Natural Beauty, and Our Problem Seeing it

Day two started at about 5:00am. I read some of the gospel of John, packed my duffle and hit the road. (Still in California)

140 runs east out of Merced. For a good ways, the road is straight with small mesas dotting the country. As the morning light rose over the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, the foothills began to glow. The grasses of the fields I was riding past turned golden, and, warmed by the sun, gave off an earthy smell.

I stopped along the road to take some pictures and the car behind me crept close as I slowed. As the driver pulled around, he blew his horn and laid heavy on the gas. I wondered how you could possibly be so impatient in a place so tranquil. I suppose that in an environment like that, a man will become used to, or immune to, the peace around him. I was taking pictures and watching the cars race by at speeds well in excess of the speed limit and wondered at them.

Then I remembered: my father grew up in northern New Jersey and never went to the stature of liberty. I live in Auburn and the only times I go see the Auburn Tigers play football is when I am working in the concession stand during the game. How many things of wonder do we miss just because we have become so accustomed to them?

Stowing the camera, I got on the bike and headed east towards the looming mountains. I rolled into Mariposa at 7:00 am. Mariposa is a homey little mountain village. It reminded me a great deal of the mountain towns nestled in the Colorado Rockies. There were little shops with balconies hanging over the sidewalks along a main street. People were beginning to open their shops and put items for sale out on the walks.

I had stowed my gloves in the bottom of my duffle which was cinched down so tightly that I opted to buy gloves instead of spend 30 minutes rooting through all my stuff. I stopped at a little hardware shop in downtown. The man in the store was still opening up and the people who ran the registers were not in yet, but I had cash, so he sold me some leather work gloves.

I had not taken any caffeine in more than 24 hours because of the fear of dehydration in the desert. As a result, I had a splendid headache. I went to a CVS, but they didn’t open for another 30 minutes… thinking I could get some aspirin later; I got on the bike and rode on.

140 was an awesome road. It was hilly and snaked its way along the edges of the mountains. At one point you could see cars winding down to the valley floor maybe 5 miles away. As I rode along, the cars became bunched up. At one point there was a rock slide which covered the road to Yosemite. There is an old railroad grade on the other side of the stream, which flows out of Yosemite Park. Engineers had built a single lane bridge to cross the stream. A temporary one way road utilized the railroad grade, then another temporary bridge which crossed back after the slide. We had to wait about 10 to 15 minutes for a traffic light to change to allow us to cross. I turned off the ignition on the bike while people got out of their cars and a small community developed. The man behind me was going into the park to climb and the couple in front was French and were touring the park for 2 weeks.

There were some young men who stayed pretty close to their car and were playing hip hop pretty loud. The sound of the heavy bass and the angry tone of the rapper seemed out of touch with the surroundings. They stayed to themselves and didn’t mix very well.

The light cleared and we got back to our rides and headed on.

As I rode along the railroad grade, I looked over at the rock slide. I am very familiar with earth moving work and I was impressed with the slide. It was probably 300 yards of buried road with the top of the slide being at least 300 feet above the road surface. The slide was all loose rock, so shoveling out from the bottom would bring a new slide down on the operator. The finality of nature is undeniable… the road was closed.

Finally, I was waiting in the line at the gate for Yosemite National Park. It felt surreal to actually be there, but anti-climatic to just buy a ticket and go in. The road slanted slightly down to the ranger hut, so I turned off the bike and let her roll to the gate and fired her up after I had a ticket in hand.

There is a parking area right inside the gates for Yosemite. They have restrooms and potable water. I pulled into the parking lot and parked in a little non-spot at the point furthest from the rest rooms right in front of a water spigot. I stretched my legs and walked out to the stream to feel the cool air coming off of the water and smell the freshness of clean mountain melt-off. I was paying attention to the people around me and was struck by the number of people who did not use English as their primary language. French seemed to be the prevalent language.

I stood there, beside the bike, and just breathed in deep. Since I left Alabama, I was struck by the pervasive smell of each area. I remember the first time I landed in Japan. My first thought was, “Woah! What is that smell?!” I got on a bus with 40 other GI’s and rode to the base I was going to be stationed at in Korea We got to the base itself and I crashed on my new bunk. A cleaning lady woke me up to warn me that I was going to be late to my first briefing. My thought, as she was leaned over me and talking to me, was that I had just met the perfect “scratch-n-sniff” candidate for the poster child of halitosis.

I know that sounds awful, but you have to have that woman’s mouth as close to your nose as I did before you judge. I actually got to know here pretty well. After we were better acquainted, I asked her about the smells. Koreans had an odor. It is the result of their diet which is heavy with fish and kimchi. Kimchi is, basically, spicey sour kraut. She told me that to her, Americans smell like sour milk.

Hmmmm

All this to say, I have become aware of the colloquial smells. At the main gate there was the smells from pine and cypress and eucalyptus trees and the stream. Yes, water has a smell. Fast moving water gives off this clean smell mixed with the odor of the wet rock and the fringe of leaf mulch along its edges. Overall, the entrance hinted of the pure nature just out of reach. It was a wonderful place to be, right on the edge of Yosemite.

I headed into the park. I stopped at the meadow, at El Capitan, Yosemite falls, the Village, and circled around to the north drive. I noticed that people were all content to listen, and smell and look. The hip hop was gone, along with all music. It was like we all knew that Nature trumps all in this place. There were the sounds of laughing, and talking, and the sound of the vehicles moving through the valley, but the honking and road rage and the bustle of the commute were gone.

Yosemite struck me as the ideal of nature. I told someone there that it’s like we have a genetic memory of Eden, and this is one of the places on Earth that still has a tenuous hold on the pure beauty of creation unspoiled. Even children seemed to know they were in a different kind of place.

Even the light is different in Yosemite. It seems cleaner, if light can be cleaner or dirtier, but there you have it, clean light. Maybe it’s because of the greens and grays all around you mixed with the yellows of wild flowers and the startlingly blue sky. Maybe it’s because the land is higher and has pushed itself up over the dust and grime of fossil fuels and what creatures have stirred up so that the light from the sun isn’t tinged with dirt. Whatever the reason, the blues of water were painfully blue. The greens of the grass and trees were so green you could feel the color touching you. I walked along the path around the meadow near Yosemite Falls and lay down just off the trail and looked straight up to a sky framed by dark green trees, the cold gray of granite and the white falls of Yosemite.

I wanted to stay and just drink it all in, but I had 2700 miles to go. I got back on “Betts” (the blue bike) and moved her across the bridge and onto the north drive.

As I was tooling through the turns on the north drive, I was following close to a car ahead. I felt bad because the driver slowed down and waved me through. I realized I was rushing him and he wanted to drink it all in. As I passed, I glanced over and we shared a moment when I recognized him as the man who blared his horn and made a dramatic turn and acceleration around me just a few hours before. We both smiled embarrassed grins, each reprimanded for our failure to drink in the greatness around us.

This little encounter brought a realization to me: how many times am I judging a person for what they have just done when either I have already done the same thing, or I am just about to do the same deed myself.

I knew a man who was a licensed professional. I had worked with him for a year or so and had known him for many years. I knew he had a drinking problem… actually he would have disagreed about the problem part, he just drank, a lot. I picked up the paper one morning and was shocked to see his picture in the news. He had been arrested for molesting a child. Turns out it was one of his daughters he had been molesting.

He lost his professional license and we bought out his company. As I was picking up equipment at his old office, his business associate was vehemently accusing this man, and I was pretty much going along, then I asked him about a printer.

“sure,” he said, “it’s a great printer. Look at this.”

He proceeded to show me the life-size centerfold print-out on the back of a door. I was about to remark that the moral distance between this man and the one in prison was not that great, but I knew it would only produce an argument with no profitable outcome.

Here is the deal, though, we are adept at setting up a moral ladder to assuage our guilt. Even in prison, the man convicted of rape is the worst offender. The one guilty of child molestation is the worst offender of the rapists. The parental molester is the worst of the molesters. A whole segment of society, known for lawlessness, enforces their own morality with, often, fatal brutality. We cannot escape morality, even in prison.

As a Christian I tend to think that I can sit proud on top of the morality heap, but deep down I know I don’t deserve to be proud at all. Read the Sermon on the Mount and see if you think you can congratulate yourself on being better than everyone else.