Paul the shuttle driver’s 2000 Subaru has crinkled Mcdonald’s boxes, French fries, splattered windows. Doesn’t need my boyfriend to tell him where the parking lot exit is, been doing this for thirty years. Sparse, grey hair to his shoulders. No kids, never married. Hiked the John Muir Trail in the eighties. Lives outside of Lone Pine. Has a girlfriend he’s never met. Sends her money every week, a swimsuit model in Modesto. Talks to her every day and doesn’t give a shit if his friends think she’s trash. Her grandmother’s sick, dying any day now and when she gets the inheritance, she’s buying a Tesla and moving to California to drive with him, shuttle hikers from Mt. Whitney to Yosemite Valley.
We’re going thirty in a fifty-five. At the Tioga Gas Mart in Lee Vining, he pulls over because his sugar’s low and a bag of chips will do it. The sugar’s made him miss the turn. I offer to drive. We switch places. Clipped to the visor is a picture of an older woman in a blue coat standing in front of a dark mountain. Her arms are folded, each hand holding the opposite elbow. My mom he says. That was the week we rented a cabin across from Jack Nicholson.
From the backseat he cautions about curves, the broken seatbelt, the cigarette lighter phone charger. He’s worried but I’m good with the stick shift. The road narrows near the park entrance. There’s no guardrail, only gravel and pine trees between us and the thousand-foot drop into the Valley. At Olmsted Point we get a look at Half Dome, its profile a granite man in repose. Then, just before the switchback, at the road’s most treacherous point, a small truck has stalled. A park ranger in a round hat directs the stream of cars into the oncoming lane and around it. With his phone Paul shows us pictures of his girlfriend. The love of my life he says.
Long, dark hair in a black bikini. In one she’s topless, in another she’s with her cousin. In another she has a pug nose.
A year from now he’ll wind through Tioga Pass toward home. The Sierra cold and blue with the setting sun behind them. A full Hunter’s Moon will have risen within arm’s reach of his car window, the steep canyon gorge to his right. And maybe, just for a moment, he will have been distracted by Tuolumne Meadows in the silver moonlight.
Someone, maybe his niece, will write about his love of the great outdoors, the years he was a third-grade teacher, how in his youth he lived off-grid in a VW van while following the Dead, and that once, he lived in rural Arlee, Montana in a cabin he built himself and raised beautiful strawberries.
