This past weekend Q and I went to Yosemite. We'd planned a nice getaway up in the glacial valley, full of scenic sights and stunning vistas. We were to hike our hearts out, climbing up the sides of mountains like spiders, rising with the sun, falling with the moon. Two dudes, embracing the photorealism of their bromance, like Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir.
We'd fled San Francisco Friday just before rush hour but still managed to hit slow rolling traffic for the first half of our voyage. Q became frustrated by our speed and began demanding people get off the road to allow him to pass, gesticulating furiously and pounding on the steering wheel. I urged him to remain calm, less he suffer the embarrassment of a stroke before even arriving at the trailhead. The moon began to rise, white, over the pale metal windmills that stood like sentinels over sprawling green pastures. Cows grazed lazily in the last bit of daylight. I stared out the window marveling at the green hills that looked soft like velvet, the occasional red barn, and the dilapidated tractors and sheds which surrounded.
As we drove on, the pangs of hunger started to kick and we began foraging. The roadside was littered with countless McDonalds and AppleBee’s, the artery clogging opium of the people. We decided that it would be best to find a local, privately owned restaurant - preferably of the biker bar variety - one that offered burgers and tall beers, hostile bartenders and poor service. Both Google and Apple failed at navigating us to the desired establishment, so we had to rely on cunning and guile, street smarts and crafty resourcefulness. Soon we arrived at The Grizzly Rock, located in the same place as a Best Western: a sure sign of quality if ever there was one. Q parked the car beside a shiny blue hillbilly truck sleeping under a palm tree. Foolishly, he started to change his pants in the parking lot while I photographed the truck. The temperature had dropped a bit since we’d begun our journey and he thought it would be easy to make a quick adjustment and restore some warmth. Unfortunately, this maneuver had marked us as homosexuals, queer city folk passing through their town, spreading our gayness like a plague.
We entered the saloon and found ourselves greeted by a gang of rednecks wearing trucker hats and flannel shirts, with beards full of scorn and ire. We were intruders. I looked at the taxidermied horned-rabbit mounted on the wall and envisioned Q and I’s severed buttocks glued to the walls, repurposed as bottle-cap openers or jammed with pickles. I resisted the urge to run and instead sat down at the bar beside Q. I ordered a tall, well hopped beer, much more potent than needed, as a necessary show of manliness. I excused myself to the bathroom where I discovered a giant photograph of President George W. Bush perched above the mirror where I washed my hands. When I returned to the bar I was alarmed to find that Q had ordered a Shirley Temple. The burly hillbillies glared, and the women did too. As I sat down I heard him say “I don’t know, I’ll have to think about it hon’, I’m on a diet.” This was bad, really bad. In a hushed voice I asked him what the fuck he was doing. Was he trying to get us lynched? He told me to calm down, that I seemed stressed, “we’re on vacation.” I composed myself and looked at the menu; burgers (a dozen different kinds); steaks; prime rib; pulled pork sandwiches; triple-stacked angus bacon burgers with a prerequisite heart-health warning. Ultimately, Q settled on a burger. To compensate for his earlier indiscretions I ordered a pulled pork and hamburger sandwich. I realized the intense irony of placing that much meat into my mouth to dispel any notions of our homosexuality.
We ate without incident and got ourselves back on the road. It was dark now and we hurtled through it, our headlights beaming, barreling across asphalt like a shooting star. A fabulous, faggish shooting star. The road was black and lonely, totally desolate except for us and the gunmetal locomotive racing beside the passenger window. We rode on in our small yellow Volkswagon bug, like a terrified mouse scurrying away from a slithering snake. It was an hour before midnight when we’d reached the hotel. Located just outside Yosemite, it was serene and austere, a river rushed outside the window of our room. I was exhausted and collapsed into bed, ready to steal as much sleep as I could in preparation for the morning hike.
Once the sun began to rise, we made our way into the valley. There was the sound of stillness, then of birds and moving trees, camera shutters, the opening and closing of car doors and trunks. The rock face of El Capitan squinted down at us while the rising sun blared into its eyes. Driving onward I saw Half Dome break through the trees, jutting out from the earth like the broken leg of an enormous statue. We drove past Curry Village and parked the car and then began our ascent. We had intended to hike Half Dome, but because it was closed we decided we would hike Nevada Falls instead.
The hike was stunning. Yosemite is a place of great beauty and wonder; rushing rivers hissing over rocks like liquid serpents; ancient trees as tall as buildings, and as wide; mammoth rocks carved by ice; waterfalls; magic forests. Everything was going splendidly, the trails were empty, the morning air was cool and we had food in our packs. Q stopped off in the woods, crouched down behind a boulder to wipe the sweat from his ass-crack with a wet-wipe. I stood and riffled through my bag to find my other lens when, suddenly, I heard a strange sound. It was a bizarre kind of hissing, staccato and urgent, high-pitched. It seemed to be coming from right behind me. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw nothing. Perhaps it was nothing; just the whisper of my imagination. Then it came again, this time more shrill. Again I looked around and saw nothing. I quit looking through my bag to focus on the sound. I stood with my head slightly cocked, tilting my ear toward the woods. Silence.
Turning back around toward the rock, I was startled by the appearance of a small squirrel. It seemed to emerge from nowhere. It's black eyes met mine and didn't waver. It pounded its twitching tail threateningly as it glared. I couldn't understand how, but the squirrel was giving me a dirty look. Not dirty like mean, dirty like...dirty. It opened its mouth lecherously and looked down toward my cock. It looked back up at me and I watched as its tail grew stiffer. With one hand it pointed at my dick and then to its open mouth. The message was clear: it wanted nuts, mine.
The sound of Q returning from out behind the rock gave the squirrel enough time to scurry away unseen. I must've looked horrified because Q asked me what was wrong. I considered telling him what happened, what I'd seen, but because we'd smoked a bit of pot, I didn't want to seem paranoid, or worse, delusional. I told him it was nothing, that we should continue on our hike. I marched on, looking back over my shoulder every so often until I was able to tell myself things were fine. We talked of rock types, igneous and sedimentary; love and loss; of growing old; science and religion. Before I knew it we were atop Nevada Falls. The view was something to behold, reverent. We stopped and took it in, ate peanut-butter-jelly-banana sandwiches and watched the water fall out onto the rocks below.
Q told me we should take a different path back down, even though it was slightly longer, because it was a bit more scenic. I agreed and we began walking along the edge of the mountain toward the other path. The open sky and rocky ground gave way to a dirt trail bounded on each side by large trees. To our right, only air, moist with mist from the falls. We traveled along the sweating forehead of a fearful mountain looking out over a lethal fall. I walked in front of Q, snapping photos and marveling at the rustic splendor of the place. Q's phone rang and he stopped to answer it. I went on further to explore the trail, when I saw something rustling in a bush just ahead of me. A bear. Of all the rotten luck. My heart went base-jumping off the side of the mountain and panic gripped me. I started to take my backpack off, to relinquish my food to the bear as an offer of supplication. But then, the sound stopped. Q came up from behind and apologized for taking the call. He asked if something was wrong.
"No, just thought I heard something in the bushes," I told him.
"Haha, you thought there was a bear in that little bush," he asked. "Is that why you were taking your pack off??"
"No," I said, feeling my face flush, "I was going to grab a different lens."
To stay true to my lie, I switched lenses and we moved forward across wet rocks past the bush. As I lifted my leg to step to the next stone, there was the sound of a blood-curdling wail unlike anything I've ever heard. It sounded like the war cry of a dwarfed crackhead who'd inhaled a dozen whippet balloons full of helium. From the corner of my eye I saw a small furry creature gliding through the air holding something pointy. I turned my head toward the left to see the thing more clearly. It was the squirrel. And it wasn't holding something pointy - it was a throbbing boner, a horrible case of penisitis. I heard Q scream "holy fuck" and I tried to dodge the animal, and the small vienna sausage dangling from its midsection. My equilibrium was compromised by the visage of this vermin Valkyrie and I misstepped, losing my footing, falling down onto wet rock. I watched the creature sail over my head, squealing, passing over me and moving right - over the cliff beside me. Had I fallen a few inches to the right, I would have gone off the cliff with it.
"Holy fuck! Holy fuck! Are you alright?! Did you see the cock on that squirrel? Holy shit! It was coming right at you," Q shouted.
He helped me up and I told him I'd seen the squirrel earlier, that it sexually harassed me in the woods where he wiped his ass.
"Well he's gone now, over the hills and far away," I told him, "let's grab something to eat, and maybe a beer to help forget about what just happened."
We hiked back down, the swelling in my knee causing me to hobble and limp. We stopped inside the Awanhee and ate hummus and had a drink. I took several Aleve and rested my leg. Q drove us up above the valley where we smoked some more pot and watched the moonrise. It was a view that is difficult to describe. The full moon glowed yellow-orange, floating upward over the mountains and, behind us, the setting sun painted the sky in pink and red.
The next day we hiked Mirror Lake and Yosemite Falls, my knee and hip still sore, but functional. We took the 120 back toward San Francisco, a drive almost as beautiful as Yosemite itself. We stopped off at a saloon in a California hick town for the last drink of our adventure. I spoke with an old man who'd spent 24 years in the Navy. He told me that since his wife passed, that he has no one left except his brother, whom he plays pool with 3 times a week. Q thought the man piteous and was thankful when he left. I found him human, vulnerable, tender, withered and frail, like a burning building ready to collapse.
We got back into the car and left. I'd been driving for an hour or so when I heard something moving in the backseat, where our bags were. I asked Q if he could see what had fallen or what was loose, god forbid it was one of our cameras. The next thing I heard was the sound of unbridled terror and shock howling from Q's larynx, followed by a frightening and familiar high-pitched grrrrrrrrr. It was the squirrel. This time it did have something sharp; it was the knife I had in my bag to cut the sandwiches with. It scurried around the backseat and leapt onto the neck of Q's chair, holding the knife to his throat.
"Fuck! Be cool," I yelled.
Q continued to scream and with its free hand the squirrel extracted a notepad from my bag. It handed me a page onto which a message had been scrawled:
Roll up the fucking windows, smoke that last joint, and play Purple Rain, LOUD!
No comments:
Post a Comment