The Gold Coast

77

When Jim wakes they are tracking through the Alabama Hills in the Owens Valley. The oldest rocks in North America look strange in this hour before dawn, rounded boulders piled on each other in weird, impossible formations. Beyond them the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada rises like a black wall under the indigo sky. Tashi sits in the driver’s seat listening to Japanese space music, a flute wandering over Oriental harp twanging; he looks awake, but lost in some inner realm.

In the roadside town of Independence, which looks like a museum of the previous century, Tashi rouses. “We need more food.” They stop at an all-night place and buy some ramen, cheese, candy. Outside Tash goes to a phone box and closes himself in for a call. It really is like a museum. When he comes out he is nodding thoughtfully, a little smile on his face. “Let’s go.”

They turn west, up a road that heads straight into the mountains. “Here comes the tricky part,” Tash says. “We only have a wilderness permit for one, so we’ll have to take evasive action on the way in.”

“You have to get a permit to go into the mountains?”

“Oh yeah. You can get them at Ticketron.” Tash laughs at Jim’s expression. “It’s not a bad idea, actually. But sometimes it’s not practical.”

So they track up the immense slope of the range’s eastern face, following a crease made over eons by a lively stream. Tashi’s car slows on the steep road. They leave behind the shrubs and flowers of the Owens Valley, track up among pines. Their ears pop. They follow a series of bends in the road, lose sight of the valley below. The air rushing in Tashi’s window gets cooler.

They come to a dirt road that forks down to the stream on their left. Tashi stops, drives the car off the track, hums down the dirt road on battery power. “Fishing spot,” he says. “And still outside the park boundary.”

They put the extra food in the backpacks, put the packs on, and walk up the asphalt road. It’s getting light, the sky is sky blue and soon the sun will rise. The road flattens and Jim sees a parking lot and some buildings, surrounded on three sides by steep mountain slopes. “Where do we go?”

“That’s the ranger station. We’re supposed to check in there, and real soon a couple of rangers will be out on the trails to make sure we have. There’s another one stationed in Kearsarge Pass, which is the main pass here, right up on top.” He points west. “So we’re going north, and we’ll get over the crest of the range on a cross-country pass I know.”

“Okay.” It sounds good to Jim; he doesn’t know what a cross-country pass is.

They hike around the parking lot and into a forest of pines and firs. The ground is layered with fragrant brown needles. The sun is shining on the slopes above them, though they are still in shadow. They reach a fork in the trail and head up a canyon to the north.

They hike beside a stream that chuckles down drop after drop. “L.A.’s water,” Tashi says with a laugh. Scrub jays and finches flit around the junipers and the little scraps of meadow bordering the stream. Each turn of the trail brings a new prospect, a waterfall garden or jagged granite cliff. The sun rises over a shoulder to the east, and the air warms. Despite the rubbing of his boots against his heels, Jim feels a small trickle of calmness begin to pour into him and pool. The cool air is piney, the stream exquisite, the bare rock above grand.

They ascend into a small bowl where the stream becomes a little lake. Jim stands admiring it openmouthed. “It’s beautiful. Are we staying here?”

“It’s seven A.M., Jim!”

“Oh yeah.”

They hike on, up a rocky trail that rises steeply to the east. It’s hard work. Eventually they reach the rock-and-moss shore of another surrealistically perfect pond.

“Golden Trout Lake. Elevation ten thousand eight hundred feet.”

Suddenly Jim understands that they’re at the end of the trail, at the bottom of a bowl that has only one exit, which is the streambed they have just ascended. “So we’re staying here?”

“Nope.” Tash points above, to the west, where the crest of the Sierra Nevada looms over them. “Dragon Pass is up there. We go over that.”

“But where’s the trail?”

“It’s a cross-country pass.”

It all comes clear to Jim. “You mean this so-called pass of yours has no trail over it?”

“Right.”

“Whoah. Oh, man.…”

They put on their packs, begin hiking up the slope. In the morning sun it gets hot. Jim suspects the tweaks from each heel indicate blisters. The straps of his pack cut into his shoulders. He follows Tashi up a twisting trough that Tash explains was once a glacier’s bed. They are in the realm of rock now, rock shattered and shattered again, in places almost to gravel. Occasionally they stop to rest and look around. Back to the east they can see the Owens Valley, and the White Mountains beyond.

Then it’s up again. Jim steps in Tashi’s elongated footprints and avoids sliding back as far as Tash does. He concentrates on the work. How obvious that this endless upward struggle is the perfect analogy for life. Two steps up, one step back. Finding a best path, up through loose broken granite, stained in places by lichen of many colors, light green, yellow, red, black. The goal above seems close but never gets closer. Yes, it is a very pure, very stripped-down model of life—life reduced to stark, expansive significance. Higher and higher. The sky overhead is dark blue, the sun a blinding chip in it.

They keep climbing. The repetition of steps up, each with its small tweak from the heels, reduces Jim’s mind to a little point, receiving only visual input and the kinetics of feeling. His thighs feel like rubber bands. Once it occurs to him that for the last half hour he has thought of nothing at all, except the rock under him. He grins; then he has to concentrate on a slippery section. Sweat gets in his eye. There’s no wind, no sound except their shoes on the rock, their breaths in their throats.

“We’re almost there,” Tashi says. Jim looks up, surprised, and sees they are on the last slope below the ridge, the edge of the range with all its towers extending left to right above them, for as far as they can see. They’re headed for a flat section between towers. “How do you feel?”

“Great,” says Jim.

“Good man. The altitude bothers some people.”

“I love it.”

On they climb. Jim gets summit fever and hurries after Tashi until his breaths rasp in his throat. Tashi must have it too. Then they’re on top of the ridge, on a very rough, broad saddle, made of big shards of pinkish granite. The ridge is a kind of road running north–south, punctuated frequently by big towers, serrated knife-edge sections, spur ridges running down to east, out to west.… To the west it’s mountains for as far as they can see.

“My God,” Jim says.

“Let’s have lunch here.” Tashi drops his pack, pulls off his shirt to dry the sweaty back of it in the sun. There is still no wind, not a cloud in the sky. “Perfect Sierra day.”

They sit and eat. Under them the world turns. Sun warms them like lizards on rock. Jim cuts his thumb trying to slice cheese, and sucks the cut till it stops bleeding.

When they’re done they put on the packs and start down the western side of the ridge. This side is steeper, but Tashi finds a steep chute of broken rock—talus, he teaches Jim to call it—and very slowly they descend, holding on to the rock wall on the side of the chute, stepping on chunks that threaten to slide out from under them. In fact Jim sends one past the disgusted Tashi and sits down hard, bruising his butt. His toes blister in the descent. The chute opens up and the talus fans down a lessened slope to a small glacial pond, entirely rockbound: aquamarine around its perimeter, cobalt in its center.

They drink deeply from this lake when they finally reach it. It’s mid- or late afternoon already. “Next lake down is a beauty,” says Tash. “Bigger than this one, and surrounded by rock walls, except there’s a couple of little lawns tucked right on the water. Great campsite.”

“Good.” Jim’s tired.

The west side of the range has a great magic to it. On the east side they looked down into Owens Valley, and so back to the world Jim knows. Now that link is gone and he’s in a new world, without connection to the one Tashi yanked him from. He can’t characterize this landscape yet, it’s too new, but there’s something in its complexity, the anarchic profusion of forms, that is mesmerizing to watch. Nothing has been planned. Nevertheless it is all very complex. No two things are the same. And yet everything has an intense coherence.

Clouds loft over the great eastern range. They descend, crossing a very rough field of lichen-splotched boulders. Mosses fill cracks, mosses and then tiny shrubs. Cloud shadows rush over them. Jim wanders off parallel to Tashi so he can find his own route. For a long time they navigate the immensity of broken granite, each in his own world of thought and movement. Already it seems like they have been doing this for a long time. Nothing but this, for as long as the rock has rested here.

Late in the afternoon they come to the next lake, already deep in the shadow of the spur ridge circling it. Its smooth surface reflects the rock like a blue mirror.

“Whoah. Beautiful.”

Tashi’s eyes are narrowed.

“Uh-oh. We can’t camp here—there’s people over there!”

“Where?”

Tashi points. Jim sees two tiny red dots, all the way on the other side of the lake. Slightly larger dot of an orange tent. “So what? We’ll never hear them, they won’t bother us.”

Tashi stares at Jim as if he has just proposed eating shit. “No way! Come on, let’s follow the exit stream down toward Dragon Lake. There’s bound to be a good campsite before that, and if not it’s a fine lake.”

Wearily Jim humps his pack and follows Tashi down the crease in the rib that holds the lake in, where water gurgles over flat yellow granite and carves a ravine in the slope falling off into a big basin.

They hike until sunset. The sky is still light, but the ground and the air around them are dim and shadowed. Alpine flowers gleam hallucinogenically from the black moss on the stream’s flat banks. Gnarled junipers contort out of cracks in the rock. Each bend in the little stream reveals a miniature work of landscaping that makes Jim shake his head: above the velvet blue sky, below the dark rock world, with the stream a sky-colored band of lightness cutting through it. He’s tired, footsore, he stumbles from time to time; but Tash is walking slowly, and it seems a shame to stop and end this endless display of mountain grandeur.

Finally Tash finds a flat sandy dip in a granite bench beside the stream, and he declares it camp. They drop their packs.

Four or five junipers.

To the west they can see a long way;

A fin of granite, poking up out of shadows.

“Fin Dome,” Tashi says.

To the east the great crest of the ridge they crossed is glowing,

Vibrant apricot in the late sunset light.

Each rock picked out, illuminated.

Each moment, long and quiet.

The stream’s small voice talks on and on.

Light blue water in the massy shadows.

Two tiny figures, walking aimlessly:

“Whoah. Whoah. Whoah.”

Slowly the light leaks out of the air.

And you have always lived here.

“How about dinner?” says Tashi. And he sits by his pack.

“Sure. Are we going to build a fire? There’s dead wood under these junipers.”

“Let’s just use the stove. There really isn’t enough wood in the Sierras to justify making fires, at least at this altitude.”

They cook Japanese noodles over a small gas stove. Somehow Jim manages to knock the pot over when cooking his, and when he grabs the pot to save his noodles from spilling, he burns the palm and fingers of his left hand. “Ah!” Sucks on them. “Oh well.”

Tashi has brought a tent along, but it’s such a fine night they decide to forgo it, and they lay their sleeping bags on groundpads spread in the sandy patches. They get in the bags and—ah!—lie down.

The moon, hidden by the ridge to the east, still lights the wild array of peaks surrounding them, providing a monochrome sense of distance, and an infinity of shadows. The stream is noisy. Stars are dumped all across the sky; Jim has never seen so many, didn’t know so many existed. They outnumber the satellites and mirrors by a good deal.

Soon Tashi is asleep, breathing peacefully.

But Jim can’t sleep.

He abandons the attempt, sits up with his bag pulled around his shoulders, and… watches. For a moment his past life, his life below, occurs to him; but his mind shies away from it. Up here his mind refuses to enter the mad realm of OC. He can’t think of it.

Rocks. The dark masses of the junipers, black needles spiking against the stars. Moonlight on steep serrated slopes, revealing their shapes. Ah, Jim—Jim doesn’t know what to think. His body is aching, stinging, and throbbing in a dozen places. All that seems part of mountains, one component of the scene. His senses hum, he’s almost dizzy with the attempt to really take it in all at once: the music of falling water and wind in pine needles, the vast and amazingly complex vision of the stippled white granite in the foreground, the moonlit peaks at every distance.… He doesn’t know what to think. There’s no way he can take it all in, he only shivers at the attempt. There’s too much.

But he has all night; he can watch, and listen, and watch some more.… He realizes with a flush in his nerve endings, with a strange, physical rapture, that this will be the longest night of his life. Each moment, long and quiet, spent discovering a world he never knew existed—a home. He had thought it a lost dream; but this is California too, just as real as the rock underneath his sore butt. He raps the granite with scraped knuckles. Soon the moon will rise over the range.