on climbing half dome, pt. 1

(the first of my writers' institute essays)

Hi all! I’m writing a series of essays about home and New York City for my Writers’ Institute classes— here is part 1 of an essay about a trip to Yosemite some years ago. I hope you’re greeting the November cold the way Bob Dylan would — with wind-tousled hair, hands shoved inside the pockets of your too-thin coat, on your way to meet your lover Joan Baez, who once wrote in her diary as a 13-year-old: “I am not a saint. I am a noise.”

At the summit of Half Dome, that sheer cliff diamonded by sunlight in Yosemite Valley, I briefly forget about New York City. I awake that morning into the blueness of a 3 a.m. dawn, insisting to my companions that no, the light in the horizon will not balloon into a baking sun, and my heat allergy will not overwhelm my friable skin. We have secured three permits to Half Dome for the day. An image placed before my eyes shows a shimmering chimera of vertiginous quartz, with a sparrow’s beak and a sloping elephant’s back. K, a college friend and my well-traveled, generous sherpa on this journey of all things sunlit and northern Californian, gives me a quick once-over, and turns back to making our ham-and-cheese-and-mustard sandwiches. We should rip into these with a beer when we reach the top, she laughs, her shoulders dancing. L is also a seasoned hiker, dry and nonchalant, quick to express wonder and dispense empathy. Both work in healthcare and technology.

Later in the afternoon, as the sun spears our necks and we haul ourselves up 400 feet of cables on unstable, unholy granite slanted at a dizzying 45-degree angle, L will reveal in between shrieks of terror that that she is afraid of heights. Like two seals dangling at the edge of hot cliffs, we will find each other’s eyes, open our mouths, and scream into the sky. But I begin the day utterly ignorant, almost idiotic with anticipation, a city child waiting to fall into the arms of nature, a Zen Buddhist seeking the flash of a snow leopard against cresting white snow. Color would solve all the grey. Tree oxygen would replace guttering gas and smoking manholes. I would forget my forlorn scientist’s bench, its pipette guns and chemical hoods, the miniature tools insensible to my touch, flung over reams of viral disease research like so many steampunk circus props. The study of life gives you carpal tunnel and caged bird tendencies before it reveals its secrets to you. "I was tormented with soul hunger," John Muir once said of his youth. "I was on the world. But was I in it?"

I had never hiked before, but lack of experience in this seemed excusable. All this cultural fuss over hiking, with its camelbacks, cairns and catholes, and for what? Let a San Franciscan get a weekend table at one of New York’s fine dining establishments, or hop on a D train that turns into an F train on an otherwise middling Tuesday afternoon. Queens can’t be all that different from Brooklyn, can it, you ask as you scurry past dim lights and deaf ears. I can guarantee the same dose of adrenaline and attendant vasodilation. How can nature break me when an entire city conspires to do just that, and fails daily? And on top of everything, it is the beginning of winter in Yosemite. The earth cannot have borne a more brilliant child than this pulsing granite valley. I am only human; I am looking forward to this.

As a child of cities buckling under their own weight, driving into that valley feels like entering God’s own private Jurassic Park – gargantuan, overshot with heavenly currency, and waiting to detonate. As we course along a highway at 5 a.m., the dawn is giving way to morning with unscrupulous, unhinged joy. Granite honeycombed by Gold Rush dynamite in the 1870s rises from both sides of the road in untamed sheets of grey. Incense cedars and Douglas firs wave in the wind, bracketing a denim sky so wide and uncluttered with steel and glass it seems almost stupid that someone hadn’t put a building there. The preface to our hike is gorgeous, all wrapped up in comfort and fresh oxygen.

One hundred million years ago, in the magma of two crashing plates, the oceanic Farallon Plate and the continental North American Plate slip and slide over each other until granite emerges onto the Sierra Nevada valley. The orange insides of volcanoes and river-water play together like children for millennia afterward, making basalt and hardened magma chambers called plutons. A certain irreverence is a prerequisite for creation. Three million years ago, the ice ages begin, and a wunderkind born of magma and ice grows rebellious, original. It carves dens and half domes out of plutons. It makes Sierra Nevada lift towards the west. Elsewhere on the planet, ancient Africa collides with pre-Europe to make the Mediterranean. The genus Homo practices walking on two feet. They build tools of awesome texture and function, pebbled with discs of black silk and white serra, at once soft and hard like the hominids who make them. The rigorous study of life yields things of wood and stone, the halcyon dimensions of freedom, the ability to pierce to the heart of things.

North America awaits these hominids, then welcomes them in the form of the Ahwahnechee, the people of the Ahwahnee Valley. I later learn from K, the one now driving us into the valley and also the benefactor of the day’s Half Dome plans, that a luxury lodge called the Ahwahnee Hotel, deep in the forests of the national park, charges its patrons anywhere between $500 to $2000 per night. They have figured out how to build here, she says. They are just clever about it. The Ahwahnee Hotel has hosted the likes of English royalty (Queen Elizabeth), American royalty (the Obamas) and they have even allowed in the occasional tramp (Charlie Chaplin, whose pictures at Yosemite with then-wife and co-star Paulette Goddard show them engaged in that other great cultural fuss, skiing). I scroll through the prices on my phone as all those masticated granite gods continued flashing by my window.

I recall that John Ford made a movie called The Searchers in 1956. Every frame is a painting – I think of Monument Valley’s canyons, its red dust rising fatly in the drumming wake of horse hooves, and John Wayne, himself a giant, ill-tempered rock formation. Ford’s wild West is a much more recognizable America, one that is honest about its fault lines and tremors, unconcerned with optics unless it has something to do with the truth. Sitting in that car, I am a city child whose heart aches for a taste of the wild American truth, but there is an edge of covetousness, a perversion to my want. The land, the name, the forests, the stories – the soul of the West rings with Native American voices. The ‘Mayan Revival’ halls of The Ahwahnee Hotel, and the ululating strains of Comanche warriors in The Searchers, contain multitudes, millennia, meanings I strain to understand. 

Before we disembark, K promises a view I will always remember. We pull in to a high watchpoint, fenced low with sanded limestone and brick. Spilling before us with profligate, sun-stained verdure, and space so wide it seems to be encircling us, is the Yosemite Valley. It is a child’s drawing come alive. Streams from the Merced River bubble through fields of Ponderosa pine and cottonwood, their heads like a million spikes so small that from a distance, they appear to congeal into undulating waves of moss. In the distance, the sheer granitic face of El Capitan, Half-Dome’s volcanic cousin, rises with a knife’s edge from the earth. A sparkling mirror, an American Everest. Cumulus crowns the tops of faraway stone fjords, the spaces between them recalling all those glacial dances from eons past. The Ahwahnechee’s black oaks erupt from crystal-spackled granite with no seeming soil base.

But my responding awe does not give me strength. I meet the ultimate truth I seek, and I am numb to its offer, scared of its expectations. My limbs take on the sensation of artifice, as do my new hiking boots, my drawstring bag with camera and electric fan and electrolytic drink, my hoop earrings. I read later in John Muir’s letters to his wife, that my abrupt urge to throw off all my accoutrements and thrash incorrigibly into the brush is correct, even righteous: “Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.” With all my baggage, I am not suited to this expedition. So, I begin here, at this lowly, cowardly place, a meek frame carrying Faustian angels of Inadequacy and Anticipation.

Part 2 on its way! Thank you for reading.