The first time I walk through Yosemite Valley, I find myself in a land on the precipice of change. It is among the very first days of a spring that has arrived, in a manner apparently fashionable for springs these days, several weeks too early, in a place that is in many ways at odds with itself. It is the sort of not-quite-cold day where some people are wearing t-shirts and some are wearing sweaters, but nobody really seems happy with their decision. Impatient buttercups and poppies bloom in places where the sun’s light is generous, while remnants of the year’s final snowfall dapple the valley’s most shaded areas; the still air of winter contains only the slightest hint of a spring breeze portending the symphony of activity that is surely soon to come. The white, desolate peaks above assert with persuasive conviction that winter still reigns supreme, but a closer look reveals even these somber goliaths of stone and ice to be succumbing to the changing tides of nature. The season for snow is coming to a definite end; even thousands of feet above the valley, it has begun to melt and make its way down the mountains as a thousand tiny waterfalls that stain the great granite cliff faces like the soft, dark swirls of a master’s paintbrush. My eyes trace the black paint strokes as best they can down the mountains before they are inevitably lost behind the mess of trees below, although I’m comforted by the knowledge that many of these mini-waterfalls and I have the same destination.
It is a destination that first makes itself known through sound. Initially, it is just another whisper in the quiet wind, but the chorus quickly grows to the point of cacophony. The tiny streams travel downhill and begin to merge with one another until the water begins to scream, drunk on its increasing power, like a crazed hero of old lashing out against any opponent that dares stand between him and destiny. Before I even reach its source, the water’s cry occupies my entire existence, assaulting my senses and demanding my undivided attention by drowning out any other noise. In this way, the Merced River reaches me before I reach it; by the time it is within my view, it already holds me in its grasp.
Standing on the bank of the Merced, I see in its turbulent, white rapids a better reflection of myself than even the stillest and most serene of ponds could ever hope to show me. All my life, I’ve been searching for a story. For my story. Something deep inside me craves simplicity; it yearns to box all of the world’s complexity and chaos into the digestible, comforting structure of a narrative. Typically, I feel like this is nothing more than a lie I tell myself, a bedtime story I cling onto to keep away the nightmares. My story, whatever it is, doesn’t exist outside of my head. Maybe the world does have some sort of overarching narrative, but surely not one that follows the simple plot that my mind desperately desires. At best, trying to cram my own life (or anyone else’s, for that matter) into these impossible parameters feels like grasping at thin air. At worst, it feels willfully ignorant and dangerously irresponsible. Regardless, I haven’t yet learned how to cope with living a storyless life, so even as I chastise myself for oversimplifying complex issues, I knowingly indulge in this lie, wrapping it around me like a warm blanket to shield my heart from the aloof coldness of an ambiguous reality.
Except here, it doesn’t quite feel like a lie. The river seems to share my desire to tell a simple story, collapsing space and time into a single dimension. The past stretches upstream into the distant mountains, revealing the path carved into the land over millennia to form the fertile, U-shaped valley whose southern edge I now stand at. Downstream, the river quickly slopes down a hill and becomes hidden from my view like the ever-elusive future, forever shrouded in mystery. In the river, I see a glimpse of the story I so desperately long for, millions of years of history portrayed as an unmistakable, unassailable truth. I watch the water as it is driven downstream by gravity, following the path laid out by its forebears. Like me, it craves simplicity. I watch it relentlessly berate any rock that complicates its simple narrative, stubbornly and patiently smoothing out any rough edges until there are no more rough edges left to smooth. I gaze upstream, into the past, and consider the history that the river deemed too complicated to preserve as well as the parts of my own story that I have weathered into conformity.
The Merced. El Río de Nuestra Señora de la Merced. “River of Our Lady of Mercy.” This is the name Spanish colonizers gave to the river I now stand by— a pleasant enough name, although it certainly does not contain the personality or sense of respect imbued in its indigenous Ahwahneechee name: Wa-kal-la (“The River”). As the story goes, the would-be conquistadors wandered for weeks across central California, starving and dehydrated, before happening across Wa-kal-la. Looking upon the river’s vast and fertile domain, the foreigners thought their prayers answered, and, proclaiming this place to be a “land of mercy,” began to claim this territory as their own. As more settlers arrived during the California Gold Rush with hopes of a big score, the Merced was deemed too crowded, and the infamous Mariposa Battalion was formed to deal with the “native problem.” Ahwahneechee villages and food stores were burned, and all the Indigenous inhabitants of this land of mercy were either killed or driven out of their homeland. Of course, not much gold ended up being found here, and less than ten years after the Mariposa Battalion’s slaughter, the tourists started to pour into Yosemite, growing into the very same flood of shameless recreationists and nature lovers which I now find myself a part of.
Gazing at the snow-capped peaks roughly 5,000 feet above me and simultaneously glimpsing some 300 years into the past, a feeling of melancholy washes over me like the rhythmic flow of water onto the bank at my feet. Nobody would know what happened here if people weren’t still talking about it. The history of this place has been smoothed over, allowing the shame I feel at being here to remain ambiguous. This, I realize, is a great injustice second only to the initial act of genocide. The mountains’ message is clear: allowing the river of time to weather away history— or in some instances, even aiding it in its goal— will lead only to more suffering.
Unstoppable water slams against immovable rock, and I see my own past in the river’s turbulent waters. My eyes settle on a small whirlpool in the middle of the river where the water slows its descent for a moment and begins to circle itself, growing ever more agitated, forming a hypnotic vortex of cloudy white, a pupil within an effervescent blue-green cornea. As I stare into this strange, alien eye, images and memories from long ago arise within me, and my mind is transported into a different scene— one that happened over two years ago and thousands of miles away. Even though I am separated from them by so much space and time, my memories of that day feel like they happened yesterday, the emotions that accompany them still raw and volatile. Staring deep into the waters of the Merced, I feel the same bubbling anger I felt that day, gazing out into dark gray skies that characterize a Texas thunderstorm. This was perhaps the first time I had felt real, adult anger, and every ounce of it was directed straight at my father.
Two years ago, my parents had just decided to get a divorce, and my family was at the very beginning of an incredibly lengthy and drawn-out process that shaded my memories of those years like a tunnel I only now find myself beginning to emerge from. I felt no anger at the divorce itself; of all my family members, I think I was actually the one who supported the idea the most. Early on, it seemed like it might even improve my relationship with my father, allowing him to be vulnerable with me in a way that had never before been possible for him. However, this timid optimism all shattered on that rainy, humid day in May. I remember I was sitting with my two younger brothers, not doing much besides listening to the cracks of thunder that broke up the muffled yells coming from our parents’ room downstairs. This was clearly harder on them than it was on me, and one of my brothers, Brandon, who has bipolar disorder, was deep in a depressive phase no doubt onset by the massive upheaval to his young reality. The shouting was clearly making him distressed, and despite my assertions that everything was fine, the rancorous sounds from the bedroom only seemed to grow louder. Eventually, whether it was out of an authentic desire to help my brother or a narcissistic drive to involve myself in the action, I decided to intervene.
“Wait upstairs,” I told my brothers. I headed down to my parents’ room and knocked on the door.
“You’re upsetting Brandon,” I said, making a point of showing how calm, composed, and generally unbothered I was by the whole situation. “You need to tone it down.” At this point, standing on the cusp of one of my life’s greatest inflection points, I had no idea how many times I would return to my memories of the next few moments in the years to come.
"You know this is your fault.” My mom, nowhere near beginning to recover from the greatest heartbreak of her life, blamed my father for Brandon’s distress, the venom in her words almost eclipsing the pain in her eyes. My dad reacted to this blow with some typical obscenity that was relatively mild in comparison, but I did not care. At the slightest hint of aggression towards my mother, I erupted, transforming into a viscous whirlwind of shut-the-fuck-ups and how-dare-you-talk-to-her-like-thats.
I’ve thought about my words so many times since I first said them, and I’m sure now that my dad must have been caught incredibly off-guard by my sudden verbal assault; like I said, we had been doing pretty good before then, at least for us. Imagining the sense of surprise and betrayal he probably felt never fails to cause a nauseating ball of shame to lodge itself somewhere in my sternum. However, my dad is nothing if not reactive, and we inevitably found ourselves in a verbal throw-down for the ages. The argument that ensued is the only part of that day that does not feel crystal-clear in my memory. I cannot remember much of what either of us said, just the feeling that floodgates of anger and hatred— real hatred— had opened within me like a great dam finally collapsing under too much pressure. I was ready to go scorched earth.
Of course, I remember perfectly well how the argument ended. Summoning all the venom my voice could muster, I told him the one thing I knew would hurt him the most. Gesturing towards the bathroom my mom had retreated to when I started shouting, my voice quieted to a near whisper. “You will never be as important to me as she is,” I told him before walking out of the room.
That was the last thing I said to my dad for over six months. Within the span of just a few minutes, my entire image of my father was transformed. The rough, complicated edges that had previously defined our relationship were smoothed out into a simple, easy-to-digest story in which he was the villain and everyone in my family, including myself, were the victims. This story, while far from the whole truth, helped me explain why my life wasn’t the way I wanted it to be and shielded me from being forced to confront the complicated mixture of shame, regret, anger, and sadness that now, hypnotized by the Merced’s spell, had finally come to the surface.
These emotions assault and overwhelm me, as if I am caught in their violent current and may, at any moment, be pulled beneath the surface into a darkness from which it is impossible to emerge. And yet, among all these negative, painful feelings, I find something unexpected: a sense of relief— serenity, even, as if the emotions I am feeling are right for this moment. Perhaps these feelings have been hiding within me all along, and the relief I now feel is from finally giving myself the space to acknowledge them. To acknowledge that no, I’m not okay with my dad as the opponent, the ever-present obstacle that must be overcome to achieve happiness. I hold the whirlpool-eye’s gaze for a second longer, watching as the churning, frustrated water spills over the surrounding rocks in a pulsating rhythm and continues its path downstream to whatever future awaits it. I realize the time has come for me to do the same.
Once more, I trace the Merced’s path down from the mountains, indulging my musings about the simple, beautiful story the water tells and all the painful history it hides for just another moment. This time, though, my eyes land not on the violent whirlpool still raging a few meters away, but on the events taking place directly in front of me. All this talk about the river telling a single story in space and time, and I had yet to devote a moment’s notice to the present. With thoroughly shaken and sobered eyes, I begin to examine the scene playing out at my feet. I am standing in an oasis of sorts, a tiny inlet where well-positioned rocks and reeds calm the turbulent river, convincing it to slow its relentless march and rest here for a while. Looking into this still water, I can see my actual reflection, a crystal-clear image only slightly distorted by calm ripples from the gentle breeze. I meet my own gaze in the river. I am struck by how grown-up the eyes looking back at me seem, and they remind me of another pair of eyes whose gaze is etched into my memory like the river’s path carved through the valley.
My grandfather died a few months ago. When I found out, I didn’t feel any sadness. In fact, I can’t remember feeling anything significant at all. His death was far from unexpected, and it has long been a struggle for me to find much love in my heart for my father’s father— the man I’ve always seen as responsible for making my dad the way he is. All my dad’s stubborn pride, his inability to admit a mistake, his close-minded, selfish way of looking at the world— it can be traced back to the lessons he learned from being raised by my grandfather. Still, his death left me waxing nostalgic. I decided to rummage through some dusty boxes to find a disc with some old home movies on it, and prepared myself for a trip down memory lane. The videos were mostly an unremarkable collection of poorly-filmed wrestling meets and birthday parties, none of which provided me with the insight into the past I was looking for. But then the screen flickered, and a new video started playing, one that traded in the warm hues of a home for the unmistakable sterile white of a hospital.
The date and time in the top right corner of the screen immediately caught my attention: 11-05-2001, 8:36 A.M. A little under two hours before I was born. The video is a recording of a waiting room, and I smiled to see my extended family gathered together, their faces filled with long-lost youth and anticipation of what’s to come. But then the camera peered through a window in the waiting room and zoomed in on a figure, clearly lost in deep thought, sitting on a bench down the hall and staring at nothing. It took me a second to recognize my father, not even three years older than I am now, obviously attempting to cope with the wave of emotions that a 23-year-old college dropout must face when awaiting the imminent birth of his first child. Someone behind the camera must have waved at him, and he looked up, 20 years into the future, into the eyes of a son who naïvely thought he had nothing in common with his father.
I was shaken by how much of myself I recognized in my father’s gaze. His semi-slouched posture; his dark, thinking eyes; his slight smile, just barely masking the complex thoughts and emotions swirling beneath the surface— in my head, these were all traits that belonged to me. It was a gaze that, in an unabashed refutation of the laws of space and time, seemed to be conveying a message specifically for me: None of this is nearly as easy as you think it is. It was also the same gaze that is staring up at me now, rippling gently in the still water of this small oasis.