on climbing half dome, pt. 2

(a year on, and an end to my first essay)

Yes, yes, it’s been almost exactly a year! Don’t scold. I am ashamed to say it, but for one year, I have entirely evaded my writing responsibilities. Even now, I lollygag in study carrells, generate idle gossip with classmates, attend ice hockey games and baseball games and club meetings and research talks. All are necessary limbs on the tree I am climbing, this generous knowledge oak with its generous branches, the topmost of which signifies completion of my second-year preclinical studies and an entrance into third-year in-hospital clerkships. But all the while, a voice screams at me hollowly, like a spirit trapped in a cursed bottle: write something! Anything! So here I am, for my summons!

Even while shirking my duties, I have continued to polish essays generated from my Writers’ Institute sessions. Here is part 2 (and the end) of my Half Dome piece.Thank you, as always, for reading.

We begin with energy, careening uphill for ten minutes before black pincers compromise my vision and I make us stop. Eighteen miles of trail and nearly 5,000 feet of elevation gain lie before us. A recurrent spindle of electricity works through the back of my neck and sings through my chest. I come to recognize it as irritation. When did walking become so difficult? Sunlight begins its beckoning, multi-spired launch across the vault of clouds above us. Histamine, an otherwise helpful molecule whose differential includes helping us sleep, feeling appetite, contracting our bladder, and digesting our food, chooses to exercise its most useless attribute in my body, and begins to make my skin itch. Entering a tunnel of shaded wood, a powerful, gossamer fragrance assaults us all at once, and both K and L turn back to me, because I am several yards behind them, and they gesture to the towering incense cedars spewing their perfume at us like benevolent sirens. I drink it down obediently. My knees click with every step, and an odd pinch in my toes begins. A line of acolytes forms, and our order rarely changes all the way up to Half Dome. My two companions turn into twenty. Mud turns into basalt steps, and I wonder at the enterprise of Americans with so much time on their hands. I imagine Tolkienesque dwarves chanting by moonlight and mithril, sculpting out steps for us lesser beings who will traverse Yosemite’s heights with far less knowledge and zeal. A withering inadequacy returns, admixing with exhaustion.

Part of the joy of living in New York is the baseline of mild triumph I generally function on. I exist on the strength of competence, and the virtue of belonging to the greatest city on the planet. I can negotiate overloud deli owners, dip and weave through crowds of lesser beings (tourists), coldly assess watering holes for tact and elegance, storm the Central Park castle. I welcome hardship, and thrive under its bludgeoning blows. And there’s also my keen desire to re-engage with nature, to extract a purer existence from the Earth. This is when I learn what a switchback is. L mentions the word in between gulps of blue Powerade. Laying a rubber arm against a conifer, I gaze up at a series of mud zigzags rising above and away from us. The sun is approaching its highest point in the sky, globular and white, pounding away at my skin. Three steps up, and there is a sharp, near-180 degree turn to the left. Two steps, then a sharper turn to the right. This continues until every ache summits, becomes a gnawing, serrating, gasping pain, exquisitely topped off by the realization that I willingly signed up for this. A misty spray makes me blink, and we are at the Vernal Fall Footbridge. Large basalt steps are black with hydration, and grown adults squeal at the mass baptism. The cataract is encouraging us, making it impossible to ask for rest.

Thankfully, when we reach the cables rising up to Half Dome, everyone stops and sits. Trees abruptly emerge into our eye-line. They’ve been here all along, pants K in wonder. I stare at our sudden vegetal meeting in agony. Sugar pines like Chennai’s limber coconut trees sprout from granite joints. Muir’s Sabine nut pines, his giant sequoias, his “poplars, alders, maples and laurels” kiss my head with their shade. I am not moving, but pain continues to pulse through me, as if resentful for such late relief. Images crowd my mind, threatening a break from reality. I observe my own activities, like a newspaperman stranded in the outermost ring of the fighting pit. I push a boulder up a ramp. I build Lincoln’s log cabin, and then a white wood chicken coop, the same one I saw when I was eight years old, in a south Indian temple town, where I was shaded by palms, sandalwoods, banyans. I climb neem trees and mango trees, I eat sugar apples and tamarind, freshly fruited for the summer. The single tree outside our new home in Brooklyn falls during Hurricane Sandy. I want to don my cape and step out onto the green. All I can do is dream, and think of the stones beneath my feet, hot from convection.

We arrive at the cables. They rise up to the top of Half Dome like a physics problem set: 400 feet of hot granite, at 45 degrees. Here, I eke out my brief, Pyrrhic triumph. For a moment, I stop thinking, and believe in my body. I realize that I am capable of divine stamina. Two chain cables stretch up the sloping elephant’s back, stretching my arms five feet apart. L is already crying. A voice that does not belong to me roars at our line to keep going. By now my consciousness has taken blunt force trauma from a variety of sources. I feel muscle exhaustion surely verging on misuse atrophy, allergic hives, rage, and dehydration kept only at bay by an unseemly mouth mixture of Nature’s Valley protein bars and blue Powerade. And still, we climb. I do not remember my last step, the final step. But at the top of Half Dome, we flicker and fall to our knees. Our ham and cheese sandwiches are gone in two minutes, washed down with some more Powerade for good measure. The vista greeting us is a possible estimate of what an astronaut might view from space. K pulls up an image of Ansel Adams’ famous Monolith, The Face of Half Dome and we realize that we are sitting just over it, the western face of this block of plutonic madness.

We are there for ten minutes. We discuss aesthetics, heat, the largesse of mother nature, the attractive flush in our cheek. We discuss who lived here originally. Consider the name ‘Yosemite’. It is the Miwuk word for those who kill. A smaller group outside the Ahwahnechee, the Miwuk were supposedly peace-loving, living in fear of their more ribald neighbors. The name was later borrowed by Gold Rush non-natives, thinking it meant ‘grizzly bear’. The Ahwahnechee for their own part called their valley Awooni, meaning ‘large mouth’. Fitting that the naming of Yosemite should mirror the country’s larger relationship with its Native American citizens. Nothing this good should be an easy fix. Despite, and perhaps because of, the American West’s complicated inheritance of Yosemite, the correct elements sting my heart, eliciting memories of displaced childhood, borrowed adolescence, muckraking city life. It is a testament to my towering self-conceit that my madeleine, my trigger for involuntary memory, is a massive batholith in the middle of the Sierra Nevada.

The trek down is worse than going up. When there is nowhere to go but home, the trees just laugh at you, offering no incense, no shade. Vernal Falls has no spray to enliven your step. My knees will not stop their infernal ache. But in two days, I will fly back to New York, reach home, and in amidst the scent of damp plaster (it will have rained in Brooklyn the previous night) and freshly laundered cotton bedcovers, I will experience the telltale facial weather of an immediate cry coming on. I will sit and weep at my bed ferociously, quickly. I will remember standing at the top of Half Dome. How unsuited I am to the natural world, I think. How different I have made myself to fit into this room. How narrow my existence has become, and how afraid I am of everything that makes me feel good. Despair will burgeon, announcing decades of future life colored by this same grey half-ness of city life, this same incapacity to drink from the correct, authentic pools of natural life. Despite an early spasm of clarity that pushed me into science, my subsequent studies have taken me nowhere. I have a concern for the natural world, I remember. I have a concern for science, for rational and reasonable thought, for making incisions into a wrapped-up bundle of skins and discovering dermatomes, little things, rooms inside bone, transformations, inner hearts. But it has not been enough. A single moment at the top of Half Dome will have to do.  

Three years after Yosemite I am at Disneyland, peering through wire mesh, and seeing dead trees everywhere. It is supposed to be the inside of Indiana Jones’ office. A pine desk turning blue with age, holding wood-handled magnifying glasses, stone Buddhas, terracotta Athenian pots. The wood-backed glass door through which students would fan in and out of this marvelous timber-loving office. Maps and globes and chestnut stools. Maple elephants marching on the carpeted floor, their mouths agape, even their tusks brown. And orange lamplight to throw it all in shadow, to make all that wood burn. At a restaurant later that day, the pale pine backing of our upholstered booth makes me think of Indiana’s table. Then a slightly sentimental image: a ship captain’s quarters. I had been reading Moby Dick fitfully, and I was growing wary of the blunt-force manner in which whales and trees and other natural things could suddenly remind me of their existence. The restaurant rocks underneath me, the customers are fitted into sailors’ garb, and my friend and I are not rotating our forks around linguine, but placing stone weights over the curling edges of maps. “It’s all this wood,” I say. “It makes the food taste so good,” my friend says.

This is what I wanted from Yosemite: a return to a purer place. In New York I sit in tree museums, in paved paradise. Nature has become functional, insensate. The trees will die their homicidal deaths as we print books, lay down railroad lines, feed stoves and build chairs. I must remember that I once sipped from the real pool of life, if only for a brief moment, at the top of a chimeric fjord of granite, surrounded by living black oaks and cedars so perfumed they made me think of Odysseus’ sirens. I reconstruct this purity every now and again with a single image. A few yards from the top of Half Dome, when the edges of my vision began to blur and the balls of my knees were loose in their sockets, my hand came to rest on a headless elder tree, stout and black with age. Its bark had made some agreement with the western wind and rain, and in certain spots under my palm it had traded its thin valleys of brown and black ridges for something that looks like sunlight-yellow seeds. In a moment of invention, the words tessellated honey arrived in my head. The invention gave me strength, it tapped some reserve of golden energy in my thighs, and I walked up to the dome.