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Will Cisco—aka Storyteller, from Toms River, New Jersey—might have been one of those souls. He hiked into our store in the early summer complaining of hurt knees. The hostel was full when he arrived, so we put him down at the cabin. He hung out there for a couple of weeks, but it didn’t take him more than a few days to make an impression, to fit himself into the life of the shop.
Wet, I don’t think Will weighed more than 145 pounds. I never saw him without his camouflage flat cap with a pencil sticking out of the brim, which accentuated his big ears and long nose. His demeanor, his boyish slenderness, and the short, black-as-coal beard neatly etched on his face made him look younger than his age, fifty-two. He had three talents—he was a handyman, a baker, and a talker—and he pursued them energetically. He was in motion all the time: going here, chattering there, fixing this or that. If his hands or feet weren’t moving, his mouth was. He remains one of the most talkative persons that I have ever met, and he wasn’t very good at resting his injured knees. When he did stand still, he could be found in a crowd of people spinning a tale of his adventures while living in Yosemite during the late seventies and early eighties.
There were two stories he told me the very day he arrived, and I heard them again, more than once, before he was gone. The first came from the summer of 1976, when he camped in Little Yosemite Valley near Half Dome and Nevada Falls.
“It was midsummer in seventy-six, and I had been in Yosemite for a little over two months already, trying to hike as many trails as I could before someone decided it was way past the two weeks you’re allowed to stay. One evening I found myself sharing a camp, having coffee and a joint, with three fellows. Two of them were brothers, and the third was a lifelong friend. One brother got around to telling me that they had some LSD and that he was going to take some the next day and climb to the top of Half Dome and dance a jig on the edge of the cliff. I told him, ‘I’m looking at a dead man,’ and of course he just laughed at that. He said goodbye to me the next morning, saying he’d see me at dinnertime, and then he climbed Half Dome and danced right off the cliff, to his death. The other two came back without him.
“The ranger had to go out looking for the body, and he asked me if I could stick around the next day and keep an eye on the campground for him; he also asked if I would mind giving some friends of his their food drop, which was locked in his cabin. Next afternoon, the ranger’s friends came looking for him, and they found me, so I took them up to his cabin, gave them their food supplies. And as I’m walking back to camp, a man comes racing up the trail. He’s frantic. Wants to know where the ranger was. I told him he was out on a search-and-rescue and asked him what was wrong, at which point he told me his buddy had cut his kneecap off with a hatchet.
“I told him to get back to camp, that I would help them. I still hadn’t gotten out of my head what I’d said to that dead kid a couple nights before: ‘I’m talking to a dead man.’ I was still replaying it over and over, thinking that my words had doomed him.
“So we go running for the campsite as fast as we can. When we get there, I see a dozen or so people around, just looking at the guy, not doing a damn thing, except holding a shirt over the wound to stem the bleeding. I pushed through the crowd to take a closer look at his leg. There’s this chunk of bone stuck in this mess, this flap of flesh, that’s hanging on by about a half-inch of skin. It looked like a half-moon and was about the size of my palm. He had almost amputated the entire kneecap of his left leg.
“I told some people to start boiling water, and I asked him how this had happened. He said he and his buddies had brought a bunch of bottles of Wild Turkey with them; he had been drinking, then he decided to chop some firewood. So, being fairly drunk at that point, he decided to hold the wood he was chopping with his knee, and cut right next to it with his hand hatchet. Missed the wood. Got his knee instead.
“I explained that he needed surgery immediately or he would probably lose the kneecap and that outside help was at least eight hours away, probably more. I told him he had two options. First option: I could clean and dress the wound and hope that later on they might be able to do something for him, with the understanding that he would probably lose the kneecap. The other option was for me to sew it back in place, hoping that this would preserve it, so a doctor could fix it properly later. He said: do whatever it takes. So I told his friends to hold him and pour another pint of Wild Turkey down him. While that was taking place, I grabbed this big fellow who was standing there, pulled him to the side, asked if he threw a good punch. He said that when he was in the service he was his unit’s boxing champ. I told him that when I was ready, I would give him the nod, and at that point, he should knock out my patient.
“I was carrying a curved upholstery needle and some nylon thread for pack repairs. I washed my hands, then sterilized that needle, the thread, and my toothbrush—sterilized it with more whiskey. Then I gave the boxer the nod, and he hauled off with a roundhouse punch that knocked the guy right off the log and out like a light.
“The surgery goes like this. I take two more bottles of Turkey and start dumping it onto the knee, use my toothbrush to scrub around the wound. I know tendons are cut, but I don’t know what goes with what. I try to match them up as best I can, studying the cuts one at a time. It was like working with a toothpick-size puzzle and then trying to stitch the toothpick together. After I finished with the tendons, I sewed the cap of the knee back on. It took fifty-six stitches. When I was done, I sat back on a rock. I could feel the adrenaline flushing through my body. And you know what I said? I said: ‘I need a joint and a drink.’ In the morning, the rangers arrived, shot the guy up with Demerol, put an inflatable splint on him, and hauled him out on a mule; he was high as a kite and laughing. That was the last I ever saw of him.
“Five, six months later, in early December, I’m working at the Awahnee Hotel in the park when a ranger calls the kitchen and asks to speak with me. He told me he was down at the south entrance, and four guys were entering the park and that they were looking for a guy named Will who fit my description. He wanted to know, did I have a beef with anyone? No I didn’t, I said. Tell them where to find me.
“They showed up at the back door of the kitchen two hours later. As it turned out, it was the brother and some friends of the fellow I had done knee surgery on. They were in the park for ten days during school break. His brother said that he figured I would still be around after all this time and he wanted to show his appreciation for saving his knee. Turns out he sent them with two hundred dollars, a big bag of good weed, and a camera, to prove that they had found me. They had to bring back either the money and the weed, or a picture of me.
“I rearranged my schedule to play tour guide for their stay, and they wined and dined me well. They told me that when the brother reached the hospital and finally saw a doctor, the doctor wanted to know why the surgeon had used sewing thread on him. To which his reply was, the surgeon was some twenty-year-old kid who did that up on the trail. The doc told him it looked like a professional had worked on him, and ordered his family doc to wait at least two weeks to remove the stitches; he said he couldn’t have done a better job himself. Let me tell you: that sure made my day, to hear what high praise the doc had for my work.”