What’s This About Anyhow?
July 7th, 2007What’s it about? You’re obviously not yet a friend and you’re not a family member, or you wouldn’t have to ask.
Sue, thoughtfully, gave me a blank Journal as part of my going away gift. Inside, she inscribed, “To Sunny, on the occasion of her pilgrimage home.” So maybe it’s about my pilgrimage home, or maybe it’s just about my desire to prove that you can go home again, but probably it’s about the fact that I still love California and was reminded fairly recently of how much I missed it. It is about a cross-country trip, what inspired me to make the trip, the roadblocks that I chose to ignore, what happened along the way, and what has happened since I hit the road.
Background
I was born in Hollywood, California… if such a place really exists! Officially, it was Los Angeles, but the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital (now Cedars-Sinai) was in Hollywood. And that’s about my only claim to fame! Though I spent a large part of my very earliest years in Fresno with my grandpa and grandma, then spent summers and holidays with my aunt, uncle, and cousins, we lived in Burbank until I was 13 or 14 years old.
My mother was transferred from the Burbank office of the State of California Department of Employment to the Fresno office. I finished junior high school here in Fresno (Yosemite Junior High), and attended and graduated from Bullard High School.
Some time after getting my first car (a 1956 Pontiac Fire Chief with apricot and white exterior and matching leather upholstery), mom managed to get me a job working weekends in Yosemite Valley. That was fun that most kids, then or now, won’t have the privilege of experiencing. But I will be forever grateful for my experience. My family had been in love with Yosemite since long before I came along, and that passion was certainly instilled in me.
Just getting there was an adventure. I don’t remember too much about the trips in good weather. But I do remember many trips in our lovely Central Valley pea soup fog! I usually left Fresno about 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. On foggy days, until I got up into the hills a bit, I drove at about 20 mph, driver side window open, with my head hanging out so I could see the white line and avoid going over a cliff along the way (although there aren’t any cliffs between Fresno and the foothills… more like the occasional ditch). Part of the goal was, of course, to get there early enough to get my free breakfast at the lodge and be able to report to work on time. The other part: to get to the gates before the rangers got there so I wouldn’t have to pay to get into the park to go to work. They probably wouldn’t have charged me anyhow, but it felt good to think I might be getting away with something.
I can’t really tell you if those breakfasts were really as spectacular as they seemed to me, or if decent restaurant bacon, sausage, eggs, hash browns, etc. simply tasted better because I was in Yosemite on a crisp, cool mountain morning, in a place I loved so much, and was getting paid for being there. Doesn’t matter! It provided me with tasty memories for the next … well… many years!
The work was somewhat less inspiring, but not so bad, all things considered. I cleaned hotel rooms in the lodge! Saturday nights, we partied with the S.O.B.s (the Standard Oil Boys; there was at least one gas station in Yosemite Valley in those days) down on the river. Getting to the beach wasn’t a problem, even though the dirt road was narrow and lined with, well, a whole forest full of trees. But for some reason, by the time I left the party to go back to the dorm after the party, those trees became downright vicious! They actually tried to attack my car and it took some pretty fancy 17 year old driving to make it through without damaging the Chief or myself.
Okay, I was a pretty inexperienced drinker and a really cheap drunk. A couple of beers at around 3,200 feet was all it took! But I made it through and had a great deal of fun in the process! Added to the family fun on our frequent trips to play in the park, Yosemite was a firmly engrained part of my culture. And it was, many, many years later, one of the primary things that called me home to California.
Coming next… My first return visit to Yosemite in, October 2004.
July 9th, 2007 at 7:40 am
I have read some of John Muir’s diaries about his experience in discovering and mappiing Yosemite, and of the many thousands who have hiked through on the John Muir trail. I have only driven in — by car and mortorcycle, on the latter at the end of winter when there weren’t 10,00 cars and buses, and the air was sweet. Also worked a conference at the Yosemite Lodge, and woke middle of the night to find a large raccoon on the table by the window raiding the fruit basket my client had provided. I snapped on my ever-present flashlight, and the ‘coon just looked at me with great indifference, pulled a banana out of the basket, tucked in under his left "arm," and three-legged it to the window and out. I closed the window, of course, and listened with amusement as others talked of missing fruit when we met for breakfast. Truly, a magic place, probably more so when we both were younger! Hugs! w
April 3rd, 2008 at 8:30 am
This is 100% real. I’m so glad that internet has people, who write so wonderful, and who don’t lie online.