The Sharp End of Life by Dierdre Wolownick

Author:Dierdre Wolownick
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781680512434
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
Published: 2019-07-05T16:00:00+00:00

twenty-four

“LOOK! THERE!”

I pointed toward the woods to the right of the car as I braked slowly to a stop. Gary and I were in Yosemite National Park for a climbing trip, driving down to Yosemite Valley to join our friends from Sacramento.

“See them?”

Gary was from Ireland and had never seen a bear, not even in a zoo. As if on cue, three adult-sized bears lumbered out of the lower woods to the right, ran across the road in front of us, and scampered up into the higher woods to the left. Each was a different color, varying from tawny gold to deep, dark chocolate brown.

“Wow!” His gaze followed them as I started driving again. “But they’re not black.”

I laughed. “They’re black bears. That’s the name. The species, or something, not the color. They can be a lot of different colors.”

“Wow.”

Every time I drove into the park, no matter who I was with, Yosemite would gradually overwhelm me. After hours of highway driving, the fragrance of the forest would take me by surprise as soon as I opened my window at the entry kiosk on the park’s edge. It made me want to get out of the car, right there, to walk and breathe it in, let it heal me, cure me of my city and suburban living.

The road into Yosemite National Park started in California’s flat, fertile Central Valley, at sea level, winding up to about six thousand feet past occasional towns, endless fields of dry grass and cattle, and rolling hills. Then it snaked down again through a tunnel of greenery, heading down into Yosemite Valley, which sits at about four thousand feet.

Sun cut through stands of valley oaks, live oaks and black oaks, buckeye and laurel in blinding swaths of brilliant yellow-green. Occasional cottonwoods towered and swayed, dwarfing the other trees. Filtered sunlight from the conifers sent sparkling spotlights onto the chaparral underbrush. The vast woods around me always seemed magical, probably because I knew what awaited me in the Valley.

The first time Charlie and I drove into Yosemite, I’d had no idea what to expect. When the road twisted and a vista opened up of a vast rock wall on the other side of the river below us, I asked, excited, “Is that it?”

He just shook his head with a smile and kept driving. Then the road turned again, and the vista expanded to include an even more impressive wall across the river, with some land, that I could have called a valley, far below us.

“Is that it?”

He shook his head again and kept driving.

“You’ll know it when you see it,” he told me.

He had said the same thing when we’d driven into Sequoia National Park to see the redwoods. He was right then, and he was right about this. As the road made one more twist and we entered Yosemite Valley, I gasped.

He slowed as I craned my neck and my whole body to see both sides at once.

El Capitan dominated the north side of the

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