California Gold (17 page)

He remembered where he was then: in a field near a tiny mountain settlement she called Crane Flat. Across the field, yellow windows checkerboarded the dark, a wooden hotel. He sat up, sleepily rubbing his stubbled chin, his bedroll and extra blanket tangled around him. He’d erected the big fly tent for her, and rolled up on the ground outside.

She sat on a log, neatly tucking the hem of the flannel behind her bare ankles. Only her small white feet showed, but the sight, and the isolation of the night, filled him with painful yearnings.

“You were thrashing and calling out. You almost rolled into the fire. What were you dreaming?”

“A nightmare I’ve had since I was little. Always the same: snow, darkness, death…” He described it in words he felt sure were inadequate.

She sat with her chin in her hands. When he was through, she stood up and leaned over him. With a deeper tenderness and a greater intimacy than propriety would normally allow, she touched his face.

“Maybe the California sun will drive out that bad dream one day.”

He gazed at her, then caught her wrist where it lay against his cheek. The campfire embers reflected in her brown eyes. Her small soft mouth opened as she realized what might happen if they allowed it.

He started to rise, but she darted forward and kissed his forehead, a light, sisterly brush of her lips. He felt like an iron had seared him.

“Nellie, I—”

“Good night, Mack. We must make an early start.”

She turned and ran to the tent. Before she dropped and tied the flap at the entrance, she looked back, and he saw her eyes saying she wished she could speak the words to invite him into that dark place.

The canvas fell. Confused, elated, wanting to run to the tent, yet afraid to do it, he bundled up in the bedroll and blanket and watched the stars for an hour. He felt young, stupid, inexperienced, hot, angry. In love.

The ascent continued. At Gin Flat, they were seven thousand feet above the sea, she said. Soon the road slanted down again, perilously hacked from a mountain’s shoulder. It gave them spectacular vistas of tree-clad valleys and higher granite peaks above and ahead. In shady nooks along the way, pristine snowbanks gleamed.

At Gentry’s Hotel and Station, fifty-six hundred feet, they paid their toll for a road Nellie called the Zigzag. “Twelve miles into the valley.”

“The morning’s for up traffic,” the toll collector said. “You have to wait till afternoon.”

So they pulled over a short way to another turnout. “Prospect Point—but the teamsters mostly call it Oh My Point.”

He understood. Before him lay a vista of great bald rock masses looming over a forested valley. Waterfalls tumbled from the rock summits all the way to the valley floor. Mack marveled as a cloud of birds swept upward past them; there were thousands of them, wings beating. “Passenger pigeons,” Nellie cried.

The toll agent put bells on the team to announce their passage down the mountain. Mack drove on the perilous switchbacks carved from the granite. “Italian stonecutters did this,” she said. “An incredible feat.”

“Don’t talk so much,” he groaned, aching from hanging on to the reins and maintaining constant pressure on the brake. The wheels smoked, inches from the edge, and the smell of scorched wood rose up through the dust. If they went over they’d never survive.

The scenery no longer existed except as a peripheral blur. The afternoon’s descent, at two miles an hour, took nearly six hours. Sweating and brutally tired, he fought the wagon down at last, bringing them into a glade by the fast-flowing Merced. There he looked up.

“God above,” he whispered. He wondered if this was how a man felt in biblical times when the Almighty spoke to him in the wilderness.

The sun speared out of the west, low now, lighting peaks and swathes of forest where it touched, leaving dark-blue shade where it did not. They were deep in the glacial valley riven by the white water of the river. Stupendous rock formations towered on the valley’s flanks. “That’s El Capitan—twice the size of Gibraltar—it goes up three thousand feet from the valley floor. Over there are the Cathedral Rocks and at the far end, Half Dome. The falls of the Yosemite are there on the left, Bridalveil on the right—they’re flowing full now because it’s spring.” He watched the awesome waterfalls plunge down in clouds of sunlit mist. Their roar was constant, primitive; something stirred in his loins again.

Nellie hugged herself. “Did you ever see its like? I’m glad I’m the one showing it to you for the first time.”

“So am I.” He put one arm around her and kissed her. She slid her arms beneath his and hugged him, giving a little groan of pleasure.

A minute later, patting her hair, then her pink cheek, she whispered, “That’s dangerous. I think you’d better drive on.”

The valley was seven miles long, a mile wide. Beyond the terminal moraine where the last glaciers had stopped twenty thousand years before, the Merced changed to a river of placid green pools and sandbars. They avoided the small raw-frame hotels already busy with a few tourists who sat on the porches in the twilight and made camp in a meadow near thickets of cottonwoods and alders. The trees tossed in a cool wind, their leaves hissing. Nellie could hardly stop showing him things: mistletoe clusters high in the black oak trees, granite lichen darkly staining the great rock formations, glittering eyes that regarded them from the woods.

“Grizzly bear,” she whispered. “If one ever comes for food, don’t argue—let him have it.”

The blazing eyes vanished.

While the light lingered, Nellie ran out among the red columbines and golden poppies in the meadow and began to dance. She was like a sprite, kicking her bare feet high. Mack clapped his hands to keep time. Her face grew flushed and finally, laughing, she collapsed against him. He held her longer than necessary. She pressed his strong arm with her palm and drew away reluctantly.

The campfire flickered, slices of salt beef sizzling in a heavy iron skillet that Mack held in his gloved hand. He liked the skillet’s feel and the smell of the meat.

Standing near him, Nellie said, “You really do have a talent for that. You’d make a fine chef for the Palace Hotel.”

“Not enough money in it,” he joked. “I enjoy cooking. Sometimes it seems like woman’s work, though.”

“Mr. Chance, you have very conventional, not to say primitive, attitudes about male and female roles.”

“Seems to me that most of the world shares my—”

A halloo interrupted him. Through the dusky meadow, a tall wiry man with nondescript clothes and a knapsack strode toward them. Hair hung to his shoulders and his gray beard was long and thick enough to shelter more than one bird’s nest. Nellie waved and started to move toward him.

“You know that man? He looks like a tramp.”

“He is, in a way. It’s my friend John Muir. I didn’t know he was up here.”

After Nellie and Muir had embraced warmly, Mack shook Muir’s hand, which was brown and strong. He looked about fifty and his eyes were a startling blue. “Pleased to know you,” Muir said. It came out “
know ye
”; he spoke with more than a trace of a Scot’s burr.

“Can you stay the night, John?”

“Aye.” Muir flung his knapsack down, then his brown sugar-loaf hat. “There are tourists here a’ready.”

She nodded.

Mack said, “Anyone would want to see this place.”

“Aye, and we’ve had our share of visitors since I first came upon the Valley in 18 and 68. I met Jessie Fremont up here, and Susan Anthony.”

“Bierstadt painted Yosemite,” Nellie said. “Mark Hopkins came before he died: Emerson, and Barnum…it’s a long list.”

Muir sat down and leaned back on both hands, the fire deepening the ruddiness of his weathered skin. “Sometimes the visitors forget to respect what God and nature put here. If enough of them do it, d’ye ken, there’ll be nothing left for the next generations.”

“John is a staunch protector of the valley,” Nellie said.

Muir sighed. “It’s a fight. Never ending.” He explained to Mack that in 1864, Lincoln, with great foresight, had deeded Yosemite and a nearby stand of big sequoias called the Mariposa Grove to the state of California. “So it’s a protected preserve. But the protection’s not strong enough. We have jackleg lumbermen up here. And the damned sheep. A quarter million in the high pastures last summer. They leave no grass or foliage; they strip the earth. I herded sheep up here myself until I saw the damage it did.”

Mack offered the salt beef. Muir picked up two pieces for his tin plate. “How would you protect the valley, then?”

“Put it under the Interior Department. Name it a national park, like Yellowstone. Control the tourists, and sequester all these natural treasures so the damned rapacious exploiters can’t get to ’em.”

“But look, sir, there are valuable resources up here. I’ve been told that the mountain snowpack could irrigate the whole Central Valley—maybe even provide water for the coastal cities, if pipelines were built.”

“Pipelines. Great God, son, what else would you allow?”

The scorn irked Mack. “What’s wrong with the idea? Water from up here could make the whole state bloom.”

“That idea is hateful,” Muir said. “If you allow a little to be despoiled, all will be despoiled eventually. Nellie my lass, your friend seems to be one of those apostles of progress who mean to reduce this place to a private preserve for profit.”

“I don’t share his ideas, John.”

Mack dropped his plate with a clatter. “And dammit, that isn’t what I said.”

“I am opposed to any development that interferes with the ordered state of nature,” Muir declared.

“So am I,” Nellie said.

“Are you required to talk that way to play the role of independent female?” Mack snapped at her.

“You don’t like that role, Mr. Chance?”

“Not much.”

“Well, that just demonstrates how perfectly stu—” She bit it off, then whirled away toward the trees to compose herself. Mack glowered at the fire.

Muir packed his old pipe with tobacco and lit it with a twig from the fire. “I did na’ mean to start a row in this camp. A man’s entitled to honest views. It’s just that I am passionately opposed to the one you expressed, sir.”

“I don’t know that I believe every word myself. I’m new to California. Trying to puzzle things out.”

Muir’s blue eyes said he’d try to be tolerant, which undoubtedly meant giving Mack a few more years to discover his error and mend his ways.

In ten minutes Nellie was back. “I didn’t mean to lose my temper.”

“Nor I.”

Somehow, though, the evening was spoiled, and the travelers passed the rest of it with little conversation and long moody silences.

Next morning, in bright sunshine, everyone seemed refreshed and forgiving, though Mack felt that forgiving spirit the least. Muir boiled the coffee while Mack fried bacon and Nellie sliced the sourdough and browned it over their fire. Muir freely answered Mack’s questions about himself. He’d been born in Dunbar, Scotland, and raised by his immigrant father in Wisconsin. He’d refused to fight in the Civil War on principle; no matter how righteous the cause, he said, war was an abomination.

“I’ve been a bit of everything, Mr. Chance. A tramp, a guide, a sheepherder, a worker in a carriage-parts factory in Indianapolis. Very fine position, that was. But the outdoors kept calling to me. Now I’m a rancher down below, and husband to my Louise and father to my Wanda and my Helen. But my lassie sets me free to roam because she knows I must.” He checked the coffee, then began to fill a new pipe. “Lately I’ve begun to write articles, and lecture some. Trying to protect places such as this.”

While they breakfasted, a great prong-horned elk stepped majestically into the meadow. It had been there only a few moments when a Yosemite hotel stage, an open wagon with canvas top, wheeled into view. On the benches, a gaggle of tourists shouted and pointed. One, drinking from a bottle at this early hour, drained and then flung it. The three at the breakfast fire clearly heard me bottle break on a rock, and me elk bounded away out of sight.

“Y’see the cause of my concern, laddie,” Muir said without reproof. Mack had no chance to answer, because one of the sightseers tossed a cigar away as the stage rolled on. Muir leaped up and dashed into the meadow. When he reached the spot where the cigar had fallen, sending up a blue trail, he stamped hard and shouted after the stage. “Stay out of this place if ye can’t treat it with respect. Any fool can cut down or burn down a tree, but it takes the Almighty years to make one to replace it.”

The shouted sermon went unheard. Laughter drifted from the tan dust cloud hiding the stage, and Muir trudged back.

“More and more people all the time,” he said unhappily. “I know we canna set ourselves above others, deciding who is fit to view these wonders and who is not. We canna stop a tidal wave. But we must contain it. Most particularly here. I tell you this. I’ve tramped the lovely savannas of the Carolinas, and dipped in the blue-green seas of the Floridas. I’ve climbed Shasta, and come as the first white man into a bay of glaciers, up Alaska way, as cold and quiet as they were in the morning of time. I have seen no place—no place—that is the match of this valley of the Yosemite. It is one of God’s crown jewels. That is why I want the national park—and also an organization of dedicated folk who will fight for every wilderness, but especially this one.” He slapped his old sugar-loaf hat against his pants. “Would such an organization include you, sir?”

Mack stood up to those fierce blue eyes. “It might. That’s the best I can promise.”

“Fair enough.” But Muir sounded disappointed. “Nellie, I must go. I’m hiking up to the high country to camp and climb and think. Maybe sketch and write a little too. I shall look you up next time I’m in the City.”

“Do, John. I want to join that organization.”

“Aye. Thought you would.” He kissed her cheek, slung his knapsack on his back, and walked away briskly into the brilliant light of the valley.

Nellie sighed. “I really didn’t mean to quarrel with you.”

He kept a truculent silence.

“Mack, please. We can differ and be friends.”

“Not if honest thoughts are somehow made…criminal.”