Armen found that he was well suited to the job at the sewer plant. It was certainly more stable than the jobs he’d held down on the coast. He was invigorated by the walk he took out on the steel deck every morning to take samples of raw and partially treated sewage. Sometimes he felt the atomized sewage dampen his face, and he was amused to find that he was enjoying himself.
The dirty work was good medicine, but Armen would feel even better with cash in his pocket. Inconveniently, his paycheck would be deposited directly into his bank account, so he’d need to take a bus up to Yosemite Valley to get his hands on his pay. When he got to the bank, he couldn’t remember his PIN, so he wouldn’t be buying a ride back home.
Armen walked to the village cemetery and found a grave marker that simply said “A BOY.” It struck Armen as profound, but he didn’t know why. He sat down and puzzled over it for a while, and then he got to his feet and walked over to the village store. He emptied his pockets on a couple cans of citrus soda for a water and energy and set off for his cabin in El Portal. Not wishing to walk the narrow, bus-stuffed highway, he opted to hike home by way of the north rim. It would be a couple miles shy of thirty, but he wasn’t in any hurry. No one was waiting for him.
He caught a shuttle from the Village to the Lodge, and hiked up to the rim from there. The dry season was well under way, and the black oaks and manzanita had begun their long, slow roast. As he ascended the sunward wall, his boots slipped a little with every step on the eroded granite. He’d stop occasionally to inhale the aroma of slowly burning vegetation.
Above the falls, the route turned up Eagle Peak Creek, passed behind Eagle Peak, and then crossed Eagle Creek. With so many eagles on the map, he frequently looked upward to check the sky. It occurred to him that the cliffs of Yosemite’s sunny side must be a great habitat for birds of prey. The thermals must be incredible, he thought, and the visibility for predation unsurpassed.
Where the trail passed El Capitan, he turned off onto the side trail to the great monolith, and he continued over the summit to the top of the twenty-eight hundred foot cliff, where he sat down to mitigate his sudden sense of profound vulnerability and soak up some sun. While gazing over the massive granite cliff, he felt the lure of the void. He felt as though something in him wanted to leap off the edge, something in him that he feared as much as any beast, and he felt his hackles stiffen. He rubbed them down and shook off the charge of fear. A moment later, he eyed a pair of turkey vultures soaring upward on an afternoon thermal. Their wings teetered nervously as if they were each on a high wire. He lay back on the stone roof, and played his best possum. He watched the soaring vultures through the shield of his eyelashes. He thought of Cindy, how she so loved to play possum for vultures, and how she’d made such an art—or religion—of it. He recalled a recent news story: A pair of Japanese climbers had recently frozen to death on the cliff face, just fifty feet below where he lay sunning. He closed his eyes and took a short nap.
Armen returned to the trail, and proceeded west behind Fireplace Bluffs and the Cascades to Foresta, a pleasant, shaded residential community above the canyon. “Foresta” was an appropriate name for the place, though not without irony. He wound down the road to the falls as the short early summer night fell, and he continued to tromp blindly down into the canyon. His feet began to ache. At one point, the white stripe of a skunk bounced out in front of him. Rather than running off into the bushes alongside the road, it proceeded to lead Armen down the dark road; an unwelcome guide in the dark. Together, they crept around yet another Eagle Peak—the one that stands above the town of El Portal. Armen managed to get to his cabin without getting skunked. When he got to his door, the village dog was sleeping on the step.
