These Places in Yosemite Take Away the Dread
A pair of wood-paneled paradises remind us that we're still here (at least for now)
One of the more difficult things to do as a parent in a time of never-ending and rolling crises is to try to figure out how much of the existential woes you feel are specifically yours and how much is an extension of what your child is going through and then attempting to reconcile—but navigating that without projections.
Try it. It’s hard.
Or, if you admit you don’t have a handle on it, go the opposite direction and just stare into the far horizon and try to blink away every problem and pretend it doesn't exist while staring at your phone and the endless scroll—updates on tragedies from land out of reach but at your fingertips, or, even worse, pictures of people seemingly enjoying themselves, Living Their Lives, while you rot in your own lament.
Now, if you can push all that aside and not spoon-feed it into the next generation, unwittingly or no, then you've won, I guess.
Me, I haven't gotten it right. And I find when I'm getting it right, I'm basically running toward what's wrong.
An example: mid-pandemic, my seven-year-old boy kept asking for a pet, which was a reasonable request. As an only child in a house with adults having adult conversations all. The. Time. Something needed to come in to offset all that.
We were lucky enough to find Bernie, the neurotic, year-old Kelpie pup, at a local shelter. He was twenty pounds underweight and had the look, at least for the first three months or so, of someone who was ready to have his bags packed and to be left back out on the street at any moment.
Bernie was an instant hit, and we thought that a lot of the physical manifestations that had crept into my sone's sphere (especially tummy troubles, which seemed to directly correlate to Zoom school sessions) would subside.
Turns out they got worse.
Our afternoon walks through the open space behind the last development in our little oceanfront town leads out to a sand bar that juts into the sea. Just over the ridge, a perfect wave in February and March—a break so precious to the locals I don't dare say anything more. Bernie loves to run and out there he’s free—but I don't think anyone had taken the time to let him off-leash in such a capacity where trails were endless and little ground creatures hid out in the native ground cover. He was a wild man at first, going up to a half a mile away until he was just a little spec on the horizon.
And while I was happy that this dog could finally live his best dog life, I looked over at my little boy, and tears streaked down his cheeks as he yelled, "Bernie" in such shrill fashion I thought the whole planet was going to split in two.
Bernie, of course, came back—every time. But the tummy problems were getting worse. It wasn't just Zoom school or not having a companion; there was something else driving this little guy to constantly worry.
We made it through summer, spending lots of the time at the beach, in the park, and playing tennis. No screen time for school certainly helped, but still, it wasn't till the fall, till he was masked up and back with his friends, sitting in a classroom, that the stomach stuff began to subside. I guess my easy, shorthand explanation is he just needed to be around his people, and even if it looks and feels like a new normal for us, it's normal for him. Case closed.
…Though, I'm not so sure now.
I think as much as he needed to be with other kids, doing the things they do: playing freeze tag, one-upping one another with birthday party plans, and trading Pokemon cards, it was—very clear—he also needed to be away from us, the not-so-quiet-whisper-talks, the shrugging and the "I don't know, just so what you think is best" ambiguous end to conversations about problems well out of our control.
It was the things that he was hearing day in and day out—from the adults in the home—that was bogging him down.
I think it's a very American thing to congratulate oneself on parenting just because we're vaguely present in the room or as a fixture in your child's life like a door—there to at least symbolically keep out the bad. But we rarely listen, end even when we do, we often get it wrong.
We get it wrong because the ones before us got it wrong, and their parents' parents got it wrong, and so on and so on. I guess the goal is to leave your kid with a carry-on to push through security when they get ready to fly, instead of five or six checked bags. Am I near that goal? I don’t think so.
…Some things, like pandemics, rolling environmental catastrophes, and living in the cruelest, most ignorant, most white-supremacy stricken Christo-fascist nation the world has ever known, can't be helped, but the way we continue to try to churn through it all—our behaviors within that mess—can make all the difference.
If there’s any saving grace, I fully understand where he’s coming from. I felt my first existential dread on vacation with my family in Yosemite. I remember being a newly minted seven-year-old and on a little spring weekend ski trip picking up this March 29, 1982 issue of Time Magazine: "Thinking the Unthinkable: Rising Fears about Nuclear War" with a picture of a mushroom cloud tearing through what I assume was the little cabin we were staying in all smiley-faced and evil.
Yes, it was an evil magazine cover.
I remember thumbing through the issue and trying to read the article (it wasn't nearly as interesting as the cover image; my first lesson in clickbait), and I went back to my Ramona book shortly thereafter.
Still, the magazine was there: while I got my ski pants on, when I had cereal, while my mom and sister made eggs, while my dad got ready to barbecue, as precocious deer came to our door and begged for food scraps, the mushroom cloud—and my presumed fate—was constantly staring back at me.
I remember finally telling my mom I was worried about dying in a nuclear war, that I was seven and didn't want to go yet. I laid it on pretty thick, but also, this was a real concern; it's right there on a MAGAZINE; they just don't put things on covers to scare children or adults—that'd be irresponsible, right? She assured me that there would be no nuclear strikes during our ski trip, but also to stay out of the master bathroom, especially in the mornings, just in case (a joke I didn't get.)
Fast-forwarding nearly four decades and I hear my son voice the same array of concerns. We're at home doing something mindless together or out at the park, throwing the frisbee or hitting tennis balls. He'll mention something about how he is really enjoying being seven, and he doesn't want it to end, even though its' been a hard twenty months or so, "I'm only this age for a year, and that year's almost up, and I don’t want it to go." In spite of everything, he’s not ready to not be seven. And boy, if the world's largest dustpan couldn't pick up all the pieces of my shattered little heart.
But then I thought of Yosemite, and the nuclear warhead, and those first feelings of knowing that this was all going to come to an end, sudden, or in a drip, that I not only wouldn't be seven forever but wouldn’t be here forever, no matter how hard I tried—and I understood once more where the stomach ache comes from.
7910 and 7914 Forest Dr Yosemite National Park, CA 95389
One of the first newsletters I did in this space was about Yosemite. There I talked about the great Wawona-Yosemite conundrum: a timeless little encampment complete with endless trails, a waterfall, a bucket list grove of Giant Sequoias and a river full of fish at your doorstep—not to mention a squeaky-stepped general store, a little library, and a horse stables just down the way all under the watchful gaze of granite giants. With a water source and 320-plus days of sun a year, you could well live out one crisis after another there and not be affected*.
*Or, it could all burn down in three months.
There's always an asterisk.
But seven-year-old me was able to lift my head out of my death-spiral magazine long enough to see what surrounded me, and I'm sure for my seven-year-old son, existential dread and ennui setting in at a young age his only real inheritance, will do the same when we visit again.
Until then, someone has the market to call this pair of Mid-sixties wood-paneled dreams their own.
The current owners split the property in two, an obvious ploy to get a few hundred grand extra that I'm sure will be lost to taxes and however many ways they end up splitting it. No matter. They go in a set like a porcelain cow creamer and sugar bowl. Buy them both and have a place for the kids to rumpus till early in the morning or that one couple who argues all the time to stay. No matter what, you'll be fine as long as you leave the interiors alone. Built-in couches and tiny kitchens were never there for pure creature comfort, but that's the point.
As we've learned and continue to find out, it's the closeness that matters.