Once upon a time when I was just a lad of twenty, a couple of friends of mine invited me to go camping with them on their parents private property on the Tuolumne River in California. It was a beautiful area, deeply softened with huge fir and pine trees and carved into magnificent canyons by the melting snows of the Sierras.
The property was in a state consistent with privately owned recreational land that nobody with any money was very serious about using, but nevertheless was used frequently by one's offspring and their friends. There was a makeshift dam on the creek with a pipe to a makeshift waterheater made from a woodstove blended with a steel drum. There were a couple of buildings, only one of which had walls, and that was the one that was size appropriate only for storing the camping supplies. The other building was a mixture of lumber and native wood such that it was not at all tempting to choose sleeping there over sleeping on the ground in the nearby pine grove.
We hiked around a bit and enjoyed the nature and the challenge of being out of our element. The next morning after we had breakfast, I started to feel a bit uncomfortable and realized that I had not seen any bathroom facilities more advanced than a tree and started wondering how I was going to take care of that need.
When I asked my friends about it, they smiled mysteriously and looked at each other. Then one of them said, "Oh, you need to go check out the throne." They both then proceeded to point toward a dirt fireroad leading up a hill near the clearing where we had the cooking pit. I glanced in that direction but I was sufficiently confused by their behavior that I gave them a questioning look. "Just follow that road, you can't miss it," they said. Then they smiled at each other again and nodded their heads mysteriously.
I figured since they had been there before, I had best just go check out this "throne". I started to walk up the fireroad and as I did I noticed that it was leading up out of the trees. The land to the East opened out into a wide rocky meadow on top of a knoll and I could see, far in the distance, the lines of ridges steering the Tuolumne as it tumbled through the foothills toward me from the Sierra mountains beyond. It looked like someone had done a little surveying and was reserving a prominent spot on that knoll for a real house as opposed to what we had seen down in the trees.
In the middle of the top of that knoll, from a distance, I could see a little structure. It didn't look like a throne. It didn't look like an outhouse. It was just a wooden box a couple of feet high with a high straight back attached to it. From a distance it looked like it was made out of scraps of plywood and palettes with decorations around the edge of the back made from sticks and other scraps of lumber. The "throne" was parked right in the middle of a very rocky part of the meadow and was facing to the West. When I got close enough, I could see that it had a beat up toilet seat nailed to it perched over an outhouse-like hole in the top of the box. I was extremely skeptical.
I started looking around to see if there would be any privacy while using this throne. I knew my friends were down below the ridge and I knew we were in a pretty deserted part of the world and it wasn't likely that somebody would be hiking nearby but I was a little uneasy without checking. When I turned around to look down the hill to the West, I almost forgot why I was there.
Looking West from that rocky knoll was one of the most stunning experiences I have ever had. My mouth dropped open as I looked out over the lower foothills of the Sierras, down that twisting canyon toward the California Central Valley. In the near distance I could see the tops of the trees among which we had slept last night. Beyond that was a steep drop into the canyon of the Tuolumne River and then one proud rocky abutment after another marched into view on either side of the mighty snaking Tuolumne. The deep green of the steep forested hillsides, the sharp tool-like cuts of the rocky escarpments on those river buttresses and the surrounding pinnacles, slopes, cliffs and canyons were breathtaking. They were interrupted occasionally by a surprise appearance of the sparkling river itself far down below, but that was just the near distance.
Beyond those roughly hewn obstructions the scene grew softer and smoother. The hills got smaller and less frequent the farther away I looked until they were replaced by the lines and planes of the Central Valley. The whole valley was also there laid out before me like a quilted picnic blanket. I had no idea what towns and cities I was looking at scattered distantly across the colorful carpet of richness but they were diamond broaches on a checkerboard coat of many colors. There were lines of trees and greenery scribbled across the blanket marking the paths of waterways dividing the valley into natural puzzle pieces. My eyes were so confused by the distance that it looked as if the far side of the valley were rising up to roll back toward me. But if I focussed my eyes on that distant edge I could tell they were just the rolling coastal hills 80 miles away and beyond that more hills and then just a hazy blue fog that didn't really look like the Pacific Ocean but what does an ocean look like from 120 miles away.
I gazed back and forth over that vista, picking out one astounding feature after another and basking in the awsomeness of being surrounded by the most glorious aspect of nature I had ever witnessed. Eventually, I realized that I was, in fact, there for a reason somewhat less dignified, and I turned around and looked at the the object of my excursion behind me. Looking back and forth from that throne to the view looking directly out from that throne, I immediately got the joke. I sat on the worlds most magnificent throne and completed my initial mission while continuing my examination of the most beautiful bathroom wallpaper possible.
When I returned to my friends there was a knowing smile on my face to match the ones on theirs and I smilingly nodded my head in response to the unspoken question on their eyebrows. No words seemed appropriate so we just kept smiling and nodding and it didn't seem the least bit weird. In retrospect I can only say, kudos to whomever chose the spot for that throne.
bill February 14, 2007, at 09:38 PM CST
