Friday, September 25, 2009

Merced River
(Part Three)

Downriver to the west, the sun sinks behind a canyon wall. Across the rapids to the north, cottonwoods rain autumn gold on the scant remains of the Yosemite Valley Railroad, a railroad defunct since 1945 when the sugar pine groves that once lined both sides of the Merced were completely logged. Jim hollers from the campground that we’ll have near-freezing temperatures tonight; it’s time to pitch my tent. He announces he’ll sleep inside his truck tonight instead of pitching a tent, ostensibly to save time when we decide to pack up, but I know he’s determined to help me learn how to feel comfortable camping solo: his agenda, not mine. This is not his first attempt. He tried it in 1993 when we backpacked in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula after Labor Day. Both my knees swelled so that I couldn’t bend them after a treacherous descent down from Grand Pass into Cameron Basin. No choice for me but to recuperate in a mountain meadow while he disappeared on day hikes into the distant peaks, heading for Deception Creek and the trails we couldn’t experience together. Not another hiker within view, not one ranger station still open. I didn’t talk to him for six months after that adventure.

I pitch my feather-weight blue Sierra Design tent all by its lonesome out in the middle of the deserted camp ring with Jim’s truck a good thirty yards away, plenty of room for carnivore or homo sapien mischief in the gathering darkness. I can’t ignore the gut feeling that I’m the one who should be sleeping in the truck and Jim in the tent, a throw-back to the not-so-distant past of my childhood when chivalrous men were expected to protect their women at all cost. But he’s not my man and I’m not his woman and El Rio de Nuestra SeƱora de la Merced splashes along past us on its own journey.

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