U-bottom valley (day fifteen and sixteen)

So this is where the foreigners were. Gathered round the honeypot, smearing their faces with Yosemite. They stare at the waterfalls, rivers turning to streams and rivulets turning into spray and drifting into mist in the breeze. Sunlight refracts through and makes a hundred spectrums, projecting onto the granite cathedral walls, El Capitan standing tall and proud, moustachioed general surveying the valley as a hundred neon climbers hang from his nose on gossamer strands. Half Dome is crying. Always crying, a forgotten bride, a grieving widow. She is all these things and more. Her veil is tattered and shredded by jutting rocks.

Old rock falls fill up the valley edges and block paths up. Look, over there, those rocks took out damn near 300 trees. Guy was walking through there, what 5 minutes before hand? Slight delay, he wouldn't be back in Nevada right now. Nature evens it all out in the end. A perfect sphere. Mudslides and waves and glaciers and rivers smooth it all out, fill it all up. Look at Kansas. I have a theory and it is right. It is my theory so it is right.

The forests are burning round here and smoke is on the wind. Forest needs to burn, it phoenixes and fixes and bursts the pine cones and the sequoias set down their giant roots in ash and soil to start a slowcreak to the stars, to the star, to the sun, to the sky, to the end. Pastel green firetrucks sit watchtower guard in the laybys. The animals cleared out helter skelter pace down valleys and over peaks, smokechoked and wheezing.

Lungs are bursting. There ain't enough oxygen up here. Tarmacked slopes crawl up this granite cliff, waterfall flolloping and rumbling and crrshing down its rocky course, seething white and crystal green, odd pieces of log and wood steadied in sidepool calms. Children are jumping and skipping up and down and we feel old, so old. Our knees psychosomatically creak away. Lungs are oranges, then apples, then grapes, then raisins, then nothing, alveoli collapsed into themselves. An upside down Y in your thorax. Your heartbeat is mousefast, 200 tiny thumps every minute, softbump chest flutter. Black and white spots flood your vision. Precipice spat boulder made shady restspot.

The bear sprints out, scattering the pine needles from their pick up stick alignment, so not askew, always askew, but in a different place, with the ferns and the saplings swaying. I miss it in a shoegaze posture. Like a big black dog they say. Moves fast they say. Sadface says I. Stellars jay in midnight blue, crested and nest proud. Squawk, indeed. Deer bow their antlered heads to sup from Mirror Lake while short sighted visitors zoom as close as they can before they canter and weave, nimblequick and bouncehop into thicket and through thicket and away again and on again. Glacier Point is a geography lesson. Look, kids, glaciation. Glaciation on its grandest scale. Put down the geography textbooks. This is no time for education. Awe.