Communing With Nature --and Pushy Tourists

Up the mountain road we go, curvy as your mother’s handwriting, the front of the minivan bobbing and weaving, then finally pointing almost straight up. Toward heaven. Yosemite Valley. Paradise in a national park.

Beautiful mountains. Lush meadows. Sun-oiled German tourists. Yosemite has almost everything heaven has, plus more. There’s bears. There’s car alarms going off every morning at 6. Did I mention the tourists?

“Out, please,” says someone standing next to me on the shuttle bus on our first full day here.

So I move over in the aisle to let her pass. On the other side, I feel a slight pressure. Then more pressure. Someone’s groping me. Not my wife. A grope I don’t recognize.

Apparently, the tourist seated to my left needs to leave too, and he has begun to push his way out, muttering in German stuff like, “I need to get out. Now! Get out of my way. Now!”

He pushes me from one side. The woman in the aisle pushes from the other. These two are making a sandwich. And I’m the meat.

“Easy tiger,” I say, but the German tourist pays no attention. He has to get out of this shuttle bus now. Maybe he’s late for something. I don’t know. But he needs off. Now!

“You handled that so well,” my wife says when the blitzkrieg is finally over.

“Thank you,” I say, wiping German sun oil off my arm.

“Out, please,” someone else says.

We have left behind our 500-channel cable boxes and our microwave ovens for the great outdoors, to breathe deep the mountain air, to fill our lungs with nature.

We have come to this tiny stretch of national park on the Fourth of July, which is a little like visiting the Gaza Strip when the rubber bullets and tear gas are flying and people are screaming at each other and there just doesn’t seem to be enough room for everybody.

We have come because this is where the action is.

“Can we go rafting now?” the little girl says.

“Yeah, let’s go rafting,” the boy says.

The kids like the river rafting best. It’s the one event at Yosemite Valley that reminds them of Disneyland, the one activity where they don’t have to hike or pedal, just lie back in a raft and float down the sweet Merced, a gentle little river about as wide as a freeway. Along the edges, deer nibble at grass.

“Sure, let’s go rafting,” I say.

*

And I put on the raft vest, the large Jane Russell vest, for full-figured fathers like me, and we rent a raft and prepare to drag it to the river’s edge.

The thing about Yosemite Valley is that no one really seems to be in charge. It is staffed, mostly, by high school and college students, some as young as 14, who appear to want to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. The mall. Their bedrooms. Geometry class. Anywhere.

“OK, listen up,” the kid at the raft rental place says.

Sure enough, the safety instructor at the raft rental place is 14. He takes a sip of his Dr. Pepper and tells us things that might save our lives.

“Make sure you go through the middle part of bridge number 3,” he warns.

Everybody nods.

“And no alcohol,” he says.

“What kind of idiot would drink on a raft?” I say to my wife.

She nods.

So we float down the river, three families in five little rafts, stopping at sandbars, splashing each other with our plastic oars.

It is stunningly beautiful here in the late afternoon, the waterfalls shining in the distance, the sunlight dancing on the water.

We stop now and then to photograph it with our waterproof cameras. The boys flex their biceps, which barely flex at all.

“OK, now flex,” I yell, pointing the camera their way.

“We are,” they yell back.

“Oh,” I say, and snap the picture.

Even on the river, the crowds are thick. No one really knows where to go, so we follow each other like ducklings, in packs of 20 or 30, trusting that someone among us knows the way.

At one point, we pull over to a sandbar to rest and 10 Swedes in rafts stop too.

“Is this the end?” a young Swede asks after 10 minutes.

“No, that’s further down,” I explain.

*

My dream is to be the first person off a shuttle bus, then lead a group of 40 tourists into the woods, where we would execute various loop-de-loops, spin moves and marching band maneuvers.

“Follow me, everyone,” I’d say, and they’d follow me into the dark forest, grateful to have someone to lead them.

Back on land, the kids rent bicycles and charge out over the flat Yosemite Valley floor.

Glaciers carved this place, leaving a 1-by-7-mile strip, flat as a bowling lane, perfect for bikes and dads who don’t exercise much.

Surrounding the valley are the sheer cliffs--Half Dome, Glacier Point, El Capitan--their giant granite chins jutting out to the sky.

Better yet are the waterfalls, especially Yosemite Falls, the world’s fifth-largest--hypnotic and changing with each new breeze.

It’s hard not to just stand and stare at the falls for hours. Many do. John Muir said he once saw Yosemite Falls halt in mid-air, resting on “the invisible arm of the north wind.”

At night, we lock our scented shampoo and toothpaste in the bear-proof lockers, then sit in lawn chairs and watch the granite mountains change colors, from white to blue to black.

As it gets darker, the kids close in on us. The darkness and thoughts of bears bring the kids home.

“What was that?” the little girl says, leaning on me as I slump in my chair.

“My stomach,” I say.

“Oh.”

Up on the cliffs, the climbers’ lights wink at us like stars. We blink back, wondering how they do it.

“What was that?” the little girl says again.

“My gallbladder,” I say.

“Oh,” she says.

She watches the climbers on the cliffs, listens to the other campers nearby, watches wide-eyed for bears.

“It’s really hard to be a dad, isn’t it, Dad?” the little girl says, still hanging on to my shoulder.

“Not today,” I say. “Definitely not today.”

In the distance, the river whispers good night.

*

Chris Erskine’s column is published on Wednesdays. His e-mail address is chris.erskine@latimes.com.