Arriving in Yosemite. When we finally got to our tents in Camp 4 i was happy to be sleeping so close to the earth and being able to look at the stars in the sky. The tiredness of having finished the article in the morning hours before leaving. Being together in a group without having found a way of speaking truthfully to each other, even about the things each of us desired to do, let alone about how to puzzle these together. A deep sleep which brought purpose and luck, so that in the morning i knew that i had to call the stables in the valley and see if there would still be a possibility to join one of the horse trail rides. By noon i was on a horse called Lucky.
It’s been forever since i’ve been riding. The ride was open for “beginners” with less than 10 hours of riding – a criterium which put me in the category of “advanced”, where i don’t feel i belong. Nothing spectacular in terms of technicalities, nor any galloping in open space. (Still, we first had to watch a small video showing all the possible accidents that could happen, and then sign a paper in which we declared that we understood that we could die. After all, this is America in the grip of an economy of insurance… ) Pretty much a path along which one horse followed the other.
This was my first horse trail of such a kind, with a “western” style (in contrast to “English” style) sadle and riding techniques. It was enchanting. Immersed in the immense beauty of Yosemite. The horse trail took us along the Tenaya creek to the Mirror Lake and its meadows and back; a trail that brought us passed the Half Dome on the side where the granite was dramatically split in half, thousands of years ago. The water of the creek and the lake came straight from the melting snow up in the Sierra. The horse trail had only been open for 2 weeks now, while usually they would have been open for almost a month this time of year. The stables higher up in the mountains were still closed, while usually they would be open by now. As we were riding, one of the guides, Bill, explained that in all the time he’d been working in the stables in Yosemite – three months every spring and summer since 1975 (i realised later on that he must have been there when we visited Yosemite with my family in 1979) – he hadn’t see a year with so much rain and snow like this one. When i went to the Visitor’s Center later on, an eldery grey-haired woman, who radiated sheer passion for the national park in which she worked, declared the year to be “disasterous”. The amount of roads and passes that were still closed, without even a perspective on when they would open. She shook her head in dispair. It’s true that water poured into the valley from all sides with such abondance and such violence – whether this spring is exceptional or not, it is very impressive. Bill saw connections: the exceptional snow and water was paired up with the slowly drying up of Mirror Lake and the surrounding creeks. Soon enough the snow at the source of the creeks would be gone; since the valley’s underground is granite, it holds no water at all. And to Bill it seemed that, as the summers go by, the time span in which the creeks are dry gets longer and longer. In the Visitors Center i learned that this “vein”, or canyon of the valley was somehow the youngest, therefore providing an image of how the others were some thousand years before, and by mirror image the rest of the valley reflecting what the Tenaya Canyon would become.
But there was more to the ride than the beauty of the nature surrounding us. There was the effort of riding a mountainous terrain on a horse – a new thing for me. The way the horses slipped constantly: the sound of horseshoes hitting and sliding on rock, and the way their bodies jerked as if the slide came unexpectedly. Probably they were just moving to keep themselves in balance. Learning how to move my body and weight in order to climb or descend with Lucky, and not just be a heavy backpack he has to carry along.
And there was still more to the horse trail. As i was settling into Lucky’s rhythm and taking in the beauty of the nature around me, my thoughts started to take me to the crossing of the mountains by those pioneers of the 19th century who pushed America’s frontiers westwards. This wasn’t the first time i was thinking about those journeys, only some weeks ago when i flew back from Washington i had been absorbed by such thoughts. The Denver-San Jose flight took us over the Rocky Mountains in sky that remained cloudless till the very westside of the Sierra Nevada, that is until the plane hit the west coast clouds. For hours i looked down in fascination to the range of mountains that those pioneers had crossed. My eyes kept on frantically discerning possible routes from many kilometers above, only to find time and time again that the imaginary trail i saw would come to some kind of dramatic dead-end. I kept on imagining the horses and wagons needing to turn around, to search for another trail. Stories of this west-ward travel had accompanied me during my flight from London to San Francisco in the beginning of this year, as I was reading Joan Didion’s Where I was From. The Sierra Nevada as the most dreaded moment in the pioneer narratives Didion talked about; Independence Rock which was named as such because those who didn’t reach the rock by the first of July had no chance of reaching the passes before snow closed them. There’s something about reading or thinking about such narratives when flying to California, and then there is something else about thinking about them while doing a horse-trail in the Californian mountains.
You could say that Lucky and i were a good match. When we were still at the stables waiting to start the trail, i knew that Lucky wanted to drink some more water – he had made that abundantly clear – which i figured he should be able to do. The result was that we came in at the very end of the trail, as Bill was waiting to close it. It was Bill’s job to make sure that nobody fell out of the trail or was left behind. But soon enough a horse with a temperament started kicking the horse behind him, which scared at least two horses who began messing up the trail. Bill needed to leave his closing position to calm the horses down, and to help the riders to keep a better distance. “Will you be fine?” he asked before he left. Sure. The only thing was: Lucky prefered to go kind of slow, and i wasn’t in a hurry either, so as we were strolling along we gradually lagged behind the trail. I was just immensely enjoying our solitude when Bill got back us. “I don’t know if it’s Lucky or if it’s me, but we’re kind of slow,” i said. By way of explanation, not apology, cause i didn’t really feel like changing our rhythm. “Ah, don’t worry”, said Bill, “Lucky is not slow. He’s safe. Doesn’t that sound better?” We laughed, and i liked it a lot. I remember thinking: i need to tell this to Chaim tonight – we’re not slow, we’re safe. And with even more trust in Lucky i let his reins totally free when the terrain was a bit difficult. When we needed to descend he sometimes just stopped for a little while, and i limited my role in these moments to saying: “Lucky, you just go down when you want to”, which he eventually would do. When the terrain was easier and flatter i had to exhort him a bit because clearly we lagged behind quite a stretch. But Bill, on his impressive mule (they are more confident on mountainous terrain) never told me to hurry up. He would also linger behind, sometimes next to us or just in front, and we both looked a bit doubtful to the riders ahead who were pushing and pulling on their horses. I really got lucky that day.