“I’m a Catholic boy. I don’t know that stuff.”
“I’m Episcopalian,” Edward said.
“When are you coming back?”
“In time for the meeting at five.”
Edward followed the switchbacks of the first leg of the Muir Trail, pausing on rock-masonry vantage points to gaze out over gorges filled with roaring white water. He was halfway up the steep Mist Trail by eleven. The smell of moss and spray and damp humus filled his nose. Vernal Fall bellowed constantly on his left, ghostly clouds of moisture soaking his clothes and beading on his face and hands. He grimaced against the chill but refused to wear a parka or anything else that would isolate him.
The wet dark gray trail rocks reflected the sky and became a somber orange-brown. When the breeze blew thick fingers of mist in his direction, he seemed suspended in a warm amber fog, the fall and weathered, moss-covered granite walls lost in a general vaporous void.
I saw Eternity the other night, he quoted, and not remembering the rest, concluded aloud with, “And it gave me quite a fright…”
At the top of Vernal Fall, he walked across a broad, almost level expanse of dry white granite, one hand on an iron railing, and stood near the wide, sleek green lip of plummeting water. Here was the noise and the power, but little of the wetness; observation and immediacy and yet isolation. The true experience, Edward thought, would be sweeping down the falls in the middle of the water, suspended in cold green and white, curtains of bubbles and long translucent vertical surfaces distorting all sky and earth. What would it be like to live as a water sprite, able to magically suspend oneself in the middle of certain death?
He looked across at Liberty Cap and thought again of the vast granite spaces within the domes, unseen. Why an obsession with places out of view?
He frowned in concentration, trying to bring up the monstrous big thought he had so loosely hooked. Living things see only the surface, can’t exist in the depths. Life is painted on the surface of the real. Death is the great unexplored volume. Death rises from the inaccessible, depth and death sounding so much alike…
There had been only three other people on the trail that morning, one descending, two climbing behind Edward. Another he had not seen, a blond-haired woman in a tan parka arid dark blue shorts lugging a big expensive blue backpack. She stood on the opposite side of the granite block, looking over Emerald Lake, the pool where water from 600-foot Nevada Fall rested before slipping over the shorter Vernal Fall. She must have camped overnight, or was perhaps on the morning leg of a long trek around the rim of the valley.
The woman turned and Edward saw she was strikingly beautiful, tall and Nordic, a long face with perfectly cut nose, clear blue eyes, and lips both sensual and faintly disapproving. He looked away quickly, all too intensely aware she was outside his range. He had long since learned that women this beautiful paid little attention to men of his mild appearance and social standing.
Still, she seemed to be alone.
Came that high, painful interior singing he had always known when in the presence of the desirable and inaccessible woman, not lust, but an almost religious longing. It was not a sensation he wanted now; he did not wish to be seduced away from worshiping the land, the Earth, to focus on a single woman, let alone one he could not possibly have. The woman or women he had imagined the night before would not evoke this kind of response; they would be safe, undemanding, undistressing. Quickly, with nothing more than a polite smile and nod, he passed the woman where she stood by the bridge and continued along the trail.
In the rocky tree-spotted upland meadow beyond Emerald Lake, he found a natural granite bench and laid out his lunch of two processed-American-cheese sandwiches and dried fruit, very much like what he had eaten on hikes in the valley as a boy. Facing the white plume of Nevada Fall, still a few hundred yards distant, he chewed crescents from a leathery apricot and brewed hot tea on a tiny portable stove.
Someone came up behind him, tread so light as to be almost undetected. “Excuse me.”
He twisted his torso and stared at the blond woman. She smiled down on him. She was at least six feet tall. “Yes?” he asked, swallowing most of a mouthful of half-chewed apricot.
“Did you see a man here, a little taller than I, with a very black full beard and wearing a red parka?” She indicated the man’s height with a hand held level above her head.
Edward hadn’t, but the woman’s worried expression suggested that it would be best if he paused to consider before answering. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “There aren’t many people here today.”
“I’ve been waiting two days,” she said, sighing. “We were supposed, to meet here, at the Emerald Lake, actually.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Did you see anybody like him down on the valley floor? You came up from there, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but I don’t remember any men with black beards and red parkas. Or any with just black beards, for that matter — unless he’s a biker.”
“Oh, no.” She shook her head and turned away, then turned back. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. May I offer some tea, fruit?”
“No thank you. I’ve eaten. I carried food for both of us.”
Edward watched her with an embarrassed smile. She seemed unsure what to do next. He half wished she would go away; his attraction to her was almost painful.
“He’s my husband,” she said, staring up at Liberty Cap, shading her eyes against the hazy glare. “We’re separated. We met in Yosemite, and we thought if we came back here, before…” Her voice trailed off and she made a negligible shrug of her shoulders and arms. “We might be able to stay together. We agreed to meet at Emerald Lake.”
“I’m sure he must be here someplace.” He gestured at the lake and trail and the Nevada Fall.
“Thank you,” she said. This time, she did not smile, simply turned and walked back toward the head of Vernal Fall and the descending Mist Trail. He watched her go and took a deep breath, biting into his second sandwich.
He stared at the sandwich ruefully as he chewed. “Must be the white bread,” he told himself. “Can’t catch a beauty like that with anything less than whole wheat.”
At three, the meadow and the perimeter of the lake, the falls and the trail below, were empty. He was the only human for miles, or so it seemed; might even be true, he thought. He crossed the bridge and lingered in the trees on the other side, with only the roar of the falls above and below and snatches of birdsong. He knew rocks of any description but little about birds. Red-winged blackbirds and robins and jays were obvious; he thought about buying a book in the general store to learn the others, but then, what use applying names? If his memories were soon to be scattered fine-ground over space, education was a waste.
What was important was finding his center, or pinning down some locus of being, establishing a moment of purity and concentrated awareness. He did not think that was possible with people all around; now was a chance to try.
Prayer perhaps. God had not been on his mind much recently, a telltale void; he did not wish to be inconsistent when all the world was a foxhole. But consistency was as useless now as nature studies, and not nearly so tempting.
The valley was still in sun, Liberty Cap half shadowed. The smoke had cleared some and the sky was bluer, green at the edges of the haze, more real than it had been.
“I am going to die,” he said out loud, in a normal tone of voice, experimenting. “What I am will come to an end. My thoughts will end. I will experience nothing, not even the final end.” Rising rocks and smoke and lava. No; probably not like that. Will it hurt? Will there be time for pain?