Trillions & Trillions

A few summers ago I traveled with some friends to the high, mountain village of Carhuaz in the Peruvian Andes, eight hours by bus north and east of Lima. Before departing from the station in Lima, the bus driver made the rounds and took a picture of each passenger with a Polaroid camera. I asked someone on the bus what the Polaroid picture was for. My Spanish is quite fluent, and yet I was sure I was misinterpreting the message when I was told that this Polaroid would only become necessary if the bus was attacked by bandits on the highway, and if we were taken hostage or killed by them. If that happened, I was informed, then at least the Polaroid would provide some record of our final whereabouts.

However, the possibility of meeting bandits on the road, or the other possibility that the bandits were sitting right next to us inside the bus, biding their time until we reached the most isolated of highway switchbacks where they would then spring into action and demand all the money from our pockets and the valuables from our luggage (which indeed happened to a friend of ours and so we knew that the bandit thing was real), was not the most pressing concern, as we began climbing into the mountains.

The more imminent threat of death, and one where I’m not sure the Polaroid picture would have come in handy, was the road itself. For hours and hours, our wobbling double-decker bus crept up the most narrow of mountain roads. On one side there was a sheer cliff rising up, on the other side there was a sheer cliff dropping down a thousand feet to the last highway switchback below. This was not a road for sissies. Every so often we would pass the carcass of an old, burned out bus lying down hundreds of feet on the sheer cliff below us, that had been stripped of its dignity but had a worryingly similar resemblance to the bus that was right now holding us in its frame. The bus we were in was so tall that it seemed to sway. I clutched the side of my seat until my knuckles turned white. My friends were less afraid, and I was amazed and moved by their apparent acceptance of the afterlife. I, however, could not disguise my fear of dying on that Peruvian mountain road. Maybe for the first time in my life, I felt that dying was a real possibility, and I understood intimately that these are the moments that help us to realize just how much surrendering work we have left to do.

I’m the kind of person who believes in the obvious. Not the “What you see is what you get” kind of obvious, but the “Follow the obvious” kind of obvious. What is the next most obvious thing? It is the best answer to every single question I can think of. Sometimes the next most obvious thing is so simple: go for a walk. Be silent for awhile. Have a glass of wine. Other times it is more life rattling: time to quit your job now. Time to write a book. Time to break your ties with this person, gently but firmly, and probably forever. Which is not to say that the most obvious thing does not like to disguise itself in strange outfits, that it does not hide in the corner of the room camouflaging with a skill no lizard could trump, into the same mundane colors of your worries and hopes and dreams for years. Sometimes my writing is like that. It hides from me under the coffee table in my own living room. I look and look for it. I roll down all the windows when I am driving and holler its name. But all that looking and hollering oftentimes just makes it crouch even more still. The most obvious thing will oftentimes wreck your whole world, so even though it is the most obvious, it is often also the most convenient not to see.

Yosemite is rippling with tourists from all over the world. We hear languages we don’t even recognize along the paths, beneath the pounding waterfalls, and in the lodge. We spend our mornings and afternoons outside. After two days of wandering about in an incessantly falling snow that has accumulated to a depth of three feet along the paths, we begin hearing rumors from locals that the blizzard is coming. This is sort of hard to imagine, as it has been storming quite heavily ever since we arrived, and the difference in what we are experiencing now, and the mythical blizzard yet on its way is somehow just easier to ignore.

On Christmas Eve, we climb into our tent after a full day of hiking into wilderness heavy and bowing over itself under mounds and pounds of snow, arriving at lakes and rivers where the great granite walls of this valley rise up on all sides and seem to hold us in an unspeakably beautiful and tenderly cupped hand.

In the night you wake up to pee. When you get back in the tent you point out that the neighbor’s tent looks like a deflated balloon. In the night we hear coyotes and avalanches all around us. One avalanche lasts for at least a minute and sounds close enough to bury us. Not long ago a good section of tents in Curry Village, the neighboring campground was buried in a similar avalanche of rock and mud. No one was hurt. Curry Village was all set to rebuild the site but geologists said I don’t think so. Are we ok? I ask you as the avalanche roars on. Hold me, you say.

Five times in the night, as the blizzard indeed hits, we wake up with jolts to an explosion of snow falling from the trees overhead and landing on our tent. The impact is so forceful and so loud and so unexpected each time, that is closer to a war zone than anything else I’ve experienced. In the morning, on Christmas Day, we wake up to an unrecognizable landscape. The snow is coming down so heavy that it soaks our boots and clothes and hair within minutes. Our tent is just a white mound among other white mounds that we assume to be the picnic table, the bear box, the bathrooms… Though our tent is still standing, two others in the campground are flattened like pancakes and snapped tent poles are sticking out of their seams.

Later on we find two men who weathered the night in one of the destroyed tents in the cafeteria warming up their chemical reaction army mre’s, and drinking stealthily from a hidden supply of booze. Shivering, bright eyed, We’re getting the fuck out of here, they say.

We meet Ed, another camper, and join him at his table for breakfast. It is 9:00 in the morning and Ed is already drunk. My wife left me a year ago, he says. I was here for Thanksgiving too. Though his tent was still standing this morning, and he came equipped with his portable video player, he pleads with me to help him get a room somewhere. His face has the haggard look of an alcoholic, his speech is slurred, and he knows from experience, that in that state he probably won’t get what he wants. Before packing up I take him over to the lodge and find him a rather expensive room at the Wawona, which he pays for in cash.

It is Christmas Day and we are loading your truck in the blizzard. We are breaking camp and this requires many trips back and forth through the path in the snow that is now up to our thighs. We are moving quickly and we are not doing a good job packing the truck because the snow is falling very thickly and twice this morning we have witnessed branches the size of our kitchen table falling off of their trees and crashing to the ground a few meters away from our tent. This is get the hell out of dodge packing. This is stuff it in with your boot heels packing and hold the rest on your lap.

Within an hour, twelve miles down the canyon, we are turning the jets off and on in our double-wide Jacuzzi in a riverside room with a king bed, wide screen tv, blasting the heat, fireplace roaring, presents piled in the corners, chocolate wrappers littering the tables, getting the chill out of our toes and already laughing about the two tents sad and popped like deflated balloons. Down here the blizzard is turned to rain. The snow line is about fifty feet above us and we can see it out the window. Propped up on what must be the softest pillows ever, in what must be the biggest bed in the world, in what could be the warmest hotel, it is a safe and comfortable place to agree that camping at Yosemite in a blizzard at Christmas, in the midst of avalanches, drunks and coyotes, in the cradle of a valley so stunning it will break your heart every time, with a loved one and a good tent, is an experience not to be missed.