A Forty Dollar Bowl of Chili

So far in your life what one person has influenced you the most? You can’t say Mom or Dad or your esposa or esposo.Mine is Thomas P. Egan. Tom and Jeannette built a home right next door to us in Marshfield in 1980. The same day we met, we went for Mexican food. Tom is originally from Rhode Island, but spent twenty years in California. Jeannette is a native Californian. They met at U.C. Davis.

Tom introduced Sandy and me to our first Cajun/Zydeco festival. That was over twenty years ago, at the Stepping Stone Ranch in Escoheag, Rhode Island.

He introduced me to our wonderful National Park system too. Tom and I have hiked the parks at Arches, Canyon-lands, Grand Teton, Rocky Mountain, Yellowstone and Yosemite.

A trip to Gettsyburg with the Egans sparked the whole Civil War thing for me (and my friend Randy Lewis of Connecticut gives tours there).

Did I mention Haven Brothers hot dog stand, operating since the 1870s? From 4 PM to 4 AM you will find the place buzzing with state cops, Brown University college kids, hookers, vagrants, regular people and Mardi Gras attendees. Tom went there through his high school and college years.

We both (separately) vacationed at Lake George, New York in our younger years. We scoured the battlefields at Ticon-deroga, Fort William Henry, Fort Ann and Saratoga while chasing the girls from Canada, aye.

Cowboy movies. We have seen them all. Lonesome Dove, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, They Died With Their Boots On, Wyatt Earp, Dances with Wolves, Unforgiven, Shane, The Magnificent Seven, Open Range, Stagecoach, Red River and The Searchers to name a few. Tom –Tomaso, Double Dribble . . . – has many nicknames. I sometimes call him Augustus after Robert Duvall’s Texas Ranger character in Lonesome Dove.

Tom decided that in the summer of 2007 everyone was invited “Maybe for the last time,” as he put it, to Yosemite National Park in California. Tom was a Sierra Club member and over the twenty years he was in California, hiked many, many trails.

Our (Bacons’ and Egans’) longtime friends Allan and Barb Sylvester had the rental car running and ready by the time Sandy and I landed. It was nice not having to drive.

Tom arranged the tent cabins and regular cabins at Curry Village in Yosemite Valley. Have you been to Yosemite? It is the size of Rhode Island, 1200 square miles of it. It’s my very favorite National Park. Better than Zion and Bryce and Glacier and Grand Canyon and Capitol Reef and Badlands and Mesa Verde. It is America’s first National Park. Abraham Lincoln himself signed the papers. Teddy Roosevelt, while camping with John Muir in a meadow just south of El Capitan, made it official. You probably know the teddy bear was named after Teddy Roosevelt. Why read fiction?

Eleven friends showed up for the trip. What a great place to bring your family. You can tent camp, trailer camp, motel, tent cabin, cabin camp, or stay at a plush hotel. There are two. The Wawona and the Ahwahnee. You can bike ride, raft, swim or float the Merced River, climb, hike, walk, hang out, attend ranger lectures and see shows. But lights out at 10 PM.

Today you can get there from the San Francisco airport in around four hours if you only stop once for Mexican food. You drive through the Central Valley — which provides the U.S. with 90% of its fruits and vegetables — up into the foothills, and finally into Yosemite Valley. In the olden days, it was a 36 hour stagecoach ride.

Yosemite features El Capitan, a granite monolith that rises 3600 feet above the valley floor. People come from all over the world to climb it. Half Dome — who hasn’t seen a photo of it? Tom gets excited telling how a glacier sliced it in half. 50,000 make the climb to the top every year. Jeannette did it with her Dad when she was a fearless teenager. Waterfalls — some of the highest, most beautiful in the world. Yosemite, Vernal, Nevada, and Bridal Veil.

Galen Clark came to the valley in 1834 under doctor’s orders. They said he would die soon of consumption, but the Sierras’ elevation would prolong his life. He died anyway, but at age 97, in 1910. Four sequoias and a grave stone mark his grave near the Mowak Indian Museum. The trees are 70 feet tall now. It’s true — I saw them.

There wasn’t much snow in the southern Sierra this past winter, so there weren’t a lot of berries for the black bear this summer. There are around 500 black, brown yellowish black bears in the park. Twenty-six of them raid the valley every night. They break into vehicles and knock over garbage cans and dumpster dive. But they don’t take the deposit cans. We saw bears every day and every night. Over the check-in desk, a video plays, saying “Take all the food out of your vehicle, including coolers.” The bears know what might be inside. Even children’s carseats need to be removed. The bears know that they are loaded with chocolate chip cookie and cracker crumbs. On average, 100 cars get broken into in a calendar year.

One evening we signed up for a ranger-led open tram tour by the light of a full moon. Everything looked black and white, just like in Ansel Adams’ photos. Our ranger pointed out lights on El Capitan’s face where climbers had hammocked in for the night during their 2-5 day climbs.

At times Ansel Adams would play piano at the Ahwahnee Hotel in the great room and in the dining room. It was built in 1927 to attract the wealthier clientele. Built of local granite and wood, it sits in the sun and faces Half Dome. For dinner it is sport coats and ties for the gentlemen and dresses for their ladies. Sandy and I took a tour of the hotel. Rooms run from $500 to $1,000 per night. If you want a bowl of chili, it is an additional $40. Well, I did have a couple Sierra Nevada beers with it... The fireplaces are seven feet high and twenty feet wide. You could park a Volkwagen Beetle in one. (Punch buggy!)

The Ahwahnee is the most beautiful hotel in the whole park system. After the hotel tour, we sat at the outside patio near the pool for cocktails. Sitting behind us was a family of four. The drill sergeant father was punishing the nine-year-old daughter by making her do mountain lunges and jumping jacks on the hotel lawn. When she didn’t do them in the allotted time, he gave her more. Disgusted, we left. Sandy suggested we walk along the Merced River back to Camp Curry. On the way, we came upon a Dad hauling a ten-foot log into the river. He put his three kids on it and floated them towards the bridge. I waded into the river to talk to them. He said a bear had just crossed the river, right in front of them, with three cubs. No psychiatrist visits in later life for those well-adjusted kids!

By the way, the California bear flag was designed by a cousin of Mary Todd Lincoln.

On the other end of the spectrum was the Search and Rescue presentation that we attended, put on by park rangers. They said the movie was graphic. I guess it was okay to call it graphic because it showed people getting killed. They showed helicopter rescues, people being gurneyed out. The gurney has a golf cart size tire in the center, so 4-6 rescuers can carry people out easier. Sixty-four percent of the rescues are trail incidents — lost, falling, broken bones, cuts. etc. Surprising to me, only 14% are rope incidents — meaning those people climbing the face of El Capitan. Mostly young men die from the raging waters of the falls. Sometimes it takes months to get their remains. Only two rangers died during these missions.

Along the roads are orange bear signs saying “Slow Down.” At each one of these signs is an exact spot where a bear has died. Fourteen died last year.

Yosemite gets 4 million visitors a year. But it did not seem like it to us. There were no long food lines, and the valley is serviced by natural gas buses to cut down on pollution, traffic jams, and parking. It was hot. Every day it was 95-100 degrees, but that baking, no humidity-type heat.

As beautiful a valley as Yosemite is, the Hetch Hetchy was more so. But it was turned into a reservoir to serve the needs of the people of Yerba Buena (San Francisco). You go that way on a 1.5 hour drive to get to Tuolomne Meadows. Two-awl-ah-may Meadows is a big favorite of day hikers. The Yosemite River runs through it. It has snowcapped peaks surrounding it. You have to drive by Tenaya Lake to get there.Tenaya was a male Mowak leader. If the Egans had a girl, her name was going to be Tenaya. But they had the Egan Boyz and you know the rest. Interestingly enough, Paul and Brian both live in California now.

On the final day we were going to go to San Francisco, but opted for nearby gold country in the foothills just north of Yosemite. In 1849, gold was discovered near Sutters Fort in Sacramento. Men that came to the gold fields were called 49-ers. Towns sprang up from Sacramento to Yosemite. They had names such as Sonora, Angels Camp, Chinese Camp, Buck Meadows, El Portal and Mariposa. The route that connects them all is Route 49. Go figure.

The gold town we visited for four hours was called Jamestown. It had historic hotels and bars, antique shops, and a Mexican restaurant that even had taquitos . . . almost as good as Jeannette’s. Here I bought two mounted movie posters, one of The Magnificent Seven on horseback, and one of Butch and Sundance (not the real ones, the movie ones). Sandy insisted that I get them for my office at Garage Mahal.

John C. Fremont, the pathfinder, came across the mountains from St. Louis four times, mapping the area for the 49-ers, people traveling west, and for the cross country train. His right hand man was Kit Carson.

Christopher Kit Carson was fluent in Navajo, Apache, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Shoshone, Paiute and Plains Indian sign language, as well as English and Spanish . . . although he could only write his name in English. During the Civil War, he was for the Union. Towards the end of his life he forced the Navajo out of Canyon de Chelly, into the Long Walk to New Mexico and Bosque Rondando.

Jim Bridger and Joseph Walker, famous mountain men, were there also. Fremont asked a friend to buy him land on the coast of California. Instead he bought land in Mariposa, in the foothills. Gold was discovered on it and Fremont became a millionaire. On Fremont’s last trip back, he came over Donner Pass and buried the bodies from that disaster — the Donner Party.

We stayed near the airport to catch our early morning flight to Boston. For dinner, Sandy and I walked to the In & Out Burger place. It is the oldest drive thru in California and was started 55 years ago. The Egan Boyz have been talking about it for years.

Our hotel room was really nice and it had indoor plumbing . . . and you didn’t have to look for foraging bears on your way to the bathroom or shower.

For $10 I purchased a lifetime senior citizen National Parks Pass. So if you want to come along next time, you can get in for free if you ride in our car . . . but you have to drive.

Thank you, Tom Egan!

by Bob Bacon, August 2007