The Voice of One Crying Out of the Wilderness

Were you unwise enough to be in the gentlemen's restroom at the Strawberry Lodge, Strawberry CA, last weekend, you might have been somewhat puzzled if not entirely discombobulated. There you would have witnessed a bedraggled middle aged man muttering endearments and weeping unashamedly as he cast loving glances at the apparently unremarkable porcelain appliances. For those familiar with the wilderness, such behaviour should be entirely explicable. For those less so, the following should count as fair warning.

My wife had casually mentioned the possibility of going on an easy, even leisurely walking trip in a place called Yosemite. Looking at the pictures of the intimidatingly high granite peaks and lakes, I had some doubts about how relaxing such an excursion might be. More alarming still, were the pictures of rugged and hideously well equipped walkers. I then checked out the trails (I’d have much preferred strolls) on Google and the words that popped up in the descriptions most were ‘strenuous’ and ‘demanding.’ I challenged my wife and after a while she conceded that there might be easier places to start. There was this other park, I would absolutely love. It was almost entirely flat; and replete with all the bars, restaurants and modern convenience that my heart could wish for. It was called Emigrant Wilderness and we were leaving the next morning.

The hiking gear had been already ordered, so I couldn’t really back out. I’d have thought that a corkscrew was all the equipment a well-equipped modern hiker could reasonably require. My wife clearly disagreed. There was a vast backpack with oodles of strange straps and pockets; a double sleeping bag in a thing called a ‘compression sack’; a water pump and filter; plastic water bottles (I filled two with a couple of litres of Jim Beam bourbon); and a stove and some little gas cylinders. The last seemed moderately redundant given the number of excellent restaurants apparently boasted by the park. I asked my wife about this and she gave me a weird look.

Amongst the gear were two large plastic barrels. These I was informed were ‘bear canisters’. They didn’t look nearly large enough to trap one, so my initial hypothesis was that you packed the things with some kind of high explosive and lobbed them at any Grizzlies that happened to wander along. Another idea was that you filled them with rocks and dropped them from a great height onto the hairy brutes. Oddly enough, it seems that both these theories were wrong, and that they were to be filled with comestibles and - believe or not - hung from trees. My wife told me that there were, in fact, no Grizzly bears in the area we would camp, but it was best to be on the safe side. I agreed with the latter, and nervously filled a couple more of the water bottles with more bourbon.

The only item I provided was a Rambo-style survival knife. This was twelve-inches of tempered steel complete will a little compass and a sewing kit in the handle. Admittedly, the compass didn’t seem to work and I can’t sew, but the razor sharp blade and serrated back would, I felt, have impressed Bear Grylls and be extremely handy in a bear-related crisis . Laura appeared more horrified than impressed. “What are you going to do with that?” she asked.

“It’s for the wilderness,” I replied. “Some call it hell; I call it home.” I growled these words through clenched teeth doing my best Sylvester Stallone impression. Laura smiled sweetly and promptly confiscated it.

The items packed, we left the Bay Area the next morning and drove for some five hours. We parked at a place called Gianelli’s Cabin and hobbled for a couple of miles downhill (I assumed there would be ski lift, elevator or something to get us back up). The going was tough and my backpack felt extraordinarily heavy. Nevertheless, after some four hours of sheer torture we reached what looked like a pleasant enough lake although it was hard to get a good impression as the sun had long set. No bars were in evidence, but it had been a long walk, it was dark and I was far too tired to investigate. Besides, I discovered that the so-called instant tent was rather less so and was obliged to help erect the damned thing. This involved laying sheets of fabric on the ground, cursing, poking ridiculously small aluminium rods through the sheets, cursing again, pulling the thing upright and then watching it slowly collapse.

Eventually the tent was more or less standing and we crawled inside. Actually, crawled is not quite the right word for what I did. Having an atrocious sense of balance and lacking what my wife calls a ‘core’ (I thought only apples had these), I lurched from foot to foot, muttered obscenities and then violently plunged inside. My wife and small daughter were far more graceful despite fits of giggles at my magnificent performance. The bedding was absurdly uncomfortable and the mattresses so hard that you could use them as chopping boards, but my eyes were closed within minutes.

The night was disturbed by a bear attack. Acutely aware of the danger - I had thought of little else since the trip was proposed and the non-lethal canisters mentioned - and with senses finely attuned to the slightest sound of ursus horribilis, I woke to hear this malevolent slithering sound and noticed the outer cover being furtively pulled away. Not losing my presence of mind, I growled hysterically and beat the sides of the tent. For some unaccountable reason, Laura had refused to return my trusty survival knife and so the savage beast was able to run off without so much as a scratch. My wife awoke at this juncture and was very much less than appreciative. Cynically ignoring my valiant struggle, she muttered that it was simply the wind which pulled the rain fly away and that I should go back to bed and stop making such an infernal racket at once. “Bed,” I laughed bitterly looking at the pathetic excuse for a mattress, but the massive exertions of the day - those seemingly endless couple of miles - paid their toll and I was soon asleep.

Dawn touched the sky with her rosy fingers, but I snoozed on till about midday. The journey had been exhausting and the night deeply troubling. On waking, I crawled painfully out of the tent hoping for a full English breakfast in one of the many local hostelries. I was greeted with a bowl of freeze-dried mush. The packet announced that this delight was Black Bean Curry prepared by a professional cook. This seemed extraordinarily unlikely - it was mush prepared by a sadistic maniac - but my nocturnal struggles had given me a healthy appetite.

After breakfast, came the second horror of the trip. I innocently asked about sanitary matters and was told there wasn’t a bathroom in this particular part of the wilderness. Panic ensued. “No … toilet? No … shower?” I stammered incredulously feeling cold sweat running down my back and a mounting sense of disgust. “What on earth does one do?”

“You squat,” said my wife, with what could be construed as a smirk. She then proffered three strips of toilet paper and pointed grimly at the bear-infested forest.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Englishmen cannot squat especially if blessed with stomachs that have been carefully nurtured with a lifetime of gourmet nosh and untold gallons of fine wine. In my case, there was also the issue of balance. I find staying on my feet a hard enough challenge at the best of times and tumble into ditches with alarmingly improbable regularity.

I shall spare your perhaps delicate sensitivities a detailed depiction of exactly what occurred in the woods that morning. A refined and squeamish Englishman had suddenly been transported into a Boschian hell replete with mosquitoes, horse flies, besmirched granite, frantic digging, and miserable indignity. Suffice it to say that when I returned and my wife pointed to an entry in the wilderness code that said “Leave no trace,” she was greeted with hollow laughter.

It was was at about this time that my wife suffered a shock, which seemed only fair given those I had received. She discovered that all water bottles were filled with Jim Beam and, surprisingly seemed less than pleased. “I thought it better to be safe than sorry. Anyway, we don’t need water,” I explained cheerfully. “We can drink the bourbon straight.” A woman of action and few words, she thrust a filtration pump into my hands and gestured towards the lake.

Now, this was the first time I had seen a lake in the wild, but to my inexperienced eyes the was something slightly wrong. A lake should, I thought, be more than a few inches deep and should definitely not be filled with tadpole-infested mud. This was surely a puddle. Nevertheless, I decided against a confrontation and started to pump for all I was worth. After an hour or so, I had produced a couple of cupfulls of clear water. I drank these as a reward for my exertions and returned bearing the news.

To my surprise, Laura seemed not in the least nonplussed by my discovery. In fact, she was perfectly aware that this was not the lake, but due to my ‘grumbling’ the night before had decided to set up camp here. The real lake was a mile or so further South. She had already broken camp - I’d have broken it on a far more dramatic way - and those instruments of torture, the backpacks, were in a neat if sinister line. I did my utmost to persuade her that as we had experienced the wilderness in all its magnificent, heart-wrenching glory,we should head back to civilization at once. We could savour the memory at our leisure in the nearest bar; we could relish every wonderful second over chilled glasses of chardonnay. It would be such a shame to dilute the sheer intensity of the experience by spending any more time than absolutely necessary on the trail. I enhanced my rhetoric with appeals to the Romantic poets, to Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats. This would evoke “emotions recollected in tranquility, ” I argued. My arguments were cogent, I thought, and surely irresistible.

Moments later we were heading South towards Powell Lake.

Children & Art

Amongst my catalogue of societal offences, surely amongst the most heinous is inflicting your child’s ‘art’ on innocent adults. You go into a presumably intelligent and sensitive doctor’s office and there defiling the otherwise tasteful walls is a picture consisting of splurges of discordant colours and appallingly scribbled lines that represent, according to the proud mother, a ‘space dinosaur’ or, just possibly, a blue sea anemone being savaged by orange vultures. She is not entirely sure, but feels a bizarre obligation to share the wretched thing with her unfortunate patients.

In such circumstances, it is hard to know what constitutes an adequate response. My approach is to quietly ignore the daubs as one might an eructation at a formal dinner party. If pressed, I might sheepishly grin and make appreciative ‘mnnn’ noises. On the one occasion I have been forced to volunteer a more substantial opinion, I was somewhat over the top:

“It puts me in mind of the later works of the great Cy Twombly. The sheer lyric elegance of the purple bit offset by that frenzied orange splurge! The architectonics! Can it be anything else than a subtly ironic analysis of the human condition in and of itself?” This was greeted with a stunned silence as my hostess evidently considered calling in the authorities.

The urge to display one’s offspring’s artistic output should be resisted at all costs. Displaying it is not an act of love; rather, it is soft headed or guilt-ridden romanticism. The child may burst into the world “trailing paths of glory”; however, he does not enter it with a degree in fine arts. Henri Rousseau’s Tigre dans une tempête tropicale may be naive and exude a childlike view of the world, but the artist was 47 years old when he painted it and had years of experience behind him. A fir cone splattered with a dab of blue paint and adorned with a twisted paperclip is not remotely in the same league; it is neither testimony to your child’s innate artistic talents; nor is it evidence of a nascent Picasso or Braque; nor is it a uniquely valuable insight into the profundities of his infant soul. It is simply a fir cone splattered with a dab of blue paint and adorned with a twisted paperclip.

So why display the vile things? To be perfectly honest, you don’t really like little Justin’s garish daubs, but somehow feel duty-bound to treasure them; certainly his poorly paid teacher doesn’t despite describing the works as ‘awesome’ artistic expressions; and, as for Justin, he would willingly swap his entire output of sand encrusted collages and potato prints for a decent Batman poster.