Annie looked uncomprehendingly at the mild landscape, silent, green, winking where sunlight touched wet leaves. Walter laughed at her expression of disappointment. “Wait!” he said.

He started up the car, rounded a turn and entered a tunnel. As they approached the exit, he slowed, and they crept out into daylight. Below them, gleaming as though an inland sea had only just ebbed away, was a long deep valley. A waterfall, an upended river, fell across the face of a bare rock escarp. A massive sunny silence lay across the valley like a wash of color, yet the naked rock faces, the wooded slopes, the vertical cliffs down which the white skeins of water tumbled all seemed fraught with turbulence.

Farther on, they walked into a silent grove where redwood trees towered. A ranger’s cabin, boarded up, its roof fallen in, sat lightly on the forest floor. Nearby, they found a tree with a plaque embedded in its bark. Some of the redwoods, it read, had been growing since before the birth of Jesus Christ. It suggested the visitor might like to press the button just below and play a recording of Nelson Eddy singing Joyce Kilmer’s world-famous poem, Trees.

They descended to the valley floor, where the Merced River wound among groves of silver pine and oak, past a lodge where a family stood on the rock terrace, posing for a man with a camera. In front of them—they were driving slowly—walked a forest ranger with stately steps, moving aside only when the car was nearly on his heels. In a clearing off the road, a woman hung wash on a line that extended from a small log cabin to a tree.

Walter said the rangers lived in the valley, and when they had vacations, often spent them on camping trips up to the headwaters of the Merced and Tuolumne rivers. “It’s another country there,” he said.

They bought provisions at a small general store and afterward drove to the upper end of the valley. “Half Dome,” Walter said, pointing up at a great gray wafer tonguing out from the cliff which supported it. Annie crouched in the car.

Walter parked close by a meadow in which three deer fed, their mottled backs warming in the sun. Nearby was a small lake surrounded by a delicate single rim of tall grass; it was still, velvet black, like a grape lying on a green leaf.

“This is a good spot.” He pointed to three rough cabins raised off the ground on stilts. “There’s nobody there. We’ll leave our things in them. The bears come to steal food. Here.” He handed her a box of dry cereal. “Go feed the deer. I’ll set up everything.”

He was so calm, so agreeable. He was someone she didn’t know.