Blistered Kind Of Love (26 page)

We spent two and a half days in South Lake Tahoe, surrounded by a mural-scape of ivory-faced peaks and pine-covered slopes. While North Lake Tahoe
is home to the rich, lakeside mansion crowd, South Lake offers strip malls, condos, and, across the state line into Nevada, casinos. It's also the largest, most cosmopolitan town within ten miles of the PCT, which means that few thru-hikers can resist the lure of its beaches and cheap eats. I for one had been dreaming of dessert buffets for days.

Once settled in our $32-a-night motel (a short walk from the state line), we peppered our usual errands with big-town excitement. For the first time since leaving the East Coast, we went to a genuine, elephantine supermarket. The selection was as enormous as our appetites, and we spent over an hour filling our cart. We wore our (empty) packs to carry our groceries in, and I proudly sported a new red sundress. I'd bought it so I had something respectable to wear while I did the laundry; I was tired of wearing nothing but Gore-Tex while in town and longed to feel like a girl again. Duffy steadfastly refused to purchase anything non-essential and had to wait in our motel room in his birthday suit until the wash was done.

That night we headed to a $10.99 all-you-can-eat buffet at Harvey's Casino, where, after about four plates of food and two desserts, I slipped into a food coma. To revive me, Duffy whispered “movie,” and soon we were in the Horizon Casino Cinemas watching a Jim Carrey flick, which I swear was the funniest, most entertaining two hours of my life. I'd never before found Jim Carrey to be the least bit funny. Of course, I was high on sugar and seriously Hollywood deprived, so perhaps my opinion should not to be trusted. After the movie, Duffy lost $150 on blackjack (his frugality, it seems, does not apply to gambling), I broke even at the roulette table, and we walked back to the motel.

The next day, Duffy waited in the park while I called my parents from the McDonald's payphone. As my father and I talked, I thought I heard enthusiasm in his voice and soon, while watching the traffic whiz by on Highway 50, I was happily reliving our Sierra adventures, from the Guitar Lake hailstorm to the hairy stream crossings and glacier traverses. Just days before our hike began I'd promised my parents that I'd call them from every town to let them know that I was safe. This was my ninth such call and
each time the knot in my stomach loosened. Duffy and I had hiked 1,089 miles without serious illness or injury. I hoped that meant my parents would worry less and begin to see the bright side of the journey. Certainly I was worrying less, especially compared with the weeks after first telling my parents of our plans. Back then, I lived in fear that maybe I was doing the wrong thing. But now, with each step north I was more secure in my decisions.

“
Salvitur Ambulando
,” I told myself, “ ‘walking solves all things,' ” and I tried to believe it. It was a bright, sunny, warm day, and I jogged down the sidewalk to my rendezvous with Duffy.

As I neared our meeting place, I was startled by the sight of a man's bare back. He was sitting on a bench reading the newspaper, and I could see each of his ribs, along with the knobs of the individual vertebrae. It was like I was watching a PBS special on war refugees, but in actuality I was watching my boyfriend slowly waste away.

Ever since his bout with giardia, Duffy had been fighting a losing battle with weight loss. To understand this, you must know that Duffy is naturally tall and thin, like a beanpole. He didn't have much excess body fat to rely on when he became sick. And although Duffy was barely eating, he continued to hike, burning thousands of calories a day. By the time we reached Kennedy Meadows, his appetite had returned but any hint of body fat had disappeared. Through the Sierra, climbing a high mountain pass per day, he continued to lose body mass until his legs looked like toothpicks. At this rate, he'd be invisible by the time we reached Washington.

Many hikers underestimate the amount of food they'll need on the trail. A man sitting on the couch watching football all day will burn 2,000 calories. But a man carrying thirty pounds over uneven terrain will burn approximately 512 calories per hour—in ten hours of hiking, that's an
additional
5,000 calories. Of course, calorie usage varies with body weight, hiking conditions, and other factors, but a male thru-hiker's approximate daily caloric requirement is 7,000 calories, the equivalent of ten Sourdough Jack burgers, twenty-five Snickers bars, or thirty-eight root beer sodas.

The hiker who isn't ingesting as many calories as he burns will quickly
run into trouble. First, he'll have less energy for the day's hike, making it feel more arduous. Second, to compensate for lack of energy, his body will metabolize fat and, in the absence of fat, muscle. This in turn makes him even weaker. It's a hungry and insidious spiral. Fortunately, most of us have spare tires and love handles to turn to for emergency energy. But when all that body fat has been used up, a race against time ensues. Duffy was already at that critical juncture, and we still had 1,566 miles to go. He'd have to make a concerted effort to eat more or else it wouldn't be my knee sending us home, but his skin and bones.

In her book
Woman's Guide: Backpacking
, Adrienne Hall states that male long-distance hikers are at greater risk for weight loss than their female counterparts because they have a lower fat-to-muscle ratio. On Hall's Appalachian Trail thru-hike, she lost eight pounds while her husband (who'd even tried to fatten up prior to the trek) sacrificed thirty. I could see a similar equation playing out before my eyes—while I'd probably dropped ten pounds Duffy was well on his way to losing twenty-five.

When I broached the subject of his new starvation look, Duffy became defensive. “Maybe if you didn't eat so darn fast I wouldn't be burning up all my muscle.”

Whoa. Granted, we shared our dinner out of the same pot, and I do eat fast, but it never occurred to me that Duffy didn't think he was getting his fair share. Now it was my turn to be defensive.

“We're both hungry and losing weight,” I said. My voice got higher in pitch and I waved my spindly arm in his face for effect. “But if you think you're not getting enough to eat, we should carry some extra peanut butter or something, just for you. Don't blame it all on me; we need to be carrying more food, that's all.” But Duffy was hesitant to add much more weight to our packs. He wanted to stop splitting the food fifty-fifty.

“I'm bigger than you and carry a heavier pack. I need more calories,” he stated with a hint of resentment.

This was my worst fear. Resentment is an ugly, gnawing scourge of an emotion. I knew that all too well because it was already scratching at the back
door of my mind. I resented the fact that Duffy could walk so quickly and so far without needing a rest, and that our hike seemed to be more physically and emotionally demanding on me than it was on him.

I'd expected to see bitterness in Duffy's eyes at some point, but I thought its source would be my hiking pace and stamina (or comparative lack thereof). The fact that his unhappiness centered on how we shared our food was shocking and humiliating. No one wants to be known as a greedy pig, and for a woman, that's an especially stinging slap in the face. But here I was, with my lover telling me that I was eating too much and that he was falling ill as a result. Could I feel lower? I rubbed my protruding collarbone and pulled my knobby knees toward my chest.

It seemed ironic that we'd be having this food fight in town, not long after visiting the supermarket. But on the trail, there was little energy for fighting. In town, with full bellies and a good night of sleep behind us, our animal survival instincts belatedly kicked in. Before we went for each other's throats with gnashing teeth, I was determined to come up with a solution. “Fine,” I said, “from now on, you get more of the food. You can have a big bite of every Snickers, energy bar, and cookie before I eat it. At dinner, you use the ladle and I'll use the little spoon.”

“That'll only work if you stop shoveling so fast.” Duffy was not fully satisfied.

“I'll go bite for bite with you. And when we have peanut butter and crackers, I'll give you two for every one of mine. Deal?” At this point I'd have done anything to make Duffy happy and forestall an anorexia-induced collapse.

The seemingly logical solution to all this was to just carry more food. We weren't hiking through a famine-ravished nation and had an abundance of nutritious and delicious items at our disposal. But we feared that by carrying much more food we would just trade one discomfort for another—heavier packs instead of gnawing hunger pains. For better or for worse, we chose hunger.

Even though we'd come to a fragile food distribution compromise, the sunny afternoon in town seemed to dull and we became restless. There just
didn't seem to be much to talk about anymore. It was time to start hiking again.

We took a taxi from the town of South Lake Tahoe back to Echo Lake, where we rejoined the trail and entered the Desolation Wilderness, so named for its dearth of trees. When glaciers carved this sixty-thousand-acre region they left a layer of rocky soil too unstable to support the root systems of many trees. The result is subalpine terrain with many characteristics of higher elevations, including wide-open views of granitic peaks and numerous rock-bound, glassy lakes and tarns. In sum, it's a backpacker's playground, just a few minutes from the bustling shores of Lake Tahoe and only hours from San Francisco. Which is why the Desolation Wilderness is far from desolate—it boasts the highest density of hikers per square mile of any roadless area in California.

As the blue waters of Echo Lake faded in the distance, we climbed along wildflower-blanketed slopes, passing side trails leading to Triangle Lake, Tamarack Lake, Lake of the Woods, Lake Margery, and Lake Lucille. After six miles we came upon Lake Aloha and its open, white granite shores. The water was wind-rippled, speckled with barren islets and pierced by gray, weathered lodgepole snags. On the opposite shore, rising out of the stillness stood Pyramid Peak, delicately laced with snow. The scene was stunningly beautiful, and we approached Aloha's waters slowly, as if advancing toward an altar. After soaking the scene in for a few minutes, we reluctantly moved on.

We camped at a delightful tarn that night—one with long, spindly grass growing out of it. As the sun set, it bathed the rock face behind the tarn in warm pink light. The foul aura of our food fight dissipated as we wrapped our skinny, shivering limbs around each other for warmth.

Over the next several days we continued to descend out of the glaciated Sierra and into the volcanic Cascades. While traversing a four-mile ridge we peered down slope toward the Alpine Meadows and Squaw Valley (site of
the 1960 winter Olympics) ski areas. Spidery chair lifts were strung overhead like mountain swing sets.

Cruising along Tinker Knob we had dramatic 360-degree panoramic views of the Tahoe area. Tahoe, in the Native American Washoe language, means “water,” and with an average depth of 989 feet and a circumference of seventy-one miles, Lake Tahoe certainly holds a lot of that. Lake Tahoe's maximum depth is 1,645 feet, which makes it the tenth deepest lake in the world and the second deepest lake in the country (Crater Lake in Oregon is deeper). From our mountain vantage point, however, the lake looked like a large rain puddle, perfect for splashing in with a new pair of rubber boots.

Mark Twain wrote of Lake Tahoe, “I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords.” And even after all the eye-numbingly exquisite vistas I'd seen over the past sixty-nine days, I had to agree—this was up there. As we sat on a ledge for a photograph (taken by an obliging day hiker), the lake and its forests spread out below. My legs dangled off the edge, and it seemed like if I just stretched a little farther, I could dip my big toe in the cool blue water.

Lake Tahoe is arguably Northern California's favorite getaway, offering skiing, snowboarding, snowshoeing, and sledding in the winter and hiking, biking, boating, and swimming in the summer. The lake, once known for its crystal clear, deep blue waters, is now paying the price for its popularity. Construction and overuse have caused the slopes around the lake to erode, sending sediment into the waters, increasing the growth of algae and generally mucking everything up, to a point where the lake's clarity has been reduced by twenty-five percent. By all accounts, Tahoe is still gorgeous but perhaps a little less so, which has plenty of people concerned. If you've ever driven around Northern California, you've certainly seen the bumper stickers that read “Keep Tahoe Blue.”

I'm sure that if Tahoe Tessie could (or should I say “would”?) speak, she'd plead for Tahoe's blueness as well. Since the time of the Washoe Indians, there have been reports of a monster in the lake. Even today, fishermen report that “something big down there” straightens their hooks and breaks their lines. This
“something,” known as Tahoe Tessie, is reported to be ten to fifteen feet long. Every year about half a dozen Tahoe Basin residents and tourists say they see her—albeit briefly—before she disappears into the lake's depths. Jacques Cousteau headed an expedition to the lake's bottom in search of Tessie, but never revealed his findings or film footage to the public, reportedly saying, “The world isn't ready.” But I was pretty darn ready and had the Lake Tahoe Monster Museum's hotline number in my pack, in case I needed to report a long-distance sighting.