Yahoo Autos We Drove 14 Hours Overnight For 45 Minutes in Yosemite
“I just think…” Zach says with a pause. “We’re going to see something we’ve never seen.”
Four minutes later, we’re in the Jeep. It’s July 3rd and seven hours of driving separates us from sunrise in Yosemite National Park. The timeline lays out like a spike strip before us. We’ll drive nonstop through the night and even that will buy us just an hour at Yosemite. After that, we’ll be forced to turn back for another seven-hour journey, with social commitments and a work week waiting on our return.
Too much time weighing the rationale would have sunk our simple plan. The Fourth of July is not for exercises in impulse control, but for celebrating the things this country got right. There’s a lot unsettled in that, but we both agree the best way to enjoy America isn’t blowing our hands off with M-80s.
We prefer forging memories in nature and testing endurance. Also telling good stories. We refuel the Wrangler a few minutes from my house in San Diego and pause to refuel ourselves. Six hours and fifty-eight minutes to go. This puts our arrival a dozen or so minutes past sunrise. That won’t do. We place a diet coke, a pack of gum, an Elf Bar, and a bag of chips on the cashier’s table.
“Is this the best part of us, or the worst?” I ask as Zach pulls out of the gas station. He shrugs.
We queue up Zach Bryan’s 34-song whopper of an album. It’s the kind you only listen to when you need time to disappear. The other Zach’s been at my house all weekend and in my life for ten years. There’s not much to catch up on so we just listen while he drives, passing Ubers filled with weekenders, others looking for answers to their own questions.
This isn’t the first time we’ve driven through the night together; it certainly won’t be the last. Back then, his mom’s minivan served as conveyance. Anywhere within a high schooler’s gas budget was liable to become a destination. One glance and we’d be out the door.
I can’t say where all the years since went, but I remember them by the moments of brilliance we snatched out of thin air. These days the destination could be anywhere in the country, no permission required. For better and for worse, there’s nothing left to stop two fools from Ohio with eyes bigger than their stomachs.
But this year, finally, I’m starting to lose my appetite. My hunger for adventure hasn’t left, but for the first time it doesn’t feel infinite, and I’ve started a journey with the feeling of quiet surrender. Nine days ago I surfed my first overhead wave. A week ago I climbed my first mountain, a 14-mile trek with 5000 feet of elevation gain. The day after that, I drove six hours in a day just to get a truck stuck in the Salton Sea. The weeks ahead are penciled in with similar ambition.
Each adventure rewards uniquely, sure to be remembered fondly. But looking at the lot, it’s hard not to be ashamed of my own gluttony, and yet terrified by the needle moving back on my own fuel supply. To live like this is an unimaginable gift, one that often keeps my eyes wide with gratitude as I bound from place to place. To burn out on these challenges I choose for myself, to complain about them, feels a sign of moral rot. Maybe I’m becoming ungrateful, maybe just beginning to get old.
Three weeks ago I took my friend Kelly for a drive in an Aston Martin I didn’t own. Her and her boyfriend, Sean, became trusted friends in record time, fellow Ohioans chasing something bigger out here in California.
I told her I was jealous, in some way, of the people who stayed back in Ohio. They can discover peace and war and triumph and pain in a place that they understand, a place that understands them.
But look how extraordinary things could be, she said. Every adventure is a blessing.
It’s all I can think about as we roll through the gates of Yosemite National Park. Zach and I are both exhausted, our moods already tinged with dread at the prospect of turning the Jeep back to San Diego.
We round the mountain as the sun paints the sky in its eerie first light. God's own garden, preserved in perfection, stretches itself open in the warmth of a new day. Rock walls bounce blues and orange-red hues between themselves, spreading ephemeral light into a soft, homey glow. One look at this valley washes us clean. The child-like wonder, the love, the excitement; all those missing emotions a seven-hour drive wrung from us come flooding back in. We find ourselves, once again, sitting with God. I feel something beyond reason here. Something primal or divine.
If our many drives together represent some fundamental question, the only answers we’ve found are in moments like these, watching dawn creep over El Capitan. To feel that once more, we’ll drive anywhere, any time. One of us will look at the other, mischief in mind, and in minutes, hours, or days we’ll be heading out the door. Back then it was the only thing we wanted. Today it’s the only thing we know how to do.
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