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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