Yosemite Bob Remembers

By Leah Garchick
San Francisco Chronicle - July 17, 2002

The Ahwahnee Lodge in Yosemite is 75 years old, and Robert Redford, who stayed overnight there last week while driving from Tiburon to Sundance, offered congratulations by offering to talk about his Yosemite connection.

Redford, who worked as a waiter in the Yosemite Lodge in 1951, had come "from a reasonably poor background" in Southern California. The year he was 10, he contracted a very mild case of polio that lasted for six weeks.

"I was wiped out for pretty much all of the summer," he remembers. "As a reward, as compensation, my mother took me on a trip to Yosemite. It was the first time I'd ever been out of Los Angeles. When I went through the tunnel that leads to Inspiration Point, it so rocked me. My immediate impulse, once I got past the beautiful shock of it, was that I wanted to be in it. I wanted to be a part of it. . . . There was such a strong impact of that place that I carried it all of my life."

Redford's first art show, when he was 16, was at Yosemite Lodge. He was already learning to climb, "into the back regions, up through the two falls, into Little Yosemite." He was hooked, and his connection to the place deepened as time went on.

In 1990, he made "The Fate of Heaven," a documentary that sent him "deep into the archives of Yosemite" and overturned some long-held notions about the roles of the government, the Army and the Indians who lived there and was a "celebration of my own feelings about Yosemite, which had grown sadder and sadder over the years."

Redford realizes that he can't keep Yosemite for himself, and that inevitably its caretakers have to deal with masses of people, "Winnebagos lined up, guides with walkie-talkies," who want to share it. Growing population everywhere else "pushes people more to these places of refuge."

Cutting down on park service funds, he says, is not the way to deal with it. "These are public lands, and that's why I fight so hard against the intrusion of government. I think we have a responsibility to take care of these people. You don't do it by cutting the staff and cutting services. . . . I have a very strong emotional attachment to Yosemite. When I came through the other day and I saw the incredible experience people have in that park, I worried about how we're going to manage it for the future."

Moving right along from this sublime combination of emotion and ecology, TIC went to the concrete: So what kind of waiter were you? "Oh," he says, hesitating for only a moment, "I was a s -- waiter. My heart wasn't in it. It was a means to an end. I was always having to take food back, because I'd taken it to the wrong table."

Redford's most poignant memory of that summer, 50 years ago, was watching the fire-fall ceremony that always ended an evening's program of skits and songs. "The calls would go out from Camp Curry to the top of the mountain, 'Are you ready?' . . . 'Let the fire fall.' You saw these coals, pushed off from above, red hot, as a violinist played 'Indian Love Song.' As corny as that was, it always got you." As to the love factor, Redford had "a couple" of romances that summer. "There were a lot of girls floating around," he recalls, "but my heart basically was in climbing."