Closing Down of Summer in the High Sierra

Late summer in the Sierra Nevada, and the days are filled with the premonition of fall. Nights have gone past being nippy, and at noon, shadows cast by fir trees have the feel of early winter.

We had rented an aluminum skiff with a small outboard, the type often used by fishermen who troll for trout. It was the second summer at Huntington Lake for my wife and me, and we don’t fish. Instead, we followed the wooded shoreline past two of the three dams that created the lake, tucked into the Sierras east of Fresno at 7,000 feet. We headed to a small east-facing cove, sheltered from the wind and bathed in early afternoon sunlight.

We tied the skiff to a rock and lay out across the thwarts, reading out loud a short story by Alistair MacLeod about the end of summer. “Our footprints of brief moments before already have been washed away. There remains no evidence that we have ever been. It is as if we have never lain, nor ever walked, nor ever thought what thoughts we had. We leave no art or mark behind.”

Later, when the sun got too hot for us, we lowered ourselves into the icy water and afterward had a lunch of leftover tuna fish, pretzels and beer kept cool in the shallows.

The sky over our heads was piercingly blue. As we lay there, watching a cloud try to form and disappear as fast, eating the last of our groceries and recklessly courting a sunburn, we tried to forget it was our last day in the mountains. But as much as we tried to hold onto this moment, we felt it slipping away.

In a few weeks, the boats would be hauled from the water, and docks pulled from the edge of the lake. Cabins, once noisy with the sound of children’s voices and families at reunions, would be shuttered, mattresses bagged, cookware boxed, chairs and tables stacked and stored, and the heavy wooden doors swung over the porches to keep out the snow.

We knew that the end of summer would bring its own hope for renewal. As the first rains start to fall, tamping the dust into mud, they hold the promise of a heavy snowpack, and none too soon for mountains and forests as parched as these.

It was a topic--the weather often is among strangers--dwelt on at a breakfast hosted each Monday by the managers of the cabins where we stayed, a rustic hideaway on the southwest corner of the lake.

Over hot cakes, eggs, bacon and coffee, some guests spoke of drought, others of El Nino. But we all could agree: Rain will be a blessing for the firefighters still battling a stubborn blaze in the nearby wilderness. It had first captured our attention two months ago when it briefly threatened stands of ancient trees.

At one point, the managers told us, the air at the lake grew eerily still and temperatures shot up to the 80s. Soon, smoke started drifting in, settling in places as thick as fog. Nothing in a rural community so terrifies as a forest fire, but a few phone calls later and everyone’s nerves were settled. It was only a change in the wind, making the fire’s breath seem much closer than it was.

But as we listened, we knew somehow this fire had implications for us.

We knew that people, far away from here, were debating ways to make these mountains and their small, scattered communities safer. They were talking about cutting down trees to protect the forest, about letting more logging companies fell big trees in secluded glades.

Ever since James Wilson Marshall discovered gold in the foothills more than 150 years ago, different visions of the Sierra Nevada have prompted fierce debate.

After nearly 30 years hiking these mountains, John Muir championed wild parks and forest reservations in an essay in the Atlantic Monthly.

“The tendency nowadays to wander in wilderness is delightful to see,” he wrote. “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home.”

Today, more than ever, wilderness is a sanctuary, a place beyond the reach of the nightly news, with its constant reminders of civilization’s own savagery.

“Why is it that one week up here goes quicker than one day at work?” asked one of our neighbors as he packed his car for the drive home.

The day before, we had taken an unpaved turnoff from the Kaiser Pass road. Our city car bobbed and weaved across the gullies and rocks as we followed Sherry Nolen, a naturalist from the visitors center at Huntington Lake, on the weekly nature hike. A couple from Palm Desert joined us.

Nolen had promised us a view of the adjoining wilderness and a short tutorial in the alpine flora of the Sierra. By the time we reached the 10,000-foot summit northeast of the lake, dust lay thick upon our car, and before us lay the vast expanses of the John Muir and Ansel Adams wildernesses, rimmed to the east by the mountain peaks of the Pacific Crest Trail.

As we wandered along the overlook, we heard the approach of an all-terrain vehicle. It rumbled up a forest trail, its driver dressed from head to toe in green camouflage. In his wake, we noticed how the carpet of star-leafed lupine had been hemmed by this fat-wheeled vehicle and others like it. Entirely legal, Nolen explained; the Forest Service had approved the trail for ATV use.

After our walk, we returned to our cars and continued a little farther down the road to Kaiser Pass Meadow. We scouted out the few remaining wildflowers growing among the grass, peered into the muddy stream that had cut a winding, waist-deep gully through the grass and counted more than two dozen tiny frogs perched on a fallen tree.

Later, lying in our skiff, we put aside thoughts of fires and chain saws and ATVs. The Sierra has survived centuries of use. One hundred years ago, we might have fished, as the Indians did, for salmon in the wild rivers that filled this lake.

Today we idle in waters created by engineers who damned those rivers to pull electricity from their currents. We revel in the sun and the soughing of the wind in the trees and, for the moment, forget about what is lost: the salmon, for example, whose path was blocked by the dams creating this lake. Instead, we daydream about our own return next year, putting aside the book by MacLeod and the story we were reading, the one titled “The Closing Down of Summer.”