Roger Moore is the third prize winner for OMCA's Tenaya Lodge Contest! Roger wins a guided nature walk around Lake Merritt with an OMCA naturalist, complete with bird watching and a special Blue Oak café picnic. We think that Amelia and Matthew will especially enjoy this outing. Congratulations, Roger, and thank you for sending your thoughtful essay below!

My Yosemite dream weekend begins and ends with a boy in a tree, with a middle featuring a wide-eyed girl with her nose in a book. The images are closer than they may seem. The first boy in the tree lay asleep in a bedroom in suburban Chicago four decades ago, with a copy of his new favorite book, Maurice Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are, barely covering his nose as he snored loudly (or so my mother later told me).

I had just turned six, and flowers had started to bloom in the snow-sprinkled spring, months before my parents' grumbling about "that Nixon" and the Cubs' inevitable collapse first taught me the meaning of loss. The image of Sendak's Max celebrating the wild rumpus as the king of beasts was so powerful that anything seemed possible. I spent part of the next day dragging so many branches and leaves into my bedroom that it looked like a soon-to-be condemned campground.

Thus began a city nerd's lifelong love of nature. Despite lacking any coordination or building skills, I somehow became an Eagle Scout and an avid camper and hiker. My favorite book in high school was Thoreau's Walden, at least until the trip to Massachusetts where I got food poisoning eating a "Walden Burger" in a crowded mall near what is left of Walden Pond. But despite loving and revering nature, it mostly seemed like an "away game" for me, recreational time out from the real-life struggles for justice and sanity in my city life. After years with my nose in books, I fully expected to teach constitutional law or civil rights.

Then, by what seemed like a fluky set of coincidences, I found myself living in California and hiking in Muir Woods with the future love of my life, Paula. Later I finally got to visit Yosemite Valley, and a single gaze at Half Dome left me transfixed. A few dozen hikes with bad directions later, I had absorbed some of Muir's magical journals and my new set of Western heroes-Stegner, Didion, Powell, Solnit-who understood that out here, beyond the hundredth meridian, "nature" wasn't an away game, it was the only game. I became a public interest environmental lawyer, and the Tenaya Lodge has become a sacred place for me at the annual conferences that gave me a chance to meet great poets of nature like Craig Childs and Gary Snyder. But I've never been able to bring my kids there.

My wide-eyed nine-year old, Amelia, wants to be a marine biologist. She swims like a fish, and her sacred spaces are Moss Landing and Monterey. But she still has a bit of fear of the mountains, even after one skiing trip, and I want her to experience the magic of the Sierras and the glory of the valley. She keeps amazing journals, and was transfixed at the Oakland Museum looking at Muir's meticulous records of all things living. She needs Yosemite, and as climate change and pollution transform what is there, it may need her just as much. Amelia would love to ski at Badger Pass and skate at Curry, in between journal entries.

My boy Matthew, who just turned six, is an amazing tree-climber who ventures higher than I ever dared (and while wide awake). But I want him to experience time and sounds more slowly, watching birds make music in the trees and living his life at three miles an hour or less. And I want him to bring what he learns right back to Oakland. Wendell Berry was right when he said that "there are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places." Seeing where the wild things are will help Matthew love and revere the sacred space right here at home, looking out from the highest branch he can find.

-Submitted by Roger Moore