#16

February 5, 2008 – Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost

Lester Burnham, the Kevin Spacey character in American Beauty said, "It's a wonderful thing to learn that you haven't lost the ability to surprise yourself."
I went on this trip as a journey following my heart to the California coast. The desert was just something between me and it. And I wasn't surprised when California broke my heart in a dozen different ways. But I never expected I'd fall in love with the desert. Death Valley touched me in a place that even Big Sur & Yosemite didn't, amazing as they are. There's something different about the desert; clean and pure in its angular harshness, stark, with nothing hidden. I theorized today that god made the desert so unforgiving so that we couldn't possibly fuck it up. Its beauty is in its sheer brutality. The awesome emptiness and unearthly silence and the absolute clarity of the light.
But again, I'm ahead of myself....
After our second night at the lovely Yosemite View Lodge in El Portal, we woke to a reasonably clear day to take one more twirl around Yosemite & take the Wawona-Fresno road out of the park. We finally got un-Obscured-By-Clouds (obscure Pink Floyd reference) views of El Capitan (the largest exposed granite face/phallic symbol in North America) and the oft-photographed and mis-named Half-Dome (It's actually a quarter-dome...look at all the angles).
And then started up highway 41 to Fresno and despite repeated warning signs about chains and other chickenshit bullshit, made it up treacherous icy mountainous roads and we were almost to Wawona where the road gets better and then...
We came around a curve and there was clearly a problem ahead. It seemed to involve fallen trees and Alpha Male dudes and trucks and chains but, interestingly enough, no Park Service Employees. ("Where my motherfuckin' park rangers be at?") We waited patiently and eventually we were go and Wawona was reached and we all got down the mountain safely.
Bound for Death Valley, we headed for Bakersfield ("all roads lead toward Bakersfield"), but determined not to spend another night there, we continued onto Barstow, forever immortalized by the opening sentence of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold..."