The Odyssey

In the American west there are highways so long and straight that over desert flats the asphalt ribbon diminishes to the vanishing point in the rearview mirror and unspools interminably ahead. The driving is so easy that music is essential to imbue the bald expanse with graspable features. Emily and I sing along with beloved songs, chat sporadically or nap lightly. Anything worth noting will be pointed out, often requiring the driver to shake her passenger awake.

For a week our days are filled with driving and our nights spill out from our tent. The dusts of the Utah steppes make for a boring drive, but a ruby sunset over those preternatural right angles compels us to pull into a long-defunct gas station. We climb onto the roof of the car and drink cheap wine from coffee cups until the dark is so complete that Emily loses her sandals. There are more days of more driving and more sunsets less spectacular than that first car-top beatitude. We sleep in a tent in Utah and a crappy motel in Nevada. We pull over frequently to ease nagging bladders and to take cheesy, posed pictures at state boundaries and historically questionable ‘monuments.’

According to the philosophy of the road trip, there is no such thing as a destination. Years of reiteration have erased the authorship of whoever first quipped that his journey was his destination. In theory, we have a goal: to get Emily (and all her things, packed in the rear of the vehicle more snugly than pieces in a masterful game of Tetris) to her apartment in Eugene before the incipient fall term at her college, the University of Oregon. Our sojourn is epic in its most Odyssean sense: a voyage of homecoming, comprised of many smaller pursuits that will avail us of the hospitality of strangers, and shaped by the vicissitudes of weather, environment, and highway construction.

In practice, I suspect my destination was always Yosemite Valley, where we spend three halcyonic days hiking, swimming, assembling tripods of firewood to fuel nightly campfires, and generally staring up at that magnificent firmament that impelled Kerouac and innumerable other travelers before and after ourselves. What happens here is a story that Emily and I will retell for years to come, each ingemination solidifying its position in my personal lore. If Yosemite is the exemplar of America’s greatest public masterpiece, the national park, then Yosemite Falls is the episode par excellence in my private masterpiece, my bildungsroman as-yet-unwritten.

* * *

Though in springtime the waters of Yosemite Falls roar mighty with snowmelt, now, in September, the lower falls barely wet the rockface enough to be seen from where I stand. Where I stand is a viewing bridge, teeming with tourists as an anthill with the perpetual and seemingly random promenade of ants. The Falls, the viewing and photographing of which are nominally the purpose of this bridge, stand perhaps 150 yards distant. They are separated from us by a field of scree and the invisible line of impassability, as decreed by park authority (by way of a tersely worded sign posted on the bridge). Emboldened by a picnic lunch and a touch of claustrophobia, I decide to ignore the sign, and I begin to climb across the rocks.

‘What are you doing?’ Emily calls to me. Besides feeling that my simian scramble explains itself, I am not myself exactly sure what it is I am doing, and so I decline to answer. Soon enough, the distance between us is too far for an audible response in any case.

A few minutes later, I look back and can see Emily is following my example, climbing across the talus pile in hot pursuit. I stop where I stand, to let both Emily and my own labored breath catch up with me. We finish the ascent together, and for our efforts are well rewarded.

At the base of the sheer rock wall, stained from the mineral deposited by water as it falls in wetter months, waits a dark and viridian pool of indeterminate depth. It is fed by only the merest falling trickle, water which gushes warm over my fingers. The pool itself is sun-warmed to the comfortable temperature of bathwater, the camera-laden scores on the bridge below have long since disappeared, and Emily and I waste no time in stripping off our sweat-damp clothes and easing our bodies in.

In some places, the water is so deep my groping toes find no bottom; in another area, only a few inches cover a rock shelf. We paddle, splash, and then lay ourselves out on the sunny rock like pale amphibians, our pasty bellies above the waterline and green feet below. If we should sing, we would be Sirens, as naked and as ebullient.

We are not the only intrepid explorers to strip here. Among a loose litter of energy bar wrappers and beer cans lie a few discarded socks and at least one tee-shirt. Though my own nudity here feels sexless, a used condom and torn wrapper attest to lustier wayfarers before us. Still, this secreted lagoon could not seem more private, more exclusively ours. For an hour we loll in delight, then re-dress and beat a hasty retreat, too pleased with the whole experience to risk being caught on exit. I inadvertently leave my favorite sunglasses sitting atop a poolside rock, an accidental addition to the cache of sartorial evidence of fondly broken park rules.

* * *

I have not been absolutely forthcoming about my purposes for this road trip, which continues for a few more happy weeks after its pinnacle at the foot of Yosemite Falls. The reason I am able, in the September of what might have been my sophomore year at the University of Colorado, to depart the state altogether for points West, is that I have found myself unfit for academic life. I was hugely successful in high school, graduating with honors, with plenty of friends and admirers, and with confidence in my own ability. Yet scarcely more than a year later, not even having left the safe haven of Boulder, I find myself failing the majority of my classes, aimless and (yet again) jobless, unhappy and listless. I agree to accompany Emily on her drive back to her own school because, unwilling to sacrifice my pride again on the altar of higher education, I am taking an undetermined amount of ‘time off’ away from academia. So, as the days shorten into autumn, I simply have nothing better to do. In retrospect I can see there was actually nothing else that I could have needed to do so much.

It is not without forethought that I earlier evoked the specter of Odysseus’s Sirens. In Homer’s Odyssey, he has been forewarned about the Sirens and their annihilative singing. Though he understands that he imperils himself by doing so, Odysseus is unwilling to go to his grave—or even to return to his home—without having heard their music, so beautiful that generations of sailors had perished at the Siren’s behest. So he orders his men to lash him to the mast of his own ship, and to fill their ears with beeswax so that they are deafened both to the poison of the music and to their captain’s pleas for release.

As Odysseus sails out of reach of the Sirens’ song, is released from his destructive desire to linger, and driven anew to return to his home Ithaca. I, too, am renewed by my own journey, which has taken me through and beyond the baptismal waters of Yosemite. It is as the Sirens promised Odysseus, ‘none that listened’ to their sweet voices ‘has not been delighted and gone on a wiser man.’

To me a song was sung in the shadow of an American monument. The trials before had been dire, had sapped my energy. I would have given anything in the moments that I swam in that sunny pool to remain there perpetually. Unlike Odysseus, it was not a rope tether that stopped me from defecting from my own homecoming. I believe that wise Greek king knew what I learned upon my own odyssey: that the true sweetness in return depends upon understanding what is elsewhere. My home is no safe harbor if the travels of my life are without difficulty.

I completed my journey. I returned to Colorado, like Odysseus exhausted and full with tales to tell, delighted, and undoubtedly wiser.