A Southerner in Yosemite Valley — Part 1: Punk Rock, Ralph Waldo Emerson and a Yosemite Flyer
After seeing my first punk show in 1988 at the VFW Hall on Franklin Ave in New Orleans, an area that a 17-year-old boy and his friends had no business being in, I was converted. I don’t remember the name of the bands that we had driven all that way to see, but what I do recall is a feeling of brotherhood with like-minded strangers, all of us equally in sync with the unrelenting beats and power chords of the three-piece punk band that opened the show.
That night, all of us were baptized in a mosh pit, our supposed sins of conformity and mediocrity washed away in a holy swill of beer, cigarettes, and sweat. After an hour of showing our appreciation for the deafening music by stage diving and slamming into one another, we walked out into the hot New Orleans summer night.
It was then that I noticed that my watch had fallen off and my front tooth was chipped. And even without the watch, I knew we were already out past our curfew. The cover story that we had invented to tell our parents, something about going to the movies and bowling, was falling apart. But we strutted through the night down Franklin Avenue anyway, as though we now belonged to this rough city’s underground scene.
It should have been no surprise, when we got back to my parent’s car, to find that the doors had been jimmied open and an emergency air pump that was under the front seat was gone. For once I was grateful for the Plymouth Horizon’s stock FM radio which was thankfully less valuable than the air pump.
Regardless, I would have a lot of explaining to do when I got home. But these reality checks did not tarnish our rite of passage, for we had been reborn as self-marginalized high school punk rockers, connoisseurs of the underground music scene. Bad Brains, 7 Seconds, and the Sex Pistols uprooted the old myths passed down by our parents, our new worldview crafted by Jello Biafra and the Dead Kennedys.
Despite the hedonistic tendencies of the scene, I appreciated punk’s brutal perspective, energy, and anger. And my naïveté and idealism inoculated me with a firm belief that punk rock could lead us all to a better world.
After high school, I attended Southeastern Louisiana University, where my pubescent idealism matured into a love of the Transcendentalists, with Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman joining Biafra and Rollins on my shelf of idols. The former spoke to my love of the woods and creeks of my youth. The latter spoke to my disenchantment with those who aspired to become corporate heroes, those who embraced the facade of society, status, and materialism. There was, for me, no middle ground.
In my Sophomore year, I found an appropriately minimalist, Thoreauvian potting shed-turned-studio apartment that I rented for $80 a month. It was 1990, and I had evolved from a high school student barely making Cs, to a studious academic who wandered the library stacks and regularly made the Deans list. My high school friends were long gone. My best friend had joined the Army. Others were scattered throughout New Orleans and the south, landing in various colleges, entry-level jobs, and rehabs.
For me, it was a fresh start. But while I found college coursework to be interesting, life outside the classroom was, by contrast, very disappointing, peppered with various part-time jobs including notetaker, pizza-maker, dishwasher, and janitor. The few bars and clubs in the area were dance clubs with strobe lights, neon-painted black walls, and sugary drinks in clear plastic cups. The air inside reeked of cologne and the walls shook with the dance techno of my nightmares.
Such was the tragic irony, that with all the freedom in the world, I could find nothing better to do than hang out in the death-dance clubs, ride my bike around campus, eat ramen noodles, and strum my acoustic guitar to REM’s Driver 8 while waiting for my laundry to dry. How long before I actually started to look forward to those dark nights in the dance club, lulled into a sleep that could linger a lifetime?
Weekends at a commuter college are especially long, and I filled those quiet Saturdays like a true Emersonian wanderer, riding my bike on empty rural roads, walking down train tracks, exploring undeveloped subdivisions and investigating their graffitied cul-de-sacs littered with TV sets, stained mattresses and befouled furniture. Bike rides to nowhere.
Those meandering roads would eventually bring me back to campus, where I followed an established routine of stopping at the water fountain and cooling off in the waterfall of air-conditioning in the campus post office.
One fateful Saturday, I leaned my bike on the wall outside the post office door as I usually did, and went inside. I noticed a flyer pinned right above the water fountain on the bulletin board. The flyer, which had been randomly stuck between Peace Corps pamphlets and several missing persons notices, displayed a picture of a single, oddly shaped mountain. The mountain looked like it had been cut in half and the remaining monumental half-dome of rock dominated the landscape. I don’t remember exactly what the flyer said, but I recall that it was no more than a simple headline. Something like: “Seasonal Employment Available. Yosemite National Park.”
Every day I walked through the student union on the way to class, and every day I would stop by the post office water fountain. With every trip, I saw the flyer. With every trip, I couldn’t help but think about how I would be spending my upcoming summer break. Maybe I would move out of my potting shed, pack my meager belongings in my Chevy Chevette, and unload it back in my room at my parents’ home. Maybe I would take a summer class, maybe not. Either way, I would need to find a summer job, though I had no prospects for anything appealing.
I didn’t know anything about Yosemite, or the Sierra Nevadas, or California. I had almost no firsthand experience of the world outside of the South. But what was represented on that flyer stood in stark contrast to the sprawling and predictable summer waiting for me at home.
I imagine this is the same feeling a young man or woman somewhere might have upon seeing an Army recruitment poster — “Do you have what it takes?” It would not matter that they had no idea what they were about to sign up for. Good or bad, it would be an adventure, a way out. Maybe at the right moment, that Army poster would have worked on me too.
But at that juncture in my life I was hungry for a different kind of war. Man vs World. Man vs. Society. Man vs. Self. I was hungry for the Nature of Emerson and John Muir. I was still filled with the rebellion of punk rock. My War. Would I walk the walk, “live deliberately”, “suck all the marrow out of life” — would I pursue the transcendental ideals I claimed to hold? Could I become Emerson’s long-legged transparent eyeball?
I was ready for something bigger, ready to meet my higher self, ready to shake hands with the almighty. I was ready for my hardcore vision quest, which of course, could only take place in the far away, unknown valley of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
I ripped the flyer off the post office bulletin board. I don’t remember if I called a phone number or sent in a postcard, but somehow I received an application for employment at Yosemite National Park. I filled it out and dropped it in the mail. Two weeks later, I received an acceptance letter. And as simple as that, I was hired — job to be decided upon arrival.
That May, just a few days after finishing final exams, I stepped off a plane in Fresno, California. My dad’s old Army reserve duffle bag rolled off the conveyor belt in baggage claim. It was stuffed with enough clothes for a week, a pair of hiking boots, a portable CD player, and some CDs.
I stood in the dry California heat in front of the airport and waited for the bus. Waited for some like-minded strangers. Waited to see if someone else had found the same flyer in a post office bulletin board on their campus too.
