Something Short of Paradise

It’s hard to know how to train the mind’s eye on something as unnatural as this week’s news from Yosemite. If Californians had anything like a sacred place, it would be that radiant expanse of range and meadow; the impulse is to regard the events there--four grotesque murders, a bizarre string of suspects--as a kind of defilement. Or, pulling back, as a tragic exception. Or, in long shot, as a sad footnote--awful, but in the scheme of the timeless Sierra, as ephemeral as the wind in the ancient trees.

What I thought of, as I read the headlines, was my own first close-up glimpse of Yosemite, one that made me think about strength and weakness, about nature and man. This was years ago, on a day that smelled of warm sun and pine needles. There was to be a wedding in a white chapel surrounded by sequoias. It had been a long drive from Los Angeles.

Lodging was in a hard-looking roadside motel. Lacking the time for a full-on camping trip or the foresight for a splurge at the Ahwahnee, we’d opted for digs in a nearby town. We chalked up our disappointment to the standard National Monument experience--breathtaking beauty surrounded by boondocks. The rooms had cheap knotty pine paneling that turned the sunlight a spooky amber. The bed had a musty smell.

The bride was from around there, and so was much of the bridal party. At the reception, the maid of honor--a big girl with long, stringy hair--got into a fight with her date. From the sidelines, as the spat continued, you could pick your drama--eternal Yosemite or the tiny humans struggling within it. A barrel-shaped girl cursing her way across the dance floor as an angry man glowered, or the foreshortened mountains in the backdrop, oblivious in their majesty.

*

What is it about nature that tempts people to imagine it is anything but indifferent to the human condition? Interesting, this resistance to any thought of ugliness in an unspoiled place. Summers of Sam, Night Stalkers--urban nightmares--slip easily into focus. Not so the back country’s powerful allure for those who can’t handle society.

After the reception, the wedding party adjourned to the motel where we were staying. The angry boyfriend and his buddies, now dressed in flannel shirts and biker vests, congregated in the open doorway a few doors down. Into the night, so musty and piney, there were shouts punctuated by tinny, clinking noises. A woman yelled; a man cursed. There was scuffling and unkind laughter. We complained to the management. We tossed and turned.

And in fitful sleep, images rose up from my rural childhood, of the backwoods hunting cabins a certain kind of people used to keep. The rooms had the same musty smell and filtered sunshine, and too often, the same mean, drunken shouting. Closeness to nature was just the cover story for these outposts; their real draw was as a hiding place.

It takes a certain strength to live in civilization: It is community, with its slings and arrows, that is man’s true Darwinian test. The weak and troubled cleave to the shelter of the fringes--to the skid rows and the shuttered apartments, yes, but, more than people realize, to the nooks and niches of the wilderness.

*

It was dawn by the time the brawling died down; we left, bleary-eyed, later that morning. On our way to the car, we realized where those clinking noises had come from: Along the motel wall, there were knee-high drifts of beer cans that had been crumpled up and thrown. In an open doorway, the bridesmaid stood with a cigarette, her face bruised and battered. We never went back to that motel. In fact, it was forgotten until recently, when Yosemite was thrust into the mind’s eye again.

The news juxtaposed the park’s grandeur against the debasement that had transpired there: First, that trio of murders. Then that cavalcade of suspects--speed freaks, ex-cons, bikers, perverts. Then the FBI claiming they were affiliated somehow. Who’d have guessed, the reports seemed to marvel, that paradise could have so many lowlifes? Then a fourth murder, a decapitation. And finally, the confession of an amiable local who, between bouts of what now appears to be profound mental illness, was said to have “kept to himself.”

Much relief is now said to be felt by park merchants, who regard this week’s news as a first step toward getting back to normal--normal being a return of the tourists who have been staying away. Less easily regarded is the unnatural force that for a season shifted the public’s focus from nature’s might to man’s random and lethal frailty, a condition as stark and ancient, perhaps, as Yosemite.

(For The Record: In Monday’s column, I credited a report on combat shooting to the Violence Policy Institute. It’s the Violence Policy Center. Apologies.)

Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.