Vanilla and Pine

Vanilla is one of my favorite kitchen ingredients. I love the old-fashioned flavor it gives to waffles, cake frosting and whipped cream. But the scent also speaks of family trips to Yosemite National Park and precious time spent with my father, recently turned a remarkable 90 years old.

The sun hits the rough bark of a Ponderosa pine, releasing the very distinct scent of vanilla. My father and I look for a fallen pine cone on the ground, then take a sample of fresh needles and a piece of bark, usually found at the base of the tree, though sometimes surreptitiously pried from the living trunk. Finally, he shoots a Polaroid picture of our find, and our work is done – we have added another tree to our collection. The High Sierra sunshine warms my back, the crisp air fills my lungs and the sound of a Clark’s Nuthatch (always my favorite bird, since we shared the same last name and I found the word “Nuthatch” to be mildly amusing, in a middle school sort of way) pecking at a dead branch for insects reverberates across the slope.

Back home, we will take a piece of cardboard about fourteen inches by eighteen, layer a sheet of cotton borrowed from Dad’s orthopedic practice on top and then make an artistic arrangement of pine cone, needle cluster, bark sample, Polaroid photo and identifying label. The final touch is to cover everything with a sheet of sturdy shrink wrap, which gets taped on the back. I was always somewhat sad when the shrink wrap went on – it covered up the scent of the bark and the pine needles. Oddly, the final step was to put the newly-created display into a cardboard box in the basement.

I suppose, for my father, the point was to encourage me to study nature and learn to appreciate his beloved Sierra Nevada, home to John Muir, his hero. While I took eagerly to identifying evergreen species by their needle clusters, what really made my day was simply the opportunity to spend time with this man. My sister, the oldest, was naturally the apple of Dad’s eye. My brother, second in line, was the first-born son, destined to earn the Eagle Scout badge my father never achieved, and to be his rock climbing partner for many years. While I ended up being more like my dad in many ways, I seldom spent much time with him growing up. He was a driven leader – Scoutmaster, hospital chief-of-staff, Wood Badge instructor – and his hours were long.

When I was only four or five, I remember that all I wanted for my birthday was to spend an afternoon with him, catching pollywogs down at the creek (actually an open ditch next to the ball field). I got my wish and returned home with various unidentified creatures in jars.

Many years later I took my first Boy Scout camping trip to the Ten Lakes region in the Sierras. Everything was going swimmingly and my dad had promised that just the two of us would hike up to the ridge above the lake and spend the night there. I was really looking forward to that. Then, one of the older Scouts was caught drinking booze and acting up and my dad had to walk him out to the trailhead in the middle of the night to be picked up by his folks. By the time my dad got back, any hope of our side trip was dashed and, on top of my misery, I developed an earache. Such is the price of sharing your father with thirty other kids.

Fast forward a couple of years and I repeated my birthday request to have my dad all to myself again. We went camping on Mt. Hamilton, in the East Bay, where we visited the mountaintop astronomical observatory before stopping at a dusty campground halfway down the mountain. I can’t remember much of that trip, though the details should have been memorable. But forty years later, I am left with the memory that I did get to spend a special weekend with the most important man in my life – the man who taught me how to identify the Ponderosa pine by its vanilla bark.