Dome - 25 May 11 - 1

Dome - 25 May 11

From the valley floor, Half Dome seems gloomy. Earlier today the sky was an intense, bright, sunny blue. My internet voyeurism takes me to Yosemite daily. Here on the prairie it has for most of the day been dark, overcast, and some times with  heavy, windy rain. While the view from Turtleback is more exuberant, the hazy view down the valley toward Half Dome and El Capitan still tells the story of the dreary afternoon in the valley. The additional altitude at Sentinel Dome gives the view of the cloudy sky an urgency that is masked with haze from lower altitudes.

Years ago I went to Yosemite. I might have been twelve. It was a place of tall trees and high places. I do not remember Half Dome or El Capitan but I must have seen them. I do remember the fall of embers from the cliff at Sentinel Dome. A practice that  has since been abandon because it offends our sensibilities. We had made camp and had dinner. I assume dinner because I do not remember being hungry, and for a twelve year old hungry would have been memorable. We had driven up  the mountain from camp. I stood a the rail waiting for the fall of embers as we talked about flinging paper airplanes from the cliff into dark and wondering how far they might go and what it would be like if only we could see them.

My folks met in California. Mom had taught in Minnesota, South Dakota, and Georgia (Spelman College) and had gone to California from Duluth with her folks when they had retired, drove the Nash with a trailer, the trailer looked like a little Conestoga or gypsy wagon: hoops and canvas her dad had built. Her dad became a citrus and avocado rancher in his retirement after finishing a career in mining engineering for Oliver, a company that mined iron ore for United States Steel on the Mesabi Range. Dad, after his stint in World War II straight out of college, had gone to California to pursue a career in big oil. He had aspirations to management,  I found home study course work among his stuff after he had died on how to succeed in business. Her folks, both college graduates, she was a teacher and he was a mining engineer, were up and coming. His folks were not college graduates, but up and coming, she was a teacher and he was a business man.

All these people imbued with energy and skill, going hither and yon, succeeding.

Well the short of it  is my middle son has lit off to California and in an age of internet and I can watch him succeed, while I moulder, unaccomplished in the backwater eddy of the confluences of lives that have come here and then gone on. I can look at the horizon and imagine what lies there.

The problem with accomplished people is that at a distance the sheen of their lives can be seen and the defects get lost in the glare of spectacular reflections. Lives seen in retrospect seem fated, seen in prospect they seem mostly to be unlucky. It is the few that succeed. "I got here by hard work and practiced skill." when in fact most of life is delivered to us and we bumble through with blind luck.

Horse thieves, revolutionary Colonels, Quaker refugees, hard luck Arizona farmers and undiscovered family: some of this is fiction, but it is the fiction I remember the truth to be. I will refrain from research, a promise I will probably abandon, but at least I can thrash about unrestrained if the facts are too repressing.