked up at me. “What made you think of that all of a sudden?”

“I just can’t imagine myself ever leaving here is all,” I said, burying my nose in the bark of a Jeffrey Pine.4 “But I know I have to leave. I need to work.” I lowered my gaze to her, and she met it.

“Maybe it was all meant to be,” she said. A beam of light streaming through the pines danced in her blonde curls. She looked saintly. I wondered what she would look like when I told her I was leaving her. I had never seen her cry, and didn’t really want to.

“We need to walk this way,” she said, pointing. And we did.

An hour later, we were seated cross-legged on a granite ridge a good thousand feet up from the valley floor. The north face of Half Dome was spread out before us, changing colors as the sun set; Clouds Rest was observing everything from its nine-thousand-foot perch up to the left; and Snow Creek was plunging down the hillside somewhere behind us. Chloe was about to prepare some dehydrated potato soup, and had a torn plastic package of coarse powder in one hand and a spoon in the other. A small pan of water sat in front of us, perched on a chrome bracket over a small blue flame, which fluttered out of the top of a shampoo-bottle-sized canister of propane. After dinner, everything would turn pink, the first stars would appear in the dark blue dome above it all, and we’d curl up in our sleeping bags.

It was all brilliant and perfect, anyway. In moments like those—up there with Chloe on Indian Rock—I recognized that. I recognized that all the shit going on up in my head wasn’t really worth all the trouble.

I squeezed Chloe’s shoulder with a dusty hand.

 The hikers that had blazed the Indian Canyon trail at some point in the mid-twentieth century were following the path that the Ahwahneechee took when they had originally fled their homeland some one hundred years earlier. The Ahwahneechee had lived in Yosemite Valley for generations—surviving by gathering seeds and acorns, plucking roots from the soil, hunting deer, trapping rodents and birds, fishing trout from the river—when, on March 27, 1851, a group of miners known as the Mariposa Battalion hiked down into the valley with the intention of driving the tribe out of their home. The battalion succeeded, but the Ahwahneechee culture survived, and years later some even returned to Yosemite Valley to find work. I have nothing to prove this, but I like to think that an Ahwahneechee who had been driven out of the valley in 1851 later revisited the very trail that Chloe and I were on that day, maybe even planting the cables that helped us traverse the more dangerous parts of the canyon. ↩︎

 Glacier Point is a viewpoint along the south wall of Yosemite Valley. It stands at an elevation of 7,214 feet—3,200 feet straight up from the valley floor—and offers tourists a ridiculous panoramic view of Yosemite Valley and the Clark Range—a string of six mountains named for the first official guardian of Yosemite National Park, Galen Clark. Accessible by road or trail, Glacier Point has been a tourist and geologist destination since the park first opened, and was once home to both a lodge called McCauley’s Mountain House, and the Glacier Point Hotel, both of which burned down on July 9, 1969. Rather than rebuilding the lodge and hotel, the National Park Service reduced development on the point and regrew most of the original vegetation that was there. They still have a store up there, though—a fairly large, ugly building that has all the same shit they sell at the Village Store in the valley, plus hot dogs. ↩︎

 Hanshan (translated as “Cold Mountain”) was a Chinese poet from the Tang Dynasty, in the Taoist and Zen tradition. It’s believed that after Hanshan’s disappearance in the Taishan Mountain range of southeastern China some time in the ninth century of the common era, a Taoist named Xu Lingfu hiked through the mountains, copying the poet’s hundreds of poems from the various rocks and trees that they were written on, and then bringing them back to civilization to share with the world. I first heard of Hanshan in Jack Kerouac’s cult classic, The Dharma Bums. Poet, translator, and famed nature writer Gary Snyder—immortalized as the Zen mountain man Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums—suggested to Kerouac that he dedicate The Dharma Bums to Hanshan, which Kerouac did. ↩︎

 The resin of the Jeffrey Pine smells very sweet, which is why one may very well see a hiker in the middle of nowhere stepping off the trail to bury his or her nose in the trunk of a tree, much like a dog buries its snout in the asshole of another dog to get to know it a little better. If the assaulted tree truly is a Jeffrey Pine, that hiker will then get a whiff reminiscent of vanilla, butterscotch, lemon, pineapple, violets, or apple. If it is actually a Ponderosa Pine, which looks similar to the Jeffrey but with slightly brighter-colored needles, that hiker may very well recoil in disgust, much as if he or she actually was smelling the asshole of a dog. The resin of the Ponderosa Pine smells like turpentine. ↩︎

[iamnotthedog]

MORRISON: SPRING 1984

I remember the first apartment I ever set foot in. It was above the western half of Morrison True Value Hardware on Main Street.1  Mom took me there one evening to visit what I assumed at the time was just a family friend. His name was Don Jevne, and he had been a friend to both Jackie and Jack Duffy for quite a while. I had met him a few times when he had come over to drink cocktails and play Trivial Pursuit and my parents were busy trying to get me into bed. Mom told me that he had gone to college like her, and had been a music teacher for a while before he had started working at True Value, which his parents owned.

The apartment was a pretty unreal place for a curious little kid to play around in. While Mom and this tall, lanky bearded man in a collared shirt, a beige sweater, khakis, and thick, wire-framed glasses chatted quietly over coffee and watched me lovingly, I toured the place. I spun a globe in the corner, looked at all the covers of the hundreds of classical records on the shelves—so many men in silver wigs, so many oil paintings of pastoral scenes. I ran my hands over leather-bound books, and watched the needle on the record player read the little grooves in the album it was playing. I walked out of that front room, with its thick carpet and faux-wood paneling on the walls, and into a short, brown-tiled front hallway, off of which was a dark little bedroom painted all blue. The blue walls contrasted with the bricks outside the window. Pigeons cooed in the alley.

I walked back into the kitchen, so different from any kitchen I had ever seen. So minimal. So few dishes in the sink, so little food in the refrigerator. I wandered back to the big storage space in the back, with higher ceilings than I had ever seen, a skylight caked with pigeon shit, piles of sheet music and a couple of music stands and a few chairs in the corner, and a bunch of cardboard boxes full of whatever this strange new man cared about enough to carry around with him. The back door of the apartment led from that big storage space out onto a roof that looked down on Saint Mary’s Catholic Church—with its big stained glass window and its tiny, neatly manicured lawn—directly across the street from the rear entrance and loading dock of True Value Hardware.2 

Years later, my older brother Jim would tell me that he and our sister Jeni and I made frequent trips up to that apartment above the hardware store with Mom back when I was too young to know what the hell was going on. The trips usually happened on Sundays after church. While Jack Duffy sat at home in his tweed chair, smoked cigarettes, drank cans of Budweiser, and watched the Green Bay Packers play football, Jackie Duffy took her kids to mass at Saint Mary’s, then we all went up to visit Don Jevne’s apartment on Main Street. That all makes sense to me now, but I still only remember that one visit, that one day.

 The western half of Morrison Hardware was in a short building, only two floors, whereas the eastern half of the store was in an old hotel, four stories high. In that way, the store, when looked at from across the street, formed a backwards “L.” The western building housed the plumbing and automotive sections of the hardware store on the bottom floor, and then the apartment and a few other dark and creepy rooms on the second floor. The bottom floor of the taller eastern building was once the lobby of the hotel, but later looked like any other hardware store, with fluorescent lights and tile floors and big aluminum shelves full of merchandise. But the top three floors were the old hotel rooms—dark, narrow hallways with early-twentieth century tiles and gross carpeting on the floors and peeling wallpaper on the walls—and all those little rooms that used to house people passing through town—people that were long dead and gone—were stuffed with junk that didn’t have anywhere else to go. ↩︎

 Saint Mary’s was an integral part of my childhood in Morrison, as our mother was a devoted—though extremely liberal—Catholic who made all of her children go to church every Sunday, and to Catechism on Wednesday nights. We were not the type of family that only saw the inside of church on Christmas and Easter; we were the type of family that could walk in the back door of the sacristy without the priest batting an eye. Father Bartel called on us to help him with chores, and he relied on Jackie to organize the weekly scripture readings and keep the back end of the church running smoothly in general. And Mom ate that stuff up. She may have considered it her penance for never becoming a nun. She had enlisted in the convent as a young woman in Wisconsin, and was steps away from becoming a nun when she met Jack Duffy, left the convent, and started travelling around the country with him, jumping from one job to the next and giving birth to my older sister, Jeni, and my older brother, Jim, along the way. Even though Mom left the convent, however, she never gave up on her faith. She was different than most of the other church-goers I’ve known in life are, though—something I would realize much later in life. She worshipped Jesus right along with the rest of the congregation, but she found her true strength in the women of Catholicism who fought for social justice—women like Dorothy Day. She was never extricated from the church for having a divorce, and she spoke openly of the divorce without the slightest blush or bow of her head. And often attempted to convince Father Bartel and other senior officials in the church—cardinals and bishops and such—that the church was wrong in condemning abortion, and in not allowing women into the priesthood. She had a shirt, in fact, with a female priest on it. It said, “Priestly people come in both sexes.” ↩︎

[iamnotthedog]

YOSEMITE: JUNE 22, 2001

Chloe and I awoke before sunrise the next morning and made it down to Yosemite Valley just in time for her to change her clothes, throw some water on her face, and hop in a white van full of stoned and hungover twenty-somethings to drive the steep, winding road up the south wall of the valley to Glacier Point. I dropped my pack in her tent cabin and walked to the Coffee Corner in Curry Village where I knew I could get hooked up with a biscuit and a cup of coffee, then I took a roundabout walk back to the employee camp as the sun finally came over the edge of the cliffs to the east and began to burn off the fog that stretched over the Curry Village Meadow like wet cotton.

I faced a rather unpleasant task that morning: I had to find my good friend and travel companion John and tell him that I got myself fired, and that I was planning on leaving the park. Just two months previous, I had left my parents’ house in Morrison and had driven the Olds down to St. Louis to pick up John, and we had spent three days driving across the wide-open south—rolling through green Missouri, the golden hills of Oklahoma, wide-open Texas, with its tumbleweed and oil rigs and roadside diners, and New Mexico, where John said he’d live in his next life, keeping all of his belongings on a horse and riding through the desert for all of eternity. In Flagstaff, Arizona, we almost convinced ourselves to make the quick jog north to the Grand Canyon, but we pressed on—reaching Las Vegas in the morning of our third day on the road, seeing the world-famous strip in the glaring sunlight, smelling of hot garbage, all of its ugliness and desperation exposed—and we reached the pristine and dew-glistened Sierra Nevada and Yosemite as the sun came up on day three of our trip.

I had met John at Webster University, where I had gone to school for two semesters in the fall of 1999 and the spring of 2000 before dropping out and heading west for the first time. In driving back to St. Louis to take John west with me, I liked to think that I helped to rescue him from the beaten path of alcoholism and physical and mental torment that all kinds of young people are put through when they are pressured into slogging their way through college far too quickly in their young adult lives. John wasn’t involved with a fraternity or anything—he was too much of a hippie for that—but what he was doing before I convinced him to drop out of Webster was almost worse. He had grown up in St. Louis, so when he enrolled at Webster, he had allowed himself not the slightest degree of separation from his past. He hadn’t given himself any room to grow, or to figure out what exactly he wanted out of life. He went from living in his parents house and going out to smoke weed and play music with the same few guys every night, to living at Webster and going out to smoke weed and play music with the same few guys every night. Then in a span of only a few months there was a big drug raid in the dorms—campus security and blue-shirted policemen everywhere—and John and all his buddies were kicked out of the dorms and started living together, so they didn’t need to actually “go out” to do anything. They were all slowly losing interest in everything but smoking weed and playing music. Then they had started losing interest in the weed, as well, so they moved on—they moved on to pills, opium, heroine. Then they got into uppers. Cocaine. Methamphetamines. Then they started losing interest in playing music, so all they were doing was getting high. And those guys were all smart people—great people, really. And if I had to bet on it, I’d say that they all probably got their shit together, and they’re probably doing fine now. But back then, back when I visited John in St. Louis in the spring of 2001, what was happening to all of them was happening right in front of me, and I couldn’t handle it. So I got John excited in the idea of California—the idea of something he had never seen, or imagined seeing—and I stole him away.

That morning in Curry Village, I walked around a bit before finding John back behind his tent cabin, up in the area the Yosemite employees call the Terrace.1 He was sitting up on a seven-foot tall boulder, barefoot, shirtless, and cross-legged, smoking a joint as big as his head. His long brown hair was parted down the middle, and flowed down over his beard past his shoulders and over his hairy chest. He was really an ape of a man. He looked Neolithic, up there on his rock, surveying the land.

I waved, and walked towards him over the gnarled tree roots and pinecones.

“Dan!” he yelled. He was always yelling my name when he saw me. He flashed a big open-mouthed smile and stood up on his boulder. “What are you doing? Get up here and smoke this joint with me.”

“I just got back from Indian Rock with Chloe,” I said, stepping up onto the thick green moss on the shaded side of the boulder. I slipped a bit, then scrambled up on all fours to sit on the rock.

“How are things going with her?” John handed me the joint.

“You know I don’t want a girl right now.”

“Well, she’s as good as you’re going to find.”

“I know.” I hit the joint and coughed a bit. “I just...”

“You don’t need to explain anything to me,” John said. He jumped up and flung his arms around. “You’re a free man! Free to roam. Spread your seed and whatnot.”

“It’s not spreading my seed that I’m interested in,” I said. “It’s just letting it all go. No more relationships. I want freedom from all that.”

I hit the joint again.

“You told me yourself on the way out here that being free isn’t just about giving shit up,” John said, reaching for the joint. I handed it to him. “It’s about freeing your MIND.” He smiled.

“Well, yeah. That’s the most important part. But it’s a lot easier to do that with fewer distractions. Fewer attachments. And I have the opportunity right now to do whatever the fuck I want to. I can go live in a cave.”

John sucked in another mouthful of smoke. He was one of those dramatic weed smokers—every hit was a really big deal, with his eyes stretched wide or clenched shut, and his hairy chest all puffed out. “What the fuck are you talking about?” he said. He was talking funny because he was holding in the hit. “You’ve got to work, don’t you?”

I looked down at my legs. Dirty jeans, almost worn all the way through on the knees. Below them, my once-grey socks were black with dust—almost as black as my sneakers. I hadn’t done any laundry in a while. “I got fired,” I mumbled.

Smoke streamed from John’s nostrils, encircling his head. “Say what?”

“Four or five days ago. I was nabbed taking some groceries from the store.”

He coughed and smiled a goofy smile. “Fuck, man.”

“Yep.” I watched him close his eyes, pinch the joint in the corner of his mouth, take another drag. “I think I’m going to leave the park,” I said.

John opened his eyes, exhaled, and handed me the joint. It was just a little nub by that point, and it burnt my fingers. I put it out on the rock.

We both stared up into the pines for a few minutes.

“You want to go on a hike?” I finally asked, breaking the silence. “I haven’t had enough. I want to get up out of the valley again.” I stood up. “Let's do the Mist Trail.”2

“So many fuckin’ people on that trail,” John said. He lay back onto the pine needles and green moss. “But yeah,” he continued, “let’s do it. It’s supposed to be hot as hell today.”

Three hours later, John and I were sunning ourselves at the top of Nevada Falls. I leaned against a gnarled old pine and ate some almonds, looking off down the canyon. A few fat squirrels and Steller’s jays surrounded me, hoping I’d throw ‘em a nut or two. I stomped my feet and yelled at them, but they didn’t budge. They hopped and scurried around, staring up at me with their beady, possessed eyes until their determination finally started freaking me out, and I stood up and walked over to where John sat under a rainbow at the edge of a swirling, blue-green pool, right by the top of Nevada Falls, where the water surged in huge white bellows over the edge of the cliff. John had his t-shirt, socks, and shoes off, drying in the sun next to him, and he was rolling another joint.

“These squirrels are insane,” I said. “You’d think that once you got away from the valley, they wouldn’t be such fat little panhandling pieces of shit.”

“People feed ‘em up here, just like they feed ‘em in the valley,” John said, lighting the joint. “Look at those fuckers over there.” Across the wide, cascading river, just on the other side of a narrow wooden bridge, a couple in matching neon green rain coats and cargo shorts sat under a short pine, dwarfed by the massive peak of Liberty Cap, and threw bright orange Cheez-Its to a pack of frenzied squirrels. The squirrels were going crazy, and their mad little huddle looked even more chaotic because of all the birds swooping in to get the little crackers the squirrels didn’t scoop up right away.

“Assholes,” John said.

We smoked the joint in silence, cupping it in our hands to protect it from the occasional gusts of mist from the top of the falls. I wanted to say something about leaving the park—to ask John what he thought about the whole thing—but I wasn’t entirely sure how to bring it up. I figured that since he didn’t mention it, he must have been okay with it. He probably just figured I’d come back, which I probably would. How likely was it that I’d find anything out there in the entire United State of America that was any better than what I had right there, at that moment, at the top of a waterfall, smoking a joint under a goddamned rainbow?

When John finally did speak, he didn’t say anything about me, or my decision to leave. He said, “I wrote something today.” He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it. “It’s a whole sprawling essay thing about living in Yosemite, but I think this one paragraph is pretty good.” He cleared his throat. “‘The most amazing thing about living out here is that you—YOU, as a human being—no longer find yourself separated from nature. You are a part of it just as the squirrels and the birds and the bears and the trees and everything else are a part of it, and so it’s your responsibility as a part of the whole life cycle to keep the thing rolling, rather than try to govern it somehow.’”

I lay back on the granite. “That’s a nice thought.”

John crumpled the paper and shoved it back in his pocket. “But I don’t think the first people who came here felt that way,” he continued. I looked over at him. He looked serious. Stoned, sure, but also a bit sad. “I’m not talking about the Ahwhaneechee—they just got completely fucked, driven out of their homeland. I’m talking about the first white people. Did they have any good intentions when they started building trails into the heart of this place, and taking their photos and drawings of it into the cities? Did they really want people to experience what they were experiencing when they first came here—did they want to share that joy, that ecstasy—or did they just want to make money?”

“It’s a different story for each of them,” I said. “I think Galen Clark and John Muir had good intentions all along. But guys like James Hutchings...I don’t know, man. Hutchings loved Yosemite, sure. But he also wanted to make his money.”3 

“See, and that’s the thing,” John said. “I like those guys. Those big-bearded mountain men motherfuckers in their suits, coming through here on horses before there were any decent trails. I enjoy reading their writings, learning about their lives. But when it all comes down to it, they’re all the same, and none of them are the Ahwahneechee, so no matter what their intentions, they’re all the bad guys. I mean, John Muir saved this place from the hunters and poachers and loggers and thieves. So I’ll let him off the hook. Galen Clark, too. But think about all the others. Think about the Mariposa Battalion. Those brutal savages, killing the natives and then writing about how they ‘discovered’ Yosemite. Think about all the journalists and photographers that were the first down into the valley. They all came into someone else’s house, brought attention to the astonishing shit going on in that house, and now that house is fucked. Its walls are blown down. It’s sitting out here, wide open and vulnerable to any old asshole who wants to roll on in in their giant goddamned camper and spread out their AstroTurf over the ground and feed high fructose corn syrup to the wildlife.”

I laughed. “You’re high, buddy,” I said.

“I am,” John said. “But I’ve got a point. We’re ALL here now, so we’re ALL at fault, to a point. All of us, walking these man-made trails through this prehistoric wilderness, laying eyes on these marvels of nature—this is not a good thing. It’s selfish. But WE—you and I and most of our friends down there in the valley—WE know that. At least WE do our best to respect the land. To learn about it. To leave it as we found it. I just hope that years from now, when I’m sucking down a can of beer and telling a trailer home full of grandkids about my time out here, and when you’re broke and syphilitic and alone and writing about all of this in your next great American novel or whatever—I hope it is clear to everyone that WE,” he patted me on the leg, then pointed to the couple across the river, now yelling and flapping their arms in an attempt to scare off the squirrels they had been feeding for twenty minutes. “WE are not THEM.”

 As of June 2012, the Terrace is no longer: The area—comprised of the several canvas and wooden cabins in Curry Village that sat closest to the base of the wall below Glacier Point—was always prone to rock slides, and one in 2008 crushed seventeen of those cabins and sent several park employees, along with busloads of school children and their chaperones, running for their lives. No one was injured in the 2008 slide, it was large enough that it prompted a new geological study in 2012 which used laser mapping to analyze the rock formations in the cliffs surrounding the valley with the intent of identifying rocks most likely to fall. After looking at those maps, researchers decided that no cabins should be located within 180 feet of any of the cliff walls. Hence, the Terrace cabins would not be rebuilt, but swept away. ↩︎

 The Mist Trail is one of the most popular hikes in Yosemite Valley: a moderate eight-mile round trip jaunt to the top of both the 317-foot Vernal Fall, and the 594-foot Nevada Fall. After hiking pretty much straight up for almost a mile—oak trees growing in the cracks of the steep cliffs on your left, the Merced River rushing below you on your right—and after passing a cliff-edge aerie affording great views of the 370-foot Illilouette Falls, Glacier Point, and Yosemite Falls and Yosemite Valley, and after crossing the cascading Merced River on a large wooden bridge full of people from all over the world, their camera shutters clicking away, you then hike back into the woods for another mile and climb up a wet, slippery, stone staircase right up alongside Vernal Falls. Unlike the thin, creek-fed falls in Yosemite Valley, Vernal Falls is fed by the rushing Merced River, and when it’s at its fullest in the spring and early summer, it is a thick, 100-foot wide curtain of white water. Taking cautious steps alongside it for a half of a mile or so, you get soaked to the bone in the mist. ↩︎

 Clark, Muir, and Hutchings are all very important figures in the history of Yosemite National Park. John Muir is the best known of the three—the current face of Yosemite and one of the patron saints of environmental activism, Muir was a wandering minstrel, nature scribe, adventurer, and seward of the planet who was personally responsible for convincing President Theodore Roosevelt to recognize Yosemite as a National Park in 1906. Galen Clark was the first official Guardian of Yosemite when Yosemite Valley was first designated as a state park forty-two years earlier, in 1864. Clark was a troubled and sick thirty-nine year-old Dubliner who first discovered the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoia trees on the south side of what is now the park. He ran a moderately priced hotel in Yosemite for years while protecting the Mariposa Grove, and went deeply in debt doing so. Clark frequently feuded with James Hutchings, a wealthy publisher and relentless promoter of the “wonders of Yosemite.” Hutchings led one of the first tourist parties into Yosemite in 1855, and later opened an inn in the park. Clark and Hutchings’ feud was brought about for the fact that after Yosemite Valley was designated as a state park and Clark became the park’s guardian, Hutchings began a decade-long fight with the state, suing for 160 acres of land in the park that he called rightfully his, and also suing to retain the right to build more hotels in the park if he desired. Ironically, when Clark’s guardianship came to a close in 1880, Hutchings became the park’s next guardian. ↩︎

[iamnotthedog]

CHICAGO: OCTOBER 24, 2012

I want to touch a glacier. I want to feel its weight under me. I want to press my hands to it and have the water running under my skin remind me in the most tangible way possible that everything is impermanent. I want to see it disappearing with my own eyes. I want to stare into its blinding whiteness and feel its resolve.

I need to get back to the Olympic Peninsula.1  I need to drive along its shores, sit on its beaches, hike through its mountains, wander aimlessly under its trees. I need to experience it the same way I did during that summer of 2001. There is something about that area of the country that has stuck with me since that summer—something that won’t stop haunting me until I see it again.

I woke up again last night, right around five o’clock in the morning, and I ended up just wandering around our little apartment and the enclosed, rat-infested square of grass outside, smoking cigarettes and thinking about things until the sun came up. As for what woke me up, it was a dream—a dream I’ve had several times now.

In the dream, I wake up on a Greyhound bus in the Pacific Northwest. The bus is slowly rolling northward along the Puget Sound, through the mountainous region on the eastern edge of the Olympic Peninsula. The land flattens out as we reached the Strait of Juan de Fuca, with towering pine trees jutting up into a claustrophobic gray sky. It isn’t raining, but the air is wet with the perennial haze forever associated with that area of the country.

We pull into a Burger King parking lot, it’s giant, lustrous hamburger glowing through the mist.

The bus driver calls out: “Half hour!”

I rub my hands over my face and through my hair, and slip on my Converse. I step off of the bus and into the moisture and look down at the rain-glossed lines on the pavement as my fellow passengers file sleepily into the obnoxious fluorescent light. As I stand there, lethargic and confused, I become overwhelmed with a feeling of familiarity, like the hand that grabs the back of your mind and gives a squeeze when you smell a place you haven’t been for years. I lift my eyes from the parking lot to the restaurant, and then to the foothills gradually bowing into looming mountains beyond. There is a dirt path on the left side of the building that trails off into the woods. The path curves around the back of the restaurant, past chained rear doors and barrels stuffed with broken cardboard and wax boxes. The smell of burgers and fries and American cheese lingers somewhere near the center of the noxious smell emanating from a few dumpsters. The path then veers to the left, points straight through the swaying, ethereal pines for about twenty paces, and comes to a hill. On the hill stands a log cabin with a large front porch. A weathered upright piano sits on the right side of the porch. The front door is open.

Ten steps up the hill, two steps up to the porch, and I stand at the threshold. A rock wells up in my heart and slowly slides its way up into my esophagus. I am scared, but not too scared to turn back. I rap on the open door and step in.

The room is small and lit by a single light fixture in the center of the ceiling. To my left, a dark and empty doorway, straight ahead a dresser on which sits a wooden bowl and a framed picture of a young boy. To my right, lying face down on a small bed, is a naked woman, the ivory skin of her delicate neck, shoulders, back, ass, thighs, the backs of her knees, her calves, the bottoms of her feet all fully exposed. Her arms rest under a puffy white pillow that supports her head of curly brown hair. Her head moves slightly on the pillow, and then she pushes herself up on her elbows and turns to look at me.

Her face is like the picture in a movie theater when the reel on a film projector slows—I see multiple faces—each sliding by, one by one. The woman is everyone I’ve ever known. I feel an overwhelming feeling of comfort and acceptance, and let out a breath that seems to come from outside—it starts in the roots of the trees, is pulled up through the branches, and falls with the rain. I see that all happen as I breathe. I suddenly want to lie with this woman and feel her skin against mine. I want to melt into her.

The woman smiles—her multiple faces smile, each with their different wrinkles and lines, the different shapes of their eyes, the different curves of their lips—but she doesn’t say a word. I take another breath, preparing to speak, but this breath comes from inside the room, and brings with it the stink of reality.

Behind me, I hear the opening of a door, and the words “Hello, Dan.”

I turn and find myself face-to-face with Don. He is much older. An old man, in fact. All pale, wrinkled skin and grey hair. He is wearing nothing but a bath towel around his waist. For some reason, he frightens the hell out of me.

“Welcome,” he says. He pats me on the back and smiles, and I relax a bit. Maybe I’m not about to be brutally murdered, after all. Don’s smile says, “I’m here. You’re here. We’ve aged. Time happens. I have nothing to hide.”

He brushes past me and sits next to the woman on the bed. I look at her again, bending over at the waist to really get a good look at her face, or faces. Is she my mother?

Don’s voice suddenly sounds very scholarly and serious. “You are not Oedipus.”

He laughs.

I step back, away from the bed, and watch Don as he kneels on the wood floor and grabs a newspaper from under the bed. Standing and holding it out to me, he points to a picture. It’s a school portrait of a young man I knew in high school, or multiple young men I knew in high school—again, the faces flicker and roll by—all of them acquaintances I never had real conversations with, but ate lunch with in the cafeteria, sat next to in classrooms, ran with on the track around the football field.

“So much potential,” Don says, pulling the newspaper back before I can see what the article is about. I look down at the woman on the bed, who appears to have fallen asleep.

“I don’t know,” I reply.

Don tosses the newspaper on the dresser and says, “They’re all ghosts.” He turns his back to me and opens the dresser drawer. “Nothing is permanent.” I notice for the first time that the portrait in the frame on the dresser is of me, as a little boy. I’ve got a blonde bowl cut, and those big plastic-framed glasses, bigger than my face. To my right, on the bed, the woman has rolled over in her sleep. At my back, a breeze comes through the door that I had carelessly left open, bringing the smell of rain. The breeze rustles the pines and causes water to fall on the roof of the porch in loud, thwacking drops. There is a rumble of distant thunder. Don has a t-shirt and underwear in one hand, rolled up socks under his arm, and a pair of khakis with the belt still looped around the waist in his other hand. He shuffles into the bathroom and I see the blurry reflection of his face on the steamy bathroom mirror above the sink before he shuts the door behind him.

I look down at the woman on the bed one more time: the curve of her back, the lift of her exposed hip. Then I step out of the cabin onto the porch through the open door. 

Standing there on the porch, I look out through the mist. Everything in my immediate view seems to be in motion. Just beyond the grassy hill sloping down to the dark woods, towering pine trees sway back and forth. Just beyond the rocking pine trees is a gigantic mountain, bluish-white. It is a glacier—a solid sheet of ice—but even it isn’t unmoving. It is heaving eastward, away from the cabin, away from the Pacific Northwest and back over the Great Plains towards Illinois, heaving like the ocean, it’s glassy-but-opaque, moonlit surface curling, then receding, curling, then receding.

The whole scene makes me a little seasick, so I turn away from all that and sit at the piano. It smells of wet wood, an almost woolly smell, and the more keys I press, the stronger the smell becomes. Most of the keys work, but a few stick when pressed, and others press together two at a time, like fingers bound together in a splint.

Don emerges from the cabin in his standard uniform—a buttoned-up, subtly-striped white shirt over a white t-shirt, tucked into khaki pants with a black belt and black leather shoes. Everything worn and faded, like he hasn’t bought anything new for years. His hair is parted on his left and swooped over his tall forehead to the right. His eyes are glistening behind the thick lenses of his wire-framed glasses.

“How long have you been here?” I ask him. But he doesn’t reply. I plunk out “London Bridge is Falling Down” on the piano, and take a long drag of a cigarette. Where the cigarette came from, I’m not exactly sure, but it burns my lungs and makes me cough—I always cough, every time, then I start to wake from the dream.

“You shouldn’t smoke,” Don says.

I can feel myself slipping away, and I don’t really want to. I want to stay right there, on that porch. I want to talk to him, and find out who that woman on the bed is.

“Your grandfather died of emphysema.”

For some reason, this comment makes him smile.

 The Olympic Mountains, which lie right in the wild and unpopulated center of the Olympic Peninsula, are one of the few places left on Earth that are still home to hundreds of glaciers. It can’t be certain how true that statement is today, though—as the Earth’s climate warms, glaciers melt, and comparing aerial photos taken from the late 1970s to 2009, researchers found that glacier surface area in the Olympic Mountains decreased by almost a third. Anderson Glacier—one of the only glaciers in the park accessible by trail—is one-tenth of the size it was in 1927. Mountains of ice that have shaped the Olympic Mountains for thousands of years are disappearing in mere decades, and bears, elk, cougars, steelhead and salmon—every living thing down to the tiny ice worms found only in glacial ice—are suffering as a result. ↩︎

[iamnotthedog]

TOMAHAWK: SUMMER 1984

A few months after my visit to the apartment over the hardware store, it was a hot and humid Midwestern summer, and my two siblings and I were at a cabin on a lake in Tomahawk, Wisconsin, with Mom and Don, who had started hanging around a lot more.1 It was much cooler up there in the woods of Northern Wisconsin, and it rained almost the whole time we were there. I remember constantly having to go inside the warm little lamp-lit cabin to dry off. After fishing, after walking in the woods, after sitting out on the crooked old pier that stuck out into the lake like an arthritic finger—we always found ourselves back inside, drying off with the stiff, bleach-scented cabin towels and changing clothes and drinking hot chocolate. I recall having a blast with it all—probably annoying the hell out of everyone with that exuberant energy that now gets all bottled up inside and contributes to my ever-escalating adult psychoses. I also recall, however, that Jeni was miserable, whining at Mom about every last thing that happened.

Jeni would have been around thirteen years old then, and I feel like I can only know the teenaged Jeni from the few old pictures I have: her shoulder-length, reddish blonde hair and bangs framing her round, pretty face and smiling eyes; the frilly, button-down shirts and high-waisted blue jeans pulled up over her big teenaged butt; always white sneakers. She had lots of freckles, too, just like Jim, who was two years younger than her. Jim was a small boy. Skinny. He usually wore t-shirts that were too big for him—often bright gold Green Bay Packers t-shirts, or those classic stripy ‘70s t-shirts—and he tucked them into his flared blue jeans with his big brown belt. He had an adorable buck-toothed smile, too. And he had a reddish-brown bowl cut, the bangs of which came down to rest on the top of his thick, plastic-framed glasses.

I also had thick, plastic-framed glasses, and they looked even more ridiculous on me because of how young I was. I was seven years younger than Jim, and I was often mistaken for what people would rather insensitively refer to as a “slow child.” I was pretty damned adorable, but I think that “slow child” comment was in reference to my huge head, my open-mouthed smile, and the fact that my eyes kind of pointed in different directions for a while. (I had surgery to correct my crossed-eyes right after I was born, but it really took ‘em a while to straighten out completely).

Anyway, I’m not just pulling those images from memory, I’m actually sitting here looking at a picture of the three of us at that cabin on that very same trip that I’m talking about. And we all look happy enough in the picture—Jeni’s standing between Jim and I, and her arms are draped over our shoulders, and we’re all smiling stupidly and looking off in different directions. But those smiles aside, I remember very clearly that Jeni was really pitching a fit in the cabin up in Tomahawk for those couple of weeks, and Jim soon grew pretty cranky, as well, but he wasn’t being vocal about it like Jeni was—he was quietly pacing around the grounds and looking genuinely sad.

I also remember finding it really strange that instead of just telling them both to be quiet and behave, Mom was getting really emotional about their little tantrums. Soon she started crying, as well, and then one night when we were all crying and complaining and really getting into the spirit of the whole thing, Don came storming in from the rain with his fishing pole in his hand, yelling at us all to shut our mouths and respect our mother—we were supposed to be on vacation, after all. None of us had ever seen him yell before, and it was pretty strange.

I had no idea what was going on.

Late that same night, I was lying on the bumpy fold-out couch bed between Jim and Jeni, listening to the bugs chatter in the dark woods outside and trying to fall asleep, when Don came creeping out of the bedroom in his Fruit of the Loom briefs and his bathrobe, and he knelt next to the bed.

“Jim,” he whispered. Jim stirred and woke, turning away from me, towards Don. I rolled over and pressed my head against his warm back as Don put his big hand on his shoulder. “Hey buddy. I just wanted to say I’m sorry for yelling at you earlier. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Jim’s little voice said, “Okay,” in the dark night air. Then Don whispered, “Okay. See you tomorrow,” and he patted Jim on the back, then went back into the bedroom and closed the door.

It wasn’t long after that trip to the cabin on the lake when Don became the newest member of our family. Jackie Duffy was now Jackie Jevne, and the Duffy kids all of a sudden had new grandparents that lived right there in town—Grandpa and Grandma Jevne, right there on Maple Avenue—and we moved into a big hundred year-old stucco-sided house only about six blocks away from our old house that Don moved all of our furniture into and immediately started fixing up, pretty much all on his own.

The reason Jeni had pitched a fit at the cabin was because Don had taken Mom out on a row boat with him, out on the lake in the rain, and asked for her hand in marriage. It was all very romantic, and the two of them were most definitely in love, but Jack Duffy was still up there in Wisconsin somewhere, and that pissed my sister off.

 Tomahawk occupies an interesting place in my memory. That trip was the first of many that we took up to that little northern Wisconsin town, planted right up there in the middle of the state on the Wisconsin River. We rented a cabin up there every summer for a while. What I remember more than anything isn’t the town itself—the town is nothing to sniff at; just a drab little Midwestern town with a Main Street, a post office, a city hall/police station, and a high school. If you look at any history of the place, chance are it will say that the area was an uninhabited wilderness until the loggers moved in in the late 1800s. But the whole area is surrounded by water—the Wisconsin River splits and runs west out into the Spirit River Flowage and north into Lake Mohawksin, which runs east out to Lake Alice and north up around Halfmoon Lake and Clear Lake to Lake Nokomis. The water is what I remember—the feeling I would get as a little kid, exploring all that water in a rowboat with Don, the creaking of the oars as we floated through the reeds, looking for a good place to catch a fish for dinner. You can take a boat to pretty much any one of those spots that you want to, and you know that the Ojibwa people who lived there for hundreds of years before the loggers moved in probably had quite a civilization built along the shoreline. Nowadays, a lot of upper middle class folks have big, garish cabins along the same shoreline, with speedboats and jet skis tethered to piers just outside their back doors. There are plenty of lower middle-class people up there, too, though—real classic American working stiffs—and a lot of them own several dingy, quaint little cabins along the shore that they rent out in the summer to make ends meet. You can get a pretty good deal on those cabins, and those cabins are where we always stayed. ↩︎

[iamnotthedog]

YOSEMITE: JUNE 23, 2001

The day after John and I returned to Yosemite Valley, I saw him off to work, had a cup of coffee at the Coffee Corner with Chloe, then wandered aimlessly down the Valley Loop Trail, thinking about the comments John had made about tourism in the park. Though I agreed with his pleas to a point, and I loved how passionately he cared for the park and its preservation, I felt like something was off about the way he was looking at things. I was determined to figure that out for myself. I wanted to reconcile my own feelings with John’s and to let them all go before I left, so I could always return to the park without anything unpleasant stirring around in my psyche.

By the wide concrete walkway leading up to the base of Lower Yosemite Falls, I climbed up on a boulder and sat, observing the hoards of people wandering up to snap pictures of the final 320-foot drop of the sixth highest waterfall in the world. I observed families, couples on romantic getaways, individual hikers and adventurer-types, bus loads of rowdy and emotional school kids, tour groups from distant cities. My plan was to watch them until I no longer felt any animosity towards them—to watch them until I saw myself in them—until I had completely rid myself of John’s “us versus them” comments, and I saw us all as equals. After about an hour, though, I began to lose hope. Those people weren’t me. I couldn’t see them as me. Some of them were my parents, maybe. Some were friends, classmates, acquaintances, and distant relatives. All of them brought back memories of my past. But none of them were me, up on that rock above them, completely and utterly alone. I felt an intense sadness for the world—everyone so lost, everyone so hopeful. I decided I needed to make my next move, and do it quickly. Then I stretched for a few minutes, and walked off down the bike path, back to Curry Village.

Entering the village, I cut up off the path through the rows of tent cabins where all the tourists stayed, thinking I might run into John. He was on housekeeping duty that day, and would be sweeping mouse shit out of the cabins and making the beds. I needed some serious cheering up—I felt so low that I was sick to my stomach—and I figured if anyone would have anything the least bit humorous to tell me, it would be John. I didn’t find him anywhere, but in the sixth or seventh open and vacated tent cabin I peeked into, there was a book on the floor—Dorothy Day’s Loaves and Fishes. The book reminded me of my time spent doing community service for a Catholic Worker house of hospitality in St. Louis, which I’ll tell you about later. It also reminded me of Mom and her Catholicism and love for Dorothy Day, which brought tears to my eyes. I couldn’t just leave it there after having that weird emotional reaction to it, so I took it with me through Cooks Meadow and down to the banks of the Merced River, and I started reading it. I figured it might have a message for me, just as Mom would if she were there.

All the God talk kind of rubbed me the wrong way at first—I had completely distanced myself from Christianity after leaving the shadow of my mother’s wing, as many young people do. I thought any religion that denied science—that seemed to shy away from any concept involving the unification of the natural and the spiritual—was utterly idiotic, and damaging to the world as a whole. But all the fervent Christianity aside, Dorothy Day was obviously an extremely intelligent woman, and her spiritual quest rang true to me, especially concerning how miserable I was feeling that afternoon:

“I felt keenly that God was more on the side of the hungry, the ragged, the unemployed, than on the side of the comfortable churchgoers, who gave so little heed to the misery of the needy and the groaning of the poor. I prayed that some way should open up for me to do something, to line myself up on their side, to work for them, so that I would no longer feel I had been false to them...”

When you are doing nothing with your life, every outside influence—every book you read, every movie you see, every person you meet—holds the possibility of future endeavor. So by the time I finished chapter two of Loaves and Fishes, I was considering giving myself over to a sort of atheistic sainthood. I began picturing myself not as a wandering mystic in the mountains, but as an urban monk—finding solitude in the middle of a sprawling concrete jungle, and using my healthy young body to help people. I thought of it as a challenge to my character: I would spread the big nature I had grown to love out on the exhaust-choked and rat-infested table known as the American city, and trade it straight up for human nature. I would allow human nature to assault my senses and fill my head with its nonsense.

I decided right then and there to shoulder my pack and hitchhike to San Francisco.

My friend Heather, who I had met during my first summer in Yosemite, had recently moved to San Francisco from Santa Barbara. Before heading to California for my second summer in the Sierra Nevada, I had learned in an e-mail that Heather was living in a place in the Mission called the Praxis House—a home for volunteers with the Food Not Bombs organization.1  I had a very rosy picture of the Praxis House in my head: I pictured young men and women in plaid shirts and ripped jeans and cotton beanies and horn-rimmed glasses, sitting around big wooden tables surrounded by shelves of weathered books and independent literary journals, smoking organic tobacco and drinking steaming cups of fair-trade coffee while discussing the _Manifesto of the Communist Party _and chopping enough vegetables to make dozens of gallons of soup for the homeless men and women that crowded the parks and street corners of the city.

I would go to the Praxis House, reconnect with Heather, crash on a couch, and try to make a new life for myself in San Francisco. The idea cheered me up a bit, and not only for all the potential that it held. It also offered me opportunity to forget about myself for a while. There was a sorrow somewhere down there in my subconscious, and for every attachment that I had stripped away since leaving my hometown, I had come that much closer to realizing it. By taking a trip to San Francisco, I would pile so many more distractions onto the ones I already had that I may avoid seeing that sorrow ever again, or at least not for several more years. I was delaying the inevitable, of course, but at the time I felt so fragile—so small and insignificant in a world full of giants and permanence—that I was willing to postpone whatever enlightenment was to come in order to avoid obliterating any last part of myself that I still had left.

I finished reading Loaves and Fishes as the sun was yet again creeping over the mountains to the west and bathing Half Dome in a brilliant wash of fiery hues. I sat there as the air got colder and I meditated, counting my breaths and giving myself some time to work up to the idea of telling Chloe that I was going to leave for a while. Then I walked to the Curry Village parking lot and got my pack out of my dusty Oldsmobile, and I walked through Curry Village up to the Terrace, where Chloe usually ate dinner with friends after her workday. The Terrace kitchen was empty save for our friend Mary, who was listening to Axis: Bold as Love on full volume and washing some dishes in the big white sink. I walked up the few stairs to the kitchen, skirted around a big table full of empty bread bags and cracker boxes and cans of food, and stepped over a skateboard that was placed rather dangerously on the linoleum floor right behind Mary’s feet.

“You seen Chloe?”

Mary pushed her curly red hair back from her face with her forearm, then held up a soapy dishwater hand. “Hold on, hold on. Listen to this bass line right here.”

We listened to the end of “If 6 Was 9” together in silence. Then Mary informed me that Chloe had said something over dinner about doing her laundry. So I walked back to the laundry room, where I found Chloe sitting on the washing machine, writing a postcard to her parents and drinking a two-dollar bottle of wine.

I decided the best thing to do was just dive right in.

“I think I’m going to go to San Francisco,” I said, dropping my pack on the floor and sitting next to her. 

Chloe put her pen in her shirt pocket and handed me the bottle of wine. “How are you going to do that?” she asked. “You don’t have any gas. Or money.” Cool as a cucumber. Always.

I took a drink from the bottle and handed it back to her. “I want to hitch there. I have a friend I can stay with for a few days while I try to find something to do. Maybe find a job or something.”

Chloe looked down at the bottle of wine in her hands. Then, after what seemed like a full minute of excruciating silence—just the hum of the dryer at work—she said, “That sounds fun.” She kicked at my pack. “You need to do some laundry or something?”

“Yeah, I should probably wash whatever I have.” I laughed. Chloe was completely expressionless. “You’re alright with me taking off for a while?” I asked. “I mean, I’m not leaving for good or anything. I’ll come back whether I find something out there or not.”

“It’s not a big deal,” Chloe said. “You need to work.” The dryer stopped running, and she hopped off the washing machine and pulled open the door. “If you’re doing laundry, you should put your clothes in now, because a bunch of us are going down to Happy Isles for a bonfire later. And you should definitely come.”

“I’m in. For sure.”

Chloe kissed me—a quick peck on the lips, no lingering—then she split with her basket of clean clothes. I did my one load of laundry and drank the rest of the wine that she left with me, watching the bugs fly into the fluorescent light in the laundry room over and over and over again.

Later that night, I went to the bonfire and I got really, really drunk—I blacked out, to tell you the truth. Eventually, I made it back to Curry Village where I slept on Chloe’s plastic mattress with her. I woke early with a brutal hangover and went to Yosemite Village to finally pick up my last paycheck, which I signed all but $13 of over to United States District Court for the Eastern District of California. Then I shouldered my pack, stopped by the Curry Village parking lot to say goodbye to the Olds, and I left the park.

Food Not Bombs was one of the fastest growing revolutionary movements in the world for years, with hundreds of autonomous chapters around the globe. Their central ideology revolves around the fact that government and corporate priorities are skewed to allow hunger to persist in the midst of abundance. In addition to sharing free vegetarian food with the homeless—recovered food that would have otherwise been thrown away—Food Not Bombs also provides hot food to rescue workers and the survivors of disasters. They were in San Francisco after the 1989 earthquake, in New York following the attacks on September 11, 2001, in Indonesia following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Following Hurricane Sandy in 2012, hundreds of volunteers helped the Long Island chapter of Food Not Bombs hand out food and clothing at Hempstead Train Station, which became the organization’s largest endeavor to date. ↩︎

[iamnotthedog]

MORRISON: SPRING 1988

If I remember correctly, Mom got pregnant with my little brother Adam around the same time she started attending Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. I have a foggy memory of hanging out in her classroom at Augustana on a blue and fragrant summer day, and I was sitting on her knee in her creaky desk chair and leaning against her huge belly while I read to her from a textbook.1 I suppose it’s possible that Mom got her degree before Don knocked her up, and I’m thinking of traveling around with her while she was making ends meet by substitute teaching all over northwestern Illinois, which she did for a good few years. But I don’t think so.

Mom was in her forties when she started attending Augustana. She hadn’t gone to college as a young woman—she had gone straight into the convent following high school, much to the chagrin of her younger brother, John, who was pretty much her best friend in the world at the time. According to her, John tried really hard to keep her from going to the convent, he was so worried about what he’d do without her.

Mom was in the convent for a couple years and was mere days away from becoming a nun and being lost to a solitary spiritual life forever when Jack Duffy swept her out into the “real world.” She and Jack left Wisconsin together and traveled all over the eastern and southern United States for the next decade, going wherever his department store job took him and having a couple of kids—Jim and Jeni—along the way. Then they eventually settled in Morrison, where she tried her hand at retail for a few years, got a divorce, married Don Jevne, and decided to go back to school and get herself into a more rewarding career.

Mom’s retail experience offers one strange yet fond memory. She managed a women’s clothing store on Main Street in Morrison for years, then, with Don’s help, she managed to buy the thing and changed its name from Mode O’ Day to Jackie’s Fashion Focus. The thing I remember about Jackie’s Fashion Focus was that Mom had this girl who worked for her whose name was Charity, and the first time I ever got a funny feeling from touching a girl was when I sat on Charity’s lap. I remember sitting on Charity’s legs at the soda fountain at Peterson’s Drug Store on Main Street, and leaning back against her breasts and getting a little tingle down below and thinking, “Oh, man. I could do this all day.” Then I’m pretty sure I spent the next couple years always trying to sit on older girls’ laps and kiss the neighbor girls.2 

Anyway, Jackie’s Fashion Focus tanked, and Mom decided to go to Augustana to get that degree she was going to get before getting pregnant with Jeni and Jim, and then she was going to teach. So, if I have that all correct, it’s pretty funny that when she finally went back to finish her degree—almost twenty years after she had tried to the first time—she went and got pregnant again.

What I remember most about April 4, 1988, isn’t seeing my little brother for the first time, oddly enough. It’s the cleanliness and sterility of the hospital in which my brother was born. I was seven years old at the time, and had never seen the inside of a hospital before, or at least not that I could remember. I had been to the cozy little health clinic out on the edge of town, with its carpeted floors and plants and patterned lampshades and stacks of magazines, but never to the hospital. It seemed like such a strange place for someone to have a baby, with its weird smells, intrusive mechanical noises, and bright white lights.

We got there early in the morning—right after breakfast. Don ushered us—little fifteen year-old Jim with his long brown mullet, his Whitesnake t-shirt, and his bleached and tight-cuffed blue jeans; seventeen year-old Jeni with her hairsprayed bangs and her huge royal blue knit sweater and her leggings and white Keds; seven year-old me with my pale blonde bowl cut, Mickey Mouse t-shirt, and floppy-tongued Reeboks—we were all ushered into a little room with pale yellow walls and long, transparent white curtains on the windows. We stood there in the early morning sunlight next to our sickly-looking mother—bags under her eyes, and her short, permed hair pointing every which way—and we took turns holding our new little brother from another father. None of us thought about it like that, though. He was our brother, period, and there he was, all purple in the face. And tiny. He had come a bit prematurely, and he was the size of a large croissant.

So we stood there in that room and held our warm croissant and let ourselves get excited about all the potential encapsulated in that weird little life form. Nobody was more thrilled than Don, though. Here was his full-blooded son, in all his wet and bloody and half-suffocated beauty. A new Jevne.

 I had been reading to Mom for three years at that point. She loved to tell her friends and coworkers about the night in 1985 when I had sat next to her on the couch in our living room and started reading to her from the TV Guide. I just pointed at a little square of text on the page and started at it, probably reading something about The Cosby Show or Family Ties or Murder, She Wrote or something. One of my first memories, actually, is of learning to read. I remember lying on my stomach on the carpeted floor of our living room, running a little red plastic scanner over the barcode underneath the letters in a picture book, and listening to the mechanical voice in the scanner read the words to me. Mom and Don were in the kitchen, clearing the kitchen table and putting leftover casserole in plastic containers and washing dishes and talking about their respective days, and the news was on the television in the corner, with the volume turned down low—someone probably talking about Madonna’s Like a Virgin, or the US performing nuclear tests in Nevada, or the US Olympic Committee endorsing a boycott of the Moscow games, or Michael Jordan winning Rookie of the Year. I wasn’t paying attention to any of that, though. I was only five. I just kept running the scanner over the words slower and slower, and sounding them out as did so, and I began to see how the words fit with the pictures, and the pictures resembled all the things in the world around me. When the mechanical voice in the weird little thing said “The dog wags his tail,” and I sounded out the words, then looked up at our new dog sitting there with that dopey open-mouthed smile on her bearded face—her paws stretched out on the carpet in front of her, her tail wagging and flapping on the carpet—the whole elaborate system made sense in my gelatinous little brain. I flipped to the back of the book, where there were words that weren’t accompanied by pictures, and when I read “The door opens,” or whatever, I saw, distinctly, in my own brain, my own picture of a door opening. And that picture was better than any picture in a stupid picture book. ↩︎

 Here I can think only of Molly. Sweet little untouchable Molly, with her upper-middle class parents and her beautiful house with a brand spanking new jungle gym in the yard, just for her. I would walk through the backyards of all four houses on the block—ducking under clothes lines and kicking at dandelions—to get over to Molly’s house and bother her almost every day as a child. One day—one blistering hot summer day when Molly’s neighbor Olivia was sick and Molly and I were left to play awkwardly, quietly, alone, she asked me to walk back behind her garage, which was weird, because there was only about a foot of space between the back of her garage and a tall picket fence behind it. We squeezed back there, and Molly said those nine words that exist somewhere in every little boy’s imagination once he reaches a certain age: “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” Then she pulled down her Osh-Kosh-B-Gosh overalls and I saw that little fold of skin and my jaw dropped and my eyes bulged and I said “Weird,” my bald little purple-headed dinkle in my seven year-old hand. ↩︎

[iamnotthedog]

SAN FRANCISCO: JUNE 24, 2001

Hitchhiking out to San Francisco was far easier than I expected. I got five rides, and the whole trip took only about six hours.1 I caught my first ride from a sun-scorched and beer-drunk Belgian couple who felt each other up while driving and took me all the way out of the park to the rustic little mountain town of Groveland—home to the oldest saloon in the state of California—where I was picked up by a short, cologne-drenched Italian man in a red convertible who drove me out into the foothills and down through the central valley to the Oakland airport going ninety miles an hour and didn’t say one word the entire way. In Oakland, I walked about three miles down the shoulder of the interstate before I was picked up by a tattooed and paranoid rockabilly bruiser in a white A-shirt and black jeans who yelled at me that I was going to get killed walking around by myself right before he let me out on a busy off ramp, with trucks roaring by, rattling the windows of his old Mustang and making the ground shudder under foot. My last ride came a mere few minutes later from a small dreadlocked Madonna named Autumn who smelled like sage, dropped me off at the front door of Bay Area Rapid Transit station, and even gave me a few dollars to take the train into San Francisco.

Once I had emerged from the subway at the Montgomery Street stop, the naïve optimism that had me believing I could just walk into the city with my head held high and immediately find work somewhere disappeared. Somehow, I had forgotten that getting a job in the city isn’t quite like getting a job in a national park—you can’t just walk into a human resources office, pee in a cup, and start working on that first paycheck. You have to already have established yourself. You need an address, and a phone number, and some decent clothes. No one ever wanders into a coffee shop with all his possessions on his back and gets a job, no matter how good his resume may be.

I became extremely self-conscious walking around those downtown San Francisco streets under all that concrete and glass—walking in the shadow of banks and office buildings in my old clothes with my dirty backpack and my long hair—sharing the sidewalk with well-dressed businessmen and women, stylish young college students, tourists on shopping sprees—everyone all clean and showered and wearing the latest trends. Cars and trucks honked at each other and screeched down the busy streets, trolley cars roared on the tracks, bells ringing, a cement truck at work provided a steady hum over all the other noise. I entered a state of complete sensory overload, and decided I needed to get over to the Haight, or maybe up around North Beach and Chinatown, where I knew there would be some crazy old hippies hanging around and I would feel more comfortable. I walked to the Embarcadero and up to the North Waterfront, then cut down Stockton to North Beach and went to that mecca for energetic young Beat wannabes like myself: City Lights Booksellers & Publishers.

I pushed through the front door of City Lights with the ring of a bell and nodded at the clerk behind the counter—a skinny young man with short, perfectly combed brown hair, round glasses with tortoise shell frames, and a wool cardigan over a tight fitting button-up with a crisp collar. “How’s it going?” I asked.

He looked up from his book with a solemn face. “Pretty good,” he muttered. I noticed that he was reading A History of the Sierra Nevada, and I smiled and pointed at the book’s cover. “I just hitched here from Yosemite.”

His expression didn’t change. “Cool,” he said. He pointed at the floor by the counter. “Can you leave your backpack up here, please?” he asked.

“Alright.” I dropped my pack on the floor and rubbed my sore shoulders as I walked back through the main room, through the old barbershop with Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s hand-written signs everywhere (“Have a Seat and Read a Book,” “A Kind of Library Where Books Are Sold,” etc.) and up the narrow, creaky stairs to what is referred to as the “Poetry Room,” where I knew I’d be able to take a load off and read for a while without being bothered.2

I sat on a little wooden armchair in the corner of the Poetry Room, and I put up my feet and read Baudelaire’s Twenty Prose Poems in its entirety. I had never read any Baudelaire before, and I really got a kick out of it. Especially “CROWDS”:

“It is not given to everyone to take a bath in the multitude; to enjoy the crowd is an art; and only that man can gorge himself with vitality, at the expense of the human race, whom, in his cradle, a fairy has inspired with love of disguise and of the mask, with hatred of the home and a passion for voyaging. Multitude, solitude: terms that, to the active and fruitful poet, are synonymous and interchangeable. A man who cannot people his solitude is no less incapable of being alone in a busy crowd.”

When I was finished with Twenty Prose Poems, I left the bookstore and walked next door to the Vesuvio Cafe where I planned on eating, but ended up spending six of my last $13 on Anchor Steam, instead. I talked to the bartender, a nice older lady with big loopy brown curls who had recently moved to San Francisco from Chicago, and seemed to have a weird sort of fetish thing for sea lions. I kept trying to talk to her about the differences between the West and Midwest—the scenery, people, etcetera—but she just kept going back to the damned sea lions. After she started to get on my nerves, I told her she should leave the bar business and get a job at Sea World. She was nice enough, though, and even gave me a shot of rye on the house. And when I noticed that it had started to get dark outside, I walked back to the payphone in the back of the bar and called Heather, who informed me that she lived “on the other side of town.”

Twenty long blocks later, and my tired feet were kicked up on Heather’s ivy-covered back porch. The last time I had seen her was in Yosemite, where I knew her to be a soft-spoken, cute valley girl who took me on my first long hike and only spoke up when she was scolding tourists for walking on the meadows instead of the boardwalks (“You’re destroying a fragile ecosystem, asshole!”). In San Francisco, I saw her in a different light—she had shaved her head, her arms and chest were covered in tattoos, and she had a much more confident and socially-and-politically-active air about her. She had a big Ball jar full of weed that one of her roommates had given her, and she offered it to me when we sat down. Then she went inside and put on a record.

We listened to Cat Power and caught up on a few things, but the conversation mostly revolved around her decision to move to the city.

“I can’t do it anymore,” she said, fingering the leather bracelet on her wrist. “I miss the park, and I miss the mountains, sure. But I can’t be out there, ignoring everything happening in the world. I need to be in it.”

I looked at her. Her big green eyes. The grasshopper tattooed on her right forearm. I wondered if she was happy. Then I lit the joint and handed it to her, and she took it, though somewhat reluctantly. “There’s a lot going on out there, too, you know,” I said. I watched her take a puff and start to smile, then frown and look down at her feet. “It’s just not human. It’s nature,” I continued. “It’s the natural world, working. Doing its thing. People in the city seem to ignore nature just like people in the wilderness ignore things like politics.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, leaning forward in her chair and wringing her hands together. “But there is so much to be done here, in civilization, among the people. So many people need help. And there is so much that we can do to ensure that future generations get to enjoy that nature just as we have. None of that is actually being done out there in the park. Everyone’s just getting high and walking around, or getting drunk and fucking each other.”

That made me laugh a little bit. “True, true, but there’s a beauty in that, isn’t there? I get really sad when I think about the fact that five years from now, all our friends out there in the park are probably going to be living in cities, working in offices and making babies.”

“I’m not working in an office or making a baby.”

Our conversation went on like that for a while. After we smoked that first joint, Heather started lecturing me like I was her little brother, but it didn’t bother me. She didn’t really seem like she meant to be doing it. And I was five years younger than her. Not to mention that I was a tramp of sorts, who was unemployed and sleeping on her couch. I grabbed the Ball jar and rolled another joint.

Eventually our conversation stalled, and several pregnant moments of silence were broken only by the clicking of my lighter as I sucked the last hints of tetrahydrocannabinol out of the microscopic, resin-coated roaches left over from our two-hour weed binge. Once Heather was no longer speaking at all and it got to the point where I was accomplishing nothing but the singeing of my fingertips, I said good night and excused myself to the couch.3

The following morning, I awoke—sprawled face-down on the couch in all of my clothes—to the sounds of pans clanging around in the kitchen, and the smell of a tomato-based soup of some kind cooking in an open kettle. Democracy Now! was playing on the radio, and there were young people in various earthen shades of plaid all over the place: back-to-back in the kitchen, walking past me from the kitchen to the living room (the couch was in a small middle room packed wall-to-wall with books and magazines), and messing around with bicycles and wagons in the front foyer.

Heather wasn’t there—she had left for work at some non-profit cooperative something or other—but after some mingling and small talk, another young short-haired and tattooed lady named Margot explained to me what was going on:

“We cook a couple big pots of soup or rice and veggies every morning, and put ‘em on the wagons, which we pull behind the bikes down Market Street to Union Square or over to Golden Gate Park,” she said.

I poured myself a cup of coffee out of a large coffee urn in the kitchen that had obviously been stolen from a Holiday Inn or any other of a number of corporate hotels, and I ate a bowl of soup and a piece of bread, fresh out of the oven. Then I walked outside and bummed a cigarette from one of the guys loading up the bikes, and I helped him put a chain back on one of them.

There wasn’t an extra bike, so I took the Market Street bus down to the square, and helped the Food Not Bombs kids dole out the soup to the bleary-eyed homeless—mostly older men, all of them extremely appreciative.4  After the soup was gone, I left them to wander around—studying the remnants of the Beat Generation in North Beach, stealing fruit from the tourist-swarmed fruit stands at the Fisherman’s Wharf, watching street performers do their thing in the Haight, drinking coffee with curb-sitters in the Mission. Then, after dusk, I wandered back to the Praxis House just as Heather was getting off work. I did the same thing for my first two days in San Francisco, but on the third day, there was a bit of a problem.

We got to Union Square around noon—a little later than usual—and a few other Food Not Bombs kids had beaten us there. The corner they had begun to set up for the soup kitchen was infested with blue-shirted policemen. A line of homeless people had formed, but the front of the line was blocked from reaching the long table by the cops. Greg, the oldest and most distinguished-looking member in our group, approached one of the policemen and asked him what the problem was. When he walked back over to us, his face was red, and his lips were pursed. He looked down at the street as he spoke.

“They’re pulling the table out from under us again.”

Margot threw her bike helmet down angrily on the grass. “At least they aren’t wearing riot gear this time.”5

Alex, the guy who had bummed me the cigarette, brought up the fact that the police weren’t going to hang out in Union Square all day. The decision was made to tell the line of homeless that we would return, and then go bike over to Golden Gate Park and see what the situation was like there. As Greg was talking to a few homeless gentlemen who were beginning to nag at the police, however, a yelling match broke out between all three parties. One of the policemen walked back to his squad car, and squawked into his C.B. that there was going to be a problem. Then another policeman, puffing out his chest and placing one hand on his billy club, approached us, marching so quickly and with his jaw stuck out so far that I almost thought he was going to come in swinging.  He didn’t, but he did put his hand on the handle of one of the pots of the soup. The kid sitting on the bike attached to that pot of soup—a squat little guy with long brown hair, a big gut, and a nasty scowl—then pedaled forward (in either a genuine attempt at saving the food or an attempt at further riling up the police), and the pot dumped on the street. Now there was more yelling, and more threats. One of the homeless men, a short black man in a dirty white trucker cap and a denim shirt, was being handcuffed.

My urge to stay and stage a protest was extinguished as soon as I saw the handcuffs. I didn’t want to spend any time in jail. I had been there before, and it was no fun.

So I walked away.

As I got over around Geary and Kearny and started walking north, Margot biked by me and slowed, then hopped off her bike, pulled it up the curb, and walked with me.

“That was smart to split,” she said, spitting her words excitedly. “I always do the same. For these guys, this is their life. They get arrested all the time. Me, I like to help out, but once the police show up, I want nothing to do with it.”

I still felt like a coward. “It’s good to believe in something so strongly that you’ll sacrifice yourself for it,” I said.

“They aren’t sacrificing themselves,” Margot said. She laughed. “They know the routine. They know they’re safe because they’re white, and they’re not homeless, and they have parents who love them.”

I chuckled, too. Nervously. I felt a little unsure about the whole thing.

“What are you doing right now?” Margot asked. “You want to come over to my place?”

I looked over at her, looking straight ahead as she escorted her bike down the sidewalk. Her short, dyed-black hair just came over the tops of her pierced ears and left her tan neck exposed. She wore a sleeveless black denim jacket and a black cotton t-shirt, her left bicep had a tattoo of a paper crane, and the inside of her right forearm was scarred, like she had cut herself several times with a dull blade. Everything about her exterior looked tough, and she talked tough, but her eyes were sad.

She seemed lost.

Then I thought about Chloe, sitting up there in the mountains of Yosemite, behind her counter full of ugly sweatshirts on Glacier Point, and I felt like a dirt bag.

“I have to get back to my friend’s place,” I said. “But thanks.”

That night, Heather didn’t come home after work. I read from a beaten-up copy of A People’s History of the United States until I fell asleep. Then the following morning, I awoke before dawn, left a note on the coffee table thanking everyone for their hospitality, and I left.

 The sheer quantity of tourists leaving Yosemite and driving west during the summer months is large enough that the chances of getting a ride are increased ten-fold. There are also lots of European tourists who fly into San Francisco, rent a car, and then make the five hour drive out to Yosemite, and having Europeans on the road is a godsend to any hitchhiker. Europeans are far more likely to pick up a person walking down the highway than any old scared-for-their-lives-because-of-Fox-News Americans. ↩︎

 Henry Lenoir, the old bohemian who founded Vesuvio Café (the legendary North Beach bar next door to City Lights) once actually lived in what is now the Poetry Room. The old studio apartment houses a massive poetry collection—one of the largest in the country—as well as a few large shelves devoted to poetry criticism, anthologies, and Beat literature—and people are encouraged to sit and read. ↩︎

 Looking back on this moment later in life—after I quit smoking marijuana because that subtle change of consciousness that it provides began making me terrified of everything—I began to wonder if Heather (who insisted that she didn’t really want to smoke weed before I lit the first joint, but then ended up partaking, anyway) wasn’t having herself a good old fashioned panic attack. I think that she was, and that I was an alien creature to her all of a sudden, sucking on his pungent alien weed, babbling on in exaggerated tones about embracing nothingness and impermanence, rarely speaking to her at all, but mostly at her, completely lost in his own thoughts. It is this kind of retrospect that makes me feel rather awful about it all, though I try to remind myself that all of this has quite possibly been lost to the point that not even I can recall whether what I perceive to have happened actually happened, or whether I am making all of this up. ↩︎

 I haven’t had much experience in dealing with the homeless directly, but the couple times I have (once in San Francisco and once at the Karen House in St. Louis), I have been rather surprised at how the truly insane homeless people—the ones that bark on your corner and piss on your bus stop and scare the shit out of your parents when they come visit from Kansas or wherever—are never anywhere to be seen. The people who show up for food and shelter are the ones who are just like anybody else out there in the workaday world; they’ve just had a little rougher go of it. The truly insane ones don’t get any help because they no longer have the wherewithal to find the places where they can get help. Somebody should do something about that. ↩︎

 Apparently since the second chapter of Food Not Bombs was started in San Francisco in 1988, it met opposition from the police, who were usually dressed in riot gear. Mayor Art Agnos repeatedly sent riot police to Golden Gate Park to find the Food Not Bombs table and overturn it, dumping the soup and bread out onto the ground right in front of the homeless people who had lined up to be fed. An even more conservative mayor, Frank Jordan, succeeded Art Agnos in 1992, and in Jordan’s four-year tenure he had more than 700 Food Not Bombs members arrested. It was a felony to serve food to the homeless. ↩︎

[iamnotthedog]

MORRISON TO VIRGINIA BEACH: SUMMER 1989

Just before I started the third grade—nine years old, I think—Jack Duffy had been remarried for a couple of years, and he and his new wife, Mary, wanted to take me on their summer vacation with them out to Gettysburg, Washington, DC, Norfolk, and Virginia Beach. I think the original plan was for me and my older brother and sister, Jim and Jeni, to all go on the trip along with Mary’s kids from her previous marriage, Boyd and Dee. Jim and Jeni both bailed—Jim because he was a senior in high school and was too busy sneaking beers and cigarettes and playing drums and making out with girls on the railroad tracks to be taking a family vacation (as most high school seniors are), and Jeni because she was down in Normal, Illinois, about to start her second year of college.

Despite Jim and Jeni bailing on the whole thing, I had a pretty big crush on Mary’s daughter Dee, so I agreed to go. I was even excited about the whole thing.

They came down to Morrison in a minivan to pick me up in late July, and we drove east. By that time, Jack was a pretty big Civil War buff—somehow finding time to read foot-thick Civil War books and biographies of Abraham Lincoln even though he worked sixty hours a week as a manager of a ShopKo department store.1 The plan was for us to head north and stop at several Civil War sites before swooping down through DC and Richmond and over to Norfolk, and then scooting out to Virginia Beach to stay in a hotel on the ocean for a week. I don’t remember much from the trip, really, but there are a couple of things that have stuck with me through the years:

I remember the Eternal Light Peace Memorial in Gettysburg. I was pretty blown away, having these adults tell me that the flame on the thing never went out, and never would. Jack talked at length about Gettysburg being the turning point in the Civil War, and the fact that it was the battle with the most casualties. He said something about brothers killing brothers—looking at Boyd and I—and though I was rather touched, I also remember thinking, “This guy isn’t my brother,” and wishing Jim was there.

My most vivid memory of the whole trip, though, is of our arrival in Virginia Beach. We got there late in the evening—the sun had already set, and there was a storm brewing out over the Atlantic. I had never seen the ocean before, and neither had anyone else in the minivan, and the excitement was palpable. The lightning and the gentle rumbling of thunder in the distance made it even more so. I remember leaning forward from my spot in the backseat, my narrow shoulders and big head propped between Mary and Jack as the old man leaned forward, both hands gripping the steering wheel and a cigarette dangling from his lips. His eyes, staring out over Interstate 264 as we drove straight towards the coast, looked like the eyes of a child about to unwrap a big birthday present. Mary leaned over and smiled at me, her eyes twinkling in the blue light coming from the dashboard, and she grabbed Jack’s leg. He was just as excited as I was, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t want to skip the check-in at the hotel and drive straight through the parking lot and into the foamy waves of saltwater, breaking over the flat white sand that stretched out beyond Pacific Avenue.

Once we had checked in, Jack walked out of the hotel lobby, away from Mary and Boyd and Dee and me, without saying a word. I followed him at a distance. He walked straight out through the back door onto a small cement patio, then skirted around the fence and out onto the beach. He didn’t look back at me following him. He slipped off his shoes and socks once he was into the sand, and rolled up his pants to his knees, then walked down and stood in the frigid Atlantic—lightning flashing over his head, and thunder rumbling from somewhere overseas and echoing off the twelve-story-high pillar of concrete and glass behind us.

I stood there and watched Jack stand in the ocean for a good five or ten minutes. Then he turned around and walked back to me, his pants, shirt, and glasses sprayed with saltwater. He squeezed my shoulder so hard it hurt, and then we walked back into the hotel and up to our room, where Boyd and Dee were punching each other and yelling, and Mary was unpacking a suitcase, folding the clothes, and putting them in a drawer.

The only other things I remember from that whole trip are that I spent one entire afternoon constructing a pretty big sandcastle that then got demolished by a freak wave, and that I shed so much skin after getting sunburnt that day that the bed I shared with Boyd was full of little white flakes of skin the following morning, and Boyd almost threw up when he saw it.

 I have vivid memories of driving to Wausau with Jim and Jeni and going straight to ShopKo and up to Jack’s little office overlooking the fluorescent-lit floor—dozens of aisles of merchandise broken up by the occasional carpeted area crowded with circular racks of clothing (ShopKo is pretty much like Wal-Mart, from what I can remember). He’d be up there, seated at a bare grey desk in his white button-up shirt with his nametag pinned to the front, suspenders stretched over his belly and clipped to his khakis. He’d always be smoking cigarettes and writing stuff on clipboards. He’d be so happy to see us he’d cry. ↩︎

[iamnotthedog]

CHICAGO: OCTOBER 31, 2012

I’ve spent the entire afternoon in the apartment alone, staring at photographs on my computer screen. The photographs are of the devastation caused by a hurricane that developed in the Caribbean Sea more than a week ago. It rolled over Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, and the Bahamas, then moved up the entire eastern seaboard of the United States, curving northwest and slamming into the northeastern portion of the country two days ago. The newscasters dubbed the hurricane “Superstorm Sandy,” and it ended up being the second largest Atlantic hurricane on record, at one point spanning some 1,100 miles.

New York and New Jersey were hit the hardest. The photographs are stunning. Lower Manhattan at night—all its streetlights off, all its windows dark—black pillars jutting into a gray sky. The sections of Brooklyn and the Battery Park Underpass completely underwater. Saltwater pouring into the construction site where the World Trade Center once stood. Surveillance camera shots of the sea pouring into the subway, rushing through the turnstiles. The Atlantic breaking over Beach Avenue in Cape May. A waterfall pouring over abandoned cars, minivans, station wagons, and trucks parked in a subterranean parking garage in the Financial District. Cars floating like empty Coke bottles in the entryway of the parking garage. Men in scuba gear wading through city streets while talking on their cell phones. The New York Fire Department in rescue boats, paddling down 14th Street towards the East River. Boats piled up on the shore in a marina in East Quogue. A 168-foot water tanker sitting on Front Street in the Stapleton neighborhood of Staten Island. Dozens of cabs parked in rows underwater in a parking lot in Hoboken. A drowned deer lying among driftwood and debris in Southampton.

It’s quite possible that my lungs are about to fill up with fluid, and if I don’t make it to the hospital in time, I could die. That’s what a fresh-faced young doctor in wire-framed glasses and two-or-three year-old New Balance running shoes told me this morning. Then he told me to have a nice day. He literally said, “If you start coughing and can’t stop, or if you have any sort of trouble breathing at all, you need to call 9-1-1 and get to an emergency room immediately. Have a nice day!”

I couldn’t make that shit up.

Alise and I took a little vacation out to Yosemite a few weeks ago—one last big hurrah for the two of us. We had a really great time and everything, but now I might be dying because of it. When we entered the park, we were given a bunch of yellow and pink and orange and green pamphlets that warned us of a Hantavirus outbreak in Curry Village that had killed three campers and sickened several more. The Hantavirus can cause a fatal disease called the Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome, which is transmitted to humans when dried rodent urine or droppings that carry the virus are stirred up into the air, and humans breathe it in. The U.S. Center for Disease Control stated that some 10,000 people who had stayed in or near certain tent cabins in Curry Village were at risk for contracting Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome, because the Hantavirus had been discovered in rodent droppings found within the insulated walls of those cabins. Alise and I stayed near those cabins for a full week. We had slept in a tent, sure, but our sleeping bags and tent flaps were all covered with dirt by the time we left. There isn’t a doubt in my mind that at least some of that dirt had some mouse shit mixed in with it, and that we had breathed in some of that mouse shit at some point in time.

The flyers and pamphlets we were given stated explicitly that if we were to become ill between one and five weeks after leaving the park, we should go to a doctor and get a blood test. The symptoms of Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome were flu-like—fever, muscle aches, and fatigue—but also included headaches, dizziness, chills, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Basically, you felt like shit for a few days. Then you felt better for a few days, while the disease laid back and gathered strength. Then your lungs started filling up with fluid, and you either suffocated to death or laid in a hospital bed for a couple weeks with a goddamned tube down your throat.

So three days ago—exactly three weeks to the day after Alise and I left Yosemite National Park—I wasn’t feeling too good at work, and figured I had caught the bug going around. A couple of the cocktail waitresses at the bar had the flu—the usual I’m-sick-but-I’m-also-poor-so-here-I-am sort of thing that happens in restaurants and bars all the time—and I figured I had caught it from one of them. I didn’t think it was anything too terrible, but then I remembered all the Hantavirus flyers and pamphlets stuffed in a file cabinet folder full of old maps and receipts and stickers and postcards from my past, and just thinking about the virus made all my symptoms get worse. I decided I should go to one of the immediate care clinics in town and get a blood test.

I arrived at Northwest Immediate Care around ten o’clock. The clinic is on the southwest corner of Elston and Pulaski—a more narrow and pointy corner than the standard Chicago city corner, as Elston is one of Chicago’s thirty-some streets that run northwest and southeast, as opposed to the ubiquitous north-south and east-west streets that make up the majority of the city’s grid structure.1 Because of Elston’s angle, then, the four blocks that make up the intersection of Elston and Pulaski form two isosceles and two scalene triangles, as opposed to the usual four squares.

The Northwest Immediate Care Clinic is on the first floor of a large building that, if viewed from above, would look like one of those isosceles triangles, but with the peak shaved off. Where the peak would be, there is a classical façade with six square-ish columns with Corinthian capitals built into the wall, and a large glass door beneath three tall windows that all face the middle of the intersection. That description sounds pretty nice, really, but the building is nothing special. It looks like an old, forgotten bank that will probably get torn down in favor of something glass someday. A blazing yellow sign above the door reads “FIBROMYALGIA TREATMENT CENTERS OF AMERICA.”2 Across the street, a similarly-shaped but much uglier and more modern building also has a door facing out into the middle of the intersection. A sign above that door reads “HAMBURGERS.” All capital letters in a dull royal blue on a white background. It may or may not light up at night.

I entered the clinic into a makeshift waiting room: a couple rows of cloth-padded, wooden-legged seats facing a wall on which a smiling, mustachioed man told men “his age” to get their prostates checked. The owners of the clinic were obviously having some renovations done in the place, as there were ladders and some large white tarps with paint on them in the long hall that led off away from the waiting room, passing the reception desk where I checked in and got the standard clipboard with the few forms that everyone has filled out at one point or another.

After filling out the paperwork and staring at a young mother’s gigantic ass for a few minutes—she was wearing nothing but Spandex from the waist down, and bending over to fiddle with the scarf of her youngest, who himself was wrestling with a loud, open-mouthed, phlegm-filled cough—I was ushered into a carpeted, fluorescent-lit room by a young Hispanic girl, not a day over 21, who seemed really excited to be there. The girl had shoulder-length, wavy brown hair pulled back with two barrettes. Her hair had some kind of product in it that made it really shiny, and she was wearing a bunch of make-up—dark blues and pinks on her caramel-colored skin. Northwest Immediate Care was obviously her first gig at a clinic, because she took my blood pressure with a big, silly smile on her face—having a really good time pumping that pump—and she was extremely excited that she knew the answer to my question when I asked her why my blood pressure was low.

“Have you eaten yet today?” she asked.

“I had some coffee,” I said.

“Well, that explains it!” Wide eyes. Big smile. All teeth.

After taking my blood pressure and temperature, the chipper young lady said everything “checked out” and asked why I had come in for a visit. I told her I had been sick for the previous few days, and that it was suggested that I get “checked out” because I may have been exposed to the Hantavirus. She said, “The Hanta-what-now?” She looked genuinely concerned, but chuckled at her own joke, anyway. I smiled politely. She said the doctor would be with me shortly.

If there’s ever a time for you to question exactly what it is that you are doing with your life—exactly what brought you to the exact place in which you sit—it is in the doctor’s office, after you have been ushered into the examination room and are sitting on that crinkly white paper which has been rolled out so carefully over the cold vinyl upholstery with the two-inch padding. You listen to the voices outside the door, and you can only think about how all those voices belong to people who are just at work. They are working through their usual routines without much thought at all, really. But you—you are sitting on this table waiting to find out if you are dying more quickly than they are, or maybe you aren’t dying any quicker than anyone else, but you are about to suffer a setback that will forever make you not quite as adequate as the people that surround you on a daily basis. You decide to stop thinking about it. You look at the floor, and judge the care you are about to receive on the cleanliness of that floor. Has the garbage been taken out recently? No one wants to see a wad of dirty paper towels in an open garbage can in a room where they are about to be fondled by a stranger. The otoscope hanging on the wall looks old. You look at the eye chart on the opposite wall, cover one eye, and wonder how old you will be before you are dubbed legally blind. You shift your weight and the crinkling of the paper under your butt seems unusually loud. It’s quiet in the hallway, and you wonder if everyone stopped talking because they heard you move. You decide you won’t move again until the doctor comes in. You look at the cross section of the human body. You look at the female, at her ovaries. You wonder what it feels like to have ovaries. Then the door opens and you force a smile that is not unlike the dozens of other forced smiles that the poor sap walking into the room has to see so many times a day.

“How we doing?” the doctor asked. He adjusted his glasses with a push of his index finger and introduced himself to me, but I immediately forgot his name. He was young. Indian. And wearing those New Balance sneakers I mentioned earlier.

“I’m okay, considering,” I said.

“So you got really sick a few days ago?” He pulled his iPhone out of his pocket and set it on the desk in the room. I thought that was strange. I stared at his iPhone and told him about my flu-like symptoms, and about the Hantavirus. He said he hadn’t heard of the virus, but had looked it up on the Internet. He said it was “scary stuff.” Then he reached under my shirt and pressed his cold stethoscope to my back. He told me to breathe deeply through my mouth.

“Your lungs are clear so far,” he said. “Any diarrhea?”

“Once, when I first got a fever.”

“Abdominal pain?”

“I’m nauseous most of the time.”

He had me lay on my back, and he pushed on my lower abdomen.

“Ouch.”

“That hurts?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm.”

He sat me up, and pushed on my lower back.

“Ouch.”

“That hurts?”

“Yes.”

He sat back down and typed a few things into his iPhone.

“You know,” I offered, “if you’re just looking at the symptom checker on Web MD, it’s going to tell you I have Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome. I looked last night. That’s probably why I’m here. I’m paranoid.”

He smiled. “I’m not looking at Web MD,” he said. He stood up and put his iPhone back in his pocket. “What we’re going to do now is give you a flu test. It’s just a little swab that we put up your nose. Takes about fifteen minutes to get the results. You don’t have health insurance, so it’ll cost you $60. But I think it’s important for you to take the test, because if you have the flu, you don’t have the Hantavirus. You just have the flu.”

“But I feel fine.”

“Yes, but you still have some symptoms that concern me. If you have the flu, you are fine, and we send you on your way. If you don’t have the flu, however, you may very well have contracted the Hantavirus. We’ll give you a blood test to be sure.”

“Okay.”

He started to leave, then turned around to face me again, his hand on the door handle. “The thing about the blood test, though, is that we won’t get the results back from the lab for at least a few days. If you do have Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome, it is more than likely going to hit you tomorrow or the next day.”

I stared at him and said nothing.

“So we’ll see if you have the flu, but if you don’t have the flu, you’ll have a couple of options. You can either check yourself into a hospital right away so they can monitor you, or you can go home, try not to think about it, and just wait and see what happens. But if you choose to go home—which you probably will, considering that you don’t have health insurance...” (He actually smiled again right here. He smiled). “...you need to go to the emergency room immediately if you have any trouble breathing at all.”

I nodded my head. It seemed like everything in the room got brighter, and blurred around the edges. My hands were clammy, and my skin was hot. I thought I might puke. Then doctor left the room, and the same chipper nurse came back in and shoved a Q-tip up my nose. It hurt like hell. “If it’s uncomfortable, that’s a good thing,” she said. She wiggled it around a bit. Man, it hurt. Then she pulled it out of my nose, looked at it, and nodded. She put it in a small plastic container, and picked up a syringe. She looked at the inside of my right arm. “Big veins!” Another smile. “I won’t even need to tie you off.” A prick. “Whoops, I missed. Sorry about that.” Another prick. “Damn. It moved! I have to hold it in place.” Another prick. “There we go. Hold this here for a second? There you go. Good. All set.”

She left with my blood in one hand and the Q-tip in the other, and this time she left the door open. A Hispanic man in white overalls with paint splattered all over them stood not ten feet from where I sat. He was discussing the color of the fresh paint in the hallway with a tall, tan, broad-shouldered man in a suit. The suited man thought the paint was too dark. The Hispanic man in the overalls thought the suited man should get some nice track lighting to brighten it up a bit. One by one, they each looked in at me sitting there on my examination table. They each looked at my inner right arm, where the Band-Aid was, and nodded. I nodded back.

After what seemed like an hour, the nurse came back in.

“You don’t have the flu!” she said. She smiled again.

“That’s actually bad news,” I informed her.

“Oh.” She blushed. “I’m sorry!”

Then the doctor came back in. But I already told you about all that. I frowned at his “Have a nice day!” comment and left without shaking his hand, went to the front desk and paid $270 for my check-up, flu test, and blood test, then walked back out onto Elston Avenue, got in my car, and drove home with the radio off and the windows closed, listening to myself breathe and thinking about those poor people who had woken up that morning with their cars and homes and businesses destroyed by the sea.

 The diagonal streets are my favorites in the city: many of them were the first constructed; a few even follow old Indian trails. True to its name, Milwaukee Avenue was the original Indian trail that led from the Chicago area up to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. ↩︎

 Fibromyalgia is a disorder that causes widespread pain throughout the body, and a heightened response to pressure on the neck, shoulders, lower back, upper thighs, and the insides of elbows and knees. The disorder affects mostly women, who as a result of dealing with the constant pain enter a state referred to as a “fibrofog.” It’s hard to concentrate or remember anything when you are in pain all the time. ↩︎

[iamnotthedog]

SAN FRANCISCO TO YOSEMITE: JUNE 28-29, 2001

I walked back up to Montgomery Street and caught the B.A.R.T. headed east to the end of the line, that being Pleasanton. On the train ride, I planned my hitch back to the mountains, and I wrote a list of all the possible places for me to get a job in the Sierra Nevada once I returned, including June Lake in the list. I wrote that I would wake up early and start my job hunt the following day, because I figured that since it had only taken me eight hours to get out to the Bay Area from Yosemite, it would take me about the same amount of time to get back. That would put me in the park, reuniting with Chloe and John and maybe cooking some food and grabbing some beers at the Village Store, all before sundown. I couldn’t have been more wrong about all that.

The Dublin/Pleasanton train station is just off Interstate 580, right next to a strip mall. All of Dublin and Pleasanton is a strip mall, it would seem. I hopped off the train feeling pretty good about myself, and I started walking. It was hotter than hell. I wandered through a large parking lot full of cars, truck, minivans, and SUVs, past a T.J. Maxx, a Fuddruckers, an Applebee’s, an Old Navy, a Best Buy. Then I cut over a wide concrete bridge and walked along a road parallel to the interstate past a Kohl’s, a McDonald’s, the Ross Stores Corporate Office, a CVS Pharmacy, a Starbucks, a Peet’s Coffee & Tea, a Trader Joe’s, another McDonald’s, a Buffalo Wild Wings, another Starbucks, a Target. The strip seemed to have no end; it was a wildly unraveling spool of rampant and foolish consumerism. The first and only respite from miles of concrete and colorful plastic signage was a golf course, right there along the 580—the Las Positas Golf Course, which abuts the Livermore Municipal Airport. I caught my first ride at the airport off ramp from a pilot with the puffiest bags under his eyes that I’ve ever seen. It looked like the rolls of skin under his eyes were literally holding his eyeballs in place, like if you took a cherry tomato and shoved it into a mound of bread dough. He had alcohol on his breath, and his left hand was white-knuckled as he gripped the wheel like one grips a dumbbell he is preparing to hoist over his head.

He yelled at me through his open window. “Where you headed, champion?” He brushed his right hand over his face and through his short grey hair, then leaned over and threw the passenger door of his Buick Regal open with a grunt.

“Back to Yosemite, sir,” I said, sitting in the plush, fragrant interior. I admired his uniform. “Did you fly today?”

“In one way or another,” he said. Then he stomped the gas pedal to the floor before I even had the door closed. I settled into my seat, buckled my seat belt, and made a few more lame attempts at conversation while staring out the window at the strip—the restaurants and department stores now giving way to car dealerships: Porsche, Honda, Audi, Subaru. The pilot didn’t say another word for the next half hour, other than mentioning that he was going to “dump me in the San Joaquin,” which scared me a bit until I realized that he meant he was going to drop me off when we crossed the San Joaquin River, where he planned on cutting north up Interstate 5.1

I hopped out of the Buick just outside of Manteca, which is pretty much the last big town before that vast swath of agriculture gives way to the Sierra Nevada and wilderness. The pilot left me with a smile and a wave and an awkward “Live fast, die strong!” sort of comment. After two more very short rides from round-bellied, flannel-and-overall-wearing locals, I was quite a ways out into the middle of nowhere, and I started cursing myself for not holding out for a long one. I walked for hours along the 120 under that impossibly hot sun. Eventually my ears and nose were so sunburnt that that it hurt when my hair blew over them. And by the time I noticed how sunburnt I was, I couldn’t pull my shirt up over my head because that hurt even worse. So I just kept walking. Other than a few honks from passing trucks, no one acknowledged my presence on the side of the road. My feet swelled, and my shoulders throbbed.

At one point, I considered sleeping in a field of avocado trees until sundown. In a heat-fueled delirium, I wandered off the highway and into a field of the short trees—all of them in perfectly straight rows, offering only the slightest bit of relief from the sun—and I walked so far out into the field that I lost all sense of direction and thought for sure that I would die out there on that plot of land, the same kind of plot that you admire from your soft seat on the airplane as you fly overhead. “It’s a perfect square!” you think to yourself. Little do you know that there is a delirious and sun-scorched hitchhiker down there, walking in a circle in the middle of that square, dying of heat stroke under the trees.

I eventually wizened up enough to pick a direction and head for it, and I was soon stumbling back out onto the shoulder of the highway, confused, frightened, embarrassed, and still very, very hot. I had tears welling in my eyes as I screamed at the cars and trucks that whipped by without so much as a single flash of a brake light. “Hell-OOOOOO!” I would yell, probably sounding like a genuine madman (which I was). Then, when the cars whipped past in a flurry of dust: “Fuck you! Fuck your mother, you fucking piece of shit! Suck my fucking dick!” And on and on. I finally dropped my pack and sat down, wondering aloud if my life would end in a roar of an engine and grinding gravel as I was violently demolished by truck tires right there on the shoulder of the 120. “Is this how I will die?!” I yelled—stupidly, ridiculously—as my whole body shuddered with the passing of each truck.

And then along came my saviors:

The plum pickers.2

Two middle-aged Mexican gentlemen pulled onto the shoulder of the road a few yards ahead of me in a full-size white van. In a flurry of limbs, I shot up onto my feet, shouldered my pack with a grimace, and ran to the passenger side of the van. The men looked like they had just finished working—they had dust in their mustaches and dark soil smeared into the sweat on their brown temples—and a young boy squatted on the seat between them and smiled at me with his tiny white teeth. They didn’t really speak English, but nodded and motioned that I could get in the back of the van.

Without giving it a second thought, I thanked them a hundred times over and ran around to the back to open the doors and find that the entire van was packed with large wooden crates full of plums, stacked one on top of the other. The plump fruits rolled and bounced off the crates and onto the floor, and their fragrant juices were running down the walls. The plum pickers looked back through a little square window and laughed at my reaction—my mouth open, my arms stretched over my head—and they said “Eat! Eat!”

I threw down my pack and sat on a crate, my back to the wall of the van, and I ate a dozen or so plums down to their cores as the men in the front spoke quietly to one another in deep baritone voices. Every once in a while they would laugh, or the timbre of their voices would rise as they would address the young one, who would giggle and answer them in his soft tenor. These were men—hard-working, good men—and they didn’t concern themselves with naïve spiritual quests or ridiculous trips to the city. They had no delusions of grandeur. They worked, they put food on the table, they loved their wives and their families and maybe their god, they chatted softly in the cab of their van, and they teased their sons and taught them how to be real men, just like them. Or maybe I was wrong about all that, and they were on a journey of discovery themselves. Maybe they were eloping gay lovers, running from their conservative and homophobic families and their demonic wives, and they had read Gulliver’s Travels together and decided to embark on an endless road trip. Or maybe they were serial killers—a Mexican Bonnie and Clyde, or Clyde and Clyde, as it were. Or maybe they were running drugs up to Northern California from Mexico. Maybe there were kilos of cocaine under all of those plums. There’s no telling, really. But at the time, they were the epitome of decency to me. They were real men. They made me feel silly, with my silly ego and my silly backpack and my silly pursuit of something more in life. Everything I needed was there, what was it I was searching for? I thought about all this as the sound of their voices, the hum of the engine, and the ripe fruit in my belly lulled me to sleep.

I woke up with the hard edge of a crate jammed in my back, and my head resting on a pile of plums. The back doors of the van were open to a stunning red dusk over a rolling, golden landscape: grassy hills dotted with short trees bowing towards the horizon. I got out of the van and looked back at a small building with blue siding and a large sign on top that said Chinese Camp Store and Kiwi Tavern. A Confederate flag and a California State flag waved slightly in the warm breeze. The parking lot was empty, save for the van. Walking around to the driver’s side, I saw that the driver was asleep. The little boy was also asleep in the crook of the driver’s arm. The man in the passenger seat was awake, and looking dreamily off into the distance. He glanced over at me, and waved me over to his side of the van.

“What time is it?” I asked him, approaching his window. He stared at me blankly and shook his head. I tapped my wrist, and he reached into his pocket, pulled out a pocket watch on a silver chain, and showed it to me. Eight o’clock. I had been on the road for twelve hours, and was still a good hour or two from Yosemite Valley. The man put his watch back in his pocket, then took out two dollar bills. He held them out to me.

“No, no,” I said, waving him off. “I couldn’t.”

“Agua,” he said. He pointed back to the store, then pressed the dollars into my hand. His companion stirred in his sleep, then awoke. The boy shifted, and laid his head in the man’s lap.

I patted him on the arm. “Gracias,” I said. The driver started up the van, nodding in farewell to me as he did so. “Gracias,” I said again. Then I watched the van back up, turn around, and drive off into the dusk, the way we had come. There were no other vehicles in the lot, and the Chinese Camp Store was closed. I bought a bottle of water from a vending machine with one of the dollars the plum picker had given me. I’ve never felt as lonely as I felt when my bottle of water fell out of that vending machine, and the noise echoed off through the hills. I was completely alone out there under a darkening sky, and there was nothing for me to do but start walking.

After about a half hour the darkness had overwhelmed me, and I took my flashlight out of my pack and let myself fall into a trance of sorts as I watched it dance on the road in front of my sneakers. I watched the light and my feet crunching on the gravel, and I tried not to think of anything but walking—rarely allowing myself to look off the road, off into the wilderness surrounding me. I walked for hours like that, staring into the light, following the 120 as it crossed the Don Pedro Reservoir and curved north towards Groveland.

I had been walking for several hours without a single car passing when I finally began seeing some signs of life again. At first the signs were just that: signs. I saw an actual road sign for Big Oak Flat, and one for Groveland, then a hand-painted one that said “Tie Dye” and “Jerky” in big block letters. Then I began to see streetlights, and actual buildings: Suburban Propane, Big Oak Saloon, a flea market. Then nothing but trees for another couple of miles. I was afraid I had missed the town somehow, and was headed back out into the nothingness. Then a short wooden fence ran along the highway for a bit, and a tall wooden sign said, “The Little House: A Community Gathering Place.” Thinking it to be a cult, I let my mind wander and freaked myself out a bit, quickening my pace and swearing that I was going to get off the highway as soon as I found a park. I just wanted a nice patch of grass under a tree in a nice residential neighborhood, where I would feel safe knowing that families were sleeping nearby—that police officers were patrolling the streets. For all of my love for nature and the wilderness, I wanted nothing more than civilization at that point. I would have even taken that disgusting strip mall I passed back in Pleasanton. I would have slept in the bushes outside a goddamned Olive Garden and begged the cooks for some day-old breadsticks.

When I entered Groveland city limits, I immediately began feeling better. I passed a Pizza Factory and Yosemite Bank, and I saw some high school kids smoking cigarettes in the parking lot of Groveland Gas. I passed a coffee shop where I had sipped espresso when I first arrived in the Sierra Nevada some two years earlier—it felt like a lifetime ago, and made me sad—it made me want that comfort again, that assuredness. I passed the Iron Door Saloon, where I heard a couple of boisterous men yelling—either having an argument or agreeing vehemently with one another, as drunks do. Glasses clinked and people laughed. When I got past all that action, the streets quieted, and I walked down to the left, off the highway down a small hill and into a park. I jumped a short chain-link fence, and walked out into a plush, grassy field. Looking around, I could see nothing save for some houses and a few streetlights. I walked straight to the nearest tree, threw down my pack, and got out my sleeping bag. It had to have been past midnight by that point, and all I wanted was a good six hours of uninterrupted sleep. I pulled off my shoes and rubbed my aching feet, hot and wet with perspiration, then I climbed into the bag and zipped it all the way up to my face.

Not one hour later, I was blasted awake by a thick, icy spray. I had no idea what the fuck was going on, and shot up to my feet—still in my sleeping bag—yelling profanities and dancing in a circle. A sprinkler had shot up out of the ground not ten yards away, soaking through my sleeping bag in mere seconds. I had barely unzipped the sleeping bag from around my torso when the sprinkler hit me again, and again, and in thirty seconds I was running through the field, back towards the chain-link fence, with my dripping sleeping bag over one shoulder, my pack in the other, and my shoes in my hand. I pulled my shoes on and stormed away from that park, and I stormed back down Highway 120, and I kept walking—shoving my wet sleeping bag into my pack as I walked out of Groveland, out of the streetlights, back out into the wilderness.

I hiked for hours in the dark, getting really down on myself. I thought only of how I was headed back to Chloe and Yosemite without having even considered going anywhere else, how I had failed to do anything productive in San Francisco—how I hadn’t even spent enough time there to do anything at all before I had decided to run back to where I knew I would be safe. I wondered if I was ever going to do anything other than run around my whole life like a pathetic little hamster in a two-dollar wheel, gripping those bars with my tiny little feet and just hoping the whole thing didn’t fall apart before I was damned well ready for it.

Then, at an unknown hour, a little brown Chevy Cavalier roaring by me at what looked like eighty or ninety miles an hour screeched and skidded to a stop just a little ways up the road from my outstretched thumb. Though scared shitless, I was so elated just to see a car on that desolate road that I broke into a run. I ran straight up to the spot where it had stopped crookedly after its long skid, it’s headlights pointed into the deep pine forest that I had been staring into for miles, hoping that nothing was staring back.

I approached the car at a trot, waving my arms over my head. When I opened the door to hop in, a wild-eyed, older fellow in oil-stained overalls behind the wheel was hollering about how he lost his cigarette when he stopped. He held up his hand with five stubby fingers stretched out, motioning for me not to sit down.

“Don’t you EVEN fuckin’ get in here ‘fore we find my smoke,” he said. “We find my smoke ‘fore we go anywhere.”

I patted down the floorboards in the dark—pushing aside greasy McDonald’s bags, crumpled newspapers, and large plastic cups decorated with the logos of various gas stations. After several awkward minutes, I finally ended up finding the thing—a thin white tube in a sea of garbage. A needle in a haystack, so to speak. But it wasn’t a cigarette. It was a joint. I held it up to him.

“You smoke?” the guy asked me, grinning sheepishly. In that dim, bug-filled car light, he looked like Tommy Lee Jones a bit, but like the older, contemporary Tommy Lee Jones. His skin looked like it was about to slide right off his face.

“I do smoke,” I said, and I shoved my pack into the back of the car and plopped into the passenger’s seat. The tires crunched in the gravel, and he punched the gas and we shot off into the darkness.

“What the fuck are you doin’ out here?” the guy asked me, pinching the joint between his lips and lighting it. “It’s dark as shit.”

“I’m heading back to Yosemite from San Francisco,” I said. I took the joint from him and puffed it. “It’s taking me forever.”

“Fuck, man,” he said. “Yosemite! That place is magical. You work there?”

“I used to. Now I’m just sort of living there.”

“You, my man, are livin’ a magical existence.” He took the joint back from me, reached over my knee, and tapped on the glove compartment with a thick, nail-less finger. “Open that up.”

I shifted my weight to straighten my legs, and pushed a button to open the glove compartment. A plastic bag the size of a small loaf of bread rolled out onto my lap. Probably close to a full pound of weed. The guy steered with his knee, held the joint with his left hand, and reached into his pocket with his right. He pulled out some rolling papers and handed them over to me. “Roll us a couple more doobies,” he said.

So I rolled, we smoked, and we talked. The guy introduced himself to me as Bronco Bill. He told me he lived with his mother until she left him on his fortieth birthday—moving to Albuquerque and giving him her house. He told me about his love affair with the lady who delivered his mail. He told me he used to chop down trees for a living. Then he listed every Super Bowl champion from 1966 to 2000, and then he started talking about his dog.

“To tell you the truth, I never once thought about my body or the state it was in until I got my Kojak.”

“Who’s Kojak?”

“Kojak is a bulldog. Sweetest dog you’ll ever meet. I’ve had him for ten years. Raised him since birth. He’s got what they call congenital heart defects. He has a shortness of breath sometimes, and his heart beats funny. It’s never steady. First time I felt it pounding all weird in his chest, it scared me to death. He was just a puppy then.”

“Did you get him checked out?”

“Yep. Took him to the vet clinic down in Merced. Hadn’t been to the doctor myself since I was in high school. But I took him in right away. Turns out his defects were and still are minor ‘nough that he don’t need no treatment. We just have to hope his heart don’t stop someday. But all of our hearts are going to stop someday, aren’t they?”

“True that.”

“Anyway, after I took Kojak in, I figured that maybe I should get checked out, too. I started feeling my own heart beatin’ in my own chest. I started checkin’ my pulse and thinkin’ I had heart problems, too. And I got paranoid for a while. Not just regardin’ my heart, but also thinkin’ about all the places I’d been, all the loose women I’d messed around with, all the high-altitude sun exposure I’d had, all of that.”

“You can’t let that stuff drag you down, man. You have to get checked out.”

“And I did just that!” He slapped the dash—BOOM—and the car swerved a bit. I giggled like a baby. “I got checked out, and I was fine. But then the doctor said he thought I may have some pretty bad anxiety, and he tried to give me some pills. I got out of there quicker’n a jackrabbit, man, and I never went back. And now, whenever I get worried about my health, I just put my hand on Kojak’s big ol’ chest, and I feel his weird, irregular heartbeat—the long spaces, the heavy pounds, the quick pumps—and I look into his eyes—calm as ever—and I think, ‘Shit, he’s not worried about anything. I’ve got nothin’ to be afraid of.’”

Bill and I kept talking like that, and we kept smoking. I eventually got so high that I forgot who I was. I even forgot where I was headed. I thought a lot about dying, and how I wasn’t ready to die, and how I didn’t want to die afraid of anything—especially the unknown—and how all I really wanted to do with my life was prepare for death, so I was ready and fearless when it came. Fearless as Kojak.

Then we pulled into the Yosemite Pines gas station, where Bronco Bill blew my goddamned mind by quoting the Tibetan Book of the Dead:

“To slave away on the pointless business of a mundane life and to come out empty—‘tis a tragic error!” he said. He said that last part with a fake English accent, like he was acting in a Shakespearean play or something. Then he laughed a loud roaring laugh and smiled from ear to ear. He was missing a few teeth. He punched me in the arm hard enough that it hurt for a while. “You’re doin’ good things,” he said. Then he peeled out of the parking lot and left me there, under a single white streetlight.

I slept on the curb until the sun came up, when a friendly and pie-eyed young park ranger with a black pompadour woke me with a gentle nudge of his foot, then bought me coffee and drove me back into Yosemite National Park, to the Crane Flat gas station.

The San Joaquin River watershed covers the entire Central Valley of California south of the San Francisco Bay. Literally dozens of rivers and creeks flow down out of the Sierra Nevada to meet the 366-mile-long San Joaquin as it flows out of the mountains and up the western edge of the valley before cutting west and dumping into Suisan Bay, San Francisco Bay, and the Pacific Ocean. After crossing the San Joaquin traveling east, you enter the rich agricultural region known as the San Joaquin Valley—an area sometimes called “the food basket of the world,” which is responsible for some twelve percent of all United States agricultural production, including grapes, oranges, peaches, plums, garlic, tangerines, tomatoes, kiwis, hay, alfalfa, asparagus, cotton, and nuts. ↩︎

Nearly all of the commercially-grown plums in the United States are hybrids of the Japanese plum. These Japanese varieties flourish in California due to its mild winters, low humidity, and minimal rainfall during the growing season. Most years, the fresh plum harvest lasts from mid-May all the way through September. The plums are picked and packed by mostly migrant workers, and are graded on maturity and sized based on the number of plums per standard twenty-eight-pound box—the boxes piled in trucks and vans and transported from field to wherever they end up. ↩︎

[iamnotthedog]

MORRISON: WINTER 1991

By the time I was in the fourth grade, I had developed a routine I ran through every day after school. I’d leave Southside Elementary and walk the two blocks home down Madison Street—the two blocks that took me past Jack and Jackie Duffy’s second house in Morrison, where I had lived for only a few months and had few memories of that didn’t have something to do with the recurring nightmares I had as a child.

When I reached Molly Deter’s family’s house that sat on the corner of Madison and Wall Street, I’d walk back towards the railroad tracks and cut back behind the houses through the grassy backyards for a block, cross our newly-blacktopped driveway, climb the cement steps to the back door of the house, and let the dog out. Aggie would bark like crazy, running circles around me and jumping all over my legs, scratching at them with her paws. Then she’d take off out into the backyard to shit and piss and sniff around.1

I’d go inside and hang up my coat behind the backdoor, tossing my hat up on the shelf above the row of hooks, and dropping my backpack full of heavy MacMillan textbooks on the floor. Then I’d get into that cupboard above the stove where Don kept his booze and chips. There were always chips up there—if there weren’t any Doritos, there would be Fritos, Cheetos, Sun Chips, Lay’s.

After I had my bag of chips I’d grab a can of Royal Crown Cola from the thirty-pack that we kept on the floor by the small wooden table that had the microwave on top of it and the dog dish underneath. I’d pour the soda over ice, and then take the chips and the soda into the living room with me, where I’d sprawl on the floor not three feet in front of the television, lying on my stomach and getting rug burn on my elbows while I watched sitcoms for a good two or three hours before my parents got home from work.

One freezing winter day when I was ten years old, there weren’t any sitcoms on television after school. Nothing was on except the news. The news was on almost every channel. I remember very distinctly standing there on the thick navy blue carpet in front of our giant tube television—my chips and soda in one hand, the remote control in the other—staring at video after video of fighter jets screaming over vast grey landscapes, dropping bombs and firing on vehicles below. Tanks rolled over giant swaths of sand. Soldiers in sand-colored camouflage ran from canvas-colored trucks carrying assault rifles. One particular six-lane highway was backed up for miles in both directions with cars, trucks, buses full of people, and various military vehicles.2

I had heard about the Gulf War briefly at school, and I had seen brief snippets of people talking about it on television when my parents watched the news at night. I knew who George Bush was, and I knew who Saddam Hussein was. I even knew that Operation Desert Shield had escalated into Operation Desert Storm one month before, and that several young men and women from the United States were over there fighting to keep Saddam Hussein’s country from invading another smaller country called Kuwait. But now the people on the television was talking about a ground mission called Operation Desert Sabre, and it looked a lot worse than anything I had seen in the past several months. It looked brutal. I saw people running. People falling, dying.

A few days later, images of a six-lane highway people were calling the Highway of Death were all over the news and in the papers. People on television were saying that the U.S. Marines had blocked one end of Highway 80 with anti-tank mines and had bombed the other end, effectively boxing in hundreds of vehicles that they claimed were all carrying Iraqi soldiers, fleeing Kuwait. Then the Marines, Navy, and Air Force pilots had spent the following ten hours attacking the defenseless vehicles. People were calling the attack a big victory for the U.S. and the coalition forces, and saying that the war was ending because of it. Mom looked really torn up about the whole thing, so when Don got home from the hardware store that evening, I asked him about it.

He told me not to worry about it. We’d talk about it when I got a little older.

That weekend, though, Don, Mom, Adam, and I went for a walk in the woods on the northwest side of town. Adam got too cold after a while and Mom took him home, but Don and I walked on in silence, our boots crunching in the snow.

Way back in the woods, we came up on a crude tree house—just three short plywood walls and a rickety floor with a couple support beams. It sat some twenty feet up in a bare birch tree with two trunks. I ran to climb up into it, but Don stopped me.

“No!” he yelled. He rarely yelled about anything, and it sounded strange. I hadn’t heard him yell since we were up at the cabin in Tomahawk, and he just wanted Jim and Jeni and I to behave so he could propose to our mother in peace. I walked back to him and he put his gloved hand on my shoulder. “Come over here, I want to show you something,” he said. I followed him over to where a pole was stuck in the ground, a good ten yards from the tree with the tree house in it. The pole had a big nail stuck in the top of it. A half-eaten corncob was stuck to the nail. “The hunters sit up there in the tree all day, and when a deer comes to eat this corn, they shoot it,” he said. His face was red, and it wasn’t just from the cold. “It’s not right. It’s like...it’s like giving someone his last meal that he doesn’t know is his last meal, and then shooting him while he eats it.”

I didn’t understand that analogy so much, but it made me sad, anyway. The only memories of deer that I had were from our road trips, when Don or Mom would pull the car over to the shoulder of the highway and whisper, “Look!” in hushed, excited tones. Jim and Jeni and I would crane our necks and turn in our seats to look off into the woods in rural Illinois or Wisconsin or wherever we were at the time. We’d see the deer for a brief moment, walking through the trees with their heads down, then bounding off into the shadows. They were magical to me. I could never see myself shooting one.

Don pulled the corncob off the nail and threw it back into the trees. Then he kicked the pole two or three times until it splintered and broke in half. He huffed—the fog from his breath filling the frigid air around us—then he bent at the knees and pulled the bottom half of the pole out of the frozen ground.

“It should always be a fair fight,” he said. He tossed the pole away, then looked up at the tree house. “Come on,” he said. “Come over here.”

Don climbed the wooden slats nailed into one of the tree trunks, and crawled up into the tree house. He picked up a flask from the floor, shook it, opened it, and turned it upside down. Nothing came out. He put the flask in his pocket and looked down at me.

“Come on up here,” he said. I climbed up after him, and when I was standing next to him on that flimsy wooden floor he looked at me and said, “Hold on.” I put my hands on one of the tree trunks, and he leaned back against it, his warm back pressing against the top of my left hand. Then he yelled, “Hi-ya!” like he was Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris or one of those guys, and he kicked out one of the plywood walls. It broke in half and fell to the snowy ground below. Don smiled at me. “Now you do one.”

After we had kicked out the three walls, I climbed down the wooden slats and hopped to the ground. Don climbed down about half way, then reached up, grabbed the floor of the tree house, and ripped it down. He hopped to the snowy ground and kicked a few of the wooden slats off the trunk of the tree, as well. Then we walked home.

They say the First Gulf War ended the day we took that walk in the woods—a mere four days after the ground attack that I had watched while standing in the living room with my bag of Doritos and a glass of bubbling iced Royal Crown Cola in my hand—while my parents were working and my little brother was at day care and the dog was charging into the living room wet with snow and smelling of cold. But from that day forward, I saw scenes of Iraq and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait on the television on almost a daily basis. When the scenes weren’t on the regular stations or interrupting my sitcoms, I’d find them in the cable stations, somewhere up in the thirties and forties. There was always something happening out there in the desert, in those small, strange countries halfway around the globe. And it always involved the United States in some way or another.

 In a predictable and cliché but nevertheless adorable move, Don had brought a dog home on his first Christmas as the new father of the house back in 1984. Aggie was a black lab/schnauzer mix. Jim and Jeni had always wanted a dog, but never got one due to their terrible allergies. They could have a schnauzer, however—schnauzers have hair, rather than fur, so people allergic to most animals have no reaction to them. The thing about schnauzers, though, is that they are historically protective and watchful dogs—they were once bred as guard dogs for breweries, interestingly enough—and that damned dog barked more than any dog I’ve ever known. It drove us all crazy. ↩︎

 This highway—Highway 80 from Kuwait City, Kuwait, to the border town of Safwan, Iraq, and on to Basra—was later dubbed the Highway of Death. Hundreds of vehicles carrying retreating Iraqi military personnel and both Iraqi and Kuwaiti civilians fleeing Kuwait were attacked by U.S. and Canadian aircraft and ground forces on the night of February 26, 1991—a controversial move that resulted in hundreds and possibly thousands of unnecessary deaths. General Norman Schwarzkopf defended the attack at length, but images of the highway after the attack were publicly cited as an influence on Bush’s decision to call for a cessation in hostilities the next day. ↩︎

[iamnotthedog]

YOSEMITE: JULY 5, 2001

On the night of the full moon—the fifth of July, I think it was—I had been back in the park for an entire week, and I still hadn’t looked for work. I hadn’t done anything except sit by the river, really. I had been high ever since Bronco Bill had lit that first joint, and I needed something to shake me out of my general feeling of malaise. I was thinking about that when Chloe found me by the river and told me to come with her—a bunch of people were going up to the high country to summit Mount Dana.1

There were ten of us on the hike. John joined Chloe and I, along with a really loud and hilarious little curly-haired Italian-looking guy named Michael who had just arrived in the park from Los Angeles, and six of Chloe’s friends who had made the journey out to Yosemite with her from her hometown. Adam was a wild drunk who looked like a mini Jesus. The American version of Jesus, you know: long brown hair, scruffy beard, thin, handsome face, brilliant eyes, long, skinny fingers that he was always pointing at things in a meaningful way. I had seen occasional sparks of brilliance from Adam over the course of the past month, mostly due to the fact that he always wanted to cut the bullshit small talk and really have conversations with people. He had a tendency to go a little overboard with the booze, and he’d get sloppy and break shit and black out a lot of the time, but I really liked him, anyway. The other guys all seemed pretty alright, as well, but I really hadn’t had a chance to get to know ‘em yet at that point. Two very tall and somewhat similar-looking brown-haired guys with unshaven chins were both always taking photographs. They were really into music and records—a lot of good hip hop and old school R&B—and they seemed to love skateboarding, and both were obviously in love with all their friends—there was a deep hometown bond there. Their names were Matt and Kevin. Kevin had a girlfriend named Morgan who was a tall blonde, quiet and shy with a soft smile. She dressed straight out of the ‘60s—flowing blouses and patchwork pants, and she always wore these thick hemp necklaces with little beads of glass woven into them. She was along for the hike, too. Then there was this short, skinny young man named Tim, always smiling. He was training to become a park ranger and had a bottle of red wine in his hand nearly every time I saw him. He was Adam’s cousin. And the ninth person was actually Chloe’s brother Travis. Travis was another smart one. Handsome and contemplative. Whenever he drank, everything he said became a cryptic message of some sort. He would look out through his glasses, off into nothingness, and make comments about life that didn’t really fit with anything going on at the time. But behind all those mysterious little mutterings he seemed to have a really deep sort of understanding of the way things are.

We all rambled up the side of the mountain, up above the tree line, at one point hiking over a big snow field where I saw a couple of marmots chasing each other around and digging little tunnels in the snow. Chloe and John were way up ahead of the pack—just a couple of dots on the massive dome of granite above. Behind them were Matt and Kevin. Michael was just ahead of me, and was talking the whole time—yelling, really—just saying complete nonsense to whoever would listen. No one could hear him, but he just kept talking, anyway. And back behind me were Tim and Morgan. Travis was behind them—still so far back that it looked like he hadn’t even started the damned climb yet. We all eventually hung out just below the summit for a while, right after we had cleared the snow field, and we waited for everyone to come together so we could hike the last bit of the trail up to the summit together. Then we got to the top of the mountain just as the sun was setting in the west and the moon was rising in the east. After a good fifteen minutes of silence—all of us staring in awe at the red globe sinking and the white globe rising, with all of Yosemite and Mono Lake and the Great Basin spread out before us—Michael produced a plump bag of psilocybin mushrooms, and the night took on the feel of a pilgrimage to Mecca.

I sat and looked out over the rocks, out to Mono Lake, while Chloe and all of her old friends reminisced about the last time they had all tripped together. I felt a little strange hanging out with such a large group of people who had all known each other since they were babies—I almost wished I had stayed behind—but John didn’t seem to care, and Michael was completely oblivious to everything. So I just sat there and went along with all of it and secretly hoped the reminiscences and the inside jokes would stop after we all started losing our minds.

John sat next to me. He was wearing this long skirt-like thing that I guess you could call a sarong—a sarong is a length of fabric with a pattern on it, worn by men and women all over the world (Southeast Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, the Pacific islands), but not usually in the United States. It looked pretty ridiculous when matched up with John’s Led Zeppelin t-shirt and his thick white socks and hiking boots. But who gave a shit, really? He was his own man. He took off his boots and pulled a pair of jeans on under his skirt, saying something about his testicles being frozen. I patted him on the leg.

“I haven’t tripped in a year,” I said. “Last summer, in San Francisco. It started out fun, but ended in a nightmare.”

He clapped me on the back, “Well, we aren’t in the city right now, are we?” He spread his arms out to the sides. “We’re on top of the world, man. This’ll be fun.”

We all ate the mushrooms with gloved hands, amongst excited chatter and the constructing of a sleeping bag shelter alongside the wind shelter, where we could curl up together and stay warm all night despite the wind. After thirty or forty minutes, most members of the party had abandoned our shelter, and were wandering off to the edges of our sloping, moon-lit plateau as the last bit on sunlight disappeared from the furthest reaches of the sky. Kevin stood and stretched his hands to the sky and said “Fuck me,” over and over again, breathlessly—in genuine awe. Michael got into a wrestling match with his sleeping bag that ended up lasting the rest of the night, while Chloe and I both crawled into one sleeping bag, zipped it up around the both of us, and leaned against the wind shelter, our limbs entwined for a few minutes or so before we unzipped the bag and our limbs exploded out of it in all directions. We both mumbled under our breath, rapidly and incoherently, about claustrophobia and such, then we smiled open-mouthed smiles at one another and melted back into ourselves outside the confines of the bag, free to move our limbs through mountain air, which felt like an icy syrup on my skin.

Once the mushrooms took full hold, everyone but Michael settled in and quieted for a short while, watching the moon rise as our bodies soaked in a warm bath of psilocybin. Michael continued his wrestling match with his sleeping bag—laughing and squealing like a hyena, zipping and unzipping the bag, wrapping it around him then taking it off, lying down in it, then standing, then lying down again. He seemed to think that he was putting on quite the comedy show for all of us, but I can’t recall a single person paying him any mind. We were all lost in our own heads, our own visions. At one point, it seemed like we were losing any possibility for socialization for the entire night, so I decided to speak up. I was always thinking of myself as some kind of spiritual leader when it came to getting stoned back then. I could probably be pretty annoying at times. But I really wanted to attempt to ease everyone towards a sort of reverence for the drug, hoping to calm Michael and put us all in the right state of mind. So I started talking:

“You all know that feeling you get when your thoughts just stop, and you aren’t thinking of anything, but you also aren’t thinking about not thinking? You’re just there? An empty shell of a body, and your mind exists outside that body?” No one said anything to this, but they all turned to look at me, their dilated pupils glittering in the moonlight. “Have any of you ever felt that way? I’ve only been there once, when I was back at my parents’ house in Morrison for a week, and I was lying in my childhood bed and trying to get to sleep by counting my breaths. I fell into this intense meditative state, and had this out-of-body experience—I suppose that’s the only way to put it, but it wasn’t really out-of-body at all. I looked at my hands, and they weren’t even my hands. My body was literally just this empty vessel, and my mind was occupying it, sure—my mind was looking through my eyes like they were the windshield of a car, but my mind could have just as easily been outside the car. It could have been anyone else’s mind at that point.”

No one had a reply to this but Morgan. Her voice sounded strange. Alien. You could tell she was really out there. “There were people out there in the Saharan Desert ten thousand years ago who lived that way all the time,” she said. “There are these engravings in southeast Algeria of hammer-headed people in robes, running with mushrooms in their hands, and there are parallel lines connecting the mushrooms to the tops of their heads. I saw pictures of ‘em in an art history class. We all thought our professor was lame, but then she showed us pictures of these engravings, and she got all weird, and she told us how her husband and her got a divorce after they ate mushrooms together, because they realized while tripping that they were only staying together to satisfy a cultural construction—not out of any sort of genuine love. She said that the trip opened her to her love of all living things, and that the possessiveness of her husband was stifling that love.”

There was another moment of silence—everyone seemingly reaching a state of contemplation—but right when I thought that Morgan finally had them all, Michael lit a flashlight, yelled, “This fucking thing! Gahhh!” and continued wrestling with his sleeping bag. John looked over at me and shrugged his shoulders, then started rolling a joint. Chloe and the others all laughed at Michael, and the group fell back into restlessness.

“We need a fire!”

“We do need a fire.”

“A couple of us should hike down and find some sticks.”

“Fuck me.”

“We’re on a goddamned mountain, man.”

“There aren’t any sticks up here.”

“What the fuck is that?”

“What?”

“Is that a bear?”

“Where?”

“There aren’t any bears up here, either.”

“Right there! Over by those boulders.”

“We should start drinking pretty soon.”

“Motherfucker, you think a bear is going to come up here?”

“I’m hungry.”

“That is a bear.”

“You couldn’t eat right now if you tried.”

“That’s a shadow.”

“Who brought beer?”

“No one needs to eat ever, man.”

“I still can’t figure out how to open this sleeping bag.”

“A bear might come up here if he knew about the smoked salmon in my pack.”

“I’ve got a bottle of red wine.”

“You brought salmon up a fuckin’ mountain?”

“That is definitely something down there.”

“We need to start a fire.”

“Something living. There! It just moved again.”

“If we started a fire up here it would blow all over the goddamned high country.”

“That isn’t smoked salmon, it’s beef jerky.”

“Yeah, we aren’t starting a fire.”

“Can someone help me?”

“Maybe it’s a person.”

“Look at it! It’s huge.”

“God damn it, somebody help me.”

“Let’s burn Dominic’s sleeping bag.”

“I paid nine dollars for beef jerky?”

“That is definitely a bear.”

“You guys are idiots.”

“Salmon is bear food.”

“I can’t feel my feet.”

I leaned back and looked up into the sky. My muscles had all relaxed to the point of feeling like I had gelatin flowing under my skin, and I was able to focus on that feeling, shut out the activity around me, and become absorbed by my breaths—each one becoming more all-encompassing than the last until I could literally feel each inhalation bringing oxygen into my blood stream. I eventually stood—slowly, deliberately—and left our pile of bodies and sleeping bags. I went to sit in the wind shelter alone, where I had a hallucination—not really a full-on twisting and disorienting psychedelic experience, but more of a widening of the lens—in which I saw all of the land around us as that heaving mountain of ice from my dream. Everything was ice—one big glacier that spread east and north, away from the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada, out over the Great Basin, east over the deserts of Nevada and the salt flats of northern Utah, over the Great Plains and the vast fields of corn and wheat and all the way out over Morrison, Illinois, and Chicago, over all of Wisconsin and Michigan and up over the Allegheny Plateau and Pennsylvania and New York, up to the forests of Vermont and Maine and New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and out into the Atlantic. It also stretched north through the mountains of eastern California and over Lake Tahoe, up over the string of National Forests that stretches from the Sierra Nevada up through central Oregon and up into Washington and through the North Cascades and into Canada. All of it was ice. There were no trees, no cities, no people. Everything had been obliterated—or possibly nothing had ever existed at all—all was a heaving mountain of ice, moving, sculpting the land. And the ice stretched from our spot up there on that mountain in that cold alpine evening with the moon so bright up above just like it stretched from the porch of the cabin in my dream, where I had watched it countless times—I had watched it heave in the rain just beyond the swaying pines while Don dressed himself in a steamy bathroom and a naked woman slept soundly in a bed next to a framed picture of me as a little boy.

After what seemed like hours, I slowly became aware of the others again.2

Michael’s drugged giggles began to make me feel almost sick to my stomach as I continued to attempt to focus on my vision—to focus on the ice that had connected everything, here with there, the past with the present—but my disgust was more with myself than with him. He was just enjoying himself, goofing around, enjoying the high. But I had closed myself off; I had shut myself out, retreated within my own obsessions. I couldn’t stand the fact that we were on this mountain, experiencing this one and only life, and all I could think about was the passage of time. Death. Then I had the absurd and egotistical idea that none of the others seemed to know or care that we were dying, and that made me really, really sad. I didn’t want to be alone anymore. I didn’t want to be scared. And I certainly didn’t want to be depressed. So I joined the others, laughed at Michael and his goddamned sleeping bag, hugged Chloe, and all of it felt fake.

I wanted to jump off the side of the mountain.

 Despite being the second tallest mountain in Yosemite, with an elevation of 13,061 feet, Mount Dana is a relatively easy mountain to summit. The trailhead is at the Tioga Pass Yosemite Park Entrance, and it is a three mile hike to the summit, with a rise in elevation of only about three thousand feet. From the summit, there are views of much of Yosemite National Park, as well as the strange and beautiful volcanic Mono Lake and the Mono Lake Basin, and there are the remnants of a very old granite wind shelter which houses a small aluminum box with notes in it from hikers through the years. One of the notes is from Gary Snyder. ↩︎

 Psilocybin is believed to affect prefrontal cortex activity in the brain, as the prefrontal cortex plays a large role in time perception. Studies on people tripping on mushrooms have demonstrated that the drug impairs a subject’s ability to gauge time intervals longer than a couple of seconds, thereby causing him or her to believe that time is standing still, or that hours have gone by when only a few minutes have passed. ↩︎

[iamnotthedog]

MORRISON: SUMMER 1991

I had a pretty big temper as a kid. All the imaginative energy that had once given me horrifying nightmares as a little boy came spewing out of me in pretty crazy ways when something got under my skin. I’d fly off the handle at the littlest things, screaming until my lungs burnt and stomping around the house looking for a door to slam.

That all changed on one summer day the month before I started the fifth grade.

I had a couple of friends over to the house to throw a ball around in the backyard. Well, really one of them was a friend and the other was a pseudo-friend—one of those kids that would just show up and hang around because we all lived in a small enough town where whenever someone in your neighborhood was having a good time you knew it and joined them. Their names were Zac and Matt. Matt was the kid I hung out with quite a bit. He was a wiry little brown-haired kid with a narrow face and pointy chin, and he was really good at pretty much every sport. Zac was just a spoiled, chunky kid from around the way. I think he was Matt’s neighbor or cousin or something, which would explain why he came over with him.

We were out in the backyard, and Zac and Matt were giving my little brother a hard time. It started with me picking on him, sure. But I’m allowed to pick on him, because he’s my little brother. These guys were just a couple of strangers, and they were making Adam really uncomfortable—really giving it to him. They said really mean-spirited, hurtful shit to him until my face got all red, and I gritted my teeth and looked at them both all wild-eyed and told them they had to leave. Then, noticing that they were two and I was one (as little boys are prone to do), Zac and Matt turned on me. All the insults they had been flinging at Adam were directed my way, and they followed me up onto the back steps, taunting me.

I walked inside, and I turned and looked at them, making faces at me. I remember Zac’s fat face, framed by his stupid blonde bowl cut—his eyes all twisted and his tongue hanging out. I was so worked up by that point that I wanted to punch him, but I had never hit anyone before. So instead of punching him directly, I slammed the door and punched my hand through the glass, shards exploding everywhere.

I stood there shocked for a second, looking through the hole in the window at the glass on Zac’s cheeks and in his hair and thinking only about how Don was going to murder me when he got home from work. Then I felt a slight sting and a strange, achy feeling in my right wrist—like a pounding headache, but just below my hand, and I noticed some blood and skin hanging in the window, on a jagged edge of glass. I looked down at my wrist, and it was split wide open. I could see bone, and tendons, and what looked like a blue earthworm, crawling from my arm to my hand.

Then came the blood.

I yelled for Mom—or what was supposed to be a yell, but was really a strange, foreign, pitiful noise—and I sprinted through the house, gripping my right arm with my left. Blood was spurting from my wrist with every heartbeat. I ran through the kitchen in a few long strides, through the dining room in two. In the living room I hurdled the coffee table and banged my knee on the couch. I lunged through the front room—the library, we called it—and then stumbled out onto the front porch, where my mom stood—a broom in her hands—looking at me frightened. I held up my wrist, and her face fell, her eyes widening, her lips curling down into a deep frown. I remember, distinctly, that she went into shock for a second, not knowing what to do, even asking me, “Danny, is this a joke?” Then her motherly instincts kicked in.

She dropped the broom and put her hands on my shoulders—I was just looking down, grabbing that wrist, my blood pumping and spurting everywhere—and she guided me inside and wrapped my wrist a few of the thin white cotton towels that we used to dry the dishes. She was on the phone in the kitchen—the one mounted on the wall by the back entryway, through which was the door with the window that had slashed my wrist open. Zac and Matt were probably still standing out in the driveway, but I wasn’t thinking about them. There were shards of broken glass on the linoleum floor, and there were white dish towels everywhere, and Mom was pacing and crying and yelling into the phone, then hanging up the phone and talking to herself and to me as I was sitting in a chair at the kitchen table, watching the white towels in my hand fill with blood. “Oh, Danny,” she said. “Oh, Danny.”

Paramedics busted in through the back door—some of them in uniform, some in street clothes—and Morrison was such a small town that I pretty much knew all of them. A couple of them even lived on our street—one was Molly’s dad. I was wrapped in a big beige-colored blanket and lying on the floor of the kitchen, and a calm and extremely tan woman with a thin, wrinkled face was smiling at me and holding my wrist very, very tightly as a siren wailed and I tried not to fall asleep. Then I was in an ambulance, then in a blue paper gown in a hospital bed, and a tall, dark, mustachioed man was standing over me under a bright white light, and I felt him plucking at my veins and tendons like he was plucking on the slackened strings of a guitar, and then everything went black.

Having a near death experience at a young age is strange, because you haven’t had the time yet to have formed any kind of an opinion about the experience. You’re past the age when you believe that death is a magical place from which people and animals can actually return, but you aren’t quite to an age where you have come to terms with death’s true permanence. You haven’t had the time to develop a fear of death, but you also aren’t necessarily not afraid. You don’t regret any choices you have made, because you haven’t made any choices. You aren’t sad about the things you won’t get a chance to experience, because you aren’t even sure yet what it is that you hope to experience. You don’t wonder what could have been, because nothing ever was. Your life doesn’t flash before your eyes. You really haven’t lived much of a life, or at least not a life of your own. You have your little quirks and your little talents, and maybe you’ve just begun to believe that you’ll grow up to do something great with those quirks and talents, but you really don’t have the foggiest notion of what that great thing really entails. Everything is just an ideal to you—an abstract concept that satisfies your extremely underdeveloped and naïve idea about what a perfect future existence would entail. You haven’t yet realized that life is all about striving to reach that perfection, and never quite making it there. You just think that life will happen, and realize while bleeding out on the floor that maybe it won’t.

The near death experience for a young child, therefore, is mostly selfless. When you are lying there on your mother’s bloody dishtowels, you aren’t thinking about yourself. You aren’t being overly dramatic about it all—screaming, “The horror! The horror!” or “What will become of me!” or going on about dashed hopes and unfulfilled promises. Instead, you look for the people you care about. You think about the people you love. You look for your mother in the sea of faces, and you hold her hand, and you don’t want to survive just to save yourself, but also to get her to stop crying. To make her smile again. And you think of the rest of your family and you wish they were there, too.

After a two-hour surgery and another four hours in recovery, I awoke in a small room in my blue paper gown with a white blanket pulled up to my chest and tucked in tight. I had white plastic bracelets with words on them on my left wrist, an IV in my left arm, and my right hand and wrist were wrapped in bandages and secured in a splint.

I heard voices. Muffled at first, like I had water in my ears. Then clear. A nurse out in the hallway said, “He’s awake!” Then the doctor and Mom and Don were all in the room, and Mom’s arms were draped over my shoulders and she was kissing my face, and Don was standing next to her, smiling with tears in his eyes.

“Nearly cost you this time, didn’t it?” Don said.

I remember having the thought that his comment was a strange thing to say to a young boy who had just been through what I had just been through. But he was right, nevertheless.

I pretty much chilled out after that whole experience.

[iamnotthedog]

YOSEMITE AND EL PORTAL: JULY 9-AUGUST 4, 2001

If our overnight mushroom trip on top of Mount Dana succeeded in one thing, it succeeded in giving me a wicked enough hangover that I stopped drinking and smoking weed for a while. Not being drunk or high, I realized that I was hungry, and realizing I was hungry made me realize I needed a job or I risked becoming a freeloader. The last thing I wanted to do was ask for anything else from Chloe. I had started feeling really lousy about all the time I had spent hanging around her, fooling around with her, smoking her weed, eating her food, when both she and I knew that I was going to be leaving her eventually. She had held my hand, looked into my eyes, and said she understood, but that only made me feel worse. So I started working my way down that list of jobs I had written on the train ride from San Francisco out to Pleasanton, back before my thirty-six hour hitch across the Central Valley. Luckily, I found work within a few days, just outside the park in a little tourist trap called El Portal.1

I got a job working the front desk at this big eyesore called Yosemite View Lodge, right there in the hot and sun-scorched Merced River Valley on Highway 140. I wasn’t alone when I found the gig: I hitched out to the lodge with a short, dreadlocked black man from Manhattan named Marcus who was also a drifter in Yosemite, and was currently in a relationship with a young woman named Lauren who worked in the park and had become good friends with Chloe. Lauren and Marcus made an odd couple: Lauren was a shy and sweet country girl, contemplative, with a long face and sad eyes. She was into Buddhism and meditation, and she knew I was a big fan of Kerouac—who was a strange hybrid of Catholic and Buddhist, himself—so she was always asking me about my views on those things. She was always asking questions, and rarely spoke otherwise—she was a truly great listener. Marcus, on the other hand, was just about the least contemplative person I ever met. He had a shifty look about him—that sly, corner-of-the-mouth smile some people have that makes them look like they’re always up to something. And Marcus really was up to something: he had a perpetual pocketful of crystalline nuggets of weed that he sold to park employees and hippie tourist types for sixty dollars an eighth. He also had a way of talking to females that made me cringe.

Part of me thought that the only reason Lauren had hooked up with Marcus was because he was black and she was looking for a change—looking to shake up all the white-bread country normalcy in her life. I never found a way to talk to her about all that, though, because I was afraid of coming off as a racist—a phobia born from the fact that I was raised in a tiny rural town that only had one black family living there once in the entire seventeen years I had lived there. They had moved away only a few months.2

Having matured a bit, though—and having spent several years in a large and diverse city—I thought I was over all the white guilt of my childhood by the time I met Marcus in Yosemite. The first time we met, I didn’t feel any differently about him than any of the other acquaintances I had met in the park. But after smoking a few blunts and feeling an overwhelming sense of pleasure every time Marcus clapped me on the back and called me his “brother,” I soon found myself in a relationship with him despite the fact that I decided after only a few days that I didn’t really like him all that much.

Marcus was the epitome of a hungry ghost to me: a greedy young man who could never be satisfied, despite the fact that he had everything most people could ever possibly want. He also seemed devoid of any kind of understanding of the people around him, or how people should be treated in general. He was out for himself, and himself alone, and he really wasn’t even good at bringing himself any sort of lasting satisfaction. The only activities he took part in on a daily basis were eating, drinking, smoking weed, and looking for someone to fuck, and he did those things over and over and over again—he only wanted more, more, more. He never stopped moving but to smoke a blunt. And he frequently made Lauren cry due to his gallivanting with other ladies.

Despite all that, I hung out with Marcus every single day for a good four weeks. We slept next to each other, woke up together, and either bummed a ride from friends or hitched out to the Yosemite View Lodge every morning, where we put on our itchy polo shirts and nametags, and worked with old ladies who were born and raised in the mountains and dressed like Gerald Ford was still in office. And after those four weeks of constant contact with Marcus, I came to the realization that everything I didn’t like about him was everything I didn’t like about myself. Only then did I start to understand him, and then I started to like him more.

Then we got fired.

After four weeks spent answering phones, greeting guests, taking reservations, and selling ugly t-shirts in the lodge gift shop, Marcus and I were called into Helga’s office one morning. Helga was the ringleader of the lodge ladies—the oldest of all of them, and the only one of them who hadn’t cracked a smile once in the four weeks we had known her. Sitting there in her office, looking into her beady little eyes behind her Coke-bottle glasses, I knew immediately that Marcus and I hadn’t been called on to receive promotions.

“Boys,” Helga said, clasping her wrinkled old claws together on the desk in front of her, “we’ve come to find that there has been a significant amount of cash missing from the register after your shifts.”

As shady as Marcus was, I didn’t see him capable of just taking cash from a register. He wasn’t that stupid. His eyes widened in disbelief. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he said. He looked at me and started to say something else, but I put my hand out.

“Give me break, Helga,” I said. “You think one of us is going to steal from you?”

“I don’t want to think that,” Helga said. She smiled a strange, tight-lipped smile. “But your numbers aren’t adding up.”

“You watch us like a hawk!” I said. My heart was pounding. “You know it’s got to be one of the ladies that have been here for years. When was the last time you checked THEIR numbers?”

Marcus shot me a sideways glance and smirked. I felt like an asshole throwing the other lodge ladies under the bus, but I knew I hadn’t stolen any cash from the register, and I figured that if Marcus had, he would have told me. He wasn’t the type to keep secrets. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut most of the time. Helga said nothing for a full minute—tapping her pen on her desk, staring at the ceiling. Then she sighed and rolled her eyes. I sat back in my chair. Marcus chuckled awkwardly. And that was that. We were both let off with a warning.

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, that was the end for us both, anyway. As soon as Marcus and I got back to the park, he started getting a group of park employees together, telling them that he didn’t see either of us working at the lodge for much longer, and that we should take advantage of it while we had it. Later on that very same night, Marcus was caught partying in one of the most expensive rooms at the lodge by one of the janitors. He was found soaking in a hot tub and sipping on a mini bottle of Tanqueray from the wet bar. A bunch of kids from Yosemite were passed out drunk on the floor all around him, a local El Portal girl that nobody knew was getting fingered in one of the beds, and a blunt was still smoldering in an ashtray on the bed stand.

Though I wasn’t present at the party, my display of camaraderie earlier that day must have convinced Helga that the two of us were tied by some inexplicable bond, so we were both fired. Marcus gave me the news early the next morning when Chloe and I found him in Curry Village, drinking coffee and flirting with the baristas at the Coffee Corner. I think I shrugged when he told me. Despite my embarrassment over the whole scenario, I knew I wasn’t going to leave my employment at Yosemite View Lodge without getting paid. Four weeks’ of full-time work at a more-than-decent hourly wage would be the heftiest sum I had received at one time in years; more than enough to get me back out on the road again.

I hitched one last ride out to El Portal from my friend Josh that afternoon. Josh was a big, long-haired hippie who had lived and worked in the park all spring and summer. When he wasn’t housekeeping, he was wearing dresses and painting smiley faces on large canvases, or strumming his guitar and singing songs that he made up on the spot. When I first met Josh, I thought he was nuts. After an all-night conversation with him by a fire down at Happy Isles, though, I realized that he wasn’t beautifully weird because of any sort of legitimate insanity, he was weird because he had decided several years previously that he wasn’t ever going to allow his creativity or his emotions or desires to be stifled by any social constructs. He was extremely intelligent, and he exuded freedom. Though he could be pretty awkward to be around, everyone loved him for just being him.

Anyway, Josh gave me a ride to El Portal in his minivan. We listened to Syd Barrett’s Madcap Laughs on the drive, which I had actually never heard up to that point. Josh called the album a “masterpiece” and said he was about to “blow my mind,” then he turned it up and sang along with every word. As soon as we got to El Portal and I got my check in hand, I cashed it at the town’s general store (run by the Delaware North Corporation, oddly enough), then had Josh drive me back into the park and drop me off in the Curry Village parking lot to inspect my precious Oldsmobile ’88, which at that point had been sitting in the same parking spot without moving for nearly two whole months.

I approached the car that evening like a man approaching a sleeping beast. I walked up slowly at first, and stood back from it with my hands on my hips and my head cocked, admiring its form and the way the dull yellow streetlights in the parking lot played on its dusty windshield. Then I stepped up to it and ran my hands over its hood and fenders. Other than being covered in inches of dirt, it was in tip-top shape—no dents, no scratches—no deer had used it as a punching bag, no black bears had attempted to rip it open and explore its contents. I opened the door and flopped inside, rolled down the driver’s side window, and dug in my pocket for my keys.

The Olds started on the first turn of the key, and purred softly. I got so excited sitting there with the engine running that I howled, startling a young couple standing nearby in their cargo shorts, baggy t-shirts, white-striped socks and sandals. They were inspecting a large, wood-framed map of the valley floor with a flashlight while their two little long-haired boys wielded sticks like spears and chased each other in circles.

“Sorry about that!” I yelled.

They smiled awkwardly and waved.

This was the freedom I had been waiting for. I had no job, no home, and a good $800 in my pocket. There was nothing left for me to do but say goodbye to John, Marcus, and Chloe, figure out where it was that I was headed next, and go.

 Spanish for “the gateway,” El Portal was once the terminus of the Yosemite Valley Railroad, which ran from 1907 to 1945. Now it is nothing but a strip of residences along the highway, along with a general store, a post office, a gas station, and a couple of lodges. The unincorporated town serves as the unofficial western entrance to the park, and is partly under park jurisdiction. ↩︎

 I always hated the idiocy that having an African American family move into Morrison had exposed in the town. A security guard in the grocery store followed the father, when no one else had ever been followed around in that grocery store EVER—not even the high school kids who really did steal from the store on a regular basis. And the son, I remember one grey fall day in gym class when were in the big old gym playing basketball—the squeak of rubber sneakers on polished wood, the sound of the dribbling basketballs echoing off the concrete walls. A few kids in the class started taunting the new kid because he couldn’t dunk. They of course thought all black people could dunk, because they lived in a sheltered little town where the only black people they ever saw were the ones playing professional basketball on channel nine. The poor kid was maybe five feet tall, if that, and I remember him running up and jumping at the hoop, over and over again. He was lucky if he touched the bottom of the net. I’m not sure where the gym teacher when all that was happening, but he was probably trying to sneak peeks of the girls in their underwear in the girls’ locker room. He was one of those types. (I think he got fired for that sort of thing a few years down the road). Anyway, the whole situation disgusted me—even at a very young age, I knew something was off about the way that family had been treated—and I had spent the rest of my childhood and the early years of my adulthood trying to make up for that wrongdoing in any way possible. ↩︎