Badger Pass is the setting for a lodge stop during Willie Keith and May Wynn’s Yosemite outing. Its ski lodge offers a warm, sociable pause in which the pair can step away, briefly, from the cramped shipboard world Willie knows he must soon return to.

Setting and approach

The visit takes place amid a Yosemite landscape where the trails are sparsely occupied and visitors seem absorbed in their own small pursuits in a white mountain world. May initially points out that neither she nor Willie has ski clothes or skis, but agrees to go when Willie proposes that they buy or rent what they need. Her reason is modest: she wants to be able to say she skied while in Yosemite. The outing is less a carefully prepared sporting expedition than an improvised attempt to make something of their time ashore.

The lodge scene

At the Badger Pass ski lodge, Willie and May warm themselves beside a large log fire and drink hot buttered rum. May removes her ski cap and shakes out her hair above her green wool jacket. The men in the room stare, while several women give her an appraising look; Willie takes evident pleasure in the attention she attracts. The scene makes the lodge a public setting as well as a refuge: May becomes the focus of the room, and Willie enjoys being beside her.

A respite with an approaching end

The quiet trails and lodge warmth sharpen the contrast with the life Willie has left behind. During the outing, he finds himself wondering whether the USS Caine could really exist: he recalls its cramped wheelhouse, clip shack, dreary wardroom, old magazines, stale coffee, rust, and the captain who rolls steel balls while speaking with his eyes fixed on empty air. The ship feels to him like a fever dream from which he has awakened, yet he knows it is real and lying in a San Francisco drydock. The relief of Badger Pass is therefore temporary and sharply bounded: in two days, Willie expects to return to that world.