Yo-se-mightily Impressive, but not for dogs

Opening shot (nothing to do with the majority of the post, but since it was the impetus for writing today, I feel honor-bound to include it):

Our house is directly behind a large Baptist church, the kind that eventually spawn food courts and become more like God malls than houses of worship, and evidently Monday is "Hour-long Splitting Howl Practice" for infants. The experience of sitting in my backyard with a cup of tea and a New Yorker, trying to be all urbane and up on politics, was so thoroughly hijacked just now that I felt like I had no choice but to come in and waste some bandwith on it. I mean, I recognize that they're babies and lack perspective, but what could possibly be so awful that you have to scream continually about it for-- and I'm not exaggerating-- one hour? And as a baby's caretaker, what level of catatonia have you reached that you can stand that? Is something wrong? Or is this just further proof that I am in no way ready to be a parent and won't be for at least another decade?

OK, done. On to the real thing.

This weekend, Pants and I went to Yosemite and it was every bit the living-in-a-screensaver experience I had imagined.



This was the view directly outside of a huge, amber-lit tunnel that plows through a mountain side as you head down into Yosemite Valley. As soon as the tunnel ends, people regularly slam on their brakes and yell expletives in their respective languages at the shock of the view, so there is a nice big parking lot to veer into while you do this.

We met a nice lady there with a golden retreiver. Both she and the dog wore big poofy pantaloons-- hers were Patagonia, the dog's natural-- and we took this as a good sign that dog-friendly fun would ensue. Sadly, this was not the case. Yosemite hates dogs, and for Pants and I, whose devotion to Abby I suspect is the source of many jokes behind our backs, the weekend brought on a moral crisis.

"Aren't dogs allowed on any of the trails?" I asked of one leather-tanned, blissed out female rangers. Wide-eyed and semi-offended, she answered, "Certainly not. They're predators!" "Even if they're on a leash? The website seemed to say they were..." "Forget it. We do have kennels though, if you walk to the horse stables."

I took our leashed predator (who gives high-fives and plays dead) to the kennels only to learn that they didn't open for another two weeks. After much grim-faced charging through crowded parking lots we finally realized our options were to either go back home or leave Abby in the camper part of the truck bed. We felt like the world's biggest assholes and Abby seconded that notion by barking forlornly at our retreating backs.



The first day, we did a 7-mile hike in to see the grove of giant sequoias. The trees themselves were humbling and hard to imagine. When you look at something 800 years old and think back to what the state of Western medicine was at the time this tree was young ("we'll just have to bleeeeed you a little!"), you really start to feel like just another fruit fly whining in the margins.



My favorite things about the sequoias were their bases. They have a way of splitting up the sides, whether from the heat of forest fires or just some condition of growth like the tree version of stretch marks, and the effect is of a small darkened stage flanked by scrolling wooden curtains.



We started out in late afternoon and saw very few people on the hike, which made the view from the top that much more religious for its solitude.



On the second day we hiked to the top of Nevada Falls, which was like having someone take an acid-soaked sledgehammer to my quads and calves but at the same time showing me views so beautiful that I was grateful for the pain. The trail to Nevada Falls stops off first at Vernal Falls, and is called the Mist Trail because you get soaked in rainbow-making waterfall spray almost the whole way up. It's a popular trail and whole Indian families, even the grumbling ancient matriarchs in saris and Keds make the trip.



After Vernal Falls, the crowd thins significantly and the percentage of brand name outdoor gear peaks sharply. Clearly, these are the Serious Hikers, the chosen few who will feast lustily on the far more exclusive views, made all the more impressive by the lasting tendon damage incurred to get there. At least, that's the vibe I picked up on as I wheezed and grunted my way to the top. At one particularly hairy switchback we encountered an older couple, the wife crumpled off the side of the rocky trail, her head on her crossed arms, her braced knee askew, panting in a state of near-total surrender. Her ropy husband stood above her, higher in the switchback with his hands planted on his hips, saying tightly, "Just a little bit longer, Nora." Maybe it was just me reading way too much into snippets of strangers' lives once again, but I felt like kneeing the guy in the nuts.

At the top of Nevada Falls, we soaked our feet in the clear green water and then laid out on a flat, moon-like expanse of granite for a short nap that got longer in ten-minute increments each time Pants' watch alarm beeped. There was no discussion about this, and after three extensions we both sat up refreshed. Getting to the top of a mountain is a great thing, but napping for the perfect amount of time once you're there is on a separate, higher plane.

And can I just rhapsodize about descents for a moment? There's nothing like the semi-controlled spastic ragdoll gait of a descent whose ascent nearly made you doubt your faith in God. It's almost a dance, a giddy, knee-destroying dance, that takes about of quarter of the time of the ascent, and for this one it was not uncommon to see people flat out running it in the safer places, their arms flapping in all directions and their feet slapping the rocky trail. Occasionally some mom would bark at her kid to slow down so he wouldn't hit a gravel patch and roll like a bowling ball all the way down, but then another adult would crash by doing exactly that and apparently loving it.

The whole trip was a much needed break from real life, and Pants took on his traditional role of fire wizard and camp gourmet, conjuring impossible luxuries from the bare earth and a few handily packed, collapsible gadgets from REI. Easily the best combination was our Saturday night meal, which came on the heels of the grueling falls hike: jambalaya with spicy sausage, Jack Daniels and coke, and then later, s'mores. I slept like a rock, like the dead, like a log, like a baby: a dead baby fashioned from petrified wood. I slept under a blazing blanket of stars next to a glass-clear river, and woke up feeling that even though I'd been rolled through a pasta press, I was clean and new and totally relaxed. . .

which is handy, since we've agreed that the home coffers are dangerously low and I need to find work. So much for my experimental hausfrau stage. Subsequent blog posts are likely to be heavy on the resume-related angst. Be forewarned.

Waiting for FedEx

Somewhere in a factory, someone is packing up my new Mac and getting ready to FedEx it to me. Its tender little circuits are being lovingly sealed away in classy, minimalistic bubble wrap, and its sleek, almost organic-looking shell is closed like a secret, waiting for me. Today, maybe tomorrow, maybe (God!) the next day, the delivery guy who's missing his left hand (but is somehow able to carry human-sized boxes *and* his little beeping signature pad) will pull up in front of my house and glance awkwardly at me when I throw open the front door before he's even pulled to a complete stop, and then meet him at the curb, bouncing back and forth on the balls of my feet. Until then, I'm going to wait in my house like one of those trap door spiders lest I miss his arrival and fail to provide the signature which will release My Mac to me.

I hope I can muster as much excitement when my first child is born. I may have to fake it.

The weekend passed fairly uneventfully. Pants and I and three of his buddies went to a triple A ballgame in Fresno. It was cold and the mascot, a Grizzly, allegedly, gyrated furiously in his dusty costume. One of Pants's friends is a baseball fanatic, but this only meant that he was a much louder heckler than anyone else. When I used to go to Astros games with my dad, a true fanatic, I'd leave knowing the family and medical histories of individual players, their seething personal rivalries, but M.'s contribution stopped at a folksy catalogue of pitching flaws delivered at high volume.

Fresno's Chukchansi Stadium, according to the teenager taking ticket stubs, is named after a casino. Whether that casino takes its name from a Native American tribe whose people once ruled the land with fearsome warriors or peaceful commerce or some combination of the two, we'll never know. Just beyond the right field fence, old downtown buildings, some with the names of bygone banks still sketched out against the skyline in iron letters, peer down. Back behind left field, the train station still has an open line and train whistles blot out the at-bat snippets of Nirvana and Marilyn Manson the players have chosen to introduce themselves. Center field is dominated by a massive electronic scoreboard/television/billboard, a short grass berm, and then a clear path of darkening sky beyond.

After the game (the Grizzlies beat the 51's handily) the stadium had a fireworks display that ended in a breathtaking finale given its small scale. It surprised laughter and yells out of me, and I imagined Fresno's homeless population, many of whom seem to live in the forested city pavilion a block from the stadium, looking up through the shadows of the trees at the exploding lights and wondering, like me, "Why tonight?" Oh well, why not? Maybe Chukchansi is just a casino.

The next day Pants and I took an evening walk to take the head of steam off the dog, who had been stalking around the house wide-eyed and grumbling all afternoon. We took her to a park downtown and made her run huge geometric paths, the greatest possible distance from point A (us) to point B (the ball), that space allowed. Two little boys came over and wanted to throw the ball for her, and she cowered and barked before finally relenting and chasing their short throws only to toss the ball back at them from ten feet away. They quickly lost interest and focused instead on a fallen nest of baby birds.

"This one needs help!" one of them shouted at me. I went over to look. One of the thirty-foot palms had dropped an armful's worth of nest, and five chicks, each as big across as my palm and covered in gray down with the black stubs of beginner feathers sprouting along their backs, lay scattered across the grass. "This one's still alive," one of the boys said, pointing to a chick who wobbled weakly on his side, "We have to help him."

I felt like a mom because I had to disappoint him. "I don't think he's going to make it, buddy. This happens sometimes." I squatted down next to them and held the kid's hand back when he reached out to touch the bird. "Probably shouldn't touch him." "Germs?" "Yeah." We stared and I wondered what to say. I pointed out what beginner feathers looked like, and described what I'd learned from David Attenborough about why baby birds have such pronounced, fleshy sides to their mouths. "It's so their moms can see where to put the food."

After a while the two boys stood up. "I have to go home now," one of them said to me, and then ran off. The other, the one who hadn't said anything at all the whole time, lingered. I started over to join Pants, who was standing over where Abby had finally collapsed in ecstasy, her tongue bright red and scrolling in and out of her mouth with her panting. I thought about telling the boy again not to touch the dying chick, but instead I said, "It'll be OK," and walked off, feeling thoroughly adult, and thoroughly weird in how automatic and obligatory it felt to say something like that.

Trucks keep stopping outside, and they keep not being the FedEx guy.

R.V. People

We went south for Thanksgiving, as in ten-minutes-from-the-border south, to camp on the beach, surf, and fry a turkey-- three things which, in the wrong combination and with too much alcohol involved, could have resulted in sand fleas, cracked ribs, and full-body third-degree burns. Thankfully, nothing of the sort happened and I was physically comfortable the whole time.

To understand how remarkable this is, we need to step back, briefly, to one of my first outings with my husband (then boyfriend) three years ago. We were going to go camping in Oklahoma in late November. (I'd never been camping because technically, spending the night in your car sleeping off 6 Cuba Libres does not count.)

We left Austin at around 4:00 in the afternoon and pulled into our campsite in the Ouachita National Forest at 11:30. It was achingly cold, sleeting, and way too Blair Witch out there for me, so I figured I'd wait out the ensuing reality check in the car with the heater running. In less than fifteen minutes though, my husband managed to conjure fire from freezing, soaked earth, and without the aid of my old standby, half a gallon of gasoline splashed near a lit match. This was an actual campfire, and its golden light enticed me out of the car and into a tent where I shivered vigorously in the fetal position until morning. Once a cold like that gets into your bones, it quickly finds its way into your soul and carves a big frowny face there. I was so actively miserable for the next three days that my bowels shut down in protest.

So this is what I pictured when I heard "camping on the beach this Thanksgiving": bitter cold, slate grey sky, the jock-strap stink of most of the Texas coast, and sand in my molars and underwear for five days as I huddle in the tent with Power Bars and a bottle of whiskey. The group of people we were going with, however, balanced out the horror of this scenario and I packed willingly and even cheerfully, looking forward to some sorely needed non-military-wife female bonding and all around interesting conversation.

I got that, but in addition, I also got this: glass-clear water dotted with schools of tiny silver fish, warm breezes and slow tangerine-tinted sunsets, a bungalow with a hot shower (praise God) and a mini fridge, and glorious, edible food. I even surfed a little, if getting up on my knees on the board and giggling a lot, then paddling back to repeat, count as surfing. It was beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that people from the northern states and Canada are evidently willing to live half the year in gas-guzzling port-a-johns with little patches of astro-turf laid out as lawns just to be near it. That's right: we were nestled right in front of a small community of R.V. people.

I have nothing against R.V. people. In fact, if I lived in a place where being "snowed in" were even a remote possibility, or where I had to chip away the block of ice covering my windshield every morning before driving to work, I'd probably consider dropping about a year's salary on a tinier, crappier version of my own house and following the nearest highway south until I hit gulf.

But the lifestyle still puzzles me. Privacy, for instance. R.V. people must hear everything through those aluminum walls-- fights, copulation, oboe practice-- and I would imagine that rumors and gossip must spread like grass fires. Violations of personal space must be big too, not only with the person or people who share an R.V. but also with their neighbors. One man's Tejano music is another's rage-inducing audio-assault, and perhaps not everyone is comfortable seeing Mr. So-and-so's holey underwear hung to dry only inches from their breakfast room window. I know from experience that there's a certain square footage needed in a living space, particularly a kitchen, to keep me from repeatedly elbowing, tripping over, and running smack into my husband, and I'm pretty sure they don't make R.V.s that big.

Probably the biggest thing that puzzles me about R.V. people are R.V. pets. They seemed to serve some vital purpose because nearly every R.V. had one, and sometimes two or three. It seems counter intuitive to me that in order to make living in a tiny aluminum house on wheels better, one must add yet another living being, but after several days of observation I figured it out. Sure, there's the companionship level on which every pet is worth its weight in gold-- they don't argue or tell long-winded stories or ask if you've gained weight, and often all they have to do is come lay their chin on your lap and look up at you to make you feel like a worthwhile human being. But the real value of an R.V. pet is their inability to shit in a human toilet. The routine of seeing to an R.V. pet's daily shitting needs provides structure to the day, exercise for all involved, an excuse to meet other R.V. people and pets, and a brief period of separation for human occupants sharing an R.V. "Guess what I saw when I took Wendell out for a shit this morning?" they can say to each other, "Those people from North Dakota throwing out a whole frozen turkey!"

Our little party made the acquaintance of several delightful R.V. pets and their respective people. One was a tubby yellow lab in the next bungalow over (so not technically an R.V. pet, but close), whose name was something in French that none of us caught. Her people were from Quebec and planned on staying put until April, which did nothing for my desire to someday visit Quebec. They also had a tiny, blue-eyed, white kitten who was set permanently on "vibrate," and who they'd picked up at a gas station somewhere up north. Early on the first morning, my husband and I also met a lady down on the beach who'd brought her giant scarlet macaw, who was huddled up close against her ear, digging his massive gray claws into her shoulder and eyeing the waves with uncertainty. Every morning and every evening, a dapper old man would putter around the perimeter of the park on his scooter with a milk crate strapped to the back, in which a perky-eared, fluffy little fox-like dog rode. My favorite, though, was Sam.

Sam was a stately old golden retriever who showed up with a pack of bikers late on the last evening. He was trim and well groomed, and carried himself with an understated dignity that made up for the wretched musical taste of his people. Throughout the night, we'd see Sam trot back and forth, always quietly focused on some vaguely pleasing errand. The next morning, as we were packing and slowly coming to terms with our various treks back to reality, I caught sight of the beginning of Sam's morning routine. His person was a graying biker with a handlebar mustache and a leather vest who apparently savored his morning back stretches and jumbo mug of propane-brewed coffee. He and Sam surveyed the early morning sky together, and then Sam rolled over on his back and did something I've only seen other golden retrievers do-- he began a vigorous and joyful bicycling motion with his back legs while whipping his head from side to side, making huge writhing dog commas in the prickly grass. Bliss.

And now, all too early, it's over and we're back in the tiny, tiny town. The semester's awkward decrescendo has begun, only to make room for the ensuing blare of Christmas' giant extended commercial, which almost succeeds every year in drowning out the melody of time off work with the family. It feels weird to have totally cheated the season in this far away corner of far-south Texas, bobbing on a glistening waxed board between temperate blue waves, slowly getting sunburned and looking forward to a night outside watching the stars with a beer in hand. Maybe that image alone will be enough to turn me into an R.V. person when I'm finally old enough and tired enough to really need and afford a few months in the sun.