Yosemite Valley

Yosemite Valley becomes both a romantic refuge and a temporary reprieve from the warship Willie Keith is due to rejoin. Its winter landscape frames his night with May Wynn and their days of recreation, while the return journey turns the valley into a boundary between their private happiness and the obligations waiting beyond it.

Setting and the Firefall

On a moonlit night, Willie and May stand beside a tall pine on the floor of Yosemite Valley, in front of The Ahwahnee. From a cliff, a cascade of embers falls through the darkness in a glowing column described as a mile high; cowboy musicians begin a melancholy love song somewhere in the gloom. The spectacle gives way to a private moment as the two turn toward each other and kiss.

They walk through the hotel’s bright lobby, decorated with Indian hangings, skins, and horns, and ride the elevator to the third floor. Willie leaves May’s room the following morning in a daze of pleasure, carrying an idealized image of her smiling in a white nightdress. The account sharply contrasts his satisfaction with May’s unseen response: in her room below, she is crouched in a chair, shivering and crying.

Intimacy and Unequal Certainty

The night marks a change in Willie and May’s relationship. Willie has not previously tried to make May yield to him; he has feared the entanglement more than he desired their final intimacy, and their relationship has remained sweet without it. This time neither forces the other, but they cross a boundary both had approached cautiously.

Their decision is shaped partly by books they have read, which dismiss conventional sexual rules as primitive taboos and treat morality as relative to time and place. Willie, buoyed by the experience, believes the books’ argument; May is less certain. Yosemite thus holds both the pleasure Willie takes from their closeness and the misgiving that he does not recognize in her. The difference between his joyful recollection and her distress complicates the scene’s apparent romantic fulfillment.

Winter Recreation and the Return

The visit also unfolds through ordinary winter diversions. Willie and May find few people on the trails and ski in a snowy mountain landscape; at the Badger Pass ski lodge they warm themselves by a log fire and drink hot buttered rum. They ride horses through the snow, eat large steaks, take a sleigh ride, and spend an evening dancing and talking at the hotel. These activities give their time together an easy, sheltered rhythm.

That refuge remains temporary. On the trails, Willie wonders whether the U.S.S. Caine (DMS 22) could really exist: its cramped wheelhouse, clip shack, shabby wardroom, rust, and the captain rolling steel balls seem like the contents of a fever dream. Yet Willie knows that the ship is real, lying in a San Francisco drydock, and that in two days he must return to it. The valley’s freedom is therefore shadowed by a fixed departure.

The next day, Willie and May travel by bus back toward San Francisco, holding hands and looking out at the snowy peaks and gorges of the Sierras. As the bus reaches the brown, bare San Joaquin Valley and follows U.S. 99, Willie recognizes that serious conversation can no longer be postponed: San Francisco and the Caine lie ahead, but so does his mother. Yosemite’s role in the story ends at this transition, as the lovers leave their secluded interlude and face the questions waiting in ordinary life.