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. ↩︎












