Sunday, September 26, 1999

I did the closet this morning.

Not all at once. I took the flannel shirts down one at a time and folded each one and put it in a grocery sack for the clothing closet at church. The good suit goes to Walt, who is the same size and has a grandson getting married in the spring. The golf shirt with the ketchup stain went in the trash. It never came out, Roger. I told you.

I kept two things. His hat, the canvas one with the sweat line. And the blue plaid flannel I took on the trail as my warm layer, which is torn at the elbow now and has a pine-pitch stain on the front and smells like woodsmoke and three weeks of me. It doesn't smell like him anymore. I thought that would break my heart. It didn't. It's just a shirt I wore up a mountain.

His side of the closet is half empty. I haven't decided what goes there. Maybe nothing, for a while. Maybe my boots.

Thursday, September 23, 1999 · Days 23 and 24: Mount Whitney

Up at two-thirty at Guitar Lake. The moon was one night past full and so bright I didn't need the headlamp. I started walking at three. Below me, as I climbed the switchbacks, I could see other lights starting from the lake, one and two at a time, little stars going the wrong way.

At the junction near Trail Crest I left my big pack with the others leaning against the rocks and went on with water and a jacket and his map. The last two miles run along the back of the ridge, and every so often there's a notch in the rock where you can look straight down the east side, thousands of feet, to the desert already turning gold. The air was thin. I walked twenty steps and breathed, twenty steps and breathed.

I got to the top at twenty minutes to nine on Friday, August 27. There is a stone hut up there and a register in a metal box. The wind was cold. Some young men who had come up from the Portal side were hollering and taking pictures. One of them took mine with my own camera, and the film is at the drugstore, and I'm afraid to pick it up.

I didn't feel what I thought I'd feel. I felt cold and hungry and very high up. I sat down out of the wind behind the hut and took out his map, the one from the garage drawer, and a pencil, and I went over his dotted line from Reds Meadow to Whitney and made it solid. It took a long time. My hands were cold. Then I signed the register: Ellen Vickery, Fresno. Happy Isles to here. For R.V.

Down the ninety-nine switchbacks to Trail Camp that afternoon, out to Whitney Portal the next morning. Meredith and Paul were both at the trailhead, both of them. Meredith ran up the trail to meet me and cried on my shoulder straps. Paul bought me a hamburger at the little store there and I ate the whole thing and half of his.

Monday, September 20, 1999 · Days 17 to 22: Mather, Pinchot, Glen, Forester

After Muir Pass the trail drops into Le Conte Canyon and the days start to run together, one pass a day, up in the morning and down in the afternoon. My legs had come in by then. I stopped counting switchbacks. I passed people.

The Golden Staircase, which is a staircase, cut into the wall of a canyon. Palisade Lakes. Mather Pass, steep and loose, where I kept my eyes on my boots. The big open bowl of Upper Basin on the other side, with little lakes lying around in it like somebody dropped them. Pinchot Pass. The suspension bridge at Woods Creek, which bounces, one person at a time; I went across holding both cables and saying the Lord's Prayer. Rae Lakes, which are the most beautiful lakes I have ever seen, and I say that having seen Evolution. Glen Pass, narrow as a church aisle on top.

Then Forester, which is the big one, a notch in a wall with the trail blasted into the cliff. At the top there's a sign where Kings Canyon ends and Sequoia begins. Two college girls from Oregon who'd been leapfrogging me for a week were up there eating tortillas, and they made me sit and gave me their last Fig Newtons. They called me "ma'am" the first day and "Ellen" by the last. One of them had doctored my heel with her own moleskin at Rae Lakes.

From Bighorn Plateau I saw Whitney for the first time. It didn't look like much. It looked like a long gray wall with a bump on the end. I laughed out loud.

Thursday the 26th I camped at Guitar Lake. Full moon came up over the ridge. I didn't sleep and I didn't mind.

Thursday, September 16, 1999 · Day 16: Muir Pass

Up from Evolution Lake past Wanda Lake, which is named for John Muir's daughter, to the pass. His other daughter has a lake on the far side. I liked that he put his girls up there.

The clouds were building by eleven. By one they were black. I got to the top of Muir Pass just as the first hail came down, and there is a stone hut there, round like a beehive, built for exactly this. There were five people in it already: a young German couple I'd camped near at Evolution, a father and his fifteen-year-old son from Bakersfield, and a quiet young man by himself who never did say where he was from. We sat on the stone benches in the half-dark and listened to the hail and counted between the flashes and the thunder. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand. Once we didn't get to one.

The boy asked me if I was scared. I said yes. He looked so relieved. His father handed around a bag of trail mix and the German girl sang something very quietly in German and nobody asked her to stop.

It lasted an hour and forty minutes. Then the sun came out like nothing happened and everything steamed. I walked down the other side over old snow in wet socks and camped by the lake named for Muir's other girl and slept like the dead.

Monday, September 13, 1999 · Days 14 and 15: Evolution

From the ranch the trail goes up the South Fork of the San Joaquin and then climbs to Evolution Valley. You wade the creek there, knee deep and cold. A ranger at McClure Meadow checked my permit and asked where I was headed. I said Whitney. He said, "Good for you," and I thought of that mother at Tokopah Falls last summer.

On Thursday the 19th I climbed up to Evolution Lake. I meant to go on farther. I didn't.

The peaks around it are named for Darwin and Huxley and the rest of that crowd. Roger would have had something to say about that. The lake was flat as a plate that evening and the whole of Mount Darwin was standing upside down in it, and the light went orange and then pink and then gray. It was the most beautiful place I have ever been in my life. I turned around to say, "Roger, look."

And there was nobody. Just my tent and my stove and my socks on a rock.

I don't know how long I cried. A long time. Out loud, the way you can't in a house with neighbors. A man was fishing on the far side of the lake and he had the decency to keep his back to me the whole time. When it was over I was so tired I could hardly get into my sleeping bag, and I slept ten hours without waking, which I had not done since February of 1998.

His dotted line starts at Reds Meadow. Everything from there on, he never saw. I have been seeing it for him. I think at Evolution Lake I figured out that I can't. I can only see it for me.

Thursday, September 9, 1999 · Days 9 to 13: Silver Pass, Selden Pass, the ranch

Out of Reds Meadow with fresh socks and a full canister. Purple Lake. Silver Pass, which I climbed slowly and came down fast. The switchbacks up Bear Ridge, which I counted and then stopped counting. Selden Pass on Monday, and from the top, Marie Lake below with its little islands, so blue it looked painted.

Tuesday the 17th I came down to Muir Trail Ranch for the food drop. It is a private ranch in a meadow with hot springs and horses, and they keep hikers' boxes in a shed. Mine was there. My own handwriting on it, from June, from the post office in Fresno. I sat down on the ground in front of the shed and opened it with my pocketknife and found the second bear canister and ten days of dinners and the letter.

All right, here is what it said. "Ellen. You can stop here. There's a way out to Florence Lake and nobody in the world would say one word. But you won't. Love, E." And a stick of the gum Roger chewed.

I laughed until the girl from the ranch came to see what was wrong. I had to repack everything twice. With two canisters the pack was heavier than it had been in Yosemite Valley. I picked it up and put it on and went.

Sunday, September 5, 1999 · Days 4 to 8: Lyell Canyon to Reds Meadow

Lyell Canyon is eight or nine miles of flat meadow along the river, deer in the grass, and then at the end it stands up and you climb. Donohue Pass on Monday morning, the first real pass. At the top you leave Yosemite. I stood with one boot on each side of the line. Nobody was there to see.

Island Pass, which hardly counts. Thousand Island Lake, with Banner Peak standing over it, where I sat in the evening and watched the light go off the snow. Garnet Lake. Shadow Lake. Blisters on both heels by then, big ones, that I should have taken care of two days sooner.

Wednesday I limped past Devils Postpile, the gray columns all stacked like somebody's woodpile, and into Reds Meadow. Box number one was waiting. There's a store and a little cafe and hot showers, and I took one, and I stood there under the water until someone knocked. I stayed the whole next day and did nothing but drain blisters and eat pie.

Reds Meadow is where Roger's pencil line ended in 1961. From there on his line was dotted. From there on, so was mine.

Thursday, September 2, 1999 · Days 1 to 3: Happy Isles to Tuolumne Meadows

I kept notes every night in a little waterproof notebook, a few lines by headlamp. I'm going to put it down here a piece at a time.

Meredith drove me up on Thursday, August 5. She walked me to the sign at Happy Isles and took my picture under it. Then she hugged me too hard and walked back to the car without turning around, which is how she did it on her first day of kindergarten too.

I took the John Muir Trail proper, not the Mist Trail, because Roger would have said the John Muir Trail means the John Muir Trail. Nevada Fall. Little Yosemite Valley the first night, where a bear walked through camp at dusk like a big brown dog looking for its dish and everybody banged pots. I didn't sleep. I didn't expect to.

Friday, up past the Half Dome turnoff. I looked up at the cables and waved. Sunrise that night, cold. Saturday over Cathedral Pass with Cathedral Peak standing up like a steeple, and down into Tuolumne Meadows, where I ate a cheeseburger at the grill and called Irma from the pay phone. "You're alive," she said. "Good. Call me from the next one."

Monday, August 30, 1999

I'm home. Twenty-four days. Happy Isles to the top of Mount Whitney, and down.

Paul went back to San Jose from Lone Pine, and Meredith drove me home the long way around the mountains, and we came in the front door last night around nine. The house was the same. The same quiet. I stood in the kitchen with my pack still on. So that fear was right, as far as it went.

Then I went in the bedroom and opened the closet to hang up my jacket, and there were his shirts. It smelled like him. Eighteen months and it still smelled like him. I sat down on the floor of the closet with my boots on and I stayed there a long time.

I'll write it all down. Not tonight.

Wednesday, August 4, 1999

Tomorrow. Pack is by the door. Irma has the key and the mail. Back around the first of September. Don't worry about me. Or do, a little. I would.

Sunday, July 25, 1999

Last long walk before I go. Twelve miles along the river bluff and back with the full pack, starting in the dark. 88 degrees at eight in the morning. Nobody walks in Fresno in July but mailmen and fools and me.

I weighed the pack on the bathroom scale by weighing myself with it on and then without. I'm not going to put either number here. The difference is thirty-four pounds with six days of food. Lyle says that's about right for my size and age, and then he said "no offense," which is how I know it was offense.

A reader in Oregon wrote to say she walked the trail in 1987 with her sister and I would not be sorry. I read it standing at the mailbox, I mean the computer, and then I went and sat on the back step a while.

Saturday, July 10, 1999

Irma had me over to watch the women's soccer from the Rose Bowl. Neither of us knows the first thing about soccer. It went two hours without a goal and then they did the penalty kicks, one girl at a time against the goalie, and by the end Irma was standing on her own couch in her stocking feet yelling. Eighty years old. When the last one went in, the American girls all fell down in a pile.

I went home and walked six miles in the evening heat on pure foolishness.