You are here

Granite And Grace: Seeking The Heart Of Yosemite

Author : Michael P. Cohen
Published : 2019-05-08

Any visitor to Yosemite inescapably encounters granite – it is the essence of the park. Few if any know granite like Michael P. Cohen, who has climbed big walls, wandered on and around its less than vertical presences, read deeply into its geomorphology and mineralogy, and intimately explored and reflected on the nature of Yosemite granite for over a half century. Granite and Grace is a meditation on what he has come to know of it in all these ways and years.

Cohen is not only a student of granite but of the history and natural history of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada. He is a philosopher, historian, naturalist, and literary scholar who has written penetratingly of John Muir in The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (1984), The History of the Sierra Club (1988), and A Garden of Bristlecone Pines: Tales of Change in the Great Basin (1998 ), among other works. He writes in the introduction, “What you have in your hands is unmistakably a memoir that deliberately attempts to carry our past metaphorically into the present – and also claims to be about metamorphosis.” Cohen enjoys wordplay, as this quotation illustrates, and the “metamorphosis” he explores in this book is not only geological but historical and personal.

Granite and Grace presents 28 short essays, the essai a method, according to the master of the method Montaigne, which Cohen says involves “a testing or trying out that subjects inner life to decisive thought.” He employs the method as he wanders Tuolumne Meadows with his artist wife, Valerie, meditating upon the experience of the moment, the insights of his reading into the geology of granite, and his lifetime of experience of rock and the place that has captured his imagination for so long.

Cohen askes two questions: “What can one learn from granite – what does it reveal about being in the world?” and “What can one learn from granite’s relations to the world in which it appears?” He finds a response to the first question in aplite dikes that stand out in “bold relief” on granite.

These dikes reveal change and yet provide stability. They are not like living things, though we name them as if they were. Trees fall and rot. Those we love die. Meadows dry and erode. The inanimate lasts longer than us, but still these insolent surfaces indicate their history. Rock, especially polished rock, remains a kind of riddle written in braille.

Metamorphosis and change appear as themes in many essays. For Cohen, “Tuolumne Meadows presents a microcosm of my desire for stability and permanence and my apprehension about instability and change, my ambivalence about the trajectory of time.” He worries about change in the natural and cultural landscape he loves, about the institution of Yosemite National Park, and about change in himself. As a student of granite, he knows everything changes, even the hardest rock, and sees changes in deep geological time all around him.

Cohen ponders the meaning of landscape. It is not, he thinks, “a portion of land that one can view” as we commonly define it, a physical geographic entity, but a human creation. In an essay titled “Iconic Landscape: Landmarks, Large and Small,” he quotes a National Park Service claim for Yosemite that, “The park boundary perfectly frames a landscape that is composed almost entirely of granite, and it’s no surprise that this landscape contains some of the most iconic rock formations on earth.”

This is accurate, he notes, because the park is a consequence of iconography, “iconized by literary and artistic representations.” There is so much rock, towering walls, granite everywhere, a powerful and unique place that has been the subject of so much writing, painting, and photography. Yet in Cohen’s view, while the iconography of Yosemite might reveal cultural clichés, “Yosemite is not a cliché but the experience of it might be.” Not for him, but for the thousands who pour through the park “as if visiting Yosemite were primarily an automotive exercise.” So many visitors scope out the scenery, then on to the next park. Such cursory encounters with iconic landscapes like Yosemite raise questions for Cohen about national parks and our experience of them.

While Cohen meditates upon the various qualities of granite, he suggests how we might experience places like Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite, the Sierra Nevada, anywhere.

I walk on granite now, cold, warm, and sometimes hot – distant, alien, welcoming, and frightening. I watch my step. There are many ways to know granite, up close and from afar. There are many ways to get up close, by circumnavigation, ascent, traverse, descent. At one time, ascent was everything to me. Now I circumnavigate. I have become less ambitious and more circumspect.

Though it should be easy to figure out what one means when one says “I am going for a walk,” one is never footloose and fancy-free. You could call a mountain walk a scramble, suggesting an eager, rude clambering, a contest that involves struggling with obstacles. Or you might speak of rambles, like night wanderings, sometimes across private property, by those who are extravagant. Or speak of travels more gently: to amble. When engaged in mountain walking, sometimes I amble, sometimes I scramble, sometimes I ramble. This is more than playing with diction or rhyme.

Flowers, too, are always a distraction. When my parents, for instance, would say they are going for a hike, I would wonder why they spent all their time sitting by the wayside, pleased to identify or contemplate a particular flower. I myself enjoy the flowers, but usually from a certain distance and at a certain speed, as I go by them. I am not, as Valerie says, much of a “flower glutton,” not yet. She, however, draws and paints the Sierra’s flowers and trees.

Cohen is a “granite glutton,” quite obsessed with this family of rocks. He finds a multitude of interesting ways to think about them. For instance, what is the difference between “rock” and “stone?” He writes, “Turning rock into stone involves an elaborate fragmentation, including mining, manufacture, transport, and installation.” This seems “an abuse or breaking of some higher law for frivolous reasons,” such as for granite countertops. “The production of stone has always been dangerous to the health of quarriers. The rules of rock are longstanding and healthy by comparison.” He also observes that “You could love stone because of what you can make with it; you could love rock because of what you can make of it, in memory and actuality.” Thoughts like this pop up throughout the book, food for thought and delight.

Writing an entire book about granite and keeping a layperson’s attention is no small task, testimony to Cohen’s skill as a writer and storyteller. Granite and Grace is chock-full of stories from personal experience, history, and science, with shots of philosophical meandering and cultural critique thrown in for spice. Where, one might ask, is the grace of the book’s title?

John Muir is still read, Cohen observes, because “he articulated a central human desire: to attend to graceful rock.” I never quite thought of Muir’s writing that way, and I am a fan, but I think Cohen is right. Muir celebrated a “world that seems elegant, finished, refined, with balance, form, style, and symmetry.”

As he does often in this book, Cohen probes the origins of words he uses, grace in this case, “from the Latin gracia for favor, esteem, regard, or good will, gratitude.” He finds grace in cold rock, but finds a paradox in his intimacy with granite that is that “grace is given yet must be earned.” Noting that by speaking of grace, he enters “a difficult terrain that seethes with religious ideas and doctrines.” But he will do it, for “Everyone lives by illusions.” He says this in the chapter “Grace on Granite” in the seventh of 28 chapters, and by the end there is no doubt he has found grace on, and I would add, in granite.

Grace on Granite is a book to be read slowly, a chapter at a time, and pondered, at least by anyone seeking to know the essence of a place and its parts, be it national park or other landscape, iconic or merely familiar. As I worked on this review, I searched for a clear answer to Cohen’s second question, “What can one learn from granite’s relations to the world in which it appears?” I’m not sure I found a clear answer, though I found some insight in this passage.

    Though pieces fall off, the body of granite rock does not rot, does not bend in the wind, does not reproduce, does not care about change. Rock endures. Rock does not change its expression. Rock has no expression except the names and faces we give it and the stories we tell about it.

This suggests the two questions are sides of the same coin. Is it that we have “relations” with rock, which means it has “relations” with us, but only when we relate to it? Cohen wants us to think about these issues of our relationship to the world, to examine our “relations,” and Granite and Grace certainly helps us to do so. Be it granite, bristlecones, penstemons, bighorns, or the Green River, we must immerse ourselves in a relationship to really know our world. This, I think, is Cohen’s central point.        

 

Comments

Thank you, John.


Very nice review. Reading it made me want to get the book and read it -- but slowly, one chapter at a time as the reviewer recommends.

--Keith A. liker, Poway, CA

 


Add comment

The Essential RVing Guide

The Essential RVing Guide to the National Parks

The National Parks RVing Guide, aka the Essential RVing Guide To The National Parks, is the definitive guide for RVers seeking information on campgrounds in the National Park System where they can park their rigs. It's available for free for both iPhones and Android models.

This app is packed with RVing specific details on more than 250 campgrounds in more than 70 parks.

You'll also find stories about RVing in the parks, some tips if you've just recently turned into an RVer, and some planning suggestions. A bonus that wasn't in the previous eBook or PDF versions of this guide are feeds of Traveler content: you'll find our latest stories as well as our most recent podcasts just a click away.

So whether you have an iPhone or an Android, download this app and start exploring the campgrounds in the National Park System where you can park your rig.