The Trouble

I have not had internet or phone connection for days.  People around me have, but I have not.  That is the way it is going, too.  Let me tell you quickly, for I don't know how long this will hold.  First, I banged up the rental again, this time the front fender.  I was trying to find a place to put the car at May Lake so that I could climb Hoffman Peak.  The lot was full, so I pulled into "a clearing."  I can't see shit out of the Taurus windows and I tapped a log.  That is all, really, just a tap.  And that collapsed the front fender.  I got out and looked in disbelief.  I am used to cars with fenders.  They fend things off.  You bump into things without damage.  But this plastic bucket just falls apart.

Sick over it, a black cloud hanging over me, I headed up the trail alone.  I hadn't a map, just some vague directions and suggestions.  I headed up a trail, underprepared.  I had no sunglasses and the sunlight was brilliant.  At May Lake, the mosquitos were horrendous.  Up, I thought, away from the moisture.  The trail continued, then disappeared across some hard rock.  I am not much of a navigator, but I felt sure the trail picked up on the other side.  I looked but found nothing.  I was high enough to see the climb by now, though.  I looked ahead for a route.  Surely it headed up between rock outcroppings, up the gully and onto clear rock.  Up ahead the mountain was covered with two snow fields.  I looked for other climbers, but I saw no one.

"This is shit," I told myself.  "I'll get up and won't find a trail and I'll be scrambling for hours in the wrong place.  Then I'll come to the snow field and slip and slide around with my balls around my Adam's Apple.  This is shit."  And I turned around.

All the way back, I felt defeat.  And then there was the car, the fenders looking just as bad as before.  What could I do?  Then it occurred to me.  When I got back to Berkley, I'd park the car in some bad part of town, maybe in the warehouse district, and I'd call the police and tell them my rental car had been stolen.  They'd find it later and I'd say, "My gosh.  Look what the little hoodlums have done!"

Something.  I have never been in an accident in my life.  I've never hit anything.  But here in the space of a week. . . ."

I got into the car and headed up to Tuolumne.  I would do a tourist hike there, back to Dog Lake and up Lembert Dome.  Everyone has done that.  But it would be exercise anyway I told myself without conviction.  I was out of conviction.

And so I walked the day away through pretty country, up the back of the solid granite outcropping.  And when I got there, the payoff was that no one else was there.  I was alone.  And the landscape is freaky.  You seemed in danger on that big sloping rock.  One false step, it seems, and you fall to a slow, sliding, but certain death.  One false step. . . .  But it is not completely true.  The rock is very walkable.  It is just the exposure that is freaky.  To be out there alone with no one else about. . . well, that was pretty lucky.

Wait!  What?  I've only had the other kind.

Back at the parking lot, I picked up my iPhone to see if I had any reception.  I wanted to call my friends and tell them I would not be back in time to have dinner by the river with them.  The iPhone was dead.  The battery, which had been fully charged the night before, was cooked.  Yes, I thought, that figures.  I need that now.  I need to buy a new phone to go with the cost of everything else.

There are good things, and I'll think of them next time, but it is the disaster that gets into your head at first.  It is also the thing that fades.  What remains are the lovely parts, simply sleeping beside the Merced River with the sound of its flowing.  Or waking to four big deer grazing around you.

There will be that.  I have to count on that.