A Walk in the Park

Well, for openers, the pizza parlor was closed. So were the bars. Traffic was but a trickle, a service truck here, a patrol car there. The bears had become more active, but there were no biologists around to determine whether this was caused by a warm spell or by an uncommon shortage of people. More than anything, it was quiet. No whirring cameras, wailing kids, rumbling RVs. No jabber of tourists. The loudest racket down in Yosemite Valley was made by a lone dog, which for hours kept up a running conversation with itself, courtesy of an echo that carried across 200 yards of open meadow.

Naturally, the idea of this national park without pizza delivery and cocktails and gridlock made the few people left behind to hold the fort more than a little jumpy.

“Eerie,” said a deputy superintendent.

“Spooky,” said a public information officer.

“Strange, just strange,” said another park worker.

“Wonderful,” said a part-time ranger, a young woman with a curly haired toddler strapped to her back.

*

She and a friend were strolling near the banks of the Merced River. This was last Thursday, a day of unseasonable balm in Yosemite. It was also, as it turned out, the next-to-last day of the partial shutdown of the federal government. For 20 days, the park--which reopened Saturday--had been closed to outsiders. Most of the federal and contract employees who live in Yosemite had been furloughed or forced to work reduced hours at reduced pay. And so they had little to do but wander the valley floor, accidental--no, political--tourists.

Myself, I had breached the barriers simply by displaying press credentials, slightly outdated. That reporters and camera crews were welcome in the otherwise closed park was a key clue to followers of political folly. This was not a shutdown necessitated by budget constraints. This was an artificial event, a tactic in a faraway game of chicken.

The sparring strategists--Bill and Newt and Bob et al.--no doubt wanted the story of the park closure told, at least at first. They wanted sound bites from those idled rangers, the turned-away tourists. This publicity would create pressure on the other side. It would help them “win.”

Had they explored California’s budget stalemate of two years ago, the Washingtonians might have realized there could be no winner. They would have seen how Pete Wilson and the Legislature, fangs buried in each other’s hide, paws clutching one another’s throat, had tumbled together to the depths of the public opinion, where they remain today. No one in the thinking public wasted time trying to decipher which side might be culpable. It was simpler, wiser, to blame both sides as one for not performing a shared task. The same will happen in the federal budget contest.

*

Politics aside, the prospect of a relatively human-less Yosemite seemed an irresistible novelty. Even with most facilities shut down and the gates closed, a few mavericks managed to slip into the park to sample the almost surreal emptiness before the shutdown ended. In the mornings, rangers would find cars stashed in out-of-the-way lots, their occupants apparently gone hiking. When caught, the crashers would be gently 86’d. One park employee said he suspected that a few hardies had clambered down trails into the valley. A charter pilot turned a neat profit buzzing Half Dome and El Capitan with planeloads of European tourists.

Still, it was nothing like normal times, when even in winter Yosemite receives more than 120,000 visitors a month. The animals seemed to notice the difference. I watched one coyote skulking alone down the middle of a bike lane. The animal appeared almost baffled that there weren’t any tourists around to scream out or at least snap a picture. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the poor creature was, well, lonely.

Late in the afternoon, I hiked toward Vernal Falls. Typically, this trail is as crowded as a supermarket checkout line on Saturday morning: A slow, tight procession of humans trudging off to consume . . . nature. This day I stood all alone on the Vernal Falls bridge and for a long time watched the clear cold water cascade down over gray and brown granite rocks and tumble toward the valley below.

The sight was majestic and mesmerizing, a display of natural power and beauty which, from my perspective, exposed the raw conceit of the budget games-players. They had demonstrated their belief that this world treasure, carved by ancient glaciers, marked by the footfalls of long-vanished tribes, belonged to “them.” Not to a higher power. Not to us, the “pee-pul” they evoke so readily in their rhetoric. To them. Yosemite was theirs to open and close and open again, however their game demanded. In politics, such displays of arrogance seldom go unpunished, by and by.