Year in Yosemite: Moving On

I was worried about moving from Yosemite National Park to Orange County, California. And rightly so. Two more different places could hardly be found. Although it may not feel like it to those who visit in summer, with its crush of people and its bumper-to-bumper traffic, Yosemite, at its heart, is about the preservation of wilderness.

In the mid-1800s, Frederick Law Olmstead (designer of Central Park) pushed for a Yosemite where roads would funnel people into 5% of its landmass. That left the other 95%, an area the size of Rhode Island, alone.

The same could not be said of Orange County. Size-wise, it’s one of the smallest counties in California. Yet, with just over 3 million people, its population ranks it third in the state, just behind Los Angeles to its north and San Diego to the south. It wasn't always this way.

As its name implies, Orange County once supplied citrus to the world. At the very same time that Olmstead was laying out his vision of Yosemite, farmers were planting Orange County's first Valencia orange trees. By 1948, 5 million trees were under cultivation on 67,000 acres of land. Yet 30 years later, only 4,000 acres remained. By 2005, less than 100 acres of Valencia oranges still existed. What happened? Development. As the aerospace and defense industries of the Cold War years moved to Southern California, the people who owned Orange County’s farms discovered the land had far more value when the only thing cropping up were office buildings and housing tracts.

Year in Yosemite: Closure

In my very favorite mystery series, the heroine, a Ms. Maisie Dobbs, revisits every site and person she encountered in the solving of the crime. Psychic and able to take on the "energy" of a person or place, she does it as a form of closure, a way to lay the energy to rest. Now that we're leaving our Yosemite home in just six weeks, I find myself following her lead.

And so, days that should be filled with organizing and packing, often find me visiting my favorite places.

But unlike Maisie, I don't want to lay the energy to rest; I want to imprint it on my soul. That's because all the mysteries I solved while living here were of the internal kind. During our three-year stay, I learned more about myself than I had in the previous three decades.

So what's become sacred to me in the time that we've lived here? Here's my top ten:

1. Walking down Chilnualna Falls Road in Wawona to the Pioneer Village, across the Vermont-inspired covered bridge to the post office. It may not sound like much, but for three years I’ve done it almost daily, usually in the company of good friends.

Year in Yosemite: Time Travel

For thousands of years, the native peoples wandered around Yosemite with seemingly no problem. For everyone else, access to Yosemite has never been easy. I was reminded of this when a friend wrote to say she was thinking of coming to visit. “How do I find you?” she asked. My answer bordered on the ridiculous. She could fly into Fresno and we’d come pick her up. Or she could fly to San Francisco, Oakland, Burbank or Los Angeles (4-6 hours away), take the train to Fresno and again we’d pick her up. Without renting a car, none of the choices were easy and even if she rented one, the trip from all but Fresno was long (especially after flying in from the East Coast). Furthermore, unless a person loves whipping around curvy mountain roads, the drive is not much fun. All of which led me to conclude that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Year in Yosemite: The Inspiration

"I know that I am one with beauty and that my comrades are one. Let our souls be mountains, Let our spirits be stars, Let our hearts be worlds."

-- Gaelic saying/Adams's favorite

We moved to Yosemite National Park three years ago because of Ansel Adams. And, spectacular as they are, it wasn't his photographs that hooked us. It was his early life. Like so many people who went on to change our world -- Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, Walt Disney, Richard Branson, Charles Dickens -- he never finished school. Some of these people dropped out for economic reasons. Some, like Branson, were lousy students. And some, like Adams, Einstein and Edison, got kicked out and were asked to never come back. Too distracted, too dreamy and too inattentive, they proved a trial and tribulation for their teachers.

In Ansel Adams's case, he got lucky. After multiple schools had asked him to leave, his parents decided to home school him. When they discovered that nature calmed their high- energy, fidgety son they let nature become his greatest teacher.

Year in Yosemite: Inspired Pilgrim

"We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us,…"
-- John Muir

 

A couple of weeks ago, 25 students and almost as many parents went to see our Mariposa County Supervisor. He spoke for an hour and held his audience spellbound. There was no talk of politics but I'd be willing to bet he filled our students' young minds with thoughts of possibility and power, social responsibility, and civic action. That's because our local county supervisor is Lee Stetson. A trained actor, director and writer, Mr. Stetson treated us to what he’s best known for—his one-man show as John Muir.

Year in Yosemite: Natural Opposites

Now that I know that we'll be leaving our home in Yosemite National Park by summer, I've become acutely aware of everything around me. Almost daily I add to my list of things that I'll miss—the frogs that bluster and croak in the seasonal pond by our library; the first daffodils that bloom at my daughter's school; the magnificent ride from Fresno to Yosemite through the Sierra foothills and, of course, the breathtaking beauty of this place.

And while I know living by the beach in Southern California will offer its own version of views to rival Yosemite's, I don't believe I'll find anything in Orange County to rival the mountain area's deeply eccentric charm. Where else but here would you find a building that's part gas station and part church? Where will I find another chiropractor's office that has copies of Body & Soul magazine sitting alongside Guns & Ammo? Will the Elks Club of Orange County help children get craniosacral bodywork like the Elks Club here does?

Year in Yosemite: On View

Before we left Los Angeles to live in Yosemite National Park, we lived in a very nice neighborhood on a lovely tree-lined street. Our daughter was at a school we liked; our closest friends were just minutes away. It should have been perfect, but I had a problem. Every night I'd wake up gasping for breath, feeling as if the city were closing in on me.

That feeling left when we moved to Yosemite. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I could breathe. It helped that we moved to quiet, laid-back Wawona and not to Yosemite Valley. The Valley is stunningly scenic but its towering granite walls, narrow valley floor and endless summer traffic jams leave me feeling hemmed in too. Living in a national park, I've come to realize that everyone has their own favorite type of scenery. Some love the deserts. Others prefer the prairies. What speaks to me are wide-open places.

Give me the rolling hills of Yellowstone over the narrow slot canyons of the Grand Canyon. I'll take meadows over forests and the sweeping pasturelands of the Sierra foothills over the mountains themselves. Even in parks defined by their valleys, I prefer the open views from on high. That's why we encourage all our friends to hike to Sentinel Dome with its 8,300-foot- high, 360-degree view of the valley and much of the rest of the park. And no visit to Zion is complete without leaving its exquisite valley to circle back through the town of Virgin to Kolob Reservoir Road for the ride to the crest of the park.

Year in Yosemite: To Manners Born

"Sure he (Astaire) was great, but don't forget Ginger Rogers did everything he did backwards...and in high heels!" -- Bob Thaves

For the women who visited Yosemite in the mid-to-late 1800s, the trip was no walk in the park. Before there were roads into Yosemite, there were steep, windy trails and women had to traverse them on horseback, same as men. But unlike the men, women weren't wearing the pants. No, they were dressed virtually the same as they would have been in the city -- chemisettes, corsets, blouses and jackets on top, with long, heavy skirts and multiple crinolines on the bottom. Completing the look was a bonnet -- offering protection from the sun and dust, but often heavy and cumbersome too.

Add to that the need to ride sidesaddle to accommodate both manners and dress and it's a wonder any women chose to come to Yosemite at all. But they did, bringing with them their good manners and good breeding because, even as early as the late 1860s, Yosemite was not the Wild West (unlike the Gold Rush towns that surrounded it), but a tourist destination.

Year in Yosemite: Buddy System

If you were to wander through our Yosemite home, here's what you would find: In the kitchen, there's a fishing pole leaning up against a wall. There's a bow and arrows in the hall closet. Under my husband's desk is my daughter's Red Ryder BB gun and homemade Indian hunting sticks, while on the porch there are hiking boots, snowshoes, skiing paraphernalia and sleds. This is all as foreign to me as the lights of Paris would be to a caveman.

That's because I grew up in the most cosmopolitan of atmospheres. When I was my daughter's age, I hung out with friends at places like bowling alleys (I’m giving away my age here) and shopping centers. When my parents were doing the planning, activities expanded to include museums, symphony halls and theaters. As I grew older, life revolved around good food, movies, the theater and concerts. Nature, as in national parks and wild places, did not rate even a blip on my radar screen.

Needless to say, the fishing pole, hunting stick, bow and ski equipment do not belong to me. No, they reflect the interests of my husband and our daughter, especially since moving to Yosemite. Unlike city kids, our daughter doesn’t have a cell phone, has never played with an Xbox, hasn’t a clue what a Wii is. For Christmas she asked for cardboard boxes, rolls of duct tape and a Swiss Army knife. Last night she spent half an hour on the phone with her father (who’s away on business) comparing birdcalls. She was tickled to bits when he mistook the cry of a black-capped chickadee for a red-winged blackbird.

Year in Yosemite: On the Wing

On a recent outing to Yosemite Valley, my family and I visited the Indian Museum. Amid the basketry, hunting tools, dioramas and clothing, there hung an exquisite "skirt" made of luminescent feathers of dark brown flecked with shimmering gold. It was breathtaking. Apparently used for ceremonial purposes by Yosemite's Miwok people, I assumed that anything so beautiful and precious must have been made from the feathers of a golden eagle.

My reasons for this assumption were logical enough. With all due respect to Ben Franklin and his love for the wild turkey, in America, eagles are king. Plus, since moving to Yosemite, I've seen golden eagles in the wild. Their feathers are indeed brown touched with shimmering gold, but, in this case, I was very wrong. Reading the sign, I learned these feathers were not from an eagle but from a flicker, and although I know birders are cringing at this moment, that word meant nothing to me. In almost three years in Yosemite, to my knowledge I'd never seen one, but now I know I've heard them. According to Google, flickers are large woodpeckers.