![]() “I remember thanking him for doing that,” Pratt recalled, “and he said, ‘That’s what I love to do, help people share happiness.’ Something like that, anyway. to help Pratt put on a wildlife festival. ![]() He gained weight in his later years, but he was a devoted rock-climber and gardener, and he “swam with a beautiful stroke,” Glover told me. Glover told me about sitting outside Vasquez’s mobile home with him and listening to his wind chimes, whose music can be heard in the video. He always had that kid’s glint of excitement in his eye.” She added, “He didn’t hold it against people who thought he was just goofy.” “A happy, happy person whose language was laughter. “That’s just how he was in life,” Pratt told me. (This same brother went on to work three seasons in Yosemite, where he saw a “moonbow,” a kind of nocturnal rainbow caused by bright moonlight refracted, in his case, through a waterfall’s mist.) Vasquez enjoyed cannabis but said that he had not been high. A cynical thought, born of narrow, urban minds, and one that I myself had ten years ago, when my brother sent the video to me. Over the past decade, many have speculated, or simply assumed, that Vasquez was stoned when he filmed the double rainbow. “I think that contributed to his decline,” Glover said. Last winter, a tree fell on his home, and it was impossible to keep it warm until spring. “It somehow survived, despite the snow.” There, he watched appreciatively as the seasons changed. “He even had a blood-orange tree,” Glover told me. He grew plums, peaches, and mulberries on the property, which his cattle dogs roamed freely. In 1988, as a twenty-five-year-old newcomer to the valley, Vasquez “hacked” that home “out of the wilderness,” as he put it in another video. More recently, he worked odd jobs while farming and filming the twenty acres where he lived alone in a mobile home, ten miles outside Yosemite National Park. (He lost this lone fight.) In Yosemite Valley, in the late eighties and nineties, Vasquez, who eventually grew a long gray beard that hung below long black curls and over a barrel chest, was a security officer and an E.M.T. ![]() He once fought in a cage-“he made some money, but he didn’t like it, because he was not a macho guy,” Beth Glover, a close friend of Vasquez’s, told me. Born in East Los Angeles, he’d worked as a firefighter as a young man. He was fifty-seven and is survived by two adult children. On Sunday, the Modesto Bee reported that Vasquez had died, the previous day, in Mariposa, California. This goes on for more than three minutes: Vasquez making sounds of astonishment coupled with laughter, then tears, then a pure and plaintive melding of the two, and a question, “What does this mean?” Wow! Wow! Whoa! Whoa! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Whoa!” ![]() The video, which has nearly forty-eight million views on YouTube, begins with casual narration from Vasquez (“Whoa, that’s a full rainbow”), which quickly turns ecstatic: “All the way! Double rainbow! Oh, my God-it’s a double rainbow all the way! Whoa, that’s so intense! Whoa, man. . . . I pressed Play for the twenty-eighth or so time. The camera could not capture the vivid intensity and brightness.” A sober note was composed in tranquillity, as such things are. Vasquez, who was known to his friends as Bear, wrote, “It was rainbowing for at least an hour on January 8th 2010. In the description below the video, Paul L. When I needed it most, about a month ago, I remembered a YouTube video, in which a pair of rainbows arc over Northern California’s Yosemite Valley. Vasquez was known for his viral video of a double rainbow.
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