May The Force Be With You

This story starts with the pungent, earthy smell of onions and garlic and sun and dust saturating the air, causing you to pause, partly to drink in the smell and partly because it is just to hot to move quickly. Rich, brown friendly faces greet you with a Buenos Dias, and indeed, it is, because there are olive and almond trees, and a large cool swimming pool, and its all lovely, even when the wind shifts and the smell of cattle and manure reminds you that Harris Ranch, with its long red brown Spanish Hacienda hotel, really is a working ranch.

This story has a small 3300 feet long runway. Shortly after taking off from this runway, stock yards come in to view, and the only thing to be said is WOW, because the stockyards are HUGE, and 18-wheelers in the parking lot look like little toys next to huge-ness of the yards. The stock yards are so big that maybe you really don't want to think about how big they are because then you'd think about how our beef gets to market and you'd never want to eat a steak again.

Stock yards north of Coalinga, Ca.

Fortunately, the immensity of the San Joaquin valley spreading out in all directions easily takes your eyes and mind away from burgers on the hoof, and you are in awe of how vast the patch-work of dark-green, variegated, brown fallow fields are. If you knelt down in a field in northern California, and shot a marble out of your fist with your thumb, and you aimed the marble straight south, it would roll all the way down the valley, past irrigation canals, past almond and olive orchards, and onions and garlic, and huge combines and tractors and trucks loading produce, and roll all the way past the friendly brown faces saying Buenos Dias at Harris Ranch, past the Coalinga stock yards, and all the way to Mexico, where it would plop into the Rio Grande River. The valley is that flat and wide and vast.

San Joaquin Valley

The Sierra Nevada mountains appear in the middle of this story, across the valley floor. You can't see them right away, because of a forest fire south of Mammoth, which is on the eastern side of the mountains, but the smoke from the fire has risen over the top, shed down off the mountains, wounds its way over foothills and into the valley. There is a moment of tension when you worry that the airport you are looking for won't be visible at all. Keep calm and turn the page. Sure enough, there it is, under a haze, sloping across a plateau, surrounded by trees. There is a rental car waiting at the airport in Mariposa, for driving in to Yosemite National Park, since its very hard to fly directly IN TO Yosemite without creating a ruckus with the all kinds of federal agencies, although that would make for a much more exciting story than driving a Prius.

If this story were a compilation of even shorter stories, the Visiting Yosemite National Park story would be entitled "Sore Neck From Looking Up and Saying WOW All Day", or "Disney Land Meets National Park". Both are equally descriptive, and its so incredibly beautiful that you really don't mind the sore neck from staring up at granite cathedrals, and it's fine hopping on shuttle buses and walking up trails with hundreds of your closest friends.

We were all there to look up and say Wow in at least 6 different languages, at the vast, god-sent unbearably stunning granite peaks, worn gray and smooth and round by ice and water. We were all there to witness it together. If any of us had arrived alone, it would have been a silent meditation, an inner aaahh, a breath that would meander around boulders, and make its way past silent deer, and past the silver branches of birch, past ferns and over the bubbling river flowing from the lake.

Instead, we, made a multitudinous, mufti-lingual song. The song reverberated with the adventurous laughter of children climbing rocks in the lake, and the cautious calls of parents, and the chatter of teenagers poking and daring one another to jump into the glassy water, and athletic young couples in short tees and hiking boots snapping pictures while laying on the ground because its the only way to get a decent shot of the vastness of Half Dome. The song reverberated off cathedral granite cliffs, and amplified in its joy.

At the end of this story, a young Japanese couple asked Roy to please, bowing head, bowing head, take their picture please. They are adorable, arm-in-arm together, under the canopy of half-dome. Roy hands them back their camera, and they bow thank you, and bow again. The young man is wearing a Star Wars T-shirt.

I like your Star Wars T-shirt, I say.. He stands erect and grins broadly.

May the Force Be With You, he says.

And Also With You, I reply.

We smile at each other, then look up again at Half Dome. Blessing given, blessing received in this sacred place.