Notes on Yashomati

As you can see below, the mountains at Yosemite were awe-inspiring. The last pic shows P. and Raina frolicking in the icy cold water (yep, that's snow you see in the hills beyond) of Lake Tenaya on our way to Tioga Pass. What you can't see are the gigantic mosquito bites P.'s back was covered with -- no one warned us about the bugs! We are so duh.

Also, what no one warned us about was how hot Yosemite Valley would be. We stayed in 90+ degrees in a wooden cabin (sans a/c, of course, this was our getting-away-to-nature fling), and the heat sapped away what little was there of my energy. As a result, we did a lot of Yosemite via a/c minivan -- very comfy -- and sympathetically watched folks in bicycles puffing up steep hills under a blazing sun. Then, there were the hikers, but never mind about them.

What we were warned about -- repeatedly -- were the bears, who apparently had a tendency to tear up cars that not only contained the processed food we cannot live without, but also innocuous boxes of Wet Ones. So P. hauled all our stuff to our wooden cabin, that looked flimsy but had to be sturdier than the tent cabins also at Curry Village. Sturdy enough to ward off a marauding bear -- that I did not know and was to spend sleepless nights worrying about.

You see, the first night we slept in our tres lumpy beds, I heard one. What I first heard were loud clanging sounds of people beating up pans. Being reasonably intelligent, I concluded that we had at least one bear on the prowl, and lay terrified, eyes wide open, the bedcovers clutched with tense fingers. Then I heard the growling. More clanging and more growls later, shots were fired, probably the rubber bullets that we read about in the Bear Aware fact sheet handed to us at check-in. Then silence. Then I hear this humongous being brushing past my cabin that shook like it was experiencing an earthquake. They say your life flashes before your eyes in moments of extreme fear, but all I could think was "F%$K!!!!!!"

And that was it.

It was probably just an half-hour of drama, but seemed like an aeon. And P. and R. slept through it all. P. was sore about missing all the action and lamented I should've woken him up. I think he's half-crazy. He didn't spend our remaining two nights there with the covers over his head. In the bloody heat, I should reiterate, because we slept with our windows soundly closed (yes, our windows were covered just by a mesh screen when the bear brushed by).

OK, so other than the heat and the bear episode, Yosemite was incredibly beautiful. It was a wonderful experience to sit on the deck outside our cabin enclosed by tall pines. No sounds of TV or music, just an occasional laugh from real live humans hanging outside their cabins playing board games or cards, or reading or watching the twilight fall softly around them, like us. The multitudinous squirrels darted around the pine cones, stopping to munch on some bug or nut. The night brought soft, cool air, scented by pine. We breathed in gulpfuls, and slowly headed out of Yosemite, making plans to be back someday.