At the Cabin

It’s Saturday. We arrived at Alderworks a week ago. We’re settling into a routine. After breakfast we hike up a steep road to a blue bridge that overlooks a magnificent glacier. It’s so beautiful that it hurts. Every hike is different, different light, different patterns of snow on the peaks. There’s an untouched forest beyond the bridge that looks like it’s straight from a Grimm’s fairy tale, complete with the shadowy possibility of some encounter with bears or wolves.

Then we return to the cabin and write and paint. Ed refines his poetry. I draw a lot, working on ideas for here and also when I return to Oakland and have larger canvases. I have a table in the cabin by a window where I paint for 4 or 6 hours.

I also cook big meals of soup and pasta and quiches with eggs from the chickens here. In the evening we walk down to the flats at the convergence of a couple of rivers, a popular staging area for cruise excursions. There are four dogs here who are always eager to escort us. Once they saw a van full of tourists from a cruise ship and blocked it, barking, on the one lane bridge. I felt very Alaskan. We are not in a van from a cruise ship. We are locals with dogs and bear spray. We have been here one week, and we’ll be here three more.

Yosemite’s Gates

ED AUST

Yosemite’s gates are sealed for good,

all visitors barred.

East of the park at Tioga Pass,

six cherubs block the entrance,

each with a flaming longsword

carved of glacier quartz.

At Hetch Hetchy on the western side,

seventy bison clog the road,

shaggy heads low and silent,

daring to be challenged.

At Big Oak Flat a granite boulder,

round as the moon over Half Dome,

rolled down a cliff on Christmas Eve

and plugs the asphalt passage.

Don’t even bother with the Arch Rock entrance

on El Portal Road at Foresta

where a great woolly mammoth

rubs its sweeping tusks

against the granite blocks,

having emerged, they say,

from a Badger Pass blizzard.

South Entrance appears deceptively open

though witnesses tell of the presence of ghosts

in the shape of leaping bighorns.

As for the thousands stuck inside,

news is sparse; electricity is out,

the trails are full of bears.

This much we know: a woman gave birth

to a child who floats when given the breast

and who laughs at the sight of the moon.