Claim What's Yours

The view from the top of Half Dome was just as spectacular as I knew it would be, and just as familiar. Kind of like coming home, really, to see the valley nearly 9,000 feet below, with its ancient glacial cut extending northeastward up Tenaya Canyon and El Capitan at the opposite end of the vista to the west; rolling mountaintops hiding fields and forests on the horizon opposite my rocky perch. At 9:00 in the morning the sun warmed my back while I gazed into the distance, remembering Jossman Burrell and letting him know I’d finally made it. Hoisting my backpack I felt the weight of the box containing his ashes. Two years Grampa Joss had been waiting for me to bring him back to this place that held his heart and soul. Given his deep affinity for the Dome, it seemed strange to me that he didn’t want his ashes to be released here, among the fissures and splitting granitic flakes on this beloved and distinctively rounded peak that dominated Yosemite’s skyline. He’d asked instead that his sooty remains be given to the grasses and soil of Tuolomne Meadows. But that was tomorrow’s task; for now he was just along for the ride and one last chance to top the Dome.

I reached underneath the box and gently pulled out the precious notebook, lifting it away from the plastic bag and holding it tenderly, still enclosed in the cloth cover I’d improvised from an old pair of jeans. Gramps had carried one of many small, black notebooks with him each of the 765 days he’d served as a ranger in Yosemite National Park. Sometimes he made notes in them, but mostly he sketched with rigorous detail whatever caught his eye, from wide landscape views to the tiniest bit of lichen on a ponderosa pine, every page signed with his initials. This particular notebook detailed the 16-mile route to the top of Yosemite’s iconic dome, from the base of the trail at Vernal Falls to the very view in front of me. Its cover was an assemblage of scrapes and divots, its leaves frayed at the edges, the elastic cover band hanging limp with used-up stretch. I knew every page like the back of my hand. Gramps had left me his entire collection of Ranger Notes, as he called them, including the notebooks he’d kept here in Yosemite as well as the later set from his subsequent assignment in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Thirty years he’d worked in the Smokies, but they never pierced his spirit like this place did.

I paused for a moment to wonder, as I had so many times before, why Gramps preferred that his ashes be spread in Tuolumne Meadows, rather than being thrown to the winds that swept the bare stone pate of the Dome. Recalling the drawings in his Tuolumne Meadows notebook, I was especially curious about a sketch of someone’s hand brushing through a field of wildflowers, a hand that didn’t belong to Grampa. The long, delicate fingers and slender wrist in the drawing spoke volumes that didn’t include a name.

As a kid growing up in Knoxville, I always looked forward to visits from Gramps, until I got old enough to stay with him at his ranger cabin in the Smokies for an occasional overnight or long weekend. Each time I came to visit Grampa challenged me with a treasure hunt inspired by his explorations. Opening one of his notebooks, he would point to something he had sketched, turn me to face in the appropriate direction down a trail, and send me off to locate what he had drawn, keeping an eye on me all the while. My objective might be anything from a rock formation to a cluster of mushrooms. Success in finding the item or location I’d been assigned was always rewarded with a special token, some small gem at the end of the search -- perhaps a photograph he’d taken of me when I wasn’t looking, or an animal bone to identify, or a strangely shaped rock for my collection.

On the weekend of my tenth birthday a gift-wrapped box was sitting inside the abandoned bird’s nest so cleverly tucked away in the rosebay rhododendron bush at the end of that day’s treasure hunt. (The ribbon he’d drawn over one of the rhododendron flowers had suggested I should reach beyond the bush’s outer foliage.) I unwrapped the box to find a belt buckle of hand-wrought silver in the shape of two intertwined loops, like the infinity symbol or the number eight. The accompanying note said, “Welcome to the double-digits, Adventure Girl! Like the two halves of this belt buckle are mirrors of each other, you are a mirror of the world, and the world is a mirror of you. May you always reflect the world’s goodness! Love, Gramps.”

Much as he enjoyed the Smokies, when “evening storytime” came around before bed, it was always the Yosemite notebooks he wanted to show me, the dome trail notebook his pride of them all. I couldn’t hear his stories about climbing Half Dome often enough as I got to know every mile of the path from afar, gazing at the finely detailed sketches while he described the thrills and challenges of his many climbs and taught me the basics of glacial geology. I remember asking him why he put his initials on each page, since he never ripped out any pages and never showed the notebooks to anyone but me.

“Always claim what’s yours, Two!” he pronounced. Because I shared his initials he called me “JB2” as a youngster, but then he shortened it to just “Two,” a nickname only he got to call me. “Not to be selfish or greedy, but to be responsible for your place in the world. Both good and bad, and even the things no one else might ever know about. Be the owner of what’s yours. That includes the things you say and the dreams you dream, not just the books in your bookcase.” His gently rounded fingers turned the pages that captured scenes from the Little Yosemite, the part of the Half Dome trail that breaks away from the Merced River and traces the arc around the back side of the dome.

“Here’s where the trail comes the closest to Sunrise Creek,” he mused, while I nodded in anticipation of what was coming next. “It’s very important for hikers to stay on the trail in order to preserve the environment,” he said like a mantra, “…but as a park ranger I had my run of the place, and on a hot day Sunrise Creek was the best skinny dipping in the whole park.” He continued, turning the page with a conspiratorial giggle, “Right here, at this curve in the trail where it’s closest to the water, I could leave the trail and walk about 15 yards further west to a massive log that had fallen over the creek. I came to think of that log as my own personal bridge, although I’d bet plenty of animals used it as well.”

As the next page came into view I couldn’t stay quiet any longer. “And the huge boulder at the other end of that log was like your own personal art studio, wasn’t it Gramps? And after you had a swim you’d sit with your back against the warm boulder and you’d sketch?”

“That’s exactly right, Two. That boulder curved around me like a cup scooped out to match the shape of my shoulders. So, now what? You wanna tell the rest of the story?”

My memories were yanked back to the present moment, sitting there atop the rounded peak, just me and a couple of marmots in the morning sunlight at 8,839 feet. I gazed in disbelief at the image in front of me, an image I’d seen more times than I could count. As often as I had flipped through these pages in the two years it had taken me to save the money for this pilgrimage, I’d never seen it before. There, on the page where Gramps had so lovingly drawn the backrest boulder at the end of his own personal footbridge, were his initials, JB, just like on every page. But on this page there was a jaggedy “2” next to the initials. “JB2,” it said. I only spent the briefest moment wondering if the “2” had always been there and I just hadn’t noticed it? No, he had added it later, for sure. Not a shadow of doubt in my mind, this was a message he’d crafted just for me, probably in the last days before cancer won the fight.

I stowed the notebook as carefully as my shaking hands could manage and quickly ate the protein bar to fuel the next portion of my trek. Bidding farewell to the view, the marmots and the mountaintop, I descended the 400 feet of Half Dome’s infamous cables, with another 4,400 feet of downhill to cover before reaching the valley floor. First, though, an off-trail excursion. It was easy enough to find the trail’s closest meeting with Sunrise Creek. After looking in all directions to make sure no one saw me leave the trail, I headed up the creek, bushwhacking through the scrub as I searched for Grampa’s personal footbridge. Worn and flaking on the top and outer edges, smooth and whole on the underside that received the creek’s splashes and steam, the fallen ponderosa pine easily supported my weight and was amply wide enough for my hiking boots to find secure footing. I watched briefly as a water ouzel flipped and splashed among the streambed rocks, unfazed by the water’s rushing current. By the time I got all the way across the log I was holding my breath at the sight of the boulder, an igneous remnant of the same glacier that had sliced the Dome in half. Stepping around to the south-facing side of the boulder, I could almost see Grampa’s shoulders resting against the boulder’s inner face, his knees drawn up as he sketched in the morning light.

The wind carried Grampa Joss’s voice straight into my ribs: “Claim what’s yours, Two.” Leaning into the concavity, I saw a stress crack in the lower left edge of the boulder, just at the spot where the “2” had been added to the initials on the notebook sketch. A tiny metallic loop stuck out from the crack, barely discernible from the shadows it cast, rusted as it was with weather and time. But the brass key that emerged as I pulled it free from the crack had somehow escaped the effects of weathering. The number 1022 stood out in stark relief as the key flashed in the light reflected by the waters of Sunrise Creek.

The key accompanied me the next day to witness the release of Grandpa’s ashes among the blue gentians, corn lilies and red columbine of Tuolumne Meadows.

It held fast as I rode the return bus to Oakland and two planes to Knoxville, where I pulled from the safe deposit box a letter he’d written two years before, nearly to the day. “You know I’m not a man of means,” it said, “but you deserve as much as I can give you, beyond a collection of sketches and musings from a guy who loved trees and rocks nearly as much as he loved his granddaughter. I’ve been putting away funds each year since you were born, and I’m glad for you to find this final treasure. I love you, Two. – Gramps.” Holding my breath I picked up from the floor the slip of paper that had fluttered out of the envelope. On the $20,000 check Grampa had written the memo, “Claim what’s yours.”