California Mashup

There are three wooden bears outside the front office of the Comfort Inn at Oakhurst. Another, much larger wooden bear stands guard over the parking lot. The basket of flowers in its hand softens its otherwise forbidding appearance. All this ursine pageantry is a salute to Yosemite National Park, an hour's drive away.

Inside the park, the real bears are up and about. Their winter hibernation is over, now that the weather has turned cheerfully hot.

This burst of warm weather has been good to the waterfalls and streams. We stood at the foot of Bridalveil Fall, and turned our faces up to catch the spray generated by water crashing down from a height of six hundred feet. (American) Indian legend says that doing this makes you lucky in marriage. It works.

Yosemite Falls is even bigger than Bridalveil, and far too violent for such gentle folklore. By the time the water hits the rocks at its feet, it has fallen fifteen hundred feet. The force of the spray and the gusting wind threaten to push you over into the rapids below.

But the waters in Yosemite Park are not all sound and fury. We ate lunch by a brisk but quiet snow-fed creek; next to us The Kid amused himself by throwing in pebbles to make splashes.

Back in Oakhurst the Jade Gazebo waits to feed Chinese food to hungry naturalists. There is no actual gazebo here. But the walls are painted a bilious green so the name is at least partly appropriate. I want to believe that the family who run the restaurant are descended from the Chinese labourers who came here to work for logging companies a hundred years ago.

Back then the lumber industry was booming. Today big agri-business has moved on to run orchards and vinyards. And now the manual labourers who work for them come from Mexico. There is a 50-mile stretch of farmland running west of Yosemite. And on the edge of this, in a place called Gilroy, hides the El Siete restaurant. Like Jade Gazebo, this is a family run restaurant in a working class neighbourhood. The food they serve is simple and irresistible. I ate more carne asada than I should have, and far more than I thought I could have.

Then I sat back, looked around, and was delighted by what I saw. Against one wall sat a device with one foot on either side of the Pacific Ocean, one that Chinese and Mexicans would both approve of. It was a karaoke machine with Spanish songs.