Western Time Diary: Yosemite National Park

When the government shutdown was in the news, I couldn't help but feel for all the little businesses that depend on travelers visiting the national parks. We like to patronize these smaller establishments as often as possible when we vacation. For our Yosemite trip, we stayed at the charming Meadow Creek Ranch Bed and Breakfast Inn in Mariposa.

The adorable chicken coop. I felt like I was in a little Irish cottage.

A clawfoot tub invites a soak. There was brandy, tea, fresh coffee and dark chocolates in the room.

Two of my favorite words to describe a home (or in this case, a home away from home), invoked so often by Laura Ingalls Wilder, are "snug" and "cozy" (or cosy).

All the little details make a place homey to me.

A cozy and snug home for fine feathered friends to seek shelter from the elements.

Homemade blueberry and black walnut pancakes (black walnuts grow on the property), with fresh fruit (including figs, which we found so much more abundant in California), orange juice and vanilla chai tea.

The Meadow Creek Ranch served Mariposa Coffee, and we stopped by to take a pound home.

When driving to the bed and breakfast at night, we  pulled the car over and turned off the lights to take in the stars. Recalling when Laura and Charles, her Pa, on the premiere of Little House on the Prairie viewed the majestic starry filled night sky,

Charles, "Hear that?"

Laura, "Hear what, Pa?"

Charles, "Stars. They're singing Hallelujah."

It's hard not to want to sing Hallelujah when seeing Yosemite.

   

  

 

 

  

 

 

Even in the busiest national parks, one can find moments of solitude. Hiking up to Sentinel Dome, we were the last two left to enjoy the views.

 

 

Ansel Adams capturing Yosemite's beauty so memorably.

 

 

Annie, at age 14, wrote here, "Yosemite is a place of timeless beauty that will never be affected by the greed and woes of humans. Here we can rediscover ourselves, others, and the bonds that connect us with everything. Here is where we realize the incomparable essence of nature."

 

 

 The author Willa Cather so missed the abundant trees of lush Virginia when she moved as a child to the Nebraska plains. Trees were so rare in the plains, she wrote, people would feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were people.

 





We should treat them with sacred awe, for they are a life force.

I feel anxious we are not concerned enough about protecting our lands. For instance, there are so many ads on television from gas companies trying to convince Americans how good natural gas is. I said to my husband, if natural gas is so wonderful, why are these corporations spending so much time and money to convince people in feel-good commercials? Whenever I see warm and fuzzy advertisements from oil companies, I immediately question.


The film Promised Land portrays how natural gas companies get landowners to sign over their land to extract natural gas through fracking. Frances McDormand plays Sue and Matt Damon is Steve, who are trying to do just that. Sue tells an anxious mother about the better school her daughter can go to. "Everything to me starts with an education." An education is correct, but who is doing the educating? Those that seek to benefit?

When Sue and Matt arrive, a store clerk is so happy to see them. He says, "We can't sell the scenery, can we?"

I think we can (the parks experience is about scenery, but then the greater lesson is of stewardship), and it's time to introduce a word that has gone missing: conservation. Steve says, "Unless we talk about cutting consumption and so far that's a conversation none of want to have." We simply must conserve as much as we can. The land cannot give more. In J.J. Brown's  Brindle 24, a cautionary novel about fracking, it was wisely stated, "We had paradise. We threw it away." Let us not throw our paradise away.

The naming of Yosemite has a dark story with roots in the gold rush, according to Ken Burns' The National Parks: America's Best Idea. In 1851, a group of white men calling themselves the Mariposa Battalion were armed and looking for Indians to drive out of their homelands from the western Sierra Nevadas. Lafayette Bunnell, so awed by the landscape here, thought they name the place they came upon, and suggested Yosemite, which he thought was the name of the tribe they were displacing. In fact, Yosemite refers to people who should be feared. It means, "They should be killers." Watch the clip here.

"We signed a paper that said they could take the trees, signed a paper that said they could take the copper from the earth," said the old chief Bizhiki, disturbed, "We didn't say they could take the earth.

Who can take the earth?" - The Game of Silence by Louise Erdrich.

Erdrich penned a series of books, beginning with the Birchbark House, about a tribe whose main focus is Omakayas, a young girl living not long before Laura Ingalls Wilder. If you read the Little House books, they are a wonderful comparison, especially for children, as these are tribes the pioneers would displace. Disney adapted a film version of Little House on the Prairie, and there's a moving scene when Charles Ingalls passes the Osages. Their chief tells him,

"This land knows our stories. The wind knows the names of the children before they're born. But this should all be yours. Why do you think so? Do our memories matter less? Does our laughter not lift its way to heaven as yours does?"

In an interview, the mother of Tori Amos, who has Eastern Cherokee roots, was asked if she felt different growing up because of her background. She recalled not knowing a difference until she went to college and observed of her classmates, "They didn't have the same respect I suppose or love for the nature I was taught and for the animals and spirits."

Tori Amos recalls,

"As I was researching for this record [Scarlet’s Walk], a Native American woman came back to see me on the last tour and she said to me, “The people that hold the land and the white brother that owns the land must come together for the sake of her survival.

And I said to her,

"But so much has been taken from you and your people already."
 
There were tears rolling down her face, and she said “Sadly enough my dear the white brother only took the land. Now he needs to take more.”
 
This woman, older, no fanfare, but her commitment to building bridges to a people that has not integrated her stories, her people’s culture. She still is compassionate and holds a space by the fire. When you stop holding a space by the fire, then there’s no chance for the people that own the land to know what they really don't have access to. It isn't taught in our schools. Their culture is segregated. They are marginalized. Yet, they are still willing to share, even though they've lost so much. Yet still not pretend that agreements weren’t broken, that there wasn’t betrayal.

So I learned a lot in this woman's activism that she carried a torch and she carried a tomahawk but she carried compassion in her other hand."

 

I wish we had a modern day John Muir to advocate for the land. We need a space at the fire to talk about these issues. I hope to see you there.

 

Western Time Diary: The Gold Rush Town of Columbia, California

The first word in my mind when arriving in the late evening in the former gold rush town of Columbia, California, was not gold. It was stars. I had never seen so many stars in my life, except for maybe the American Southwest.  There is so much light pollution in our congested northern New Jersey area, stars here were my gold dust in the night sky. 

We stayed at the Harlan House bed and breakfast, for adults only (unfortunately the owner had a few bad experiences with ill-behaved children). Families might want to check out the historic City Hotel or Fallon Hotel which was our next choice.

A front porch seems so inviting.

The rose room. Are there ghosts here? Do you believe in them? It seems like these old homes must have spirits.

Bonnets getting me in touch with my Laura Ingalls Wilder.

A beautiful cross stitch reminds us, "To love and be loved is the greatest joy on earth." I do believe this is indeed one of the greatest joys, but it doesn't have to be romantic love. It can be the love of a family member, cherished friend or pet.

Remember that Little House on the Prairie episode where the Ingalls and Edwards families tries their luck at panning for gold? Laura encounters an old man whose wife lay buried in the river, her grave robbed by hungry gold seekers.  Before her death, he always wanted more gold to buy her more things, but after he said everything he ever wanted was buried in the river. 

A breakfast scramble with hash browns, bread, fruit with jam, tea and juice. I adore a beautifully set breakfast table, accompanied by a pot of tea.

Right across the road from Harlan House is a trail leading up to a restored school house. This marker remembers a teacher Karen Bakerville Smith, who taught with the same effort toward excellence as the pioneer teachers. If you get the Hallmark Channel, you might enjoy (as I did) the adaption of When Calls the Heart, about pioneer schoolteachers, a film that is being developed into a series for 2014. In an age when so much of entertainment is shallow, I'm so glad original content is being produced showcasing teachers and the West. Who cares about the vapid lives of today's reality starlets or limited talented celebrities who can't get press without shedding their clothes? I'm so tired of hearing about them. These women's lives were far more interesting.

I like what the singer Tori Amos said, "Every day you wake up and say not,“What do I know?” but you wake up and say, “What can I learn today?” I learn so much from traveling.  We should all strive to continue learning.

 

I'm a little obsessed with old schoolhouses. Maybe I was a schoolteacher once in a past life?

""Gold" someone yelled above the noise of the river. "Miles north of Old Dry Creek!"

Suddenly the noise of picks and shovels stopped. Before our eyes was a swarm of men hurried out of camp to where their horses were grazing. They mounted and disappeared into the woods. Others packed tools and bedrolls onto their mules: some just started walking.

I was amazed at the power of that one word: gold." - Seeds of Hope: The Gold Rush Diary of Susanna Fairchild, California Territory 1849 by Kristiana Gregory, part of the Dear America series, an engaging fictional diary line introducing U.S. history to readers young and old.

Gold. It was on my mind for a few weeks before my wedding. I used my grandmother's engagement ring from the 1920s, but we needed wedding bands. My grandfather's didn't fit Steve and the engravings might have been jeopardized with stretching and I didn't favor the look of the yellow gold. I opted for a rose gold band for myself with tiny specks of diamonds. I asked about the origins, since I started reading H.W. Brands' "Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream"  (a book I need to get back to). I quickly learned how hard it is to trace the origins of gold.

I thought about Brands' remark in an online lecture about how he was raised in Oregon and traveled with his father seeing parts of the Lewis and Clark trail, while his wife from Maryland thought in the context of the Civil War sites. A lifelong New Jerseyan, we have revolutionary war history reminders, and so often you'll see a plaque from the historical society retracing Washington's army's steps. His wife and I never thought much of the gold rush, which brought California to statehood in just two years and was one of the largest migrations of people since the Crusades, according to Brands.

It's easy to romanticize legions of people coming from all corners of the globe seeking riches, but there was so often a root of desperation bringing the 49rs there, and the aftermath was even darker. Journalist Chris Bowman noted,

"Opportunists swarming the Sierra Nevada like grasshoppers, rearranging its rivers and streams, choking them with mining debris, polluting them with everlasting mercury, scalping hillsides, denuding forests, overfishing, overhunting, overrunning meadows with livestock, introducing diseases, displacing native plants, ousting thousands of environmentally conscious American Indians and forever shattering the primeval stillness of the mountains...Undeterred by law or conscience, the 19th-century Argonauts simply helped themselves to billions of dollars' worth of Sierra gold."

The courts would take 35 years before imposing the first restraints on the hydraulic mining. Until then it was a free-for-all.  As historian David Beesley said simply,

"There's no evidence that anyone stood up for the mountains."

Read more here: http://www.calgoldrush.com/part4/04environment.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.calgoldrush.com/part4/04environment.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.calgoldrush.com/part4/04environment.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.calgoldrush.com/part4/04environment.html#storylink=cpy

At the local bookseller, I spotted McGuffey readers. I can just hear Mrs. Beadle telling students to take these out on Little House on the Prairie. I read the readers emphasized spelling, vocabulary and public speaking which was more important in 19th century America than it is today. I think the beauty of the word isn't valued enough in our modern age.

I wondered about the lives of those pictured here.

Evangeline and Other Poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, published in 1847. What will the popular storytellers of our times tell future generations?

 

The Columbia cemetery.  In a New York Times op-ed piece, "The Man Who Loves Cemeteries," author Allan Gurganus writes, "A novelist needs both a dictionary and a cemetery. Graveyards offer more than your eventual remaindered resting-shelf. Approached in the joyful spirit of mortal play, they provide historic bullet points, bird sanctuaries, excellent fictitious names, and the lifelong source of such sweet calm." I think many of his points could be true for non-novelists too.

In the cemetery that sits behind his North Carolina home, he aches "most for child brides perished in childbirth. One epitaph runs: “Mother — she did all she could.”

Here lies a soul who lost their life at 26 years of age from falling down a shaft. What's so striking walking through here is the short life spans. A few celebrities were in the news of late passing away in their seventies and the first thought I had was that seems so young, but in this time it would be ancient. Many gravestones marked not just years but days. Each day mattered.

This marker is in memory of the Chinese pioneers, whose remains were disinterred and returned to their homeland.

Natalie Merchant's rendition of Poor Wayfaring Stranger from The House Carpenter's Daughter folk album comes to mind when I stroll these old cemeteries. Despite how downtrodden the narrator is, I think of the comfort they find in going on to beautiful fields to meet "my mother, said she'd meet me when I come" and to see "my loved ones, gone on before me one by one."



"Who were the homestead wives who were the gold rush brides, does anyone know? Do their works survive their yellow fever lives in pages that they wrote," Ms. Merchant pondered in the 10,000 Maniacs songs Gold Rush Brides.

At the local bookshop, I picked up A Columbia Diary, the real life diary of Clementine Brainard, covering her life from 1853-1858. Clementine wrote in the first entry on October 19, 1853 of her intentions to keep journey during her sea journey but didn't. I brought a diary with me I had romantic notions of keeping during my trip, and alas was to exhausted at day's end. My blog is the closest thing I keep to a diary of my thoughts and memories.

Clementine writes, "Do I ever have any thoughts that are worth being transferred to paper? I must be a singular individual if I do not." Do you keep a diary?

Clementine recorded memories of her husband's frequent ill health, mail deliveries (but doesn't elaborate much about what's in the letters) and speaks matter-of-factly often when talking about death (maybe unsurprisingly seeing how common early death was). She bears her first child with barely any mention before and after the event. Clementine's husband dies at age 30 and she remarries and bears six more children, four of whom die in infancy.

So much is documented (arguably overly documented) in our digital age. Will these modern forms have the permanence though of the older forms of diaries and journals?

I needed some tea to ponder all of this. I read about Columbia Kate's teahouse doing trip research beforehand, and knew I would love it before I even set foot in it. I was right.

Their dining room was bustling, so we ate in their airy, cheerful screened patio.

Tea cups adorn each table with names of mines and claims.

An autumn feast of blackberry sage tea, pumpkin soup and an apricot scone with the trimmings. Love the tea cozy!

A Meyer lemon bar to share. I've loved blue and white dishes for ages. They always bring back memories of eating mashed potatoes in my grandparents' house in Switzerland as a child.

 



A Columbia welcome wagon. How welcoming this town did feel, and left me with so much to think about.

On the road to Yosemite next. Coming in to Columbia, we passed by a field of wind mills. How different this view was from what the gold seekers saw, and the preservation of the environment was on my mind again. Election Day is tomorrow, with as usual little mention of how the candidates plan to protect our air, oil and water supplies - the greatest gold we have. Our local paper had a section on where the gubernatorial candidates stood on the issues and unsurprisingly the environment did not make the list, even though issues like gambling did. This in spite of the fact that New Jersey has 113 active  toxic Superfund sites, the most in the nation, and a natural gas formation has been discovered in New Jersey, opening up the possibilities of fracking in my home state. I thought about all the harm the gold seekers did, intentionally or not, with no regulation or protections of our lands.
I'll be voting tomorrow for my own gold.