Wednesday, September 23, 2009

HEED THE RACCOON, Part 2: Reflections on a Trip to Yosemite National Park

You know you’re in trouble when your checking account is $890,000 in the hole. It’s a long story and all I can say is that the raccoon tried to warn me.

On our first day in Yosemite, the raccoon tried to steal my dinner and then, when he started to recover from being blasted by my blood-curdling scream, he looked at me with a mixture of sadness, searching, and something else, as I wrote about in Heed the Raccoon, Part 1.

Our second day, we suffered a car breakdown, and had to deflect our plans due to out-of-control fires and road closures from rock slides.

Because we had spent most of a day waiting for a tow truck, we decided to stay an extra day, but thick smoke from the still-burning fires obscured views, so we headed in the opposite direction of the fires to Mariposa grove to see the giant Sequoia trees, a life-long goal of mine.

We decided to take an hour-long walking tour to learn about the trees. Before embarking on the tour, Vince asked me if I wanted him to go back to the car and get water, but I shook my head, confident in my ability to abstain from fluids for an hour, and because I didn’t want him to take the time to go back to the car.

A young, soft-spoken ranger led the tour. He didn’t even break a sweat on the mostly upward-slanted tour while most of us were breathing heavily. The ranger explained that the grove supposedly possessed rejuvenating powers and he had found that to be true since coming to work there in his 50s. It was funny because he looked like he was barely in his early 20s and maybe hadn’t even started to shave yet, but he delivered the line in totally deadpan, Steven Wright-style. Though clearly a joke, I breathed deeply just in case, soaking up the air that, at least at that moment, was smoke-free.

The trees are a marvel: Tree trunks thick enough for a small car to drive through, with sprawling surface root systems to soak up the maximum amount of water and perceptible personalities so pronounced that humans give them colorful names that reflect their unique shapes and growth patterns, such as the California Tunnel Tree, the Bachelor and Three Graces, and the Grizzly Giant, the oldest tree in the grove, thought to be 2,700 years old.

At the end of the informative tour, the ranger gave us the option of going back the way we came—the fastest option—or going off in a couple of directions, one of which would enable us to see the Faithful Couple, two giant Sequoias that had grown into one. By then, I was tired and thirsty, but the idea of seeing the Faithful Couple seemed irresistibly romantic.

Under ordinary circumstances, the extra distance to see the Faithful Couple wouldn’t have seemed far, but my throat was parched and my muscles were starting to ache, partially from exertion, but probably mostly from dehydration. Still, we kept going. I was captivated by the notion of seeing the Faithful Couple, and when we found them, it was worth the walk. Two giant trunks had fused at the base, joined in a stirring symbol of two life forms that had become mutually dependent, inseparable. We found a nearby couple willing to take our photo in front of the grand trees, a photo we could treasure and look back on in our old age, after our own lives were inextricably entwined, a process that was already well underway.

The next morning, on our third and last day in Yosemite, we exited our hotel, which was located in El Portal, eight miles from the park. The smoke from still-ablaze fires was so thick that it stung our eyes and our car was covered with ash, fallen from the sky. We found out later that El Portal had to be evacuated.

Back in Oakland, we had a wonderful visit with Vince’s son Jason, his wife Yvette and their daughter Lydia, but that’s another story. Oddly enough, on our way up a hill to see a steam train in Berkeley, Yvette’s Honda CVS--which until then had been an incredibly reliable car—overheated and we had to head back. We began to wonder if someone had put a California car curse on us.

On the Sunday morning that we were to leave, Vince loaded our luggage into the trunk of the rental car and then headed about 20 feet back to the house to get a cup of coffee. He grabbed the last bag of luggage, but when he went to put it into the car, the luggage was gone. Suddenly, he understood why he had heard car wheels peeling out.

When Vince told me that someone had snatched our luggage out of the trunk, I thought at first he was joking. Then, it started to sink in. All of his clothes were gone except those on his back, as well as my toiletry bag, and our notebook computer. And what else?

“Welcome to Oakland,” said Jason, clearly stricken.

Fortunately, we still had our wallets, so we could still catch our plane, leaving it up to Jason to make a police report. On the plane, we began to take inventory: the computer not only contained a lot of music tracks, documents, and photos, but also Vince’s business files and TurboTax, which contained our financial info and Social Security numbers. In addition to everything else, they had stolen the keys to the car we had left in the airport parking lot. Not just the keys, but the ticket to help us to locate the car in the airport lot. How would we even get home? And if we could find a locksmith at 10 p.m., how could we convince him that the car was ours, since it’s registered to my son who is living at the moment in South Korea, and who has a different last name?

I’ll gloss over the gory details, but we finally got home.

At first, there seemed to be no financial repercussions, and I still had all my credit cards, but I kept an eye on my finances. One day I was checking my accounts online when I saw a check had gone through for $728 to a Best Buy in Dublin, CA. It was a copy of my check, but with a different name and Social Security number. I realized that I must have thrown a pad of checks into my toiletry bag, and someone had evidently photo-shopped another identity onto my checks.

I spent all night on the phone making reports and, the next day, I went to the bank to freeze my accounts and open new ones, something I should have done right away. I thought I had taken care of everything.

Then, I checked my account online and there it was: In the checking account column, it said minus $889,000. I started to hyper-ventilate. Something must have gone wrong!

Eventually, I found someone on the phone who told me that’s the bank’s method of putting a hold on your account, posting a ridiculously high amount. I’m still leery that I’ll be held accountable somehow, but the jury is out.

Then, I thought about what else had been stolen. Our only copy, downloaded onto the computer, of us standing in front of the Faithful Couple.

And I remembered the raccoon. Now I understood that the raccoon was trying to warn me that it’s a dangerous world, and that despite the threat of instinct-driven thieves, there’s an even more dangerous version, predators by choice with no respect for hard-earned ownership or the investment of someone else's blood, sweat and tears, who want to redistribute whatever wealth exists with themselves as the beneficiaries out of a sense of entitlement and disrespect for any higher authority.

OK, so maybe the raccoon didn’t say that--but his eyes did.

Vince and I had to spend many more dollars and much more energy-draining time shopping to replace everything that was lost, but some things can’t be replaced, like that photo of us with the Faithful Couple.

So you’ll have to take our word for it—or ask the raccoon, if you can find him. Somehow, I think he was watching all along.

--Jeanne Johnson (Ms. Sticky)

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Thursday, September 3, 2009

HEED THE RACCOON: Reflections on a Trip to Yosemite National Park

I think the raccoon was trying to tell me something.

After night fall, I sat down to eat my turkey and cheese sandwich at a picnic table in a Yosemite National Park lodge. I put the sandwich on the table and was beginning to unwrap it when I was startled by something that popped up on the other side of the table. It was a raccoon, his beady, bandit-masked eyes focused like lasers on my sandwich. I screamed one of those involuntary, from-the-gut screams that pierce the air and probably rattled the raccoon’s spine, because the startled raccoon stopped in his tracks and his eyes locked onto mine. He looked both stunned and sad, as if to say, “Give me a break, lady.” And his eyes seemed to say something else, I couldn’t figure out what.

I just gathered my sandwich, clutched it to my chest, wary of a potentially rabid creature, as I backed off and he slinked back into the darkness. Suddenly, I could no longer eat safely. Other creatures would vie for my food unless I protected it. I may have been on a man-made deck at a man-made picnic table, partially illuminated by man-made light, but the raccoon was a reminder that, in reality, I was in the wilderness and, in the wild, food sustains life. It doesn’t matter who pays for the food with the artifice of paper or plastic because, in the end, whoever gets the food and consumes it, owns it.

I felt so threatened that my husband and I retreated to the relative comfort of our rented PT Cruiser, where we ate our food out of our laps, protected by a rather complex human contraption that amounted to a metal tent—a car that would fail us the very next day, shattering our brief illusion of shelter and technological superiority.

I would be remiss if I did not mention Yosemite’s stunning beauty. But it’s not like the beauty of Southwest Virginia, where I used to live. The hills of Virginia are curvaceous, maternal, blanketed by green, and in many ways, shelter-like and comforting. Yosemite is jagged, massive, carved by glaciers, and, if anything, conveys the formidable and unmerciful force of nature. The towering rock formations are a reminder that, compared to granite, flesh is laughably feeble. We may create small worlds where we have some measure of control, but in the end, the sense that we can control anything of importance is a delusion.

One time, I was climbing up a rock wall and stupidly banged my knee on a protruding rock. The rock didn’t attack me, but I thoughtlessly attacked it, and lost. Flesh and bone are no match for stone. In any showdown with a rock, I would lose, as my aching knee attested.

During the day, the vistas were beckoning, beauteous, and beyond comprehension. As night closed in, and our Cruiser traversed twists and turns, those same vistas seemed to morph into massive, hulking, unseen beasts with cavernous mouths that could consume me if I took a wrong turn.

That night, I was relieved to check into our ordinary hotel and zone out on a manufactured mattress, complete with cotton sheets, while watching inane dancing images on a metal box, probably made in China, with a Gideon Bible by my side.

The next morning in our ordinary hotel, I thanked God for hot showers as I took one, and then we drove to the park. Just as we passed the Ranger-staffed entry station, our car started to ding, hiss and gurgle like a big pot of boiling water. As our car overheated, we coasted into a nearby parking lot where we waited for a rental car replacement. And waited … and waited.

All in all, it was a pleasant spot to break down, equipped with rest rooms, water, a soda machine, a pay phone, picnic table, and nearby babbling brook. The pay phone may sound like an anachronism, but keep in mind that with spotty cell phone access, finding a pay phone can feel like finding a life line. And it felt like a gift to be able to make a free 800-number call versus paying roaming charges while on interminable hold with Alamo car rental company.

We were thankful that we didn’t break down on a single lane road with no way to communicate, but still, the hours dragged on. We ended up waiting for more than six hours, about a third of that time spent on hold on the phone.

In the meantime, we watched huge billows of smoke rise from the mountains, as a ranger informed us that a planned, controlled fire had gotten out of control. It was another reminder of nature’s destructive force. It was as if nature was channeling the wicked witch from the Wizard of Oz and a mutant Mr. T in a parallel universe, mocking me. “So, you think you can escape from a raccoon in a car, huh? Well, I pity you, fool, what about fire coming at you when your car is broken down? How do you feel now, measly human? Hot fire. Hot car. And I’ll get you, too, my pretty. What good is your metal tent when it won’t move and you can’t escape the approaching flames?”

Eventually, we got a Hyundai Sonata with a good sound system. Maybe I’m easy to please when it comes to cars, but it felt luxurious. Just give me new car smell and a good sound system and I may as well be in a Bentley. We drove through the park, past frequent reminders to abide by the 35 mph speed limit. I thought I recalled the park ranger saying that more than 100 bears had been killed in the park that year by cars,which must be an exaggerated figure from my faulty imagination, but whatever, it was a lot. Even though I knew it wasn’t logical, I couldn’t help but think that the spirit of an angry bear (or bears) had sought revenge by wreaking havoc on our rental car.

Now that we had a functioning car, I wanted to visit the impressive and historic Ahwahnee Hotel, but an irate police officer stopped us when we blithely followed a shuttle van past a barricade. It turned out that the road and the Ahwahnee were closed due to rock slides. No human had been hurt, but rocks the size of microwave ovens, hurtling from above, had done some serious damage to parked cars, and the rangers weren’t taking any chances. Afterward, I wondered if we would have encountered one of those rocks had our car not been stranded. I guess we’ll never know. Contrite over our trespass, we turned around and headed back to our ordinary, rock slide-free hotel.

I knew that firefighters had been working all day, so I was surprised when we rounded a corner and saw mountainsides aflame in the night. We pulled the car over dumbstruck. Huge swathes of forest were still on fire. The mountains were surrounded by an orange glow and flames flickered over ravaged land. The silhouettes of whatever partial trees were left rose out of that burning halo and I stared as if staring at Apollyon and his demons rising out of hell’s portal. It felt symbolic and deeply creepy.

I thought again about the raccoon and what he might have been trying to tell me.

Later, I’ll post what I think I figured out.

--Jeanne Johnson (Ms. Sticky)

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