In the spring of ’92, on a walk by the Santa Cruz shore, Ric Otte asked me if I would like to come rock climbing with him and his friends, in Yosemite. There was another of those things you should do at least once in your life … I thought. Actually it was another of those things that you can get hooked on, like sugar and olives in martinis. My trip did not begin well: the airline shipped my baggage into the unknown. So the first night Alvin Plantinga shared his tent with me.
We camped in (in)famous Camp Four. Dinner in camp was, remarkably, a beef stew that Jim and Dan had brought along from Michigan. While we ate someone told a story about how in a shared tent one person dreamt he was being attacked by the other, and starting hitting back. It must have made an impression on me, for when a lot of noise around midnight woke us up I was sure, in my sleepy state, that in the next tent Jim’s son Dan must have dreamt he was being attacked. But Al was more awake, he sat up and called “Are you all right?” and crawled out of his sleeping bag to investigate.
Jim and Dan had left a pack with some food outside the tent, and Jim, waking up to shuffling outside, was sure that Ric was as usual playing some practical joke. So he stuck his head out, and yelled “Hey!” The bear hauled back and slammed him back into the tent — then followed up by sticking his head in. This bear wasn’t vindictive though, for then he just left.
The ranger came and gave Jim a ticket for leaving food out. Al took Jim to the clinic, where the doctor put eleven stitches into his bleeding scalp. I carried the food out of our tent, looking sheepishly at Ric who pointed to the bear box … It was dramatic even for a night in Camp Four.
Nevertheless we stuck to the plan for the next day, to climb Fairview Dome. Ric and Dan took charge of me. The others made up a second party. When they had climbed a pitch, though, Jim had too much of a headache, and they went back to camp. It is a wonder, in retrospect, that Ric and Dan managed to get me up all those pitches, and I was slowing them down considerably. We also hadn’t left early. Much of our conversation was about the peach milkshakes to be had in Curry Village once we got down, whether we would meet the others there in the pizza place … bit by bit the talk turned from what we would eat to whether we would get there in time, and then to whether we would be walking down in the dark ….
The last pitch, I remember, we climbed in the light of the moon. Ric had happily brought a flashlight, but it was a long way down, in increasing, eventually total, darkness. And Fairview is in Tuolumne so it was quite a drive back too. We got back to camp at about two in the morning. Ric and Dan sat down to eat but I managed only to take off my jacket and shoes, lay down in the tent, and was comatose.
There are many, many climbing stories to be told, from the next twenty-five years, but for now I just want to touch on life in Camp Four. It is a very lively, but in itself truly lugubrious place, with a single bathroom, a few water taps for an awful lot of people. But there is a picnic table and bear boxes for each site. No showers, but Ric found a key to the outdoor showers belonging to the Yosemite Lodge across the road, and those we enjoyed until, a few years later, a flood took out that entire area.
When it came to cooking we all took turns, but certainly Ric was the most inventive. I remember especially a time when friends of mine, John and Marie, came there for a hiking holiday. They got a site in Camp Four, and pitched next to us. What makes Ric’s cooking memorable on that occasion was a certain contrast. On the way in we had stopped to shop for food. Ric told me to find the turkey stuffing. “But we’re not going to have turkey”, I said. No, the idea is to heat a can of cream of mushroom soup, you pour it over the stuffing, and Yumm!
So, come supper time, Ric brings out the stuffing and the mushroom soup. And I glanced over to the next site. There was John, tending the camp stove. I was staring. There was a cloth neatly draped over the picnic table, there were candles, and a bottle of wine, Marie was putting out real wine glasses. I could smell the steak. Well, probably it was filet mignon that John was preparing, in a cast iron skillet, the way it should be.
I sighed. I looked at Ric who was happily, nay, proudly, dividing his special dish on our plates. I thought, well, just in case, I’ll put out some bread and butter …. Not that I specially wanted a romantic dinner by candle light, of course ….
Bas van Fraassen's Commonplace Book 