YOSEMITE

I was driving south from Sacramento.  Just south of Stockton there was a sign: Yosemite, Take 120. I pictured the road, a two lane blacktop heading east, running as flat as the San Joaquin Valley floor until it reaches the foothills of the Sierras and starts climbing higher and higher until it reaches Yosemite. The road may follow an Indian trail, laid out centuries ago, then replaced by a dirt and gravel path which in turn was replaced by this paved road with its sign - Yosemite.
     I've been to Yosemite twice. The first time was insanely rushed.  I had driven up the east side of the Sierras on the 395, through towns called Independence and Lone Pine, up higher and higher until I reached the Tioga pass at about 9900'. I didn't know it but if I'd come a week later the pass would have been closed because of snow. As I turned west, I also didn't know that the road, which went right through the park, was the 120. The sun was very bright, the air clear, and I passed an Alpine meadow that glinted in the light. I remember a lake and then the drive down ultimately to the valley floor. I'd only just realized I didn't have a place to stay for the night and I'd have to find a motel outside the park. So I was in an insane rush and speedily took in the sights but it was a kind of if-it's-four o'clock this must be El Capitan.
     The second time was very different. I had a room at the Wawona Hotel near the Mariposa Grove and I spent a morning wandering through the impossibly old, impossibly huge trees. There's no other word for them but awesome, and although there were other people there, we all were silent, our mouths stopped by awe.
     This time I dawdled as much as you can in a weekend. I walked up to the base of El Capitan, considered hopping over the Merced River which was almost a trickle, making it hard to believe this is the river that carved out the valley, along with the help of some glaciers. I got as close as I could to the famous waterfalls, the ones on a thousand souvenir postcards. The water begins falling in each of them very high up and comes down in thin white ribbons. You can't see its movement from a distance but up close, the sound and the power of the water is the sound and power of nature.
     I spent a long time at the lookout point from which you can see down the whole Valley with El Capitan on one side and Half Dome in the distance. It's one of the most famous and popular views of the park and, as I gazed out, the other tourists suddenly felt very far away. I sat on a low stone wall and tried to come up with something original to say. I gave up pretty quickly.
     There's a field of study called hermeneutics.  Its name comes from Hermes, the messenger of the Gods the go-between, the interpreter. Modern hermeneutics is the study of theories of interpretation - for instance, how do we understand, interpret all the levels of meaning we use to see and understand a text or our experience or a work of art. Since ideas and experience are always shifting, how can we get at the truth?
     Sitting on the stone wall, I realized my time in Yosemite had a hermeneutics all its own. There was the present, the direct experience coming at me through all my senses, my spiritual response to all that beauty. But there were layers beneath that, adding to that direct experience. There were the Indians cutting trails as they tracked animals. There was a book I had, written by a traveler in 1888 and he called the park by its Indian name, Yo-semite. There were Carlton Watkins' 19th century photographs of the Valley monuments and wide vistas from the depths of the Park, and Ansel Adams' oh so familiar black and whites. There were the people who climbed the sheer face of El Capitan without ropes, clinging to the rock by their finger tips. There was a vintage travel poster I'd once seen, of this very view.
     But mostly there was John Muir who walked south from San Francisco, over the Pacheco Pass, across the flat Valley and into the Sierras and ultimately to Yosemite. His love was immediate and included very pebble and leaf and animal. He was endlessly curious; on the night of a storm, he climbed up high in a tree because he wanted to feel the power of the storm. There was the fight he made to save the Hetch Hetchy valley which he lost and then watched as that valley, part of Yosemite, disappeared under hundreds of feet of water when its river was dammed up. I'll never see Hetch Hetchy but it has a meaning for me built on Muir's struggle to save it.
     All these layers and more were part of my experience looking down the Valley. If I had stopped to tease them out, I wouldn't have been present for my experience of the Valley view. But layers like these are beneath every experience and idea and feeling I have. They're part of what I mean when I say, "I". Some are accessible when I go looking for them while others float somewhere beyond my consciousness, always ready to flood in.
     Somewhere south of Stockton I saw the sign for Yosemite and I said to myself, "Let the revelries begin."