Kidnapped!

Mr. Philena kidnapped me on Labor Day weekend. We had started by going to the Marin Shakespeare performance of Much Ado About Nothing, which was fabulous. The two leads were apparently old stars for the Marin Shakespeare company who had requested (via a vulgar, badly-written couplet) to do Beatrice and Benedick, and it became extremely clear why they are such favorites. Their chemistry was magnificent, their comic timing was marvelous, and they were familiar enough with the setting and the audience that they knew exactly how much they could get away with in terms of zaniness. They edged right up to the line of too wacky, but didn't quite step over it. They were also excellent actors. When Beatrice came on stage, I instantly recognized her as the incredibly sexy, dangerous, serpentine Goneril from the production of King Lear that we had seen two years ago, and Benedick in that same production had been a very good Edmund. It's all well and good to see plays because you know the material, but I must say that if I learned that Marin Shakespeare were doing some play I was not too eager to see based on the script, I would be much more likely to see it anyway if I learned that Cat Thompson and Darren Bridgett were to be acting in it.

After the play was over, we drove--somewhere. I didn't know where we were going; my job was simply to read "Take exit 234K towards Highway 812 to Podunkville" to Daniel, which led us to a Best Western just on the outskirts of Manteca. The next day we drove to Yosemite, where we skipped the valley floor entirely and drove into the high country, which had been impassable because of snow the last time we went, late June (June!) of 2005. We saw the Tuolumne Meadows, climbed to the top of Pothole Dome, and strolled along the Tuolumne river, where we saw a deer and two fawns, and where Daniel went swimming. Then we drove along farther, stopping to admire such places as Tioga Lake and the view from Tioga Pass, which we took over the mountains to drive to Lee Vining, a small town on the side of Mono Lake! Mono Lake is one of the drainage lakes of the Great Basin, and because there are streams flowing in but no outlet, all the minerals that are carried by the streams into the lake are left behind when water evaporates. The result is that Mono Lake is rather like the Dead Sea: twice as salty as the ocean, and 100 times as alkaline through the extremely high concentration of sodium bicarbonate, also known as baking soda. We went swimming in Mono Lake, and the water was so buoyant that it was very difficult to sink, and so salty that when we came out, we dried extremely quickly, because the sludge that clung to our skin as we exited the lake had very little water in it. Most of it was salt or baking soda, which we saw in the form of a white crust over our skin after the water had evaporated.

One aspect of Mono Lake that makes it famous are the tufa formations. The idea is that water in the form of rain and snow sink down into the soil surrounding the lake, absorbing the calcium as it goes, until it hits the hard bedrock underground. This bedrock then channels the water into the lake in the form of underground streams. When the calcium-rich water hits the lake water that is so rich in sodium bicarbonate, a chemical reaction ensues, resulting in calcium carbonate formations all along the outlets of the underground streams. Calcium carbonate is what makes up limestone, so the tufas are essentially cave-less stalagmites. The reason they are present along the shores of the lake (since, remember, they were formed underwater) is because Los Angeles started tapping into the water that fed the lake in the 1940s. The level of the lake dropped dramatically, exposing all the formerly underwater tufas, and in the 1980s environmentalists managed to stop the water diversion, allowing the lake to gradually start regaining its former volume. The water level has risen quite a bit since then, but it's still eerie to walk along, 100 or 150 feet from the shore, and see markers saying "This is where the shore was back in 1954."

While we were at Mono Lake our movements were a bit constricted, because the winds were so high that it was difficult to stand upright outside. Of course, all activity on the lake was canceled, which included boat tours (which we were planning on taking) as well as the walking tours that were supposed to replace a boat tour if it was canceled. We did manage, however, to get a look around the Panum Crater, a volcanically formed baby mountain that is part of the newest mountain chain in the US--only 40,000 years old, and still under formation! The winds were remarkable up there: they blew sand and rocks into our skin so hard that we had to huddle down amidst the rocks during the strongest gusts, which we were told reached up to 55 mph--but that was before they strengthened later in the afternoon. We spent much of the rest of the day hiding in our hotel room, with the wind howling so loudly we couldn't even watch television or anything, because we wouldn't have been able to hear the sound. A camper was blown over on the road, and that evening, after things died down a bit, we heard that the winds had reach hurricane forces, which means at least 74 mph.

The next day everything was calm and beautiful, but we had to be back in Berkeley in time for me to finish my syntax homework, so we left unwillingly, promising to come back. We did stop, however, on the homeward journey, to take a ranger-led walk in Tuolumne meadows, where we saw birds and marmots and ground squirrels, and we had lunch in the Merced Sequoiah Grove. Then we drove home.

I know that normally when I write about this sort of thing I post pictures, but we took something like 60 pictures of our trip, and it's a bit much to put them all here. Fortunately, Mr. Philena has a picture website, and so I'll just direct you there, where everything is posted in chronological order and neatly titled and labeled. Enjoy!