Forever Young

There is a scene in the sleeper hit movie, Breaking Away, when Dave Stoller, the Italian-loving cyclist, races his bike through an Indiana cornfield. The camera pans out. You can see the greenness of the corn field stretching for miles over hilly undulations. Dave pedals effortlessly, and the simple purity of the surrounding elements, the light, the wind, the sky, highlight his restrained rapture as he pushes himself hard. The music accompanying the scene is the melodic french horn aria from the overture of Rossini's The Barber of Seville.


I first saw Breaking Away in 1979, the year it was released, with my brother Joe. We saw the movie on a school night at my mother's insistence. We needed to see the movie, she told us with an almost urgent tone, much the same as when she told us to go to mass every Sunday. Go figure! We knew, therefore, it was important.


It was later that same year, on August 19th, when we ventured out of Tuolumne Meadows to Young Lakes for a 6 day foray. Young Lakes sits in a typical Sierran 10,000 foot basin between isolated Ragged Peak and the Mt. Conness ridge:

The first 3 miles of the trail to Young Lakes courses through the high Sierran meadows bordered by Delaney and Dingley Creek. From the meadows you can look back to the brown pyramids of Mts. Dana and Gibbs, and west to the washboard foothills which fall off into the Central Valley. There is light and wind and sky. There are also the Rossini french horns if you hike alone and listen real hard. I remember hearing them.

This trip was particularly memorable. My two brothers and two sisters and I were all immersed in mid and late adolescence, the time of college applications and learner's permits and ridiculous corsages and boutonnieres worn to formals at the Cocoanut Grove. This was also the time when we were blissfully unaware of impending grown-up responsibilities. So it was good to frolic in the Sierras.

It was also then that my parents were reveling in the prime of their parenting career as demonstrated in this trip photo:

Also accompanying us on this trip were family friends, Don and Mary:

Don, just after his haircut

Mary, sewing her own backpacking clothes

Our Young Lake's campsite boasted a pristine view of Ragged Peak:

The nine of us slept under the stars like a row of supine pawns on a large, blue tarp with frayed edges. (On those early trips we never took tents). My dad would sleep on one end, and the rest of us would argue about who would sleep on the other end. Nobody wanted to be the dreaded "end sleeper." The end sleeper was vulnerable and subject to bear attack, sniffing mice, alien abduction and a restless, sleepless night.

Don brought along an emergency space blanket. Ahh, the space blanket. These are the silver mylar blankets compacted in a package the size of a bouillon cube. In an emergency situation, like a Summer snowstorm or unexpected loss of clothing or locust swarms, you could whip out the space blanket and wrap it around yourself and survive miraculously.

So Don was a little chilled one evening (he had the end position that night), and he wrapped the space blanket around his sleeping bag. However, there is no such thing as quiet mylar. Everytime Don would roll over, nay, everytime he would breathe in and breathe out, the space blanket would crinkle. It would crinkle all night long. It was agonizing, and not unlike someone holding a fistful of rice crispies next to your ear and squeezing relentlessly.

Don slept great. The next morning, though, his space blanket had mysteriously disappeared. He looked up in the trees, he looked in the lakes, he looked in the meadow. Vanished! To this day the mystery remains, though I hear rumors of a great buck with silver antlers which may be seen on the shores of Young Lakes when the moon is full. If you get close enough you can hear its antlers crinkling in the breeze.