Yosemite National Park is one of the most beautiful places on earth. To see its meadows, rivers, and waterfalls is a great thrill for every nature lover . . . As beautiful as it is, there is one way in which its beauty seems to multiply upon itself—to visit the park with someone you love. Add romance and the park takes on an additional incredibly rich vitality—not easy to put into words but for all those couples who go, they understand well enough what it means to be in love and to be in Yosemite: it’s magic!
I was lucky enough to experience this magic, by being with the woman of my dreams: a vibrant brown-eyed red-haired friend who was as smart as she was beautiful: the woman of my dreams, truly!
Walking and hiking with Jill Holden made everything about the beauty of the park seem twice as wonderful, and our hike from the valley floor to Glacier Point seemed to involve more floating upward than any real exertion, so much were we in love. Years later, I was given the gift of a second pair of eyes that could see beyond the immediate into deeper truths; I learned to see Yosemite as the ancestral home of Native Americans like the Miwok and Mono Lake Paiute, especially after I became friends with a cultural demonstrator named Phil in the Indian Museum, but this was a good number of years after Holden’s passing . . .
This is a story about two Native Americans I met in Yosemite, named Frankie Florez and Leigh. In brief, I gifted him with a decorated Indian hand drum I had purchased the summer before. He offered me in return a beaded wood-carved necklace that he was wearing, given to him by a Sioux sun-dancer. That seemed far too precious a gift to me and so I politely refused, despite knowing that etiquette called for me to accept it. Frankie then sang and drummed a song especially for me, a Sioux welcoming song. This was one of the greatest moments of my life although I did not appreciate fully the fact that Frankie did not yet think it sufficient thanks. The next day he asked me if he could perform a feather-cleaning ceremony for me, to which I readily agreed.
We met outside the Indian Village, near the tall wooden palisade across from the Pioneer Cemetery. It was getting towards twilight when he pulled from the back of his small pick-up with camper shell a long box containing a beautiful feather, delicately crafted. He positioned himself and me properly and then began to sing and chant, using the feather to gently touch and sweep various portions of my body. When finished he decisively flicked the tip of the feather away from him while observing carefully his own motion, we both half-expecting to see something fly off from the very tip of the feather: that is, if there were something hurting me or not belonging inside of me, this ceremony would clean it out from my body and soul.
For my part, I could see nothing in the gathering twilight. I thanked him and we parted, he remaining behind while I headed for my car. I barely got a few steps when tears began welling up in me and although I fought to maintain composure, within seconds I began crying. Indeed, to my own great surprise, I started crying harder and harder, until, with emotions intensifying at a frightening rate, I began sobbing and bawling!
I tried my best to keep walking, as my car was not far—not more than a walk of a few minutes from where Frankie had performed the Chumash ceremony. Yet with nearly every step the urge to cry became ever stronger so that I could walk only a few steps at a time. I was now crying so hard that I was often forced to stop, followed by a few more hesitant steps, followed by more gushing tears that doubled me over.
In this slow and painful way I made my way toward my car, feeling quite embarrassed and not wanting to be seen in this fragile condition, although there were but few persons still around. Nonetheless, like any man, I did not want to be seen crying and when I did see others, even from afar, I would straighten up the best I could and try to walk on. This task proved increasingly difficult as buckets of tears kept welling up inside me.
I was losing the battle to maintain some semblance of self-control. The need to cry was becoming wholly unstoppable. When one cries like this—not just crying but sobbing—the tears seem endless, coming forth from the deepest well. Somehow or other—in this halting, jerky, weak-knee walking manner—I did make it back to my car which provided me with a temporary sense of relief.
I felt glad to have completed at last this part of the journey but even as I tried to open the door, a new wave of intense crying engulfed me once more, to the point where my stomach muscles began hurting and other parts of my body ached as well. I finally got the door opened so I could climb inside and collapse on the driver’s seat, where the final wave of intense sobbing totally engulfed me. I simply succumbed, letting myself go. I cried and I cried!
It was all the strangest experience as I had only cried like that once or twice before in my whole life (the first time when our beloved family dog Snookie died and the second when my mother passed) but even those tearful episodes were not as intense or prolonged as this one cry. I could feel, beneath this intense emotional outburst, the cause of it all but the tears were turning me into such a shambles that I could hardly articulate the thought. It was all about Holden, I knew!
The exchange of the drum, the offer of the sun-dancer’s necklace, the Sioux welcoming song, and the feather-cleaning ceremony had filled me with a sense of pride—a quiet pride, but pride nonetheless. It reminded me of a boyhood pledge of mine to always care about Native Americans: to remember them and their historic plight, to get to know them personally when chance allowed, and to defend their rights by becoming an activist someday. I surely had wanted to become an Indian myself as a child and I had never lost that feeling even after so many years. Meeting Phil and then Frankie and Leigh simply made me feel proud and certain that I had arrived at a very good place in my life.
To that, I had added thoughts of Holden and the wondrous week we spent together at Yosemite in the most beautiful of places with its grand cliffs and mountains and spectacular greenery and fabulous waterfalls. I wanted to return to Yosemite many times more with Holden at my side for we both loved the park’s gorgeous beauty and the sublime grace of Mother Nature’s artistic masterpiece. After her death, I stayed away from the park for seventeen years—before finally being able to bring myself to return, not knowing what to expect or if my emotions would allow me any peace.
The park had immediately offered me its healing balm. Sometime thereafter Phil and I met and became friends, and we spent many an hour in the Indian Museum conversing as tourists flowed to and fro. Then one year came my impulsive purchase of a hand-drum during the June “Big Time” pow-wow and my gifting it to Frankie the following summer, and the rest of what followed is as I’ve described it.
The thought of Holden—if only she could be there to see me and witness the feather-cleaning ceremony—is what triggered the great emotional burst of tears. It occurred to me (only later) that I had climbed inside my shell when I first received word of her death and that, although I had experienced a few tears then, I had never allowed myself to cry forth the great sadness that consumed the very center of my being.
I had kept all that grief inside of me for many years, perhaps unconsciously not believing it possible for a person to ever cry out such great hurt and sorrow. I did not think of all this while sitting in the car that day, my body still convulsed by waves of sobbing and blinding tears, but only later when I finally had a chance for calmer self-reflection.
As a post-script, the next day in the late afternoon when I met Frankie and Leigh again in the Indian Village, he asked me how it went and if anything had happened after the completion of the ceremony? I smiled and tried to answer briefly that things were fine but the puzzled expression on his face clearly indicated he wasn’t satisfied with such a brief answer and that he wanted to hear more details. I was stuck for a moment as I could not hope to explain the crying without describing my relationship with Holden and to do that that I would need to commit to the telling of a rather lengthy story.
Living in a society that favors rush-rush-rush and which hardly knows how to slow down enough to savor the truly sublime moments of life, I offered “It’s a long story” and again tried to politely defer a more meaningful answer. Yet this was Native American cultural pace, not white man’s rush-rush time, and so to his head nod indicating “We’ve got time!” and the silent “Please begin”, I consented to tell Frankie and Leigh my story.
After describing how much Holden and I loved one another, the week of camping we spent together at beautiful Yosemite, her untimely death at age twenty, and my seventeen-year exile from the park, I moved on to describe the saga of the great tears: the small halting steps with the first waves of tears washing over me, briefly subsiding, bursting forth, the sobbing and the bawling, and all the rest.
I did not offer any theory as to why, such as the pride I felt to be part of the ceremony and my deep desire that Holden could have been present (having not thought of it at the time) or even that I had simply bottled up all those tears of sadness and grief for Holden’s passing lo! these many long years ago. As a consequence, I think the end of my story appeared a bit disjointed, not flowing smoothly from why spending time with Holden in beautiful Yosemite, to the buying and gifting of a drum, to my participating in a healing feather ceremony, led me to crying my eyes out.
Frankie, who was new to performing the ceremony (learned from the Chumash) and perhaps not sure what to expect in the way of personal story, listened intently yet I could see plainly that a piece of that puzzled look on his face had not disappeared entirely. Perhaps he was expecting a more physical response, such as “the ache in my shoulder is gone” or “the pain in my leg is no more”—as there was always a distinct sense that the feather-cleaning ceremony could help find injury or ache and cure them.
I suppose my grief for Holden was a specific enough soul-pain–a real hurt and injury of its own kind– but I lacked the ability to articulate this thought well. For a brief moment, we four (Phil being present as well) all encountered an awkward moment of silent uncertainty: a brief breakdown in understanding during the silent communion of four souls searching for an answer when the situation rather suddenly and remarkably resolved itself in an instant.
Frankie’s girlfriend, Leigh, sitting next to him on his left, reached out and touched him lightly on his left forearm. She did not speak nor did she need to, for when their eyes met something in the way of silent understanding flashed between them. It was as though she had spoken and said: “It is like our love for each other. Roger loved Holden with his whole heart and soul and she him. This was a deep pain inside him from which he could find no comfort or release. He has kept this hurt bottled up inside of him all these years until he met you and this ceremony, at long last, allowed him to cry all those tears.”
Her warmth and woman’s intuition flowed into Frankie enlightened his face in the most beautiful way, with merely one last questioning gaze as though to ask her: “I did the ceremony well?” to which Leigh, without speaking, allowed her finger-tips on his forearm and a small quiet smile at the corner of her lips to convey a silent yes. Frankie then transferred his gaze back to me and our eyes met, and I cannot begin to express the feelings that flowed between us in that briefest moment when two souls can be illuminated as one. Man to man, we understood one another: if he could conceive of losing the woman he loved, he then would know the unbearable agony I had endured with Holden’s death. He had freed my soul.
Without Leigh’s presence and her timely touching of Frankie’s arm, the whole moment might have been lost and sunk out of sight–instead of being raised to the most beautiful and gentle intimacy that only a deeply shared understanding can bring, an exquisite moment of sublime communion among four diverse souls. Thank you, Leigh, for understanding what a man’s love for a woman can be: for sharing your own love for Frankie, for getting to know Holden and me, and for reminding everyone that love is the universal and common bond of all great humanity.
Roger
