Sunday, December 16, 2018

Fish Camp, California

This place is mentioned in "Homecoming" with Julia Roberts on (Amazon) Prime Streaming.
Fish Camp, California really exists on Highway 41 going into Yosemite National Park from the route you usually take if you are headed north from Los Angeles or San Diego area in Southern California in General. From where I live either 120 or 140 is usually the route I take in because 41 is too far south to make it practical from Northern California on the coast where I live. My first time in Yosemite we drove in on Highway 41 was summer vacation in 1963 when I was 15 years old and I lived in Glendale and the next fall my friend Mike and I would be sophomores at Glendale High School. We had gone to Woodrow Wilson Junior High School together for three years before. I had given him my Newspaper route of the Glendale New Press when I was 10 years old. So, when I started Junior High at a new school I knew him from the paper route and we became friends in junior High School. He passed away in 2011 I believe. He had been to Viet Nam  In the Air Force and repaired jet engines on U.S. planes there during the Viet Nam War and so was buried in a Military Cemetery in Bakersfield. We had climbed up to the top of Vernal Falls in Yosemite in 1963 when we were 15 together. We did it once again in our 40s before he passed away sometime in his early 60s. HE WAS 64 WHEN HE PASSED AWAY. I remember being so upset when he died that I couldn't even speak for a day. But, I'm also a survivor too. So, I always live on for my family, even when my mother was dying of senile dementia from 2001 to 2008. That was the hardest thing I ever had to deal with in my entire life. But, luckily I had my family to live on for. "Life is for the Living!"

Yosemite in 1963 had firefalls of cedar bark from Glacier Point onto the rocks below every night during the summer. If you can imagine "American Graffiti" in Yosemite with Firefalls at 9pm every night and people jumping off the bridges into the river during the days and racing their cars on the roads there at night and floating down the river on rafts with bonfires everywhere and people laughing 24 hours a day and having a really good time everywhere then, then you can imagine what Yosemite was like in 1963 in the summer there.

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