SF Feeling Like Home

Funny how trips within trips exaggerate the elasticity of time. I've been gone for almost a month now and coming back to George's house tonight from Yosemite feels as close to home since we drove down my dusty Toma Road. Party because it is a place I know well and feel welcome, but also because it marks a return. It is a complex equation: a parenthetical operation embedded inside another. 

And our route, particularly this short cut on Priest something road with its sinuous twists through dried out hills, provokes another level of "path" awareness. As in life itself, the view ahead is sometimes clear, you can actually see it, anticipate your place. Other times the way disappears, seemingly connected, but you can never really know. Is it segments or is it a line?

Visual Notes of High Country

It is still a blur, a fly through nature's most spectacular sculpture. Today we were above it all at Glacier Point. It is the spot from which they used to launch the falling fires, yelling "firefall" as the embers plummeted to Curry Village below. You can see the entire valley from there and lording over it all is Half Dome, hunkered down among other humps. Two streaming waterfalls etch lines down to the Merced River. 

I had a moment of reflection and irritation inspired by battery death at the highest level, elevation wise I mean. I was at Glacier Point, the ultimate vista machine, and my camera batteries died. Normally I carry extra but I had transferred them for my canyon ride and forgot to switch back. For several minutes I was practically paralyzed. Could I still see with naked eyes? I had my pen and sketchbook, but the team was waiting. What is experience? Is it the record that inspires memory or is it only the minutes of real time? Since time was limited I deferred pondering these and other questions of the sensorial until I was sitting in front of a grey box rather than the entire Yosemite Valley. Then I borrowed Katherine's camera.

Olmstead Point

A near far juxtaposition: the massive cracks between sheets of rock render them as tiling patterns. On the next plane, the cracks blend into a hard baldness as the king of hunching shoulders, Half Dome, peeks above. Soft green of redwoods closes the curtain.

Canyon Ride

Early Intake

This is a place I headed on my bike ride this morning. An unexpected pleasure of continuing to draw rather than attend meetings in El Portal. Rented a Trek for the day and discussed a ride with the rec folks here at Evergreen. The guide asked how I was with hills. Fine I said. I like hills. And he even mentioned that it was a canyon I would be descending. Twelve miles seemed viable so I headed out with the other half of my salmon bagel from breakfast, some water, my camera and drawing stuff. It was all downhill from there. 

Tacking between thrill and terror (not unlike Wren's motorcycle inspired days in Santorini), I flew, then braked off and on for miles. My gravity fueled power cut a vertical swath toward the Tuolumne River. The road's edge is close and the drop far so I hug the mountain despite increasing my risk of a head-on. Crystal blue sky behind tall redwoods extend the vertical pull. I thought to myself this is one of the most breathtaking rides I've taken. 

Then I started remembering. I have to go home, back, upward. How far had I come already?This is the effortless part. I wanted to keep going, but I had to make it back. I turned around, and started up. My bike was not very nuanced in gear shifting. Felt like there were a few missing between the easiest and the next easiest. Add a little odd clicking and it wasn't long before visions of parching in high altitude, using up the available oxygen, took hold. Turned out the actual distance fell far short of the psychological distance. I was home in two hours, sore but back.

Lembert Dome

Here in Yosemite, well there at Lembert Dome, a place I could have stayed for quite some time. But time is of the essence here and since Yosemite is the same area as Rhode Island, we are driving quite a bit, trying to cover as much of the high country as possible. I suppose a glance is better than not seeing at all, but sometimes the sensation of of the ultimate tease is more than one can bare. Not complaining though as drawing, high speed drawing continues. 

On this sheer face of rock, the gradual increase in steepness enables you to climb further than you might think. It reminds me of the same allure Lake Michigan offers as you swim out further and further, into deeper and deeper, bluer and bluer water, where the bottom disappears and infinity inspires terror. 

In Motion

This is where I started. Talking about how moving gets me drawing. I didn't mean drawing motion, but just the act of travel, setting out. Drawing while moving though is something I've tried to write about before - the way it forms a hinge between the focused or sustained and the cursory glance needing memory for details. Some things pass quickly: gates, cows, electrical poles; while others appear unchanged: sky and land intersection, the double yellow line. 

Preparing for my working trip to Yosemite, reading the text so far, I am particularly taken by the language of Charles Palmer, a historian, who recounts the evolution of the high meadow roads. Most fascinating was the consciousness in the early 1920's of Steven Mather to open Yosemite to autotourism. Not only did he intend to make the spectacular place accessible to more people, he initiated a class shift: more people of less means could get there. The roads are designed as visual programs, vistas from the car - windshield tourism. Iconic views were purposely framed as these great smoothings carve through mountains, cut broad transects through disparate terrain. They in essence provide an extended view in motion. 

I've never been to the upper meadows part of Yosemite so reading this, considering roads as a design project in and of themselves is (perhaps naively so) eye opening. So I am ready to hit it, the road, once again.