Cry Wilderness

by Frank Capra

  Lift up your eyes to the left with me. There, in majestic splendor, with no intervening lesser heights to mar its grandeur, one sees and feels an overwhelming spectacle—a fifteen-mile panorama of the snow-mantled Sierra Crest. Six noble peaks brush the sky; the first five, Mount Wood, Parker Peak, Koip Peak, Mount Lewis, and Mount Gibbs, are all just under 13,000 feet; Mount Dana is just over. Two notable passes are also plainly visible. One is 11,100-foot Parker Pass, notable not only for its inaccessibility, but more so for the 1,000-foot glacial moraine that lies athwart the mouth of Parker Canyon—the only terminal moraine in the area that remains as whole and as perfect as when it was first deposited by a glacier eons ago. All the rest of these great rounded ridges, that look like man-made earth dams across canyon mouths, have been cut through and partly washed away by streams. In Parker Canyon, the creek cut through a lateral (side) moraine, leaving the terminal unchanged.

  And the second pass, Mono Pass (10,604 feet), a rocky saddle between Mount Lewis and Mount Gibbs, is, historically speaking, second only to famed but much lower Donner Pass. For untold centuries, the Mono, heavily laden under basketloads of Mono “flies,” pinon nuts, and black, glassy obsidian rock (to fashion into arrowheads, knives, and other tools), trudged up their well-worn Mono trail—from Mono Lake up Walker Creek to Walker Lake, then up to two small above-timberline lakes (Sardine Lakes), followed by a short but dangerously steep rocky climb to the Crest and Mono Pass. From the Pass, the trail meanders gently down through the west side forests to beautiful Yosemite Valley, where the Mono bartered their cargos with the Yokuts for deer meat, acorns, and certain black and brown willow bark (for basket-weaving) found only in Yosemite.

  It was over that Mono Pass (plainly visible to the naked eye), and the ancient trail down this Walker Canyon—better known as “Bloody Canyon”—that the reverse gold rush took place in the sixties and seventies when Mono’s siren cry of “Gold!” was heard in California. In 1863, William H. Brewer, leader of a Whitney survey party, wrote: “…a terrible trail…utterly inaccessible to horses, yet pack trains come down, but the bones of several horses and mules and the stench of another told that all had not passed safely…horses were so cut by sharp rocks that they called it ‘Bloody Canyon’…” (Note: from the Sierra Club handbook The Mammoth Lakes Sierra).

  John Muir wrote of Bloody Canyon: “I have never known a…mule or a horse, to make its way through the canyon, either up or down, without losing…blood, from wounds on legs. Occasionally one is killed outright—falling headlong and rolling over precipices like a boulder…”

  Now shift your eyes to the right (east) of US Highway 395—that thin silver strand that here separates antithetical worlds—and you will gape at some of the wildest and most desolate country found anywhere.

  Less than ten airline miles from the Arctic beauty of the Sierra Crest, a forbidding, treeless, half-mile-high chain of twenty volcanos (Mono Craters) scars the horizon as it curves to the south, its open craters as ragged and ugly as earth wounds made by emerging bullets shot from below. To the east and north, great waterless wastelands stretch beyond the heat-withering horizon; powdery pumice deserts difficult and often impossible to travel, for boots sink in the volcanic ash and stir up clouds of choking dust.

  But the central figure in this inhospitable scene is Mono Lake, twenty miles long and fifteen wide; a dead lake, its alkaline waters saltier than the ocean. There is a local joke:

  “Dip your dirty clothes in Mono Lake once, they come out clean. Twice, they disappear.” Add the lake’s two treeless islands (one black, one white), the alkaline scum that froths its shores, and the ghostly white, weirdly fluted tufa “towers” that stick out of its shallows, and—well, if Jupiter’s moons have lakes, they would have to look like Mono Lake.

  And Mono Lake must have looked just as dreary eons or at least a century ago, when Mark Twain and his genial hobo pal, Calvin H. Higbie, while seeking (if it entailed no work) the legendary riches of the Lost Cement Mine, stumbled onto the “Dead Sea of California,” as Twain called it in his very amusing adventure book, Roughing It: “…one of the strangest freaks of nature to be found in any land…so difficult to get at that only men content to endure the roughest life…will consent to such a trip…Mono Lake lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert…[a] solemn, silent, sailless sea…[surrounded by] upheavals of rent and scorched and blistered lava, snowed over…with drifts of pumice stone and ashes, the winding sheet of the dead volcano whose vast crater the lake has seized upon and occupied…”

  Despite Mono’s repelling prospects, Twain remained to explore it and make notes more humorous than scientific: “Half a dozen little mountain brooks flow into Mono Lake, but not a stream of any kind flows out of it…what it does with its surplus water is a dark and bloody mystery…” A meteorological comment: “There are only two seasons…round about Mono Lake—and these are the breaking up of one winter and the beginning of the next…” A chemical observation: “Its waters are so strong with alkali that…if we threw water on our heads and gave them a rub…the white lather would pile up three inches high…we had a valuable dog. He had raw places…more raw places on him than sound ones. He was the rawest dog I almost ever saw. He jumped overboard one day to get away from flies…bad judgement…it would have been just as comfortable to jump into fire. The alkali water nipped him in all the raw places simultaneously and he struck out for shore with considerable interest. He yelped and barked and howled…and by the time he reached shore…he had barked the bark all out of his insides, and the alkali water had cleaned the bark all off his outside…[and] he finally struck out over the mountains at a gait which we estimated at about two hundred and fifty miles an hour…”

  An ecological observation: “…millions of wild ducks and seagulls swim about the surface, but no living thing exists under the surface, except a white feathery sort of worm, one half an inch long, which looks like a bit of white thread frayed out at the sides…” Then Twain describes hordes of flies, “something like our houseflies,” which he says blacken the beaches to eat the worms that wash ashore: “a belt of flies an inch deep and six feet wide…clear around the lake—a belt of flies one hundred miles long…” Throw a rock among them, he writes, and they will swarm up “like a cloud.” And they don’t mind being held underwater, he noted; in fact, they loved it: “When you let go, they pop up to the surface as dry as a patent-office report.” But all things, he philosophized, have their use “and proper place in nature’s economy ducks eat the flies—flies eat the worms—Indians eat all three—wildcats eat the Indians—white folks eat the wildcats and thus all things are lovely…”

  And Twain observed another instance of nature’s wisdom. He was told that thousands of seagulls flew over from the Pacific to lay their eggs on Mono’s smaller, black island. And since the islands were “utterly innocent of anything that would burn; and seagull’s eggs being entirely useless unless they be cooked, Nature had provided an unfailing spring of boiling water on the largest island [where] in four minutes you can boil them as hard as any statement I have made during the past fifteen years.” And he was told that within ten feet of the boiling spring there was a spring of pure cold water, sweet and wholesome. “So, in that island you get your board and washing free of charge—and if Nature had gone further and furnished a nice American hotel clerk who was crusty and disobliging…I would not wish for a more desirable boarding house.”

  So Twain and Higbie had to explore that big island—whether to boil seagull eggs or look for a crusty hotel clerk, old Samuel Clemens didn’t say. One hot blistering morning, he and Higbie rowed a boat to the island; that is, Higbie rowed, because Twain (anticipating his Tom Sawyer’s labor-saving knavery with the fence-painting gag) swore that it made him deathly sick “to ride backward when I work.” But, he added with pious-tongue-in-impious-cheek, “I steered.”

  On the island they found jets of steam, scorched and blasted rocks, and “a small pine of most
graceful shape and faultless symmetry” that was kept brilliant green by steam that “drifted ceaselessly through its branches…” But no fresh cool water: “We hunted everywhere for the spring…climbing ash-hills patiently, and then sliding down the other side in a sitting posture, plowing up volumes of gray dust…nothing but solitude, ashes, and a heartbreaking silence. Finally we noticed that the wind had risen and we forgot our thirst in a solicitude of greater importance…we had not taken pains about securing the boat. We hurried back to the landing place, mere words cannot describe our dismay—the boat was gone!… We were prisoners on a desolate island…with neither food nor water. But presently we sighted the boat. It was drifting along, about fifty yards from shore, tossing in a foamy sea…it approached a jutting cape, Higbie ran ahead and posted himself on the utmost verge and prepared for the assault. If we failed there was no hope… When [the boat] got within thirty yards of Higbie I was so excited that I fancied I could hear my own heart beat… When, it seemed to go by, only one little yard out of reach, it seemed my heart stood still… But when [Higbie] gave a great spring the next instant, and landed fairly in the stern, I discharged a war-whoop that awoke the solitudes!”

  Why all this personal affinity with Mono Lake and Mark Twain? Because two weeks earlier a local lawyer friend, Steve “Boat-court” Gorski, had presented me with his copy of Twain’s Roughing It, and I hadn’t stopped laughing since. I’m certain I’ll never drive by Mono Lake again without laughing. One last Twain titter:

  “In speaking of the peculiarities of Mono Lake, I ought to have mentioned that at intervals all around its shores stand picturesque turret-like masses and clusters of a whitish, coarse-grained rock that resembles inferior mortar dried hard,” and that if one breaks off fragments of them, “he will find perfectly shaped and thoroughly petrified gull’s eggs deeply imbedded in the mass. How did they get there? I simply state the fact—for it is a fact—and leave the geological reader to crack the nut at his leisure…”

  Well, I just had to crack that nut. The petrified gull’s eggs bit earned me some queer looks. But the gargoylish white rocks—that I had always imagined Mono’s little water demons had sculptured to guard Mono’s shores against desert demons, like Quasimodo’s gargoyles guard Notre Dame’s spires—turned out to be a fascinating natural phenomenon. They are freshwater coral! Limestone buildups of the limey secretions of certain tiny plants (algae) that multiply around freshwater springs; a cousin of the ocean coral, a similar deposit secreted by tiny sea animals.

  I left Mono Lake and its dead sea mysteries, and began climbing the grade to Conway Summit (8,138 feet). But I couldn’t help stopping near the top of the grade—at “View Point”—for one last look at the desolate area where Twain had had so much fun. For Mark Twain is a disease. When his laughing bug bites, it enslaves. Yep. Way down below me in the withering heat waves, Negit, the small black island, was still the hot “incubator” for the eggs of thirty thousand seagulls. And the larger, whiter island, Paoha, was still wreathed (suggestive of its name) in the wraithlike vapors ascending from its hot springs—Paoha is the Indian word meaning “small spirits with wavy hair.” That’s the island that nearly claimed Twain’s life, but which within a few years was to save the lives of hundreds of Chinese. It seems that the wild mining town of Bodie, said to have had the best water, the worst climate, and a killing a day, also had the biggest Chinatown in California, next to Sacramento. And it also seems that the bad men of “Shooter’s Town”—who boasted they had themselves a man a day for breakfast—all got drunk together and went on an “anti-chink” shooting hellbender just for the hell of it. Learning of their plans, the engineers building the Bodie and Benton Railroad, hurriedly gathered all their coolie workers together, and rafted them out to Paoha and kept them there, until Bodie’s bad men had run out of enthusiasm and liquor.

  It must be that islands have always fascinated men. Show a man an unclaimed island anywhere and he will come up with an uncontrollable yen to claim it and build his castle on it. Paoha was no exception. Over the century, many white men have planted their flag on Paoha and dreamed of building castles, only to have their dreams shattered by Paoha’s harshness.

  But strangely enough, the “spirit island with the wavy hair” has been hospitable to the animals left behind by would-be castle-builders. Today there are some three hundred wild goats and a large population of Belgian hares roaming the bleak island.

  Did I say they were building the Bodie and Benton Railroad, after saying that there was not one foot of railroad track in Mono County? That’s right. The thirty-one-mile railroad, that was built to carry lumber and wood fuel from Mono Mills (in the Jeffrey Pine Forest) to Bodie, died and was dug up when Bodie died and was abandoned.

  Jeffrey Pine Forest! By George! I’ve forgotten to mention the most astounding of Mono County’s paradoxes: That distant expanse of cool green that lies hidden behind the Mono Craters’ scorched row of volcanos—the northern flank of the largest stand of stately Jeffrey pines in the world! As anomalous alongside Mono Lake as a two-hundred-square-mile forest of green pines would be if it were smack in the middle of the Sahara Desert.

  But how can a cool forest of great pines possibly exist in the arid “Rain Shadow” of the Sierra wall? Is there a chink in the great wall through which Pacific storms can spill over? Yes. There are gaps (passes) in the Sierra Crest—like the gaps of missing teeth. But most of these gaps are protected from the brunt of winter storms by other high peaks (other teeth) west of the gaps. There is one notable exception: the Mammoth gap. Here the windblown storm clouds can race straight up the Middle Fork of the San Joaquin River unhindered by any peaks, and slide smoothly over the relatively low rounded saddles of Mammoth Pass and Minaret Summit, to drop their rain and snow over a highly favored two-hundred-square-mile area of the Rain Shadow. Result: the world’s mightiest stand of Jeffrey pines in the middle of desert country.

  And the Jeffrey pines reminded me that both Bear Bait and Dry Rot were holed up in their shady fastness. My God, yes. Forget Mark Twain. Get going. There’s a sheriff waiting at Bridgeport to ask questions about Lefty. But what could I say in defense of Lefty? I was certain he had disobeyed orders. What defense is there against insubordination?

  I stepped on the gas up the grade. Would charity be an excuse for insubordination? Why, yes…of course…charity. Without charity we are tinkling cymbals. If charity is greater than hope and faith, it must be greater than minor disobedience. Big charity organizations were always “blackjacking the rich” for the poor. When you donated to charity weren’t you “stealing” from yourself, or your children, to help the poor? That’s it. I would make my pitch for Lefty in the name of charity. Would the sheriff swallow it? I had my doubts as I topped Conway Summit and began to descend into Bridgeport bowl.

  Chapter Three

  Bridgeport, the county seat, population: 460, lies in the middle of a cattle-dotted, lush green meadow surrounded by Sierra peaks. In summer, descending into the bowl from Conway Summit, the distant town always reminded me of a white wedding cake on a green table, around which the mountains sit as wedding guests.

  But in winter, the master pastry cook goes berserk. He pours thick icing all over the cake, the table, and the mountain guests, making the bowl one of the coldest spots in the country.

  As you arrive at the courthouse itself, all white and trimmed with red, you have to admit it is one of the prettiest buildings in California, even though built in 1880 at a cost of only $31,000. Fashioned of native wood, quaintly carved, its two stories, red roof, and graceful cupola, together with its tall narrow windows, all blend into a harmony most pleasing to the eye.

  Outside, a delicate iron fence surrounds the grassy courtyard, while a row of handsome silver maples separates the rush of twentieth-century traffic from the nineteenth-century leisure of lawn and gardens.

  Pushing open the tall main door, I entered a high, dark-paneled hallway. The floor creaked wit
h age, as did the stairway I started to climb. I couldn’t help wondering about all the stark human dramas that had been played on the creaky boards of this old frontier theater of Justice.

  At the top of the stairs a skinny, far-out young man buttonholed me. I thought he was one of the four Beatles.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Capra, Jake Ziffren, Mono Herald…”

  “Hi, Jake. What’s cooking?”

  “Not much. What brings you to the county poorhouse?”

  “I dunno. Sheriff asked me up to a hearing… Supervisor’s Room, he said.”

  “Oh-ho-o…” His long ears pricked up like a setter’s pointing at a pheasant. “That’s where they’re meeting.”

  “Who?”

  “The Civil Service Commission, the Sheriff, the DA, and I dunno who else.”

  “What’s the meeting about?”

  “Search me. My boss said to me: ‘I think that hearing’s gonna smell from herring. Go up there and nose around.’ But nobody’ll talk. The whole building’s clammed up.”

  “Okay. Wait here till I come out.”

  “Oh, boy…will I?… First door on your left there.”

  I knocked. A uniformed deputy sheriff opened the door a crack.

  “Frank Capra, sir. The sheriff…”

  “Oh, come in, Mister Capra.”

  He squeezed me through the door, then locked it behind me.

  I found myself in a high-ceilinged, paneled room, dimly lit by the pale light of a cloudy day and the still paler glow of overhead neon tubes.

  Against the narrow windows, on a raised dais, flanked by federal and state flags, and looked down upon by pictures of George Washington, the father of our country, and Lyndon Johnson, father of the Great Society, sat an owlish man at a large raised desk that commanded the room.