THE INTIMATE IMMENSITY OF HOME

In mid-summer, the evening primrose begins to open its blossoms with precision timing at Camp Mather, the City of San Francisco’s family camp just outside Yosemite National Park. To see this wild California native spread its petals you must be on time. It takes less than a minute for a bud to spring open like a little upside-down umbrella; by the next day at noon it has shriveled. The glaciers that sculpted Yosemite lasted longer, perhaps 200,000 years, said geologist Neil Fahy, the camp’s naturalist emeritus.

Neil Fahy moves easily through both botanical and geological time, with human history in between, among the rocks and trees. His knowledge and love of the Sierra is wide, deep, and longstanding. He was 85. when I first saw the astounding primrose event with him at Camp Mather. Now he’s 92, still leading walks that reveal natural wonders to adults and children.

“Come on tonight’s botany walk, it will be spectacular,” he had said that one morning on our way back from a forest walk to a swimming spot below a waterfall. So I showed up at the appointed place and time. A small group of us, seven adults and three children, crossed a grass ballfield and stopped between a roadside ditch and a barbed-wire fence at the edge of a horse pasture, to a spot where clusters of waist-high plants with elongated leaves stood in the tall grass. Many were topped by dead blooms but there were clusters of buds ready to open among them.

“They are pollinated by a small moth,” Fahy explained. “Bees can’t get deep enough into the flower to collect the pollen, but this moth can. When the flower drops off, there’s a seed at the stem.”

We saw an oblong green seed, like a tiny cucumber, that had dropped to the ground. Then we waited.

I wasn’t expecting the curtain to this show to rise at the exact time interval named by our guide. He had told us it would occur between 7:45 and 8:15 p.m. But at 8:10 one of the children shouted: “Here! It’s happening!”

Neil walked over to look. “Listen now,” he instructed. “You can hear them pop.”

A yellow flower midway up the stalk of one of the plants began to spread its four lemon-yellow, scalloped petals. We saw them move, as in time-lapse photography, except that this was real time. Four petals opened like tiny upside-down umbrellas, the sepals bent backwards. And here was another one, and another, and then there were many, a whole crowd. We gazed transfixed. Within twenty minutes, the whole primrose patch, maybe twenty square feet, was dotted with yellow sunbursts. Large bees arrived to pierce the stems and take some of the pollen before the moths came.

“They’re bandits,” said Neil, “but I think maybe they aren’t doing any harm.”

We watched until near dark, then walked away, past huge black oaks, incense cedar and sugar pines, each growing in its own time. This is a place where time, and our place within time, is visible. Some of oaks are hundreds of years old. The native Miwok used to come up here from the valley in summer to gather acorns and grind them into meal. The grinding holes in rocks around the camp were used less than four human generations ago. Over the years, Neil has found numerous stone pestles and placed some into these holes, thereby somehow shrinking the time gap between the Miwok and ourselves. Our predecessors had just left, it seemed.

Home is a place in time. This place was long the summer home of Neil Fahy as well. He started working at Camp Mather in 1944, hired at age 17 as part of the summer crew when older youths were off to war. The City of San Francisco had established the camp in 1924 for its summer residents on the site of a sawmill and railroad station that had served in the construction of the O’Shaughnessy Dam. Later Neil became a geologist and worked for Chevron for 12 years. Now he’s here every summer, and in winter he does research on life in caves, especially snails, at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

“People send me snail questions from all over the world,” he said.

“What’s your favorite hike here? I asked. “That would be Poopenaut Dome,” he replied.

The following evening, I joined him, a few other campers, and a park ranger on a hike to a granite outcropping beside the Tuolumne River, and climbed up a small granite dome below the O’Shaughnessy Dam. It was obvious why this would be a favorite spot for a geologist. We were 2,000 feet above the river, at a place where its course is squeezed between glacier-polished cliffs that are nearly vertical.

Upstream, the Hetch Hetchy Valley lies under water behind the O’Shaughnessy Dam, built between 1914 and 1923 as part of the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct system to supply San Francisco with pure mountain water. Neil stepped onto a boulder, the rest of us settled on other rocks to listen. It was a quiet, almost windless evening, the sky was pink-tinted, we could only stay a little longer if we were to make our way back by the fading light.

Neil took us back 11,000 years, when ice a mile thick was slowly moving across this land, bringing huge boulders from elsewhere, dropping them as it melted. He pointed to where he believed the river was diverted by the moving ice, and to areas that were never glaciated. He took us into the last ice age and help us to see geological time.

We had visited the O’Shaughnessy Dam on a previous day, and Neil had pointed out what an amazing achievement it was. Behind it extends the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, eight miles long, holding back the river’s pure mountain water to be carried 185 miles via the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct to Crystal Springs Reservoir for San Francisco, all by force of gravity, without a single pump. Awesome. But in the context of ice age time, this dam is just a flimsy thing, a small device dropped in the mountains.

Coming from the crazy time-obsessed urban world, I need days just to begin to feel myself a part of the natural world. The afternoon after visiting Poopenaut Dome, (the origins of the name remains a mystery) I walked into the forest near the cabin where we were staying and sat down on a log. Sunlight puddled on the duff-covered ground, between shadows cast by the swaying canopy, in synchrony with reflections on the nearby lake where almost all the children and most of the adults of Camp Mather were playing. Only now, on our sixth and last day here, did I finally feel at one with the music around me. Puddles, flecks of light under the trees, the quick squirrel flicking its tail, running by. And me, sitting on a log, we were all here together.

The next morning, before leaving Camp Mather, I checked on the primroses again and found a busy scene. Three kinds of bees and one flying ant were taking licks and nips, or dips into the dying flowers. Toward the end of this day, another generation of blossoms would be springing open.

THE INTIMATE IMMENSITY OF HOME

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