The loud sounds of the rain against the canvas roof of my tent cabin, was the background music for the nights I would lay in bed reflecting on all the moments that allowed me to spend three months in Tuolumne Meadows. Without any phone service and minimal internet access, it was the first time in a while that I didn’t feel weighed down by the constant influx of news. Instead, I found myself surrounded by granite domes, marmots and a magical community of wild humans.
Three years of Stanford weighed heavily on me. Failed chemistry classes. Barely passing classes I devoted hours into. Frustrated that the conversations I wanted to be having weren’t happening in my classes. Junior year I thought about dropping out more times than I ever had before. Maybe I would have, had I not spent the summer in Tuolumne. I was ready to disconnect from everything and everyone.
Looking out from the top of Pothole Dome, I can see the place that started to feel like home within a few days of being there. The peaks that wrap around the meadows melt from bright greys to reds against the vast blue of the sky. The tranquil Tuolumne River on its way to the frenzied San Francisco.
The borderless sky, whose sunset colors I could never quite match with my watercolors, was medicinal. The afternoons of painting on one of the many domes, watching the final moments of sunlight leave the high country, gave me the energy to heal wounds I had duck tapped together, wounds I told myself I would get to later.
How could I make time to deal with them if every moment seemed consumed by another assignment, another subject I had never learned in high school?
Of the many unexpected precious moments that came from my time in Tuolumne Meadows, perhaps the one I am most grateful for is getting to share the Tuolumne sky with my mami. As the naturalist rangers gave their star programs that summer, I tried so hard to remember as much as I could, hoping to tell my mom all about it when she came to visit. Venus. Mercury. Mars. Jupiter. Saturn. I began memorizing the map of the sky.
Venus. Mercury. Mars. Jupiter. Saturn. I knew their names long before I knew how to find them. I didn’t even know I could see them all without the help of a telescope until last summer.
I didn’t know I could see them growing up when my mami would set up blankets outside our home in Anderson Valley, where my siblings and I would lay down to look up at the night sky. We didn’t know the names of most of the stars and constellations, but as we laid under the night sky, and our skin tickled from the cool breath of the night wind, we knew that their glint had a story to tell us.
The sky that my mami grew up seeing in Mexico City didn’t look the same as the one I got to see growing up. I think that’s why every time she gets home late, regardless of how late, or what she’s doing, she takes a second to look up, to take it all in.
Anderson Valley. Despite the various places I have made a home at over the course of my life, AV is the place that I always go back to, where I find the most comfort. The three-hour drive north from Stanford is one that I happily make when school becomes too overwhelming. The small, quirky community in Northern California raised me.
From kindergarten to senior year of high school, the faces around me stayed pretty consistent. Many of my teachers taught my older brother eight years before me, and my little brother nine years after I made my way through their classrooms. One might see some Boontling signs all over town, the jargon made up of English, Gaelic, Irish, Pomo and Spanish in the late 19th century by Boonville residents. Maybe see a few people wearing t-shirts of a bear with antlers and Bahl Hornin’ printed on them. A town with its own jargon, many wineries and an award-winning brewery, makes sure that everyone knows how to say good drinking.
Growing up in AV allowed me to develop a deep love for the natural world. From rolling around in the mud with my little sister, to smashing blackberries between my fingers and pressing my palms against my cousin’s shirt before running back to the house in a fit of laughter, or picking up every salamander I could find, I knew I had the best playground. The forty-minute drive to the ocean never felt quite real, not with the redwoods towering all around me, leaning over to tell me to slow down, telling me that everything will somehow work out. And maybe I believe those gentle giants, because they have had centuries to figure it all out.
The fertile soils of the valley I call home are perfect for pinot grapes, whose harvest depends on immigrant labor. Harvesting that my father, mi apá, did, and my abuelito before him.
I can look up at the sky from every place that’s ever been important to me. A reminder of those I love when I am not with them, a screen to share with them when we’re all together.
I could look up at it during every winter break my family would spend in my father’s hometown in Mexico, as we made our way back from eating tostadas at my Tía Chole’s place and running around la plaza lighting fireworks with my friends, daring each other to hold on to them until the last second, unable to resist the thrill of almost getting burned. They lit up the dull gray of the pavement outside my abuelito’s store, where I would run into to grab a gansito, running out just as quickly, yelling back to tell him to put the tasty chocolate treat on my dad’s tab. The soft, wise chuckle I heard behind me told me it was probably one of the many things he wouldn’t write down.
The weeks spent in Mexico gave me some of my first wild experiences, even during the time we spent on the road. The wild scenes in Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, a movie that I watched over and over again during our three-day trip, captivated me. They showed me the Grand Canyon for the first time, they introduced me to the American West. The eagle that soared through the skies and the horses that ran freely across lush, green landscapes made me believe that these open spaces were promising me happiness. Spirit gave me the nature I needed, at least until we made it to the soft hills that surrounded La Laguneta, the small town in Michoacán my dad calls home.
It was perhaps in La Laguneta where I was most wild. Like the one time five-year-old me decided it was a good idea to light a firework inside my room. I watched in panic as my blanket caught on fire, but somehow managed to put it out. I covered up the blanket with another, and went downstairs, pretending nothing had happened, my heart beating rapidly at the thought of how badly things could have gone. I should have known my mother would discover the hole days later as she started packing up our room.
I never really understood why we had to leave. Leave the place that meant so much to all of us. Why my dad insisted that we get in the car and drive thousands of miles away from his parents. I wanted to sit at the kitchen table at my grandparents’ house every morning, eating papaya with my abuelito, and asking abuelita for a chocolate bar from her stash in the oven.
There were many tears shed by my siblings and me when we had to leave the small town in Michoacán. It was never enough time with my grandparents, never enough days of running down the hill at dawn to help my Tío Chepe milk the cows. The soft roughness of the udder mimicked by the palms of my hands after three weeks of trying again and again to get some milk out, frustrated by the ease with which my uncle seemed to do it.
Every night, my abuelita meets my abuelito at the store to help him close up, before they go home together, their shoulders touching slightly as they walk back illuminated by the orange glow of the street light. Sixty years of love are reflected in their six children, twenty-one grandchildren and four great grandchildren. They share the space so intimately, so quietly.
When my abuelito y abuelita got married, they didn’t have much else apart from their love for one another. Their first home together didn’t come until after they had already had all six children. The bracero program, which brought Mexican laborers to the United States for temporary agricultural work, was an opportunity for my grandfather to make more money for his family. More money from wages that were actually so low, that my abuelito says there were times he made more money playing poker than he did during that season of work. Bracero, someone who works with their arms. Arms that have held our family together.
After the bracero program ended, my grandfather continued making the journey to California. The money he made en el norte was a lot more than any job he could find at home. My grandmother raised their six children while he was gone, sometimes not hearing from him for months. The letters that helped her hold on to the hope of seeing him again could take a while to get to her. There were times she thought she would never see her husband again, knowing that he put his life at risk every time he made the journey back into the US as an undocumented worker.
Before vines of grapes covered the hillsides of Anderson Valley, they were covered by apple orchards. My abuelito picked those apples, at the same time sowing the land for his children to return to the same place for work, for his grandchildren to run around on, for his grandchildren to dream limitlessly.
My father was seventeen the first time he made it to AV. The land promising opportunity, just like the promises it had made my grandfather. He stayed for good in 1988, at 23, when my mom made the journey with him.
My father’s hometown only had an elementary school, my father walked twelve kilometers round trip in order to get to middle school and high school. Twelve kilometers. Almost eight miles. There were days when one of his friends would let him borrow a bike. On those days he could sleep in. It is on the days when I set out for a hike that I think of the privilege of making the choice of walking somewhere because I choose to, for fun. The privilege of not having to walk for survival, because I have no other choice.
During my first week of training with the ranger naturalists in Tuolumne Meadows, we talked about wilderness. It was one of the many topics we covered that week with people from all over the park and surrounding communities, which included topics like geology and history in order to give us better grounding for a summer filled with educating park visitors. Surrounded by lodgepole pines at 8600 feet of elevation, a wilderness ranger, who has done a lot of work in protecting and conserving designated wilderness spaces, started his talk by asking us what we thought of when we thought of wilderness. When the word “exclusive” was used to describe it, he immediately got defensive. He seemed surprised that exclusivity was brought up. At one point, he even described protecting wilderness as protecting the land for the minority who enjoyed having these spaces. There was an inability to understand, and a refusal to listen, to why there are people who are unable to access these spaces. He acted as if pushing for inclusivity was pushing for getting rid of wilderness.
Describing wilderness as areas protected for the minority of people who enjoy and access them was insulting. I was angry that he felt it appropriate to insinuate that people who don’t have the time or resources to visit national parks cannot enjoy the beauty of them. That they just simply don’t appreciate it.
Angry because I knew that the love my father felt for the land was greater than any I had experienced before. I’ve seen the joy in his face at discovering a redwood tree growing on our property, and in the careful way two summers ago that he released the baby skunks he found trapped behind some garbage cans. Angry that this ranger seemed to truly believe that my father couldn’t care about Yosemite because he’d never spent time in it.
A woman I worked with, someone who in many ways had offered advice and helped me navigate my time in Tuolumne, told me many times that she didn’t understand how people could visit Yosemite and stay for only a day or two. It came up in the visitor center when someone would ask what they should do in the park with the short time that they had. I would tell her that it shouldn’t matter how long people had, our job was to help them make the best of those moments, to enjoy the spaces we were privileged enough to call home for an entire summer. That there were many reasons why that might be all the time that they had to spend in the park.
That summer my mom could only visit for less than forty-eight hours. She drove over twelve hours round trip, with my little brother as her co-pilot, and every moment I got with them was cherished. Laughing as we soaked our feet in the cool water of Tenaya Lake. Resting my head on my mom’s shoulder as she kissed my forehead and we listened to the sounds of the banjo, fiddle and guitar tell stories around the campfire.
I spent three months in perhaps the most beautiful, awe-inspiring place I’d ever been to. But this place that brought me so much joy held an incredible power to hurt me.
It hurt when I had to explain to people over and over again about privilege. Their inability to understand that not everybody has the time or the resources to spend two weeks in a national park.
How could I explain that I didn’t love the natural world because I’d climbed numerous peaks or hiked the tallest mountains? That I loved it because of the times my mami would hold me as we looked up at the night sky together, imagining the stories that their light had to tell us.
These wild places are mine to enjoy because every hike I go on is a reminder of the miles my apá walked to get to school. Of the miles he walked across the desert in search of the American dream.
But this land is not mine, stolen land can never truly be. Public lands because of violent displacement. The idea of pristine landscapes created by white conservationists hinges on the erasure of Indigenous people from their homelands, so how can I allow myself to reclaim a space that has been made available to me through genocide and theft?
A desire for public lands to be more accessible doesn’t mean a desire to get rid of wilderness. It is a desire to feel welcomed. To feel joy at encountering faces and experiences similar to your own.
It is a desire for people to realize that places like Tuolumne Meadows, can be enjoyed by everyone. That just because someone doesn’t have the means to get to it, or doesn’t feel welcomed, doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t fall in love at first sight with the surrounding granite masterpieces sculpted by glaciers.
I have experienced the natural world in unexpected ways. I have learned to rejoice in the small moments, to love deeply. A love learned from the people in my life who were wild in ways that haven’t been included in definitions of wilderness before, a love learned from the stars that stitch me together and make me feel complete.
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