Too Hot and Bone Tired

I don't have any photographs from Yosemite, so. . . Berkeley.  Who gives a shit anyway.  I should just tell you it is from the Yosemite gift shop and let it alone.

Yosemite is hot.  And the water is gone.  I mean there was very little snowfall this year and the falls are dry and the river is low.  It is even warmer than it should be.  I've been coming here forever, and I have to tell you it feels like the end of the world.

I hiked too hard here my first day being a flatlander who under normal circumstances is in terribly good shape and can kick ass but who is now injured and fat and. . . .  Anyway, I climbed a trail to the top of Nevada Falls.  Usually I do something else the first day, but I thought what the hell.  But my knees!  I did it, though, in normal time if not quicker. . . just me and the European families with their teenagers all blonde and healthy as hell running around and laughing while I struggled to manage a smile.  They ate lunches and jumped in the river and I lay back on a granite rock and marveled at them.  It is good to be European, I think, watching them enjoy life so.  Not that others aren't as happy.  Down below on the valley floor are thousands of Mexican families.  Not one family, really, but at least six, big huge bunches of them in baggy jeans and big t-shirts having their own kind of fun.  But climbing two or three thousand feet through granite passes, you hear only German and French and Italian.




O.K.  I am just sweaty and achey and maybe a little bitter.  I could tell you other stories but you wouldn't believe them.  It is better that I remain the schlemiel and the hapless victim.  But I tell you truthfully that my life is not like this and that things happen that are not in the realm of normal belief. But I have no cell phone connection and little internet connections, and I need to go to sleep because the children will be on me by six.  Oy!  What can I say.