Six of Us, a Canvas Tent, and No Reservation |
Up the coast with the windows down and a paper map on my mother's lap, into the redwoods, and finally into a valley that shut the whole car up. |
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News for the America we remember |
The wagon was a Country Squire with the fake wood on the side, and the night before we left my father packed it in the driveway like a man loading a ship. Everything had a place. The tent went in first because it was the heaviest. The Coleman stove and the lantern in their steel boxes. The cooler with the block ice, which lasted three days if you were disciplined about opening it, and we were not. Six of us. Two in front, three in the middle, and whoever lost the argument in the way-back facing out the tailgate window at the traffic behind us. |
We left at four in the morning, which my father did on purpose, because he believed in getting a jump on it and because we would sleep for the first two hours and he would have the radio to himself. My mother navigated off a folded gas station map on her lap and an AAA strip that she had gone in person to the office to get, and the two of them argued about the route for thirty years and enjoyed it. Then we got on the coast highway. That road hangs off the side of the continent. The turnouts came up fast and my father took every third one, and we piled out into that wind with the ocean going gray and white below and the whole car smelling like ice plant and salt. |
We camped in the redwoods that first night. You come off the coast into those groves and the temperature drops and the light goes green and everybody in the car stops talking, kids included, which does not happen. The trunks are wider than the car. You cannot photograph it. My father tried, every year, with the Instamatic, and every single picture came back as a brown blur with a person in front of it. The tent was canvas and it weighed sixty pounds dry and considerably more wet. It smelled like mildew and cedar and it took the two oldest of us plus my father twenty minutes and one argument to raise. |
We had no reservation. I want to be clear about that because it sounds made up now. You drove into a campground and looked for a site that did not have a car on it, and you took it, and then you went and filled out the envelope and put your cash in it and dropped it in the iron pipe. Two dollars. Three later on. If the place was full you drove to the next one. And then Yosemite. You come in through the tunnel and the road opens up and there is the valley, all of it at once, the big face on the left and the falls across the way and the meadow down the middle. My father pulled into that turnout and did not say a word. Nobody did. Five children shut up in a station wagon at the same moment is the only real review that view has ever needed. We stayed a week. We swam in the river, which was so cold it took your breath in a way that made you laugh. We hiked to the base of the falls and |
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