Leaving Yosemite

Rag tired.  I left Yosemite today not knowing when I might ever be back.  Everything changes.  My friends have a family now, and I can't presume to crash their lives any longer.  Woeful, but so it goes.  There are, of course, so many other places to go, but this has so long been my heartland. . . etc.  And so (once again), I rose early and headed out of town for Carmel.  Though I had not originally planned on it, it seemed like the right time to go.

As I pulled out of El Portal onto Highway 140, I saw a woman standing on the roadside with her thumb out.  Of course I stopped.  I couldn't figure out how to work the door locks, so she handed me her small backpack and I threw it into the back seat.  She asked me in an odd way where I was going.  I told her Monterey, and she became very animated.  I asked where she was going but couldn't understand her.  She was deaf and could not articulate the words so well.  I thought she was happy because she, too, was going to Monterey.  O.K., I thought.  I'll have company rather than my own thoughts.  Maybe that's not so bad.  But after a few minutes of trying to talk, we fell silent as we followed the Merced River down the long ravine through granite and grass and pine around the swinging bends of the river, down, down the mountainside into the great farmlands of California.

But the silence was difficult, I guess, even for someone deaf, for she would ask me questions and I would turn my head dangerously to her looking away from the tight curves of the narrow road trying to get an idea of what she was saying, trying to read her lips and her hands as she signed as she talked though I do not know sign language, and then I would quickly look back to the road and correct my trajectory so that we would not fly into the river far below or run into some random oncoming traffic.

She grew up in California, mostly in the Sierras, I think, though she came from Pittsburg originally.  Now she lived in Foresta, a small private community that is inside the Yosemite National Park just fifteen minutes from the valley floor.  I had stayed in Foresta years ago when my friend lived there before he moved to El Portal, another Yosemite town.  I tried to tell her that, but she needed to see my lips, I think, as I talked, and things became confused.  "No, no, I don't live here.  I've been visiting."  I told her the names of my friends and she said she knew them.  She was a big wall climber, she said, and she began to tell me with great animation some of the places she'd climbed.  Impressively, she'd done the Nose of El Capitan three times.  She wanted to know if I climbed, and I held my fingers about an inch from one another for her to see.  I'd climbed the Royal Arches, I told her, and she said she had, too, ten times.  I asked her if she knew Lynn Hill.  Yes, they were friends, she said.  I tried to tell her an interesting story about Lynn Hill and me and found myself now signing to her emphatically, my hands now flying around the car as if they had language of their own.  She was probably used to such things and she seemed to get part of the story.  "She is divorced now," she said, getting the part about the attraction we had had.  "Twice."  She told me she had a ten year old son now, too.  I began asking her if she knew all the famous climbers I had come to meet over the years, especially the women who I knew had liked me.  "Do you know Bobbi Bensmen," I asked?  She shook her head without enthusiasm.

Then we fell silent again.  It had taken a lot of energy to talk this way, and the silence was now not as awkward.  Oddly enough, we were approaching another hitch hiker, an overweight man with a backpack.  "Why not?" I said and pulled to the side of the road.

"Where're you going?"

He named a road I didn't know.  Then he introduced himself, first to me, then to the woman in the front seat.  She did not notice, so I answered for her.  She could see I was talking, so she turned around to face him.  He asked her something and she answered in that language of the deaf that first takes you by surprise.  Feeling the need, I interpreted.  And then we all fell silent.

In a short while, he pointed to a road and said that he was going there, so I pulled over and dropped him off, watching him grab his pack to make certain he didn't take hers as well.  So long.  So long.

Then off again.  Down and down we slid through the great golden grass hills and the dark brown earth and the deep green of the sparse trees that dot the hillside, those colors deeply ingrained in my unconscious so that I dream them often, then past the fruit and vegetable stands that sit in front of groves and fields, pistachio and cherry and peach, avocados and strawberries and corn, nuts and fruits and vegetables of all kinds, the fields shifting to groves and back.

We talked some more.  We compared places we'd been.  Argentina, Peru.  I told her of the avalanche on Cotopaxi in Ecuador.  She told me of climbing in Patagonia.  She'd climbed all over Europe, Italy and the Dolomites.  She loved Chamonix but said it was too expensive.  We talked about the food of Italy and her travels through France.  

And then we were in the city of Merced.  I began looking for my turn off and found it.  And now I knew where she was going.  Merced.  She was going to the airport to fly to Las Vegas, she said.  An Expo for the deaf.  There would be 20,000 people, she said with excitement.  It would be great.  I thought about that, about what that would bring to her.  And so I pulled over into a gas station and stepped out while she grabbed her bag.

"I've travelled all over the world with this," she said pointing to the smallish bag she was now holding.  "It is great."  And then we hugged, and I said wait.  I got a notebook and a pen and asked her to write her name.  She did, and put her email address as well.  "Write," she said.

I will.