Welcome to my world, I wanted to tell my wife and kids on the banks of Upper Cathedral Lake in Yosemite. This was their first backpacking trip, their first journey into the Sierra Nevada's backcountry, the magical realms where cars could not venture and most people would not. The dayhikers had departed for Tuolumne Meadows 4 miles downtrail. Now the lake was ours, and ours alone. The nylon of our tent flaps fluttered occasionally in the afternoon breeze, mimicking the sound of the water lapping the nearby lake shore. Camp squalor had ensued splendidly in typical entropic fashion, with Nalgene Bottles and bear canisters and clothes strewn about and, like the universe, expanding away from our packs in the center of camp.
I had lit the camp stove for dinner and the familiar, steady hiss of its flames serenaded my reverie as I sat on a bear canister and slowly applied too much chapstick. I was boiling water for freeze dried food. The sound of the stove resurrected a memory about a backpacking trip years ago with my family when we all laughed at a mosquito on my dad's forehead. I had not thought of that mosquito for 30 years. I suddenly realized the stove had brought the water to a rolling boil, and the image of the mosquito was flicked from my thoughts. I turned off the stove. The flames settled and disappeared, and the hissing decresendoed like the sound of a whistling tea kettle being moved to the kitchen counter to pour water for tea. Now it was starkly quiet. I noted it acutely, like when you're reading the newspaper and the dryer turns off, and you look up and realize you haven't been paying attention to what you were reading.
Lydia read on a hot granite rock. She propped the Agony and the Ecstacy, the biography of Michelangelo, on her knees and turned the pages intently. Michelangelo wanted only to carve white, veiny marble she reminded me. He hated to paint.
While the boys jousted and fenced with branches of various diameters, Clare sleepily exited a tent with her hair asunder. "Dad," she asked, "Where's the dirty laundry bag?"
"Clare," I replied, "you're backpacking. Everything is dirty. Your clothes. Your face. Your hands. This is your new reality."
Sammy had lost two Power Bars somewhere between our car and our present backpacking site. We had searched his pack diligently without success. If the bars were still in the car then our car was at risk of attack from a black bear. The olfactory prowess of Sierran blackbears is unmatched. There were stories of bears ripping a Datsun to bits, because a dessicated piece of gum had been carelessly stuck under the driver's seat. I had thought of hiking all the way back down the trail to search the car, but decided against that. The mystery would not be solved till later...
