The Last Season by Eric Blehm Read Free Book Online

offered a job in Yosemite National Park asthe office manager for its concessionaire, the Yosemite Park and Curry Company. The following day, Dana gave notice at the bank.
    In August, the family moved into House 102 on Tecoya Row, Yosemite Valley—the Curry Company’s employee housing area. The small but comfortable clapboard half-a-duplex was, for Dana and Esther, a romantic wilderness cabin. After more than a decade of uninspiring desk work at two banks and years of discreet yet persistent job hunting, Dana had realized his dream to live and work in the mountains. It was still a desk job, but that was of little consequence. House 102 came complete with living and dining room windows overlooking the waving tall grasses of the Ahwahnee Meadow. Towering over a wall of trees across the meadow stood the awe-inspiring granite monoliths of the Royal Archers, Washington Column, and—dominating the horizon—the world-famous Half Dome. Their back door opened to yet another dizzying wall of granite, which rose above the evergreen forest that surrounded the home on three sides. It was a wilderness utopia enhanced by the sound of the rushing Merced and the nostalgia-inducing smell of piney campfires each evening. Friends and relatives who came to visit commented that the Morgensons were living in a postcard.
    Once settled, Dana spent every spare moment exploring the mountains and “learning their secrets,” he’d often write in his journal. His passion became the wildflowers. He read avidly and befriended local naturalist Mary Tresidder and the renowned naturalist Dr. Carl Shar-smith, who sensed in the man from the accounting department an unexpected kindred spirit for the park’s wild places and shared with him their knowledge of the park’s secret gardens.
    Dana garnered his own reputation as the valley’s authority on wildflowers, which in time would be his ticket out of the Curry Company’s accounting office. Beginning each spring, he was approached to identify flowers or point park employees or tourists down the right mountain trail which he had, over the course of years, walked, documenting all the species with both his journal and his camera. Shadowing Dana on many of these outings were his two boys, both of whomwere casually taught the scientific names of wildflowers and trees on one walk, trail names and peak heights on the next. Always on these adventures, they were fed a seemingly endless diet of quotes from John Muir, Albert Einstein, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Ogden Nash—a few of the authors whose books lined the walls of the Morgenson home, which came to be known as one of the valley’s more extensive private libraries.
    One of Dana’s favorite Whitman quotes was “To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakable perfect miracle.” It was this sort of appreciation of their surroundings and life that instilled a sense of awe in Dana’s two sons, who especially liked walks along the rushing torrent of the Merced River. “Thousands of joyous streams are born in the snowy range,” Dana quoted Muir, “but not a poet among them all can sing like Merced.”
    The Morgenson brothers learned from their father that church and wilderness were one and the same. Though they regularly attended Sunday services in the valley, Dana wouldn’t think twice about replacing a pew with a chunk of granite on a Sunday morning hike to, for example, the wet and boggy Summit Meadow in search of the “ghostly” white Sierra rein orchid or, as he would record in his notes, “ Habenaria dilatata of the leucostachys variety.”
    Dana would talk to the animals of the forest as though they were neighbors, saying “Good morning, Mrs. Squirrel, how are the kids?” when passing a trailside burrow known to house a litter of pups. Equally respectful to the two-legged fauna inhabiting the park, he would tip his hat to park rangers,