Reverse Valentines

It was August, 1980, when my entire family and my brother Joe's nameless girlfriend pulled into the dusty and gravelly Onion Valley parking lot on the Eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevadas. We had driven all day from Santa Cruz in our dependable Chevy Beauville:

(Not the actual Beauville, mind you, but you get the idea. These vans were popular in the 1970s and were a sign of prestige and carefree suburban Catholicism).

Earlier that day we drove through Yosemite and over Tioga Pass. As we approached the pass we entered a classic Sierran afternoon thunderstorm, the kind where the thunder cracks like an almighty whip and everyone starts screaming, and the clouds are dense and Crayola black. The rain came at us sideways like darts in the gasps and gusts of the wind. But the Beauville kept us safe as we descended through the granite amphitheatre of the Tioga Pass Road toward Highway 395.

We set up camp at 9,200 foot Onion Valley late that afternoon. The storm had long cleared in predictable fashion. Our plan was to rise early and hike up and over Kearsarge Pass and spend a week heading South toward Mt. Whitney. We kids spent dusk running around in grand, adolescent fashion amidst the thistly shrubs and undergrowth which smelled like onions and wet dirt.

That night, tucked in my sleeping bag, I was still and quiet in an effort to extinguish the achiness in my eyes and the throbbing in my head brought on by high altitude sickness. But I didn't quite mind. The accompanying insomnia was pleasant in an odd way, and I was content to stare heavenward and count the falling stars and let the onion smell go in my nose and out my mouth with each breath. Everyone seemed to be snoring and oblivious.

"Dad," I said round about midnight, "Are you awake?" My hands were clasped behind my head.

"Ughh" he answered as if he were poked with a stick. "What do you need?" he finally asked like he was taking a call from a nurse at the hospital.

"Nothing," I answered. "Nothing at all." My headache was dissipating, and I felt quite fine.

The next day, with full packs, we hiked up toward Kearsarge Pass and saw the aptly named Heart Lake:

Heart Lake

Yes, it really is shaped like a perfect valentine. Ahh, valentines. A few years back our son, Sam, made valentines for everyone in his class. He had taken pictures of each of his classmates and carefully downloaded them and cropped them and resized them. He then printed them and cut them into heart shapes and glued them onto red paper. "To Scott," he would write, for example, to his friend Scott, "Happy Valentines Day! From Sam." So the recipient would receive a picture, well, of himself or herself.

Clare came into the kitchen and stared at Sam's valentines displayed on the counter. She stared a really long time. She picked one up, looked at Sam, then burst out laughing. "Sam," she said, "Don't you realize this is the stupidest idea ever? Who wants to get a valentine which is a picture of themselves? What is this? Some kind of a reverse valentine?"

I figured this was simply like getting a friend a gift that you yourself really liked, like a T-shirt that you thought was hysterical or a gift certificate to your favorite restaurant. Once I gave Turkey Tetrazzini Pete a CD of the five Beethoven piano concertos for his birthday. Pete is about as musical as a pile of moist sod. He simply looked at the gift and said, "Uhh. Thanks." I think he was just being polite.