Detroit to Gloryland

Written by Garrett Dempsey

Fall Issue '24 - Online Shop

Do Lord, oh do Lord

Do remember me

Do Lord, oh do Lord

Do remember me

Do Lord, oh do Lord

Do remember me

Goin way beyond the blue

I got a home in Gloryland

That outshines the sun

I got a home in Gloryland

That outshines the sun

I got a home in Gloryland

That outshines the sun

Goin way beyond the blue

Spiritual

Shelton Johnson grew up in northwest Detroit. He graduated from Cass Tech High School in 1976, seemingly a world away from Yosemite National Park and the Range of Light that would become his home. Three decades after graduating from Cass Tech, Shelton begins his novel, Gloryland, with the spiritual quote above. His path to Yosemite, and the legacy of hundreds of Black soldiers who also journeyed far from their homes up into the high elevations of the Sierra Nevada Mountains between 1899 and 1904, was the inspiration for a 2024 version of this journey. Eight Detroit youth and as many adults traveled this past summer to visit Yosemite, to bring Shelton good tidings from the Great Lakes, and to make their own epic journey from Detroit to Gloryland.

Where does one begin a story framed by two places with such sublime beauty as Yosemite and the Great Lakes? Shelton doesn’t use the moniker “Gloryland” lightly. He has experienced the transcendence of that place. Shelton was also raised in the cradle of our planet’s largest freshwater basin. He grew up surrounded by great nature. Just imagine the Great Lakes for a moment, and zoom out, letting your mind’s eye see the earth fade into the distance until it's only a pale blue dot in that vastness of space. Freshwater, our life blood, gathers in our part of this tiny spec of star dust on a scale unlike anyplace we have observed in the solar system. One can almost feel the weight of it in the big lake, Gichigami, and sense its movement as it flows through the Strait of Lake Erie. The Niagara Falls could almost become an afterthought in the grand scale of the entire basin. 

So where do we begin a story about a journey between two places that defy all description? Let’s start by remembering that all the special places in our lives were new and unfamiliar to us at one point. Whether we experienced a place only once, or so many times that one memory bleeds into another, the imprint on our lives is indelible. As you read the tale of our group venturing to Yosemite, hopefully we do more than just describe what we experienced, hopefully we remind you of what the most special places in your life mean to you. This Yosemite trip changed our lives. This story is a celebration of the transformative power of nature.

Speaking of new and unfamiliar places…

I moved to Michigan from the San Francisco Bay Area over ten years ago. I knew next to nothing of substance about this place before I arrived. I knew three things: Axel Foley was from Detroit, the place was surrounded by tons of water, and there was an island with expert fudge makers somewhere on one of the lakes. (To be honest, I knew about three other things: Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye. But that’s pretty much it.) Shortly after I arrived, I wrote a few lines in homage to some Ojibwe friends that helped me get my bearings in this new place:

Heart and mind shaped by the Pacific

Foghorn lullaby

Crashing waves for a wake up call

Then a move to Michigan and it all went quiet

Anishinaabeg voices broke the silence

Maple sap courses through xylem, rice stalks rustle and sway over water

Songs are sung

Plastic and leather pouches fingered open, whispered gratitude, tobacco spread

I offer this because the journey from Detroit to Yosemite was as much about people as it was about place. Our Detroit crew, while unique in their own way, are all in the Great Lakes because of Manoomin. While my wife’s career drove our move to Detroit, none of what we know would be here but for Manoomin and the Anishinaabe relationship with it. Rice and maple sugar have been powering birch bark canoes around the lakes long before young Henry Ford worked on engines along Atwater Street in Detroit. I have witnessed African American teenagers in Detroit ponder their own story while in conversation with Ojibwe educators there to share lessons learned from our natural world. People and place are inseparable. In turn, Shelton shared with our group, in the midst of a full day together in the park, that he developed a deeper understanding of his African heritage through his time as an interpretive park ranger in Yosemite. As if on cue during our trip, I read a few brief sentences on one of the Buffalo Soldiers installations about some of the Black officers that remained overseas after the Philippine American War in the early years of the 1900s. Their assignment was to train a new division of Filipino officers of the United States Army known as the Philippine Scouts. My grandfather was an infant during that war, but he eventually became one of those Philippine Scouts, and that determined how he and our family endured the next war to visit the islands—World War II. Our family did not make it through the war unscathed.

We lost my grandmother, her sister, and nephew. My grandfather emigrated with his large Filipino family to San Francisco, his first command located in what is now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. His third oldest child, my Uncle Melecio, eventually graduated from West Point. It was a proud day for my grandfather and our family. I’m still struck by the new revelation that Buffalo Soldiers had a hand in shaping what would become one of the most significant elements of my grandfather’s, indeed my family’s, story.

On a recent visit to Washington D.C. I found myself with some time before my departure and I decided to trace down some of the Buffalo Soldiers lineage and legacy with a visit to Arlington National Cemetery. I went there to visit the gravesite of Charles Young. He commanded regiments of the Buffalo Soldiers in the Philippines as well as the High Sierra. His command of Sequoia and General Grant National Parks in 1903 made him the first African American superintendent of a national park. He’s legendary, and I wanted to pay my respects. (By the time I arrived at Arlington, I had forty-five minutes to locate his marker and return to the gate. I was like Tuco in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—running through the cemetery, my head on a swivel looking at every name as I made my way along the sprawling rows of fallen warriors.) I finally found his marker. It’s a simple design, but of a size and location befitting his station. He rests on the edge of a gently sloping ridge, not many others below his marker, just a small hillside of grass leading to a small valley with the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier atop the adjacent ridge, an orange and indigo sky deepening into the winter afternoon at the time of my visit. It was quiet (other than the sound of my labored breaths from 30 minutes of running) and I grew reflective. Charles Young was the third African American to graduate from West Point. He and the soldiers under his command shaped the story of our county. They had a hand in shaping my grandfather’s story back when his homeland was the object of Uncle Sam’s first imperial desire. Then fifty years after Charles Young graduated from West Point, my Uncle Melecio did the same. While my uncle wasn’t the third Filipino to achieve that honor, there couldn’t have been too many before him that did.

Woodwind Song in the Forest

The Buffalo Soldiers of the 24^th Infantry and the 9^th Cavalry served in the High Sierra from 1899 to 1903. It took them thirteen days to trek from San Francisco to their summer post in the mountains. It took our Detroit crew thirteen hours to fly from Detroit and drive up to our campsite alongside the Merced River in Yosemite Valley, but those hours were stretched across a twenty hour day beginning with a 3:00 a.m. wake up call. Our group of fifteen touched down at SFO and then received a crash course in San Francisco history (and weather) in the few hours we spent there before heading up into the mountains. It was important to visit the Presidio Army Base where the Buffalo Soldiers stationed before beginning their trek across California and up to their summer post in Yosemite, Giant Sequoia, and General Grant National Parks. The airport was sunny, then 30 minutes later we were at the Golden Gate, where fog-laden, stiff breezes blew sand in our faces. Waves crashed on the rocks sending salt spray into the air. The Interpretive Park Rangers waiting to greet us were all wearing thick, green puffy jackets. For the uninitiated; this is summer in San Francisco! It meant a lot to our group that the three rangers welcoming us took the time to share some of their own story as well as that of the Fort and the Buffalo Soldiers that came before us all. Christian is a Black Park Ranger and he’s from Detroit. (Couldn’t have dialed that one up any better.) We made sure to bring him some Manoomin. Christina and Alejandro are Californians from the great Central Valley and their families trace their stories south to Mexico. All their stories resonated with our own in some way and they welcomed us like extended family.

By the time we made it into the mountains, it was dark. When the sun rose the following morning, our crew awoke to a forest of tall trees and backdrop of thousand-foot rock faces on both sides. We had a day to acclimate to the space, hear stories about the bears wandering through camp, and greet the other members of our group arriving from other parts of the country. The next day started early. It was National Buffalo Soldiers Day and Shelton Johnson was spending it with us.

Shelton is a trained musician. Most people forget this. They are drawn in by his command of the spoken and written word, yet he has the soul of an artist and it manifests in most everything he does. As we all settled into our chairs, the eager energy hung in the air over our circle. Shelton invited us to get comfortable, but the “edge” was evident. We’d anticipated this moment for a long time. Then Shelton pulled a small, hand carved flute of sorts from a string around his neck. He asked if he could play us a short tune, and with no more of an introduction than that, his notes filled the space between the trees. It blended with the bird calls and then subsumed them. Our ears could only hear his tune, all our eyes trained on this one person in our circle, offering us a song to begin our time together. When Shelton finished, we smiled, offered gentle and sincere appreciations. It was the response of an audience delighted, and now we were settled in and ready.

Our lives are so scheduled, but this day was designed not to be. The students among us live by a bell schedule for nine months out of the year. The rest of us, many at least, move through days broken into thirty or sixty minute meetings. Increasingly we can stack up entire days with neatly aligned rectangles on each day of our weekly calendars. So for our group to have an entire day filled with intentionality but without a required agenda, it was a joy. Shelton gave us long form storytelling at its finest. He laid out for us a figurative tapestry: legacies of the Buffalo Soldiers, the history of parks, displacement, migration, civil rights, liberation, and self realization. Our time in that circle epitomized the intersection of people and place. Then the students and the teachers gave Shelton gifts from their schools, from his school in fact, and his hometown. It was a perfect warm up for the day ahead.

Shelton led us on a hike to Sentinel Dome where we enjoyed full circle views of the High Sierra. It was one of many jaw dropping moments, and this one ranked pretty close to the top, literally. We were awestruck by the view. The teens scrambled to all parts of the dome, clambering up small piles of boulders dropped atop this rock thousands of years ago by a glacier. Each vantage point begged for a selfie or group picture. 

Legends Atop the Rock

For much of our time on Sentinel Dome, Shelton was off to the side, engaged in conversation with another member of our party, Philip Henderson, a world-renowned Black mountaineer and a friend. We first met Phil when he introduced our Detroit Outdoors crew to ice climbing at Michigan Ice Fest five years ago. If one is to have a guide through the mass of stoked up humanity that is a climbing festival, Phil is the man. He met our group at MI Ice Fest again last winter, this time as one of the professional instructors brought in by Down Wind Sports. In between those times, Phil busied himself doing no less than organizing the first ever all Black Mt. Everest expedition team, known as Full Circle Everest. He joined us in Yosemite because like Shelton, Phil loves the outdoors and he’s committed to sharing this connection with the next generation, particularly Black and Brown youth. He’s akin to Shelton in another way: they are both at the pinnacle of their professions. Their peers are the best in the business, and speaking of the best, they were joined on Sentinel Dome by Chris Hill, the Chief Conservation and Outdoors Officer of the Sierra Club, an outdoors woman and national leader in the environmental and conservation movement. She too was drawn into this Yosemite crew because of the opportunity to support the next generation of outdoors enthusiasts. (And for the record, Chris has also climbed with us at Michigan Ice Fest. She climbed with Conrad Anker and Sam Elias at Ice Fest as well, but that’s a story for another time.)

Seeing the three of them atop the rock, with Half Dome and Yosemite Falls in the distance, I couldn’t help but think about the famous photograph of Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir taking in this same vista in 1903, less than a mile from where we stood on Sentinel Dome. Buffalo Soldiers escorted Roosevelt through San Francisco in the days before he made his trip to Yosemite, and Charles Young commanded a detachment of those soldiers in the Sierra that summer. Now here we were, observing Buffalo Soldiers Day just over one hundred and twenty years after Roosevelt and Muir made cause with one another up on this rock, and this day we had another three national leaders, legends of their own time, gathered in the same place. At a time when all the statistics and reports tell us that People of Color are strikingly underrepresented in outdoor recreation and conservation spaces, the gathering of Shelton Johnson, Philip Henderson, and Chris Hill atop the second national park ever created in the world portends that we can indeed overcome.

Campfires as Sacred Space

As any coach will tell you, the team locker room is a special place. One must earn entry into that space and respect is paramount. Campfires and the circle around them can be just the same. So it has been ever since our ancestors first gathered around the flickering flames. Our Yosemite crew will never assemble in that configuration again, yet we created a remarkable experience together. Our first “circle up” of the journey was in the baggage claim area of the San Francisco airport. For the first few times our circles kept changing as new members arrived, and once we settled into Yosemite the campfire became our circle. That was our space to reflect, share, and listen. We opened up to one another around that campfire and in turn made the experience of Yosemite deeper for each person. It’s a sacred space that one is invited into. I’ve shared lots of my own reflections in the preceding paragraphs but there was so much more shared by our group in that space that I will never put into words. I’ll carry them with me, and maybe some of the things I shared will stick with my companions. The key to the whole thing is that you have to earn it to really get it. There’s no cliff notes or downloads of the experience. In some ways, our Yosemite crew took ten years to assemble. Shelton Johnson was the cornerstone, and all the years that Detroit Outdoors has spent leading outings in Detroit and throughout the Great Lakes we’ve known we carried his spirit and commitment with us. We didn’t sign up for a Yosemite trip in a catalog, we’ve built relationships with partners, battled mosquitos along the Rouge River, climbed ice along Pictured Rocks, plunged into Lake Superior (which felt like ice), dipped our paddles into the Au Sable, developed teens into outdoor leaders, and convinced dozens of adults that they could be the ones to introduce the next generation to nature. We didn’t just travel from Detroit to Yosemite, we brought Detroit there with us and became like family in the process. Now we have a home in Gloryland and we will remember it forever.

BIO

Garrett Dempsey is the lead Sierra Club staff with Detroit Outdoors. His experiences growing up in San Francisco and organizing with communities in Oakland, California and Detroit have shaped his passion for connecting urban youth with the outdoors and nature.

Fall Issue '24 - Online Shop