“Sure. Are we going to build a fire? There’s dead wood under these junipers.”

“Let’s just use the stove. There really isn’t enough wood in the Sierras to justify making fires, at least at this altitude.”

They cook Japanese noodles over a small gas stove. Somehow Jim manages to knock the pot over when cooking his, and when he grabs the pot to save his noodles from spilling, he burns the palm and fingers of his left hand. “Ah!” Sucks on them. “Oh well.”

Tashi has brought a tent along, but it’s such a fine night they decide to forgo it, and they lay their sleeping bags on groundpads spread in the sandy patches. They get in the bags and—ah!—lie down.

The moon, hidden by the ridge to the east, still lights the wild array of peaks surrounding them, providing a monochrome sense of distance, and an infinity of shadows. The stream is noisy. Stars are dumped all across the sky; Jim has never seen so many, didn’t know so many existed. They outnumber the satellites and mirrors by a good deal.

Soon Tashi is asleep, breathing peacefully.

But Jim can’t sleep.

He abandons the attempt, sits up with his bag pulled around his shoulders, and … watches. For a moment his past life, his life below, occurs to him; but his mind shies away from it. Up here his mind refuses to enter the mad realm of OC. He can’t think of it.

Rocks. The dark masses of the junipers, black needles spiking against the stars. Moonlight on steep serrated slopes, revealing their shapes. Ah, Jim—Jim doesn’t know what to think. His body is aching, stinging, and throbbing in a dozen places. All that seems part of mountains, one component of the scene. His senses hum, he’s almost dizzy with the attempt to really take it in all at once: the music of falling water and wind in pine needles, the vast and amazingly complex vision of the stippled white granite in the foreground, the moonlit peaks at every distance.… He doesn’t know what to think. There’s no way he can take it all in, he only shivers at the attempt. There’s too much.

But he has all night; he can watch, and listen, and watch some more.… He realizes with a flush in his nerve endings, with a strange, physical rapture, that this will be the longest night of his life. Each moment, long and quiet, spent discovering a world he never knew existed—a home. He had thought it a lost dream; but this is California too, just as real as the rock underneath his sore butt. He raps the granite with scraped knuckles. Soon the moon will rise over the range.

Chapter 78

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