Instead of writing anything last night, I decided to hold out for the luxury of a table at the Pines Cafe here in Independence. The Cafe is closed. That means it’s before six thirty in the morning. We are sitting and waiting and this fills the time nicely. Yesterday was easy. We had to climb up and out of the canyon we were in and take a turn east at a trail junction. The junction where we had breakfast was nothing more than the tippy top of a five foot high sign exposed above the surface of the snow. We sat in the wind and I thought about being warm in an extremely detached way. From the junction it was nine miles up and over Kearsarge Pass to Onion Valley and a twenty mile road to town. About three quarters of a mile from the trail head two older ladies resting trail side asked us if there was any snow further up the trail. Dyl politely told them yes but expressed to me the desire to be able to psychically transfer all the snow bound memories of the last few days to them in a flash. Immediately after hitting pavement we were asked by a packing up father and son team if there was snow on Forester pass. We told them yes and that we would discourage them from going over it without an ice ax. They were dismayed at the information but graciously suggested to their wife/ mother that she give us a ride into town. A man in cowboy boots and a cowboy hat just walked by and said, “Mornin’.” There was one particular post card in the Subway/ Mini-Mart corporate infusion of Independence that made me think of school and my former lifestyle and activities. A huge full moon, looking really quite large, loomed over the high Sierra. Ahh, I mused, the magic of computer imaging. I woke up this morning and the rising sun striking the mountains in accompaniment with the rising full moon looked exactly, (Just a second the Cafe opened.) like the post card. The table is a nice big piece of pine and easy to write on. Dyl cracked his lids and gasped, “Oh! That looks just like the postcard I bought.” To which my reply was, “I saw that one but I thought it was faked.”
“Well I thought about the astronomy and figured it could probably be like that.”
“That’s what I for taking classes studying how pictures are altered in order to fool people instead of science.” I laughed out.
The Pines Cafe looks like one of those places built in a time of prosperity that seats more people than live in the town. We are in the Cafe part. Next to us is the larger “Pine Room.” All the tables are big varnished slabs of pine. On the way to the john in back I spied an old stocky man with a white flattop and a dirty white V-neck T-shirt pulling a hot tray of biscuits out of the cooker. We have ordered up identical huge breakfasts which we plan to wolf down forthwith. The Post Office is across the street. After picking up the box and making a couple call we will try our luck hitching back up the road. We hope to be up and over Glen Pass by tonight. The official slogan of this trail segment was, “Trail Schmail.”