Yo-Ho part deux is on the horizon

In ten days or so we depart for Cali again: a couple of days in the Bay area, followed by a week in Yosemite. Even if a wish were to take me back in a moment to my beloved White Mountains forever, that wish would have tough competition from both destinations. San Francisco and the East Bay are all Massachusetts could be if Massachusetts didn't have its head permanently stuck up its arse. Yosemite is easy to describe, but hard to comprehend if you haven't been there. Go there, even if you have to walk.

This time we get to go slightly off-season, when many of the thicker variety of tourist will have crawled back under their rocks. This is good in some ways, bad in others. It's chiefly bad in depriving us of much of the unintended comedy.

My notes from the past Yosemite trip have inspired some mule-based and bear-based humour from those who know me in real life. When I introduced Hobbes, my unique mule, I mentioned that I brought to the encounter a sorry record in equine relations. In large measure, Hobbes cured this: he even improved my posture in the saddle.

Bears are another matter. Intellectually, a childhood in the boonies, and country relations who still have bears in the backyard, have given me a healthy respect for campground pests that weigh upward of 200 pounds and don't understand when the treats are gone. Emotionally, yes, I'm a little bit afraid of bears. For good reasons.

One of my earliest memories was of a father pulled into damage control over a horrible tragedy. There was a wildlife exhibit in the White Mountains that attracted tourists. It included a couple of bears. My brother and I had seen all this. The bears escaped their cage, killed a couple of people and horribly mauled several others, one of whom we had met. My parents didn't sugar-coat their conversations about this, and we as children were somewhat shaken by the story.

It was some years before this wildlife exhibit had bears again. When they did, the bears were yearlings raised in captivity. My brother and I were brought to meet the new bears, to see them and wrestle with them. The last was not entirely voluntary. The bears were our equal in size, but a good deal stronger. (My father had odd ideas about child rearing.) Unlike some people skeptical of the strength and intelligence of these animals, I've experienced it firsthand. It was enough of a challenge with ostensibly friendly bears, and I have no wish to test the goodwill of a wild bear. A little fear of bears is healthy: it minimises the sort of dumb mistakes that usually precede bear incidents, and remember: the National Park Service is mostly on the bears' side, even when they're caught red-handed with your pick-a-nick basket.

We expect to spend half of our stay in Tuolumne Meadows, where the trailheads average 8000 feet, where the only showers are open just from noon to 3 p.m., and where bears are as common as squirrels. It's also a place where one gets to hike through scenery that is simply beyond breathtaking, where cell phones and Wi-Fi don't happen. It is a good place in which to apply healthy caution about one's wild company.

We will shower before we fly home.