THE YOSEMITE SEVEN’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE
September 2022
When 7 guys plan a 5 day walking and hiking tour of Yosemite National Park to celebrate a friend’s birthday, you would expect the pre-trip conversations to be about hiking boots and backpacks. When it’s a 70th birthday, and each guy has a Medicare card in his wallet, the discussions are about who uses a CPAP sleep apnea machine, who wants to share a bathroom with a roommate and how many times a night each of us get up to pee.
I would have thought that by the time I hit 70, anxiety about fitting in and making friends would not be a thing, but before we all met in San Francisco for the four hour van ride to Yosemite, it was on my mind. We are all long time dear friends with Peter who turned 70 on the last day of the trip but we did not all know each other. Two of us were from Peter’s high school and the basketball team, one from law school, a college roommate, a friend from the shared world of kids and families. My relationship dates back to when we were baby lawyers in Brooklyn. The magic sauce of the trip was our shared long time bond with the birthday boy. So It wasn’t like we were strangers. We just needed to get to know each other. To be safe, I found myself dusting off my chops as a retired class clown.
As a rule, 70 year old guys who aren’t starting a prison sentence don’t have roommates. Spouses don’t count. They are more familiar than they want to be with our annoying personal habits and assorted unpleasant nocturnal sounds. I knew early on that things would be ok when my good humored roomie offered to carry me over the threshold. He and I covered a lot of personal ground in the course of our stays in three hotels together. I also hit the hypochondriac sweepstakes because in addition to being a lovely guy, my roommate is also a highly respected internist. As we chatted I was able to put him to sleep with highlights of my entire medical history.
Years ago there was a horror movie about a boy whose superpower was that he “saw dead people”. I have always identified with that kid because where other people see an ordinary physical challenge I see calamity. It’s a reverse superpower that I sometimes refer to as my “apocalypse now” approach to life. Unlike my wife who is able to wait until there is actually something to worry about before she gets nervous, I never let reality and facts interfere with my danger anxiety. If I was a risk assessment manager for an outdoor adventure company, on my first day of work I would fire the staff and padlock the front door.
On this trip my reverse superpower had a few moments to shine. On a 9 mile hike up a rocky trail to the top of Nevada Falls, there was a series of switchback sharp turns at the edge of a serious drop into the valley below. My visions of falling included an image of me airborne into the abyss. I was a happy boy when we finally zig-zagged over those large slightly slippery rocks to the top where things leveled off and it was time for lunch.
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Then there was Lembert Dome. After miles of climbing through a forest, the trail opened up against the base of the smooth, dome, shaped mountain. Leaving poles behind, we walked up the steep windswept incline with its much-appreciated “grippy” surface. As the strong wind and gravity pushed back I used my hands for this climb in a way that felt like a shout out to my pre-upright ancestors. As I made it almost to the top my “apocalypse now” fantasies, included the call to next of kin.
Although there are few more spectacular places on earth than Yosemite, the high points of this trip were our conversations and our new friendships. On long hikes and van rides, over meals and drinks, we talked about anything and everything, laughed and then laughed some more. We had the kind of conversations that college freshmen have, up late, in a dorm room. With cell phones not working and our families and daily routines 3,000 miles away, amid a forest of towering sequoias and magnificent granite mountains, rivers and waterfalls carved out in millions of years of glacial history, we did our own digging to find out about each other. Marriages, careers, children, paths taken and not taken and the future. On the subject of a personal exploration of being Jewish I found myself asking a guy I just met a few days ago if he believed in god.
Even saying that I’m 70 years old feels like I’m talking about someone else. This next decade is not typically a phase of life with expanding horizons and new friendships. The stars were aligned this time and as one of my new buddies put it in a message to the group from home, “I went on the trip to honor Peter and came back with five new wonderful friends”.
