The Cactus Eaters
Authors: Dan White
How I Lost My Mind—and Almost Found
Myself—on the Pacific Crest Trail
For Amy
Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods. Here grow the wallflower and the violet. The squirrel will come and sit upon your knee, the logcock will wake you in the morning. Sleep in forgetfulness of all ill.
—John Muir,
The Wilderness World of John Muir
Many lives are so empty of interest that their subject must first perform some feat like sailing alone around the world or climbing a hazardous peak in order to elevate himself above mere existence, and then, having created a life, to write about it.
—William Gass,
The Art of Self:
Autobiography in the Age of Narcissism
I
t’s 9:00
A.M
. in the southern edge of the Sierra Nevada, eighty-five degrees and rising. The water in our bottles is almost gone, but I don’t panic. I suck my tongue. I lick my hot teeth.
Allison, my girlfriend, stirs in her sleeping bag. She wakes up slowly, stretching her arms to the tent’s nylon roof. From the way she smiles at me, you’d never know we’re in crisis mode again. Yesterday, our unbreakable leakproof water bag broke and leaked all over my $385 Gregory Robson backpack. We’ve been rationing for fourteen hours now. I take a deep breath, try to stay calm, and smile back at her as best I can. Our love is still strong, in spite of the fact that Allison’s hair is shagging into her eyes this morning, making her look like a yak, and in spite of the fact that we haven’t had sex in God knows how long. I emerge from our tent on my hands and knees and shake my boots for scorpions. There are none this morning. My socks are brown and hard and smell like ham. I put them on anyway. Allison puts on hers. “Cowboy up,” she says. She has splotches of dirt all over her body. I’m not looking so great, either. After
178.3 miles and 2 1/2 weeks of this journey to the north, my shirt rots on my back. Pig bristles sprout from my chin.
We dust ourselves off and load our stuff into our backpacks. I walk out into the dry heat with Allison, my back pain, and the little bit of water we’ve saved. Five miles to go until we reach Yellow Jacket Spring. I am worried that the spring will not exist, or will have uranium or a dead cow in it. This morning I feel the strain of all we’ve seen and experienced: the heat blisters, the rashes, the dust devils, the coyotes who keep us up at night with their relentless whining. Still, things could be worse. At least we’re making progress. This, after all, is our dream, to be here in a real wilderness. I remind myself that we’re here by choice. We walk on. Beads of sweat draw paisley patterns through the dirt on my legs.
I watch Allison move through the landscape with confidence. Though she’s dirty and tired, and in spite of what’s happening to her hair, she is still lovely. She pouts in concentration as she studies the map and compass. Now she’s passing me on the trail, edging around me, taking the recon position without consulting me. Is this an unspoken act of rebellion, I wonder? I walk behind her, and though I wish she’d spoken to me about this leadership change—I’m the designated leader for today—at least I’ve got a nice view of her calves and her trail-hardened bottom as she leans forward to climb the hill, her hands on her shoulder straps. Her solar-reflective Outdoor Research survival hat shades her face. I try to forget my thirst, but I just can’t. Every time I swallow, it feels like there’s a Nerf ball in my throat.
The word
Sierra
conjures images of mountains, glaciers, rivers, and charming marmots. Scratch those pictures from your mind. Replace them with dust and dirt and sweat, canyon oak, piñon pine, and in the middle distance, blunt-topped crags the shape and color of an old dog’s teeth. Every once in a while there’s a hint of darker colors: the slate-gray berries on a juniper bush, the black on the back of a turkey vulture below us in a canyon, but
for the most part the scenery is pale beige, the color of stucco, the color of gefilte fish. The Pacific Crest Trail is renowned for its beauty, but this patch of trail is plug-ugly, and we haven’t seen a human in five days. We walk downhill along an abandoned jeep road to search for the spring. Every once in a while the top of a piñon pine peeks from behind a stack of boulders. A mirage appears in a bend on the road. Pools of quicksilver fade as we approach. After fifteen minutes, the dirt road levels, then turns uphill on a punishing grade. I’m starting to wonder why we haven’t found the water. It seems we’ve gone far enough. I’m starting to worry that the spring has dried up.
To distract myself, I remember how we boasted about the trail to everyone who would listen. Even Patrick, my swordfish-nosed barber, knows all about it. Allison and I ditched our jobs in Torrington, Connecticut, to walk the Pacific Crest Trail, a 3-to-10-feet-wide, 2,650-mile-long strip of dirt, mud, snow, ice, and gravel running from Mexico to Canada. The trail starts at the Mexico-California border town of Campo, buzzing with border patrol guards in helicopters. It climbs the Laguna, San Jacinto, and San Bernardino ranges, drops to the Joshua trees and hot sands of the western Mojave Desert, and rises close to the base of Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the lower forty-eight states. The trail nears the thermal stench pots, fumaroles, boiling lakes, and gassy geysers of Lassen. Then it pushes through the Columbia River Gorge and into the North Cascades before coming to a stop in Manning Park, British Columbia. The trail spans California, Oregon, and Washington. On the PCT, you pass through state and federal lands, sovereign Native American territory and timber holdings. You see a thousand lakes, and travel through seven national parks. In the northern lands, mountain goats scale hundred-foot walls in seconds flat. Reach out your hand and you can grab a fistful of huckleberries right off the bush. In northern streams, river otters splash in the shallows.
The PCT is America’s loveliest long-distance hiking path, but the trail exacts a toll for a glimpse of its pretty places. In some areas, you must find your way amid the firebreaks and game trails that slither off in all directions like the fever dreams of a serial killer. Ticks, in chaparral lowlands, will crawl onto hikers and bite them in the armpits and groin. Walkers whip off their clothes to find forty or fifty of them at once, looking like M&Ms with legs. More than 50 percent of the people who walk the trail give up in despair, often within the first week. The route has existed in various forms for more than forty years, and in that time, roughly a thousand people have hiked it all. That’s fewer than the number of people who have stood atop Mount Everest.
The trail ranges from just above sea level to 13,180 feet. It twists through lands where surface temperatures creep past a hundred degrees, and up into terrain that is snowbound for most of the year. Pacific Crest Trail hikers must time their walks perfectly. If they start too early, they find themselves marooned like Ernest Shackleton, hacking at snow walls with their ice axes. If they start too late, the Mojave toasts them in their boots. Even if they make it through the desert, snowstorms will slam them in the Cascades, sometimes in early September. Unfortunately for Allison and me, we couldn’t get out of Connecticut until June. Now it’s almost July and the landscape is set on broil. It’s empty here. Most hikers passed through these lands six weeks ago. Allison walks beside me now, her footsteps faster and more insistent. “Why,” she says, “is it so fucking hard to get a drink around here?”
The guidebook claims there’s a spring at the top of the next hill, just off the jeep road. But when we get to the top, there’s no water at all, only invasive thistles with barbs sprouting from them. Everything here is thorny. All creatures crouch and squint. A collared lizard rests on the trunk of a dead pine tree and stares at a point in the distance. As I glance at the lizard,
I wonder why he looks so comfortable out here. In fact, the lizard is doing push-ups against a rock, practicing calisthenics in the burning sun. I wonder why he seems relaxed, and how someone as smart as I am could run out of water.
Water is so basic. It’s elemental. And it’s never been in dispute that I’m smart. I have a degree in English with honors from Wesleyan. The
U.S. News and World Report
ranked Wesleyan higher than Middlebury in its most recent listings, and while we got edged out this year by Swarthmore, we beat the shit out of Bucknell again. My genetic inheritance should also count for something. And unlike the lizard, whose life is a series of simple impulses, I’m complex. There has been life on this planet for 3.8 billion years. Homo sapiens, my people, have been around for only the last 200 odd millennia. A lot of trial and error has gone into our development. Our ancestors started out with gills and mud flaps, but we got over it. I am the result of a painstaking process. The lizard and his kind have been trapped in an evolutionary funk hole for millions of years. My brain, if I had to guess, weighs 1,400 grams, which shakes out to something like 3 1/2 pounds, give or take a gram. The lizard’s brain weighs a fraction of a gram. The lizard cannot reason. He has no appreciation for symbols and abstractions, nor can he solve the most basic problems. He can’t even regulate his body temperature. So why am I so fucking thirsty? And why is the lizard smiling?
This is nothing, I tell myself, nothing at all, as Allison watches me, squinting. “You’ll figure this out, you’ll find the water,” I tell myself. “You’re the smartest guy in the room.” In fact, I’m the only guy in the room, but there’s no room, and I’m starting to wonder why we didn’t just go to Bora Bora. I hear it’s overdeveloped but nice. You can get a package deal there. The Beachcomber is, supposedly, pretty sweet. At this moment, we could be out on the warm Pacific Ocean, eating wahoo burgers, drinking cold Hinano lagers, having sex on decorative
mats in a glass-bottom over-water bungalow with views of sea cucumbers and eels. Instead, we are here by choice, staggering. Pines rise from the gulches, and while I know it’s unwise to anthropomorphize lizards, not to mention trees, you’d have a hard time convincing me that those pine trees don’t look like rows of upraised middle fingers. The gulches look as if they must be holding water, but when we walk out into the trees and take a closer look, there’s nothing but more dirt. I’m starting to lose it now. We’ve been thirsty for hours, and while I can’t gauge the extent of my dehydration, I can feel the temperature climb past ninety degrees. If the spring has dried up, I suppose we could turn around, get back to the trail, and head north to another spring. But the nearest spring is seven miles to the north, and what if it’s not there, either?
I’m scanning the scenery wildly, feeling every heartbeat thump in my temples. I recall a factoid from my high school biology class. Mrs. Caterberg said that donkeys and camels can lose a third of their water weight and suffer no ill effects. But if a human being loses a tenth of his body’s water weight, he starts acting crazy. If he loses 25 percent, his blood turns to pudding. His muscles seize up. Then he starts hallucinating. Eventually his tongue turns black. So how much water weight have I lost already? How about Allison? Ten percent? Eleven percent?
At last, a stab of light appears through the trees. We waddle through the underbrush and arrive at a patch of brown-red dirt and dry grass with a sad little sinkhole in the middle of it. In the middle of the sinkhole is a puddle three by two feet, a few inches deep. It’s our only option. There are leeches in the water. I poke my index finger into the muck. The water is lukewarm and indescribably filthy, but I don’t hyperventilate. Allison takes off her pack and removes our water filtration survival bucket—the sawed-off bottom of a gallon-sized Safeway fruit punch container. I scoop up some water and let the dirt particles and slime settle to the bottom. Then I take out our expensive ce
ramic water filter, which we ordered during a supply stop in Tehachapi on a warranty replacement several weeks ago, after our first water filter exploded at another water hole. I place the floating intake valve into the water and pray.
“There’s a good boy,” I say, below my breath, to my filter.
Allison is standing over me, watching. I hold the filter in my hands. Cradling it. Cooing. It’s crazy to talk to your gear, I know. Gear is inanimate. But if you
must
talk to your gear, for best results, use a respectful tone. Don’t shout at your gear or speak in a condescending manner. Don’t try to force your will on your gear or your gear will thwart you. Use a normal voice, with the slightest hint of authority.
“All we need is a few good squirts,” I say to the filter. “That’s all you need to do.”
And the filter works beautifully at first. It is nothing short of alchemy, the way it sucks in cloudy water and turns it clear. We filter enough water to drink on the spot. In fact, we drain several quarts in one sitting, but we want more, even though the water is lukewarm and has a strange gravlax stink to it.
“More, more, more,” I say to the filter, “Keep going. You’re doing great. Two more quarts. Please.”
The gadget lets loose with a digestive burble, followed by a crackling sound, which gives way to a sputter, a wheeze, and an emphysemic rasp, as pressure builds in the intake valve. The filter seizes up. The lever won’t crank. The outtake pipe won’t release any water. The man at the filter company swore this filter would not let us down. He swore that it was a free upgrade, the schmuck. “Work, goddamn it, work,” I snarl as I crank the lever as hard as I can. Out bursts a geyser of pressurized filth water. The filter unscrews itself, coming apart. A feeling of horror comes over me—the feeling that all our past water crises are repeating themselves, as if we are stuck in a wormhole in time. I look around at the scattered bits of filter and Allison and the fat sun. For now, at least, we’ve drunk enough to drown
our thirst—for the moment; the thirst will soon return. And now that our thirst has been quenched, we’re suddenly hungry. Allison decides to make lunch with the remaining water. But when she rifles through the food pack, there is nothing left but Velveeta and pasta shells. She accepts this without comment.
Calm and silent, she bends over, takes out the camp stove, lights it, puts a bit of water in the pot, covers the pot with foil, lets the water boil, then dumps in the pasta and Velveeta. The water turns the color of Hi-Liter fluid. Our slender patch of shade pulls itself out from under us, exposing our faces to the spotlight sun. Allison and I are looking at each other quizzically, sizing each other up, and I know what she’s thinking and she knows what I’m thinking and I know that she’s thinking that I’m thinking that she’s thinking the same thing. It does not need to be spoken. It hangs in the air in the form of silence:
“What are we doing here?”
Allison keeps stirring. Pasta rises to the surface, like answers rising from the murk inside a Magic 8-Ball. How I wish I had a Magic 8-Ball now to help us decide. Quit or keep going.