Back to Issue Fifty-Eight

YOSEMITE FOREVER

by BRENDAN BOWLES

“It began with a car crash,” the father would say, later, in recounting the tale, “a wanderer blown off course. We should have taken it as a sign and turned back then.”

The father had just been handed a map at the gate, been asked not to speed—“speeding kills bears”—and told Bridalvale falls was closed for restoration.

“How do they close a waterfall?” the father had asked. “Tighten a spigot?”

The daughter moaned and sunk into the backseat.

The young park ranger looked confused. “Just the rec station,” she said. “The bathrooms and stuff.”

Perhaps the daughter could have a job like this one summer, thought the father—this cute ranger was about her age. Would be good for her to rough it a bit and he could see her smiling and welcoming families to Yosemite. Well, maybe not smiling exactly.

“Right,” said the father to the car. “We’ll unpack and then a hike?”

“Which one?” said the mother. “There’s so many.” She held her glasses to her forehead, up off her nose, studying the map. “I forgot it was this big.”

He’d forgotten, too, how the park started small, at a clinch point—he had to slow and squeeze the car under two giant rocks teepee’d against each other—and then suddenly they were out and through, expelled onto a curving, one-way road, steep valley walls to either side, lined with spruce and black cotton oak and all the other trees he couldn’t name. The road was freshly paved. It was a pleasure to drive, zipping along. Oh, thought the father, nature! They hugged the Merced river, taking the turns as they came. Happy families waited for traffic breaks to dart across the road, flip flops slapping, fathers carrying coolers and sons hauling floaties, waving thank you to the stopped cars on their way down to the eddies and the bubbling streams and the sand beaches that gathered and slanted into water the way glass sometimes breaks at an angle. Eden, thought the father, like so many before: Yosemite forever. And perhaps the mother would get naked with him at night, and slip down to the water, just the two of them, for a bit of the old outdoorsy—mother who was still in the map, always the planner, missing the scenery. The daughter had her wired earpods in but he could tell she was watching the river change as they drove: growing thick and turbulent and then thin, a trickle from a boulder. The father thought that if he ohhh’d and ahhh’d loud enough the son, the youngest member of the family, might also look up from his iPad, experience the majesty and the beauty for himself.

The son did not look up. It was increasingly hard to compete with Minecraft. He could sit for hours with that game, content to tunnel and smash, build structures using a gun that plopped out bricks with a gravelly crunch. Inside that bright, open world, the son owned castles, haunted houses, a ranch, whatever his mind could devise, built from the ground up. Sometimes, to try to connect, the father would ask for a tour of whatever project the son had on the go: a giant house in lush mountains with thirty-plus nonsensical rooms devoted to daily activities—the room where he brushed his teeth before bed, the room where he sat and thought about cats, the room for Nana’s trumpet (“But Nana doesn’t own a trumpet?”). In a world of blocks everything could be made to fit together and the father suspected that was the appeal for the boy, who would as soon line up his toys as play with them. The game didn’t seem to have much of a storyline that the father could tell. You built and you toiled and sometimes, often randomly, you died, drowning or burning or bonked by a wolf. Maybe that made the story an American story, of expansion and extraction, going Westward or downward, with a lot of dumb luck.

“The crown jewel of the National park system,” said the father, approvingly, and then, “Jesus he’s speeding.”

“Speeding kills bears,” yelled the son in the back.

“That’s right,” said the father. He never knew what the boy might be taking in but this made sense: the son had shown a special interest in the possibility of bears, which seemed to terrify and thrill him in equal measure. He’d asked about them before bed in the weeks leading up—will they see one? What will happen if they see one? What will happen if they don’t see one but one sees them?

“Asshole,” said the daughter, taking out one ear bud.

“What’s the rush?” said the mother.

Just as the white Range Rover shot past on the left, the tree line, which had been so close to the car, peeled back, unzipped along both sides, opening on a full, panoramic sweep of the valley. They were in the bottom looking up at the granite cliffs—Half Dome and Sentinel and El Capitan—ringed by a series of waterfalls, thrilling and dangerous but silent from this distance, pouring water into the bowl of the valley—amazing, thought the father. His son, sensing the shift in scenery, was looking up too. This might be the son’s first waterfall. The father had to think. His first real one, anyways, not in a game. He’d brought them here because he wanted them to see a different side of the world, a wild one, and also, if he was hoping, a different side to their father. And in that moment the father wanted to say something about how strange, that the water in the brook was the water from the falls was the water that they drank in San Francisco—there was a good thought there but it wasn’t full formed yet, like he was still feeling around it, trying to find its edges, so he could lift the thought entire and present it, broken off and polished, to his clan.

“Man oh man,” said the father, instead.

The mother gripped his knee. “It really is something.”

He’d done good with this one.

Up ahead, a grey Tesla in the right lane had slowed to a crawl. It had decided, without signalling, that it might like to cut across both lanes, trying to make the entrance to the first parking lot. The Tesla’s sudden desire to get over wouldn’t have been an issue if everyone had been going at the same lolly-gagging speed, hunched up over their steering wheels, staring up. But the white Ranger Rover was going too fast for that. Later, in telling the story to the school secretaries, the father would say the brakes shrieked, that horrible, single high note, calling to the people in the parking lot like deer in the fields, all of them lifting their heads from the grasses, alert to danger. The secretary said brakes only lock in movies now and so he couldn’t have heard the squeal. The father didn’t know what to say to that—it wasn’t how he remembered things. In either case, he continued, The Tesla froze, bunkered down for the bang at the end of that note, like the promise of every lit firework: the sizzle and the sizzle and the sizzle—the Range Rover swerving, over-correcting, losing control, the back of the Range Rover caught up to its front—boom. There was a curious inevitability and a slowness to it all, as the Range Rover ended its brief dodging maneuver in the back of a parked, silver Prius, a bystander in all of this, off to the side of the road.

“Did you see that?” said the mother.

“Oof,” the father. He’d felt the crunch in his stomach. The sound made him sick.

The family’s car slowed and then stopped. As did the cars behind them.

And of course the idiot Tesla was unscratched.

The Ranger Rover’s driver was out now, yelling at the Tesla. Like the waterfalls, the father couldn’t hear the man yelling, but he was sure it was loud up close. A rattling fury you’d feel in your bones. With one arm the driver was presenting the Tesla owner’s car back to him, then the front of the Ranger Rover, then the Tesla again, as if helpfully drawing a line from the Tesla owner’s unblemished incompetence to the wreckage of the other man’s vehicle.

The people in the parking lot came out from their cover and closed in around the scene, gathering without approaching, a tableau of ineffective, gestural help.

“I was going a little fast and he shot right by me,” said the father. “Must have been doing double. The Tesla could at least get out of the road.”

“There,” said the mother, “now the Tesla’s pulling over.”

“Wonder what he’ll do,” said the father. “Not much he can do.”

“Aren’t we also supposed to stay at the scene of an accident?” said the daughter, taking out her other earpod.

“It’s not an accident-accident,” said the father.

“Everyone’s fine,” said the mother. “Lucky no one was standing there.”

“And besides,” said the father, “Don’t you want to see some stuff? We’d be stuck here all day.”

There was no answer to this. He put the gear in drive.

“Shouldn’t of been speeding,” said the mother, eager to make a lesson of it.

“No coming back from that,” agreed the father.

“Slow is smooth,” said the mother.

“Smooth is fast,” said the father.

The father watched the scene recede in his rearview mirror. He was thankful it wasn’t them, that they could leave this scene behind. Someone else could be in charge, surely. The father couldn’t do it all. Someone else—

Something about water, thought the father.

The father had set an alarm for a Saturday morning months earlier and woke, put on the coffee, waited for the camping passes to open online. He had an eye on one of the prized spots, a long weekend before his daughter went off to college. He’d pictured fireside chats and maybe some quality time on the hikes and a chance to say how proud and how well she’d do and protect your drink and don’t get too drunk but also if she did that was fine too but don’t let your friends leave you and don’t ever leave your friends and she could always call them, anytime day or night, which she already knew. She was such a bright girl—radiant, if only with those same friends—he could hear her on the phone sometimes through her door, laughing so hard, at what, he had no idea. At him? Sometimes. She had so many opinions, so many of them foreign. The whole ride up the daughter had noted each Trump sign they’d passed, like a self-satisfied tic under the box labelled “Fucked, irrevocably, forever.”

Everything about her was doom these days. She spent too much time reading the news, like her mother, repeating the news to each other. He wanted to show her: there are still good things. Nothing made you feel as helpless as being a parent. Yes, she’d missed prom because of Covid but then a skinny boy still came by the house that weekend, tie matched his mask when they’d asked him to come up, and the kids had made their own prom in a field with hanging lights and everything—she told all this to her mother—and she’d gotten home close to five am, maybe a little wobblily on the stairs, the sound of dropped shoes, but you know, he was glad for it—something like the real thing. There were still good things.

The mother read all the other signs they’d passed but skeptically, as if they might contain some hidden meaning: “Pick blackberries here.” An hour and a half of almond trees wasn’t much to stimulate the mind. Then the father saw a handmade Trump sign with a coiled snake. “Don’t tread on me,” he’d read aloud. He liked that slogan, could relate.

“Idiots,” said the daughter, from the back.

So he’d said, “They’re not all bad people.” He tried to make eye contact with her in the mirror. “It’s been hard out here with the droughts. Mega farms. Mexico, NAFTA. Not easy being a man of the land these days. Or ever.”

She made a face like, what would you know about it?

Sometimes she made him feel so distant. He was the slime on a rock she’d sprung from one day—they might be related, but it would take a microscope to find a sense of connection.

And then there was the boy. Nature was supposed to be good for him. Horses especially. There was a program they’d tried where other kids like him are lead around on horseback. He’d been too afraid to be placed that high up but he’d been thrilled by the big, tumbling shits the horses took and liked to put his hand on their giant, bulbous tummies. The volunteer kept pulling him back, worried he might get kicked in the head, and the son didn’t want that. There were a few scenes so they only made it the one day.

So the father had booked the site and bought the tents and propane refills and downloaded a playlist from Spotify called “Yosemite Forever” and it was playing now. They were prepared. He felt prepared. He didn’t know most of the music and he thought it might appeal to his daughter who liked the unremarkable yet blandly expansive pop music—no heart, but lots of propulsive, four on the floor banjo.

It was painful to be so close after driving so long. They’d circled two camp cul-de-sacs, the numbers ending before theirs. Now they were on the third.

“Nine-seventeen,” said the mother. She sounded skeptical of its existence.

“Ah,” he said, “there!” Between two minivans: nine-one-seven in rusty letters on a pole in the ground. He pulled the car into the birth, lined by logs half-buried.

“This is it?” said the daughter, taking out her earbuds.

“Nice of you to join us,” said the father. But she had a point. A pole in the ground and a parking spot were about it, as far as the campsite went.

“There should be a table,” said the father. “Maybe someone borrowed it. We’ll have to go looking, see if someone has two.”

“There’s a firepit,” said the mother, hopefully.

“And I think I see a grill for it in the bush,” said the father, stepping out of the car. “And you’ll all be happy we’re so close to the bathrooms when it’s night.” He nodded to the neighbors on one side, which he could see, beers in coozies, having a nice time, and they smiled back, beers lifted overhead in greeting. He couldn’t see the neighbors to the other side, although the bikes suggested a range of children—maybe one of his kids would make a friend. Probably not.

The double beep of the trunk opening sounded like the end of every trip.

“Wilderness one-oh-one, my boy. You got to make camp while there’s light, everything else follows.” His father had said the same thing to him, and now he’d teach his son. Start making some memories. But he also knew you couldn’t pick the things you’d remember, nothing special about a Sunday with a certain kind of light hitting a crystal bowl at Nana’s and separating into jewel-toned globs you could wear on your wrist. The kids would have memories of him long after he was gone, but they wouldn’t be the ones he’d chose, that much he knew. They’d stand in the shape of him, that much he also knew, when everything was else was changed and gone.

“I’m hungry,” said the son. He had a way of saying everything like it was his father’s fault.

After setting up camp, the father wanted to get a hike in before lunch. They stopped at a bridge to admire the unbraiding of water through rocks. An alarming sign, printed and stuck to the bridge, warned of two toddlers who had drowned right there. The large font claimed, confusingly, “They never went swimming!” and had a photo of the two cute kids hugging each other, big eyes and short brown hair. It didn’t look too strong down there. Maybe it had been stronger earlier, when the glaciers were melting. Or perhaps the bank was undercut.

“And you know your father took me camping here early on,” said the mother.

“We know,” said the daughter.

“I’m tired,” said the son.

“And I’d never been much into camping,” said the mother, “but he was so excited and he pulled out all the stops trying to impress me, to make it a nice trip. Pillows and mats and he bought a queen-sized sleeping bag—”

“Big Agnes,” said the father, admiringly, as a man might do of a thing well crafted.

“And we hiked through the park,” said the mother. “No car camping. Took a week, just me and your father. It was beautiful.” She had a way of stretching out the word “beautiful,” putting all of the accordion ridges in it, which he loved to listen to.

The mother and father looked at each other to say yes, they remembered. It was a good memory between them, one they returned to often on Sunday mornings: a place of escape when the coming week seemed long and uncertain from the pocket of the sheets.

“But so windy one night,” said the father.

The mother, smiled, picking up his lead. “And because it seemed like he knew what he was doing, I thought, no, there must be a reason why he’s building that fire right up against that dried out log. Huge chunk of old wood, long as a car and white as bone.”

“Bleached from the sun,” said the father. “I thought it would block the wind.”

“He thought it would block the wind.”

“And it did,” said the father.

“So he started the fire, right up against it.”

Exactly as his father had taught him, teepee formation to let the air circulate.

“When are we eating again?” said the son.

“After dinner he doused the little fire and we went to bed,” said the mother. “We didn’t know the heat had started a fire inside the log. We woke up coughing. Smoke blowing into the tent. Burning embers floating across the door. We could feel the heat. Your dad had to spring out of bed, naked as the moon, trying to pee it out.”

“Gross,” said the daughter.

“Are we done now?” said the son. “Are we going back?”

“We already used all the water we had,” said the mother, “and it was all night like that, up and down, howling winds, we thought we’d have it out and then it would come roaring back and I’d have to send your dad out again.”

“And then she’d go out, be squatting over it,” said the father, “and me throwing dirt on it, this massive log.”

“Okay—” said the daughter.

“—we didn’t get any sleep at all,” said the mother.

“I have since learned my lesson,” said the father. But the lesson he took from that night was not about campfire safety. He was smiling at the mother. And smiling at the other stories from that trip, the ones they couldn’t talk about in front of the kids, but she knew and he knew exactly what they were smiling at. The lesson he learned was that love was a thing you could live in, like that tent or Big Agnes. And the two of them, when they were in it together, were unstoppable. Like water, with whatever held it together, when they were going in the same direction, they could do anything, move mountains—but not, apparently, their children, who were, at this moment, looking hot and tired and bored with them. He’d been a little nervous to check, although the mother would know: he suspected they weren’t even halfway to Nevada Falls.

“Do you want to go back?” said the father. “Or we can go hike a waterfall. There’s something called Emerald Lake up there—doesn’t that sound nice for a swim? You ever swam on top of a waterfall?”

The son shrugged. He knew when he was expected to perform enthusiasm, usually for strangers, and he always shut it down like this. He made you realize you were the one who wanted something; you were the problem. The son was his own man, no doubt about it, thought the father, and that could be a good thing, maybe.

It was the worst fire season on record. But they said that every year. There had been so many fires that summer already and new ones every week. At a certain point, you had to wonder what was left to burn. From the top of the waterfall, they could see an anvil-shaped cloud of smoke above the trees.

The father subscribed to an app for by-the-minute updates on local, notable crime—“Man with axe, .86 miles away,” but it had since expanded to the spread of the wildfires and the measure of air quality. He’d be at work and get a notice like, “Lightning Complex Fire 0% Contained” and think huh, that can’t be good.

“Ah,” said the father, breathing deep of the thing he came for, “open air and nature. Feels good. Doesn’t it feel good? To be outside. What do you think, my boy?”

“A controlled burn,” said the mother, reader of signage, laminated and pinned to an a-frame.

“Controlled burn,” said the father. And then he added, feeling poetical, “sounds like a metaphor for life,” although even he wasn’t sure quite what he meant by it.

“Sounds oxymoronical,” said the mother.

The father made an appreciative sound.

“And is that normal?” said the daughter. “You think it looks right? Weird it’s close enough to see.”

“It says don’t call the cops,” said the mother.

“We’ll worry when we can smell it,” said the father.

“Seems close,” said the daughter.

“I wonder how many calls they get anyways,” said the mother, “from people who don’t read the sign.”

“My app says there’s three active burns in the park,” said the father, “looking up from his phone.”

They left the high edge of the outlook and ambled over to Emerald lake, a narrow body of water between angled slabs of grey rock. Some of the kids were sliding down an embankment. At the edge of the lake was a cusp where the water overflowed, cascading down in a waterfall that generated its own rainbow. Another stunning waterfall-lake-vista combos in the land of such things.

The father removed the son’s trunks from his backpack and pinched the waist apart, held them up so the son could see, in case that inspired some spark of desire to join the other kids.

“I don’t want to go in,” said the son.

“You don’t have to go in,” said the mother.

The son was hunched forward on a boulder, feet tight up under his knees. Didn’t look comfortable at all. He was scratching something on the rock beside him with a stick that he’d found.

“We came all this way,” said the father. “Aren’t you hot?”

Didn’t the son even want to see the view?

“We’re putting them on at least,” said the father.

“No,” said the kid.

“In case you change your mind,” said the father. “I’m not going to break my neck getting out to do it later.”

“He’s not going to get in,” said the daughter. “And where are we supposed to change?”

The father said, “There’s a bathroom up there. Or you can do the old towel watusi like me.”

“The waterfall,” said the mother. “Maybe it’s better if he doesn’t go in.”

“All those lessons we paid for,” said the father. “And I’ll be right beside him.”

The mother and the daughter looked from the lake to the bathrooms, an apparently insurmountable distance.

“Well I’m going in,” said the father.

His daughter hated the sight of him shirtless. It was always, “Ew, dad, I have friends coming over. Dad, ew, put a shirt on, I sit there sometimes—or, Mom, God, can’t you make him put a shirt on, ew.” When she was little she’d put her head to his chest and listen to his heartbeat and pluck at his hairs. He supposed it was good, this disgust with her parents, helps to get the young ones out of the nest. And off to college. It was natural. And maybe teenagers’ terrible personalities served a useful evolutionary advantage, creating two mutually beneficial poles of repulsion. Otherwise they’d stay adorable and you might not mind them sticking around, never marrying, there for dinner and tv forever. Instead, her disgust drove her out and so the species could continue.

And then there was the boy.

“You coming with me?” said the father. “Or,” he said, crouching low, hands open in front of him, grumbling in his monster voice, taking two over-sized steps, “do I need to throw you in?”

He knew instantly it was a mistake. Everyone on the lake was trying to have a nice time. Families splashing and sliding down the shoot of water over the rocks, yelling to let other kids take turns. New couples taking selfies, those fast-fading smiles between checking the results, trying again, the smiles turned up like a scorecard. Robust college kids drinking warm beer and pulling out tinfoil packets of sandwich.

The son screamed no.

The father flinched.

The whole lake looked up.

When it was clear no one was going over the waterfall, they’d lose interest. It was the same at the accident, the same at every public scene. The father straightened. He filled his chest. He avoided the people looking at them.

“Go to your mother,” said the father, “now.” He used the flat voice of no dissent. The voice for dogs and children. “You need more sunscreen.” It was often the only voice that got through to him. Eventually the son would realize how powerless the father really was—he had this voice and the count to three and that was all. He worried that day might come soon.

The father bunched up the trunks and shoved them to the bottom of the bag, muttering his way down to the lake, alone.

He slipped a foot from his sandal, gave it a shake under the stream, one big toenail like the dead eye of a fish staring up at him. Water was obviously moving toward the fall but the current was gentle. Seemed safe enough. The signs about drowning kids at the bottom must have been a fluke. The father put his hands in the lake and examined them under the ripples, where the color seemed to bleed at the edges, like he might dissolve, be carried over the falls, particle by particle, and in the falling be reborn as mist.

Don’t let it get to you, the mother would say, you always let it get to you. It isn’t personal. You just need to understand that. But it felt personal—how could it not?

If the father swam now, there’d be more grumbling when he wanted to wait to dry off, more grumbling as the day dragged on. It seemed he’d have to wait for quorum on swimming to keep the peace—permission to swim at a park, now when did that happen to him? But what father isn’t ruled by his own family? Surely it had been that way for his own father. But Yosemite had been different—a different side to his father. When the accountant with the bare ankles put down the spreadsheets and picked up a knife, taught him to fish, to skin a fish, to build a fire and cook the fish they’d caught—in the garden of Yosemite. No fishing now and no fires on account of everything already being on fire, but still. And no matter, there’d be plenty of chances for swimming and hundreds of lakes to choose from—Sunrise, Cathedral, Tenaya. It was Yosemite, after all. There’d be time to swim.

Everyone would feel better after lunch, the father decided. Including him. He wiped his hands on his shorts and returned to the brood.

But it all changed on the way back to lunch. Like the car crash—that quick. “We’d gone up to blue skies,” the father would say, shaking his head, “and came down to orange.”

It was creepy and wrong, the orange light, and you knew it in your body. People didn’t dawdle on the paths. Not that there was anywhere to rush to—you couldn’t get away from the glow—but you wanted to. Not like a beautiful sunset, not at all, all that orange. A sunset is over there. And in the evening. This orange was soupy, and you were in it, moving through it. And everything was orange.

High overhead, and through the orange filter, the sun, a hot red dot. It looked smaller than normal, and irritated, like a wound, a bunched carbuncle, a nipple oozing day. He realized he was looking at the sun with his bare eyes. They all were. “That can’t be good,” he said to himself. “Stop looking at it,” said the father to the son.

“Why?” said the son.

“You’re not supposed to look at the sun.”

“Why?”

“You know why. Don’t play dumb. It’s bad for your eyes.” It was strange though, thought the father, to have this thing hanging over us our entire lives and we’re all just supposed to avoid it most of the time.

“Can’t really see much of a view anymore, can you?” said the mother. “With all the smoke?”

“Doesn’t smell bad at least,” said the father.

“There might be some old masks in the car,” said the mother.

“It’s only bad if you can smell it,” said the father. “Right now the smoke is still pretty high up.”

“What happens when it comes down?” said the daughter.

The dated, 50s style logo and the chaste, practical uniforms, the khakis and high socks and boots and dimpled hats and jaunty neckerchiefs. The wood shingle outhouses. The quaintness was the comfort of every national park. A fixed experience, through generations, half dome in the red light of evening, the meadows of Toulamne and Tenaya Lake, in a clearing big enough for an echo—and nothing had changed since he was boy with a father of his own, that one summer after his parent’s divorce—the only trip he could remember taking with that brawny giant of a man, face like a whaler, all clean jaw and squint, shaved fresh every morning, even weekends, without fail. A reliable man from reliable times. Come look at the trees, the water, the rocks, goes the general idea. And that’s what they were doing, walking through the creaking and the cool of Mariposa Grove, an experience that hadn’t changed, when everything else in the world had changed.

The sky was still orange and everything stank of campfire but giant sequoias were stunning. They lived up to their name, towering above the modern boardwalk. He’d tried to wear the mask but couldn’t stand it, the muggy bubble strapped to his face.

“Why is a boardwalk so pleasing?” asked the mother.

The father thought for a minute. They walked together. “The promise of access to spaces that would otherwise be impassable or difficult? And maybe the path—the readymade path—decisions made for you.”

“Plus it’s tidy, isn’t it,” said the mother. “Something clean laid over something messy.”

“And potentially deadly,” said the father. “No snakes up here or drowning. The pleasure of every bridge.”

“But not too high, like a real bridge. Elevation without the danger,” said the mother.

It was beautiful to be on vacation. This is what they came for, smoke or no. Talking and walking and eating and drinking. The same stuff of everyday life, but in a whole new locale—now strange, made marvelous. He tried not to think of all the squirrels burning in their homes, the speed of their hearts in their chests. Winter rations burning with them, all that work for naught.

The boardwalk ran alongside one giant felled sequoia. At the end of the tree the boardwalk opened to a nook with a spot to stand and take photos the tree’s messy system of roots, exposed to air, like a wild medusa head of startled activity, frozen in the act of reaching, reaching for something beyond its grasp. Maybe the thing that could have saved it. The earth.

“And that’s what under all of them,” said the son.

“Exactly,” said the father.

Then the son decided he wanted to crawl under the barrier and climb on the roots, which could damage them and certainly bother all the people taking photos, and so the father had to use the voice again to talk him off the idea.

“Here’s some good news,” said the mother, hoping to distract the son. “This sign says that fire is good for the trees. Right here,” she said, reading, “controlled burns clear the competition and expose the mineral soil for their seeds.” Then she showed him a pinecone and let him hold it, hoping to instill the wonder, that something so big could come from something so small. But the son was already small, from two big somethings—the miracle of his growth, the assuredness of that destiny, of cells dividing and multiplying, bones stretching and then hardening like roots inside the body—unremarkable, all of it, because it was assumed. It is only the reverse that feels shocking to a child; that an adult was ever small, powerless, that a father could ever have been picked up and carried away against his will.

They only made it a little farther. They found the tree you could drive through, a tacky but touching form of entertainment, and then agreed to turn around. They wanted to be back in the car, where they could breathe the clean, recycled air.

After dinner, the phones started. Different cell providers pinging different towers, meant campers got different messages at different times, from one neighbor’s campsite, and then another, further off, and then another, phones lighting up like fireflies along the valley floor. The names of the areas were different, but the general idea was the same, all caps with the yellow hazard emoji of the emergency notification system hijacking your phone: they were evacuating to the south. The so-called Creek Fire from last night was growing out of control. That must be all the smoke, they said to each other, and then went back to their beans.

Zero percent contained, the father’s phone told him.

After dinner, the daughter announced she would be sleeping in the car because her eyes were burning. Fine, said the father. The son didn’t seem to mind, absorbed in his game. When the son lost after dinner, whatever losing meant in Minecraft, he started yelling loud enough to bother neighbors, and so that was time to shut down and turn in. The night was over. They weren’t supposed to give him that power—they’d both agreed—to end an outing, but it was easier and they were tired.

The thing that bothered the father about the game was that it wasn’t cooperative. It seemed, as with school, he was content to sit alongside others playing, playing beside but not with them. It was a new way to tunnel further into himself, and further away from the world.

Throughout the night, the mother showed him each new evacuation message she got, waking him as they came in, and each time he answered the same: We aren’t there. That’s somewhere else. That’s not us.

Sex in a tent. That American rite of passage. A little stiff from sleeping rough, hair pasted to the side of your head, sealed up in all that steamy, dewy morning body, uncertain of the air mattress and weight distribution, a thing to solve together. The pleasure was the challenge of staying quiet, this variation in the normal patterns requiring a new intensity of attention, of listening to their own sounds, magnified by fear, each catch of breath, the rustle of plastic sheeting, and working in small and foreign space, missionary made harder by the way her butt sank into the mattress and a cellphone that kept showing up under his hand then falling into the divot in the mattress by his knee, and then somehow under her so she moved the phone up by the pillow and that’s where he saw another notification come in through her hair. But they made it work and smiled at the feeling of having gotten away with something and it left the father feeling light, unburdened as he stepped out of the tent and into another strange, orange day, while the mother stayed behind to tear the bedding apart, trying to find the cellphone that was everywhere during the act and nowhere after.

In nature, thought the father, so much of your mood could be dictated by menu. Because they weren’t allowed a fire, the oatmeal he’d planned was off the table. “Fucking global fucking warming,” mumbled the daughter, ripping open the box of granola bars. With a mouth like that, the mother had said once, you just know she’s going to come home one day with a neck tattoo of her boyfriend’s name. They liked to scare each other with all the things that could wrong, a strange game, he didn’t know why they did it or enjoyed it but they did. Which might be why, by the time the kids were up, the mother was still in the tent, doomscrolling on her phone.

“My throat hurts,” said the son.

“Did you sleep in your mask?” said the father, setting the cups for orange juice. “Like I said?”

“No,” said the son. He’d barely eaten anything.

“Why not?” said the father.

“I don’t know, it came off.” This was a new, annoying habit, to say, “I don’t know,” before answering with an answer he knew.

“It does seem to be getting a little worse,” said the mother, looking at the father. She was out of the tent now, sitting at a picnic table freckled by bird shit. “The fire’s really growing.”

“They should just send dad to go piss on it,” said the daughter.

“And they keep moving the evacuation point,” said the mother. “That can’t be good, right?”

“Might be better up at Lake Tenaya,” said the father. “It’s higher elevation. We could try that today.”

“Bit cold for a swim,” said the mother. “With the sun blocked?”

“At least to look at,” said the father. “I remember it really being something—biggest lake I’d ever seen when my dad took me. Come on, you want to sit around in the smoke instead?”

“Do you think we’re safe here?” said the daughter.

“Fire doesn’t go downhill,” said the father. “It goes uphill. Everyone knows that. And we’re in a valley, safest place to be. Water everywhere.”

The mother discretely showed the father her phone with the Air Quality Index for Yosemite. It had a Geiger-looking reader and he didn’t like how far into red the needle swayed. The smoke was starting to come down. Or the fire was growing close.

“There’s not going to be any getting away from global warming,” said the daughter, digging her boots out from her tent. “This is the new normal. There’s nowhere else to go.”

“To the lake,” said the father. “We can still go to the lake.”

“At least to look at it,” said the mother, backing him up. “It’s in all the brochures.”

“Then you’ve already seen it,” said the daughter.

At least he hoped they could still go to the lake: the roadblock suggested other plans. The father stopped at the back of the line, put the car in park, and turned up the music from the playlist. He felt impatient, ready for the trip to start. There were only two days left.

The mother read on her phone.

The daughter typed on hers.

The son played Minecraft.

When they got closer the father could see a different young girl in the same park uniform, heavy boots, standing in the middle of the road. She stood well back from the window when it was the family’s turn to drive up to her. She pulled her ventilator down to ask where they were staying. The father wondered why the answer mattered but didn’t ask. “We’re not evacuating,” she said, “but Wawona and the Mariposa grove will be shut starting tonight at seven.”

“At seven,” said the father, as if that were the important information he could not forget.

“Are you going to be evacuating?” said the mother. “Are the fires close?”

“They’re not evacuating,” said the father to the mother.

“But be prepared to evacuate,” said the park ranger.

“Do you think it’s less smoky anywhere else in the park?” said the father. “I was thinking up at the lake, maybe?”

Even with a mask on, the father could tell what kind of a face the park ranger was making. He’d seen it enough with his daughter, the narrowing of the eyes, that thing animals do to protect their vision before attacking. He wondered if no one had asked her that singularly stupid question, or if everyone had asked her the same singularly stupid question. “There’s multiple wildfires burning around us and we’re closing part of the park,” said the ranger, “which hasn’t happened since the flooding in ninety-seven. So no, I don’t think there’s anywhere less smoky right now. This is a bit unusual. Kind of an emergency, actually.”

“Oh,” said the father, “Right. Well,” said the father, putting up his window, “let’s just take a quick look then, thanks.”

Tioga road to Tioga Pass, two hours of winding road, upon which to debate the more than academic distinction between ready to evacuate and evacuate. Eventually the father put on “Yosemite forever” and turned the volume up too loud for anyone to talk, the music pausing abruptly only once, when service returned, a mechanical wheeze from his phone and then the mother’s. Another evacuation notice, another town emptied of people, filled with fire, left with nothing.

And then they were at the lake, speeding alongside it. Up here, the orange glow was gone and the world was worse without it—only black and grey remained. Slate skies, granite cliffs, the dark spires of trees. Even the water looked wan and drained of color. But he wanted to get into it—they’d come all this way.

“What do you say, Gloomy, care for a swim?”

“Now?” said the daughter.

“It’s pretty cold out,” said the mother, interpreting the temperature for him. “I didn’t bring anyone’s bathing suits.”

“I’ll wear my underwear,” said the father.

“Gross,” said the daughter.

“You’ll get arrested,” said the mother.

“Stay in the car then,” said the father. “What about you, kiddo?”

“My eyes hurt,” said the son.

“Have you been staring at the sun?”

“What sun?” said the daughter.

“It’s the smoke,” said the mother. “Mine are a kind of sore too.”

“And you?” said the father.

But he knew the answer.

This is how it would be. Stabbed in the back by his own generals. Well that’s how it was, then. No helping it. The father stood outside the door to throw his shirt in, then one shoe and the other, peeled off his socks, mustered what he could of his dignity and dropped his cargo shorts, chucked those in too—all the while the daughter yelling to close the door and shut the door, like they were suffocating.

The mother watched him with a strange look from the car. For a second he thought she might change her mind and join him for a swim, but she never did.

The father walked to the lake, the soft foot walk of an indoor man, small steps on sharp stone, the walk where you don’t move your shoulders for some reason, in case that helps, holding everything tight.

He wouldn’t stay for long. Wasn’t worth the complaints. But there’s no way he was going to Yosemite and not getting in a lake.

He’d tell the boy he saw a bear. Tell the daughter lake was full of Trump supporters, a flotilla out there, chanting. He’d tell the mother nothing.

There’d been other cars parked but he was still surprised to see families down at the water, with their unusual floaties, which all had the wildest shapes now. Donuts and pizza slices. A strip of bacon. Sharks with fins and pink swans. When had that industry innovated so wildly?

The air blew strange. Hot like the oven door was open somewhere close, and then cold, chasing in after. And then hot again from a different direction. Strong winds carrying fire. And there wasn’t any sun. Not like it was behind a cloud. Just not there.

From the far side of the lake people appeared like apparitions in the haze, bringing messages of the dead. They’re just coming to look at the lake, he told himself. He didn’t care what they wanted. He slipped off his underwear. It was just a trick of the light, he was sure, the water was fine for swimming, not really yellow at all. It would be cool but it would be real, and that would be a comfort.

It was oddly silent down by the water. No birds, having stayed in their nests. He could hear a dog collar, somewhere close. But he couldn’t see a dog.

Then tinkling passed and was gone.

On the hills, a cross-hatching of pines, like the inner thighs of a high school cutter, the kind on students his daughter’s age, that he’d pretend not to notice.

He waded as far as his knees, took one quick breath and crouched, submerged to his waist. He stopped there, not yet committed ot the cold. He was stalling, getting just enough under the water to cover his modesty. He touched the surface with his hands, wore the lake at the tips of his fingers.

And then the sky began to move around him.

Across the lake the kids starting crying out for their parents to look. Not at him, but at the sky. Look what was happening.

A few flakes at first. Great big fat ones, landing softly, silently on the smooth surface of the lake and where they touched the water turned, recoiled, tightened, as though around some invader. The flakes twisted where they landed. But they didn’t melt. It wasn’t snow, of course. Not this time of year. And there wasn’t snow to save them from the fires.

And then the kids went back to their shouting games, splashing and pushing each other off the pizza slice, the sound of a beer opened and echoing around the lake, country music from a pill-shaped speaker, another family, having a nice time, swimming and playing, indifferent to the ashes reigning down.

The father plunged into the waters, head and shoulder, cutting a current. The churning of his feet. He remembered his own father in the red bathing suit, which he’d seen once in his life on that trip to Yosemite and never again. His own father, heroic and capable, a man who could survive by tooth and claw, who could hunt and kill—provide—who was never confused. He knew everything there was to know.

And the water was cold, so cold he could feel the glacier in it, felt himself a glacier, the pale juggernaut that could carve a valley, that had carved this valley, all those years ago, stately and towering, indifferent, making its own path. He put one arm out, pulling the water, then the other, he would make his own path, too, out into the lake. This was everything: to feel ancient and connected. To all of history. And he felt his father within him, and beside him, as the two swam out, into the lake and back into time. He could hear the mournful horn, a woolly mammoth on the banks, calling out to its kind. A flap of wings and a tree explodes into flight and motion, a flock of massive birds. A long neck protrudes—the dinosaurs have come to see the man who swims through time. And the giant sloths and the camels, too, they’ve come down to the lake to watch. The father, this human hunter, has become historical, and the tiger comes to visit. With the squelch and thuck of mud, a heavy paw pressed to earth, a saber-tooth tiger saunters along the ridge. And the women on the banks with their long black hair, baking bread from acorns, kneeling to their work as the children chase each other through their mother’s skirts and the father’s own father, in his red bathing suit, a torpedo of a man, whose questions were not the father’s questions—all of them have come to watch: Yosemite forever.

The father lifted his head to breathe. To take stock, exhale. The air he could taste was dirty.

Grey skies, grey cliffs, black water.

The mother was on the shore, no apparition, calling his name. She held a towel in one hand and a mask in the other.

“I thought with all this,” she said, meaning the ash, “you might want these. If you’re going to stay out there. Although I don’t know why you’re insisting on—wait, are you naked?”

“I’m not staying out here,” said the father. He took the towel and covered up. “And no one can see.”

The mother looked around to confirm.

“I just wanted us all to be together,” said the father.

“I know,” said the mother.

And she did know. He believed her.

By the time he got back, large flakes of ash had gathered on her shoulders and in her hair, and probably in his if he could see them, flakes of hard matter burnt soft and set loose. The way heat can make a thing collapse, sucking it into itself, the father felt that now, inside himself.

It was time to go. He knew. He’d already made them stay too long.

The creek fire had jumped the San Joaquin river, the mother told him, which took everyone by surprise. In almost two days it had gone from a spark to 72,000 acres, and growing. It was close now. That’s the smoke they were getting.

They would go back and pack, leave that night. A straight shot, 99 to the 120 to the 4 West and all the way home. Because they left so late, they had to stay in a motel in Sacramento and finish the next morning, the day the sun never rose. Terrible and unnatural, the day the birds never sang. An ill omen, they could all agree—it made headlines on the East Coast.

The next time he heard about Yosemite on the news, they’d had to close the park again, not for fires, but for floods.

To claim, as he did, they’d had to pack quickly and flee the fire, was to sound more dramatic than it was: no flames like a red tide rushing down the hills. No propane tanks exploding, highway melting, horses galloping wild eyed and charred along one side, still smouldering as they ran.

Instead, it was bumper-to-bumper traffic, people observing every four-way stop. Like a holiday weekend only worse. The three-hour drive to Sacramento took seven. An eerie procession, with only their headlights, swirling tubes in the smoke, to guide them. When the ash finally descended, it blocked out the sun and threw the world into darkness. The halogen lights of every car glowed bright than he’d ever noticed before. A neon world, like the one in his son’s game. All light made precious. Each reflector like a cat’s eye at night.

Sometimes they’d hear helicopters they couldn’t see. The whooshing of blades sounded decisive, exacting and powerful. It sounded like the cavalry and it felt like hope: the greatest country in the world, springing to action. It sounded like everyone will be fine.

And at one point they came across a Denny’s still with power.

“It’s oddly comforting, isn’t it?” said the father, and it was, the mother agreed. They marveled at the red-letter sign, spinning slowly in the smoke, a beacon for weary travelers.

“What,” said the daughter, “you want to stop for pancakes?”

The father looked to the mother and the mother squeezed his thigh. Patience, she telegraphed. This sucks but don’t get angry. The father managed a smile. The mother was right, of course.

“Well, you know what they say,” said the father, “bad trip, great story.”

“No one says that,” said the daughter.

And the father laughed because that was true.

And soon she’d be gone, off into the world, and he’d miss her. She’d come back different from college. The father sure had, he thought, and remembered how much smaller his home felt after. And his own father, smaller after too, and smaller each time again, each visit home, older, both of them. Once you leave, you can’t go back, not really. Your home becomes your childhood home. He’d miss his daughter terribly, even in these, her surly years. Wise sage, and oracle of gloom. And also his son, tamer of horses, breaker of blocks. He’ll be grown before they know it. And in the passenger seat, the mother, the navigator, guide and balm to sailors. Interpreter of signs. The world could burn. He had everything he needed right here, in this car—it was that drive-home-from-the-hospital feeling, the same one after his daughter was born, when he couldn’t believe they were just allowed to leave with her after, that no one would stop them—someone should stop them; they had no idea what they were doing—and he felt he could make the whole drive like this, steady arms gripping solid wheel, hugging corners, smooth tracing every turn, no rolling stops, no twenty over, as all around went up in flames.

 

Brendan Bowles is from Toronto, Ontario. He holds an MA from the University of Toronto and an MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was one of two Canadian nominations for PEN International’s New Voices Award, a finalist for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Caliber Essay Prize, won The Toronto Star Short Story Contest and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award from the Writers’ Trust of Canada in 2016.

His work has been published and produced for stage and radio and has been generously supported by grants, residencies and fellowships from the Banff Center, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and more.

He was a 2017-2018 Fiction Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a 2019-2021 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He’s currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Stetson University in Florida.

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