As a boy growing up in the tame, tramped-over precincts of the Hudson Valley, 30 miles up the river from what was then the world’s biggest city, I couldn’t help wanting more from nature. I avidly read Outdoor Life magazine, watched documentaries about the Rockies and Alaska, traced my finger along the serrated spine of California’s Sierra Nevada on the relief map our teacher thumbtacked to the wall in elementary school.
There were bears out west, mountain lions, coyotes and wolves, badgers, marmots, golden eagles – and what did we have? Deer, squirrels, maybe a fox or two (not that I ever saw any). Westchester County was the only place I knew then, a place of housing developments and remnant woods, swamps, brambles and fished-out lakes, and I couldn’t help thinking that everyplace I set down my sneakered foot was a place where dozens of others had stepped before me. It was all so used, landscape like second-hand clothing.
The first time I did manage to venture west of the Hudson I was in my mid-20s and on my way to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Attending the workshop was an inestimable experience both professionally and artistically, but if anything, wild nature in Iowa seemed more remote than ever, unimpeded skies opening up above geometrically precise farmers’ fields that went on forever. On graduating, I found myself in Los Angeles, a sun-blasted desert city clogged with traffic, which was about as far as I could imagine from the wild west of my dreams. It was then, just as I’d given up hope, that I discovered my mountain.
Note the possessive. It’s not actually mine – it belongs to all the citizens of the US, and beyond that, to all the citizens of the world – but it holds such a powerful grip on me I can’t really think of it in democratic terms. The place I’m talking of, the place where I spend several months a year, is part of the Giant Sequoia national monument, which comprises over 500 square miles, contains the only extant groves of the world’s largest tree and sits at an elevation of 7,200 feet above the San Joaquin valley. It is just south of King’s Canyon, which in turn is just south of Yosemite national park. (I know this as a matter of fact but not experience: though from my mountain I can see as far north as Mount Whitney – the tallest peak in the contiguous US – I’ve never been there, nor to Yosemite nor even King’s Canyon.)
All these places are far better-known and more heavily visited than the little settlement of Ponderosa (population 19) where I stay, which is perhaps why I’ve never ventured north. I am not a misanthrope (or not entirely) but I like my experience of nature to be unmediated by the presence of other members of my species, and so I stay away from the venues where the tourists gather en masse. I have had the awe-inducing pleasure of standing alone among the giant trees, both sequoias and redwoods, and hearing nothing but the chatter of the squirrels and the high wind in the tallest branches. My favourite spot, generally untouristed, is the Freeman Creek grove of redwoods, just a few miles from my house. Our skyscrapers are impressive, but they will fall (“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”), yet these trees, some of them dating from the time of Christ, endure. That is something to wrap your mind around. In stillness. And solitude.
When I first began visiting, this community was part of the Sequoia national forest, but that designation changed in 2000, when President Clinton rededicated the park as a national monument, which means mineral and timber extraction is no longer permitted. Formerly, I would go deep into the backcountry and encounter clearcuts, where trees had been shaved off the sides of slopes like whiskers off a stony chin. The land is dedicated now to recreational use only and it abuts the Golden Trout wilderness, which can only be entered with a permit from the Forest Service. (The golden trout, native only to a small area of these mountains, is a subspecies of rainbow trout that blazes with red and gold during its spawning season; I have caught bushels of them over the years, not out of hunger or to satisfy my predatory instinct, but just to marvel at the beauty of them, after which I give each one a little kiss before releasing it to go on living its fishy life in peace. Peppermint Creek, with its sculpted canyon and its plunge downslope to the Kern river canyon, flows within three miles of the house, and the Tule river tumbles down the other side of the mountain into the San Joaquin valley. Both have been stocked in the past with the more common rainbow trout, but there is a movement afoot to end the practice and keep these waterways pure for the native goldens.
In addition to fly fishermen, the area attracts rock climbers from all over the world. Most of them scale Dome Rock, a big exfoliated granite monolith that offers 360-degree views of the mountain range, from the aforementioned Mount Whitney to the north to the Kern gorge (famous for its whitewater rafting) to the south. Many a summer evening I’ve gone out to Dome Rock to lie back on the smooth stony surface, prop my head on a granite pillow and contemplate the deeps of the Milky Way while wondering how the indigenous tribes of the world manage to translocate our creeping satellites to their cosmogony.
Often, while my children were young and still in school, I would spend periods alone on the mountain, working through the morning and into the afternoon, after which I’d typically hike out to one of my favourite waterfalls with book and dog, experiencing nature in a Wordsworthian way, my conscious mind gone into hiding. Again, these are the occasions when I do not invite interaction with my fellow humans, and I must say that in all the years I’ve been wandering these woods, I have never seen anyone else (if you except winter, deep snow, and the blur and roar of the infernal snowmobiles). Once, during the Memorial Day holiday (at the end of May), when the tourists were sure to be abroad, I was crossing a logging road on my afternoon hike and heard a vehicle coming around a bend up ahead. I was presented with a quandary: I could stand there and either wave to or ignore whoever might have been so rude as to intrude upon my solitude in a public space on a public road, or I could just … duck into the bushes and hide. Which is precisely what I did: I crouched in the depths of a mesquite bush till the offending car was out of sight.
This is why I love my mountain. I can do that. And I can tramp through snowstorms late at night when no one is stirring and feel the kind of excitement John Muir (father of the US national parks) must have felt when he spent a stormy night up a tree just to embrace it and know what it endured in the absence of reportorial creatures. (And then there was the night – snowing, below zero, very late – when I was two miles out in the woods and lubricated by a judicious squirt or two from my bota bag (wineskin) and it was the dog that brought me back to my senses, as in, what are we doing here when there’s a fire at home, and a bed too?)
Is that dangerous – to be inebriated in a snowstorm on a very cold night on the top of a very cold mountain without a soul around? I suppose so. But it is liberating, too, and certainly in the moment it felt essential as a way of connecting with the pulse of the Earth, which is what this is all about in the first place. It’s rugged country and unforgiving. People do get lost up here. People die. But most of us manage to find our way back to those beds, whether they be at the Ponderosa Lodge, in the back room of a rented cabin or on a campsite, atop a neoprene pad. There are wild animals here, animals that can cause grievous harm – the most dangerous of which happens to be the common deer mouse. And why is that? Because the faeces of this adorable little rodent can infect humans with hantavirus, which produces an often fatal respiratory illness. (Second place goes to ground squirrels, which harbour the fleas that carry bubonic plague, a few cases of which are reported in California each summer.)
As for larger creatures – the ones I dreamed about as a boy – we have an abundance of bears (the black bear, ursus americanus; the grizzly, despite continuing to appear on the state flag, was exterminated in California nearly 100 years ago), coyotes, mule deer and mountain lions. Most visitors to these mountains never catch a glimpse of a lion – it’s a melt-into-the-shadows sort of beast that primarily hunts at night – but lion tracks and scat are fairly common. I have been fortunate enough to encounter lions on four occasions over the years, and on two of those the lion was closer than I would have liked.
Let me set it up for you. There I was, a peripatetic novelist with a head full of words, hiking out to the Nobe Young waterfall – where I have frequently observed the scat of these creatures – and oblivious to anything beyond the pleasure of a warm summer’s day, when I stepped on a twig, which snapped, precipitating an answering snap no more than 40 feet away. This answering snap was the result of a mountain lion’s rupture of a similar twig as it bolted in headlong panic away from me. This was a primal scene, predator and prey, and yet, though my blood was pounding, the news was good: better the creature should be running from me than toward me, no? And so, that evening, back at the cabin, I phoned my wife, who was home in Santa Barbara, and told her of the excitement I’d experienced, this jolt of wild nature (nearly) fallen in my lap. She was noncommittal.
A week later, far down the same watercourse, I was doing precisely what you are not advised to do in lion country: minimising my height. I was fly-fishing for golden trout on a shadow-infested evening in a silence as deep as the world, and was crouching low to avoid alerting the fish to my presence. For a long while I worked a pool by the side of an enormous mesquite bush, until finally I heard just the faintest noise, as of movement there. When I parted the bush to investigate, I saw, as in the cinematic version, the fresh paw print of my lion, slowing seeping with water. She had been right there, just feet from me, curious cat, observing the odd behaviour of this novelistic ape who’d come to invade her territory. This time, when I phoned my wife to fill her in on my adventures, she had one thing only to say: “Will you please stop harassing that poor animal?”
Indeed. And that is the essence of it. I was invading the lion’s territory and not vice versa. But then that is the privilege of living on my mountain, among the big trees and the wild creatures that can’t help but persist in spite of us.
• Rooms at Ponderosa Lodge cost from $46 a night. Lettings site VRBO has a cabin in the area from $117 a night (sleeps seven)
TC Boyle’s latest novel, The Harder They Come (Bloomsbury) is out in paperback on 7 April, price £8.99. To order a copy for £7.19 including UK p&p, go to bookshop.theguardian.com
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