Liam.

The summer I turned twenty-one I had my one and only Yosemite love affair.

Summer 2003 was chock-full for me. I spent most of it in Washington, D.C. where I was taking summer classes at Cornell in Washington while interning at Americans United. I have some more complicated memories from that summer, but most are really airy and happy. I remember being so shocked at how clean the subways in D.C. were. The high ceilings, spotless platforms, subway cars that, unlike New York’s, were not filled with people eating hot dogs, throwing their trash on the floor.

D.C. was a really fun place for a kid turning twenty-one. I went out with my roommate Jose every single Thursday to the fun video bar down the street. I walked around a lot, listening to the Postal Service album that came out that year on my Sony Discman. It was great summer, but by the end of it I was ready to go home to Yosemite for a bit before heading back to my senior year at Cornell’s Upstate New York campus.

I’m not a summer person - I hate heat and sunburn very easily - so I summer was always my least favorite season in Yosemite. Back then, it wasn’t crowded year round like it is now, so the summer hoards made the summer heat even more unbearable when contrasted with the cooler, less crowded months ahead. There were always people everywhere as I rode my bike through Yosemite village, on the way to the Village Store to buy an energy drink (I was going through a Monster energy drink phase back then). My family ceased using the car locally for the entire summer, sticking to bike trips to the grocery store daily rather than bigger shopping hauls.

It would be a while before my childhood hatred of Yosemite summers completely dissolved, but summer 2003 was definitely the spark that led to my appreciation for it now.

I can see now that many things make Yosemite summers magical, and for me they mostly happen at night. I grew up on Lost Arrow Road, below the Lost Arrow Spire, which is just to the right of Yosemite Falls. Summer nights feature a ghostly, mesmerizing phenomenon called the Lost Arrow Winds, where warm air is pushed over the granite cliffs above my old neighborhood. It’s an oddly thrilling sensation, the warm wind contrasting with the crisp nighttime air. There were few streetlights on Lost Arrow Road so walking around or biking at night could feel a little haunting. But there was something comforting about the Lost Arrow Winds. They really only existed at the small corner of our neighborhood where our house was, so it felt like a reminder that I was nearly home.

We didn’t have air conditioning in our 1929 Craftsman bungalow. Instead, we kept our windows open and used fans. The smell of hundreds of campfires would waft through the window, leaving my bedding and clothes smelling like smoke. My bedroom was on the Yosemite Falls windy side of the house so I got the most of that campfire smell. I hated that when I lived there, but it became nostalgia after I’d been at college for a while. A smell that evoked childhood and nature (and that was probably terrible for my lungs).

Summer 2003 was the summer my mother was into mojitos. She’d make a batch and we’d drink them in her antique hurricane cocktail glasses etched with flowers. We liked to barbecue and eat outside, normally really simple things like grilled corn and chicken. The mosquitos were always a nightmare, but we dealt with it because the rush of the creek was close by and Yosemite Falls was there when you looked up.

My best friend Caroline was working for wildlife management that summer. She lived in employee housing on Oak Lane, around the corner from me. We chatted on the phone quite a bit that summer and she told me she was working with a guy she thought I’d like. Caroline has gay aunts and uncles and, like me, comes from a Bay Area family. So she knew not to do that “I have a gay friend you guys will like each other” thing a lot of straight women do to gay men where they try and pair two men who have nothing in common. So she was cautious in saying much about her intern Liam, but she’d had a lot of fun with him all summer and thought we would get along.

My parents had a steady stream of people coming in and out of our house for my entire life. My siblings’ friends who lived with us during summer jobs at the Visitor Center (housing up there was always sparse for temp jobs). Friends they’d made over the years on their trips to Scotland and Japan. Old friends from their college and Central Valley years. There was always someone around. So when Caroline brought Liam over to meet everyone, it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary - my parents were used to meeting new kids.

Caroline and I will always be family. We have the type of intimacy that just doesn’t fade. We have so many hours logged that we just feel normal around each other, even though she’s busy and overwhelmed with two kids and a very demanding job now. I’m really proud of the woman she grew up to be. She’s now a wildlife biologist protecting Yosemite’s wildlife and she takes her job very seriously. She’s why if I see you feeding a wild animal, you’re gonna get slapped.

Caroline and I used to just walk into each others houses without knocking. And I doubt she knocked that day she brought Liam over to say hi.

Liam was our same age, about to go into his senior year at Notre Dame. He was 6’4” and gorgeous. Broad shoulders, incredibly sweet eyes, big full lips with a dorky smile, sandy brown short hair, just sort of a Norman Rockwell drawing of an all American football hunk. He was a man, which I liked. I tended to not to be attracted to guys my own age because I didn’t like that they looked like boys. To this day, if a younger looking guy hits on me, I basically barf. Sorry twinks! What was most attractive about him was his playfulness and humility, he didn’t take himself seriously but was earnest in his interest in other people.

I was immediately into him. Caroline was relieved she was right. But there was more to it. Caroline and I had been best friends since we were fourteen. Since we started passing notes in freshman year health class about our homophobic teacher. She’d felt as invisible sexually as I did in high school, but she had had a few little romantic trysts with boys. I think she was happy to see something like that finally happening for me, in my home territory.