|
"It was like lying in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hand of man," wrote Teddy Roosevelt, of camping in Yosemite Park. At about 4 am, after hours of being unable to sleep; ofshivering（颤抖）in the cold mountain air – despite going to bed fully dressed and with a wool hat pulled down over my ears – and trying to silence my crying kids who kept waking up andwhimpering（幽咽）in the chill; of futilely attempting to find a position on the air mattress that didn't send my lower back intospasms（肌痉挛）; of listening to sounds that might or might not have been a bear sniffing around outside our tent, I finally couldn't stand it any more. I simply had to pee. Gritting my teeth, I turned on a flashlight, put on my shoes, unzipped the door of my tent, stumbled out into the night, and made a dash for the pit-toilet at the edge of the camp site. There was no bear. But there were an impossibly large number of stars twinkling above. I peed, ran back to my tent, and half-slept till dawn. Hours later, as the sun crept up over the edge of the awesome Lassen peak – the jagged relic of a powerful volcanic explosion that strewed boulders over hundreds of square miles – in the remote northeast of California, I pulled my sleeping bag over my head andwhined（发牢骚）exhaustedly that "everything has gone wrong." Like so many other grouchy early morning, pre-coffeeutterances（表达，说话）I make, this one was ludicrously off-key. Things weren't wrong; they were right. | 
