The Cactus Eaters (12 page)

But Clarke’s nearly forty years of service to the Boy Scouts, including a seat on the Eagle Scout Examining Board, rein
forced his notion that the wilderness was a testing ground. Clarke did not come up with the original idea for a Pacific Crest Trail. Apparently, the first person to broach this subject in public was a Miss Catherine Montgomery of Bellingham, Washington, who spoke in 1926 of her dreams about a “high trail winding down the heights of our western mountains…from the Canadian border to the Mexican Boundary Line.” But Clarke was the first to fight for the trail and articulate a clear PCT philosophy. Born in 1873, Clarke lived at a time when America was still trying to figure out how to use the forests and parklands it set aside for preservation, distraction, and amusement. In the early days of “ecotourism,” most tourists didn’t venture very far into the backcountry, perhaps out of laziness, but more likely because of lousy equipment. Their hiking gear was even more awkward and clumsy than the irksome loads I shouldered on the Pacific Crest Trail. As recently as the 1920s, tents were white canvas monstrosities that weighed fifty pounds. “People slept in bulky woolen bedrolls fastened at the end with giant safety pins,” wrote Roderick Nash in
Wilderness and the American Mind,
his history of America’s relationship with the great outdoors. “Food came wet-packaged in cans…. Wilderness travelers who carried their equipment on their backs were so rare as to be considered eccentric.”
*

Because there was so little access to the forest, hucksters filled the void by creating entertainments that reduced tourists to meek observers and wilderness to empty spectacle. James McCauley, perhaps the creepiest showman in the history of cheesy backwoods tourism, amused late-nineteenth-century Yosemite visitors by flinging various objects—including, by one account, a live chicken—off the 3,200-foot-high drop-
off at Glacier Point. A San Francisco reporter filed this eyewitness report: “With an ear-piercing cackle that gradually grew fainter as it fell, the poor creature shot downward; now beating the air with ineffectual wings, and now frantically clawing at the very wind…thus the hapless fowl shot down, down, down until it became a mere fluff of feathers…then again dotted the sight as a pin’s point, and then—it was gone.” The story could be apocryphal, considering the newspaper reporter claimed the chicken survived the fall and climbed back up the cliff to be hurled off again, but McCauley certainly flung burning bushes and other detritus to amuse the masses, while shouting, “Let the fire fall!” The tradition survived through the 1960s.

Empty spectacles and tourist coddling irritated Clarke. He loved to take forays through the woods near San Gorgonio Mountain in Southern California. With each exploration, he noticed more concession stands, roads, and development ruining the “primitive” feel of his beloved mountains. In the backcountry it was becoming impossible to escape “the honk of the auto horn or the smell of the hot dog,” he said. “Our wildernesses are about gone. They have been driven to the high mountain divides where runs the Pacific Crest Trail System.”

His disaffection gave birth to his PCT vision. The West Coast, he said, must have a long trail that melts flab and serves as a watchtower from which day hikers and long-distance backpackers can keep a careful eye on excessive logging, modern conveniences, and development. Without such a trail, primitive areas could be lost altogether, and so would the souls of California’s youth. Seventy years before Keanu Reeves played an anti-robot resistance-fighter in
The Matrix,
Clarke warned Americans of our “enslavement” by radios, automobiles, and film projectors. “Make a ratio of the number of motors, of the number of tickets sold for movies, the number of radios sold, compared to our popula
tion, and compare these figures to any nation in Europe…and we see what an appalling over-mechanization has done to enslave the people of the United States.”

In 1932, Clarke lobbied the U.S. Forest and National Park services to support the construction of his “continuous wilderness trail…maintaining an absolute wilderness character.” To plead his case, he warned the government about “a marked deterioration in the physical, mental and spiritual caliber of our youth. The medical report of the U.S. Army on the physique of 5,000,000 young men taken into the armed forces shows a serious deterioration in…their legs and backs, causing a misplacement of the internal organs…In a word, too much sitting on soft seats in motors, too much sitting in soft seats in movies…too much lounging in easy chairs before radios.”

Taking his cue from Benton MacKaye’s blueprint for the East Coast’s Appalachian Trail, Clinton Clarke articulated his cure-all for America’s oppressive softness: a 2,650-mile trail linking three countries—the United States, Mexico, and Canada—while spanning the length of California, Oregon, and Washington. Clarke, at first, was dismayed by the rights-of-way issues that stood in his path. The trail, even now, crosses a hodgepodge of private and public interests, and some of the owners aren’t thrilled about bearded smelly Wookies like me trudging across their ranches and grazing fields at the behest of the federal government. Fortunately, by the early 1930s, various trails along the route were already established, and could easily be subsumed by the PCT, including the Tahoe-Yosemite Trail and the spectacular John Muir Trail, which plunges into territory so remote that hikers don’t cross a road, or see a powerline, for two hundred miles. At the time, the proposed route was the longest scenic trail in America, five hundred miles longer than the Appalachian Trail. Clarke envisioned a path on a Cecil B. DeMille scale. In one of his writings, he said that the PCT might one day be part of an even more gargantuan footpath,
“The Trail of the Americas,” ten thousand miles long, from Alaska’s Mount McKinley to Chile’s Mount Aconcagua, the highest mountain in South America. This übertrail would use “ancient mule trails” and the shoulder of the “Pan-American Highway.”

I suspect that Clarke would have enjoyed seeing the Lois and Clark Expedition rise up, the day after the cactus-chomping incident, and hike to an overlook where we saw our first snowy glimpse of Olancha Peak, to the north. He would have liked to see us grimace beneath our pack weight as we climbed steep hills, each with a tiki-shaped dolmen on the top and, out of nowhere, a row of foxtail pines. Fallen needles softened our steps. Pain and reward were Clarke’s mottos, although he never put those philosophies to the test on the PCT. There is no record of him even taking an overnight camping trip on it. It saddens me to think he fought so fiercely for something that he didn’t get to enjoy, but maybe it’s for the best. After all, his hiking philosophies were so weird that I wonder how he would have held up out there. “Always rest by standing on the trail in the sun,” he once wrote. “If you sit down you will lose pep. Drink little water. A raisin under the tongue will help. Do not eat when overtired.” Clarke also advocated bringing almost seventy pounds of pack weight into the forests, not including water. With that much weight on his shoulders, he may very well have given himself a Pacific Crest coronary. And Clarke was deep in his middle age before he even started thinking about the trail. When he took up the PCT’s mantle, he was already fifty-eight years old, and trying, with mixed results, to drum up publicity. He asked the Boy Scouts to do a “team relay” in which groups would hike small chunks of the trail in tandem, to help map the route. The Boy Scouts turned him down flat. His second choice, the YMCA, reluctantly agreed to help. The mapping didn’t exactly light the headlines on fire.
The Los Angeles Times
of 1932 hardly even mentioned his ef
forts. But through the relay, Clarke met Warren Rogers, then secretary of the Alhambra YMCA, and another unlikely advocate for the longest trail in America at the time. Like Clarke, Rogers was a native midwesterner. Stricken with polio as a child, Rogers suffered from the nickname One and a Half Step, because one of his legs was half an inch shorter than the other, forcing him to walk with a gimp. Years of playground teasing drove him deep into the forests and up the faces of steep peaks. He wanted to prove that he could go where anyone else could. Rogers bagged 11,502-foot San Gorgonio Mountain when he was only fifteen, and in the course of his lifetime, he scaled 19 peaks over 9,000 feet “and never had so much as a sprained ankle.”

It seems inevitable that Rogers would pair up with Clarke to develop the Pacific Crest Trail. Clarke was the visionary, and Rogers was the leg man, willing to walk vast distances to help chart the trail. In his mid-twenties, he led teams of boys to hike and help map out the proposed PCT route in relays over three years. There’s a photo of Rogers from that time, eager and gawky, with a goofy smile, hiking with a fuzzy beard, jeans, work boots, and a heavy pack. Thirty-four years younger than Clarke, he handled most of the field work. The federal government helped out with groups of Civilian Conservation Corps workers, who burned connector trails on the footpath. Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, America took up arms, and federal trail funding came to a dead halt. The PCT withered. By the time Clarke died, in 1957, at age eighty-four, the trail had fallen into obscurity. Clarke’s hometown newspaper obit did not mention the PCT in its headline, which read, “Cotton Mather Descendent Dies Here.”

But Rogers kept rallying for the trail, and he never compromised Clarke’s original vision. In a newspaper interview, Rogers made it clear that his dream trail was no place for tender-feet or casual pleasure-seekers. The trail, he said, would be an “authentic” experience that would test the resolve of everyone
who traveled on it. “It isn’t like going through a path in the city among the trees,” he said. “We never intended to stick mileposts up on the damned thing and destroy the wilderness. You’re supposed to be enough of a backpacker to follow the maps.”
*

Rogers’s perseverance paid off in the 1960s, when America was finally ready to support the PCT. Backpacking, once considered a “marginal” activity, started to boom then. The other development was gear. World War II nearly killed off the PCT, but the accompanying technology boom helped the trail in the long run. The war led to the proliferation of lightweight plastic, nylon, aluminum, and foam rubber gear, some of it spun off from state-of-the-art military rucksacks. Freeze-dried rations helped inspire the stomach-turning, flatulence-inducing “foods” that made the Lois and Clark Expedition possible.
†
Backpacking’s new convenience and popularity emboldened PCT advocates, who lobbied Congress to pass the National Trails System Act in 1968, placing the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails under the care of the U.S. Department of the Interior, and the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation. Congress declared the Appalachian Trail and the PCT the first two official national scenic trails. By 1975, about thirty people had through-hiked the PCT. Interest fell in the 1980s but rebounded in the 1990s, with the advent of the light packers, led by backpacking guru Ray Jardine, whose once-ridiculed ideas about ultra-minimalist loads are now common practice on the trail. Another breakthrough came in 2004, when Scott Williamson—who had already hiked the trail six times—became the first person in history to through-hike it twice in one seven-month slog. Interest in the trail remains strong—
these days, roughly 125 people a year complete it—but the PCT brought no such stability to its cocreator, Rogers. For the last twenty years of his life he tried to build a living off the PCT, producing food packs and maps, but could not get the business off the ground. Rogers eventually lost possession of his 850-square-foot redwood house in Santa Ana.

“He just could not keep it together,” his son, Donald, told me. “There is no money to be found in the Pacific Crest Trail, and it just bankrupted him. He always gave so much more than he got in return.”

The last time Rogers set foot on the Pacific Crest Trail, it was 1991. He was in a wheelchair. A photo shows him cutting the ribbon at a ceremony dedicating a new trailhead for the PCT at Walker Pass, California. His smile looks strained. He’s wearing a plaid windbreaker and a scarf around his neck. Because of a bureaucratic holdup, Rogers did not live long enough to see the official completion of the PCT route. The last major snag was the privately owned, 275,000-acre Tejon Ranch in Southern California. The ranch’s recalcitrant owners, fearing litter and fires, refused to let trail planners chart a course through their land and posted armed guards to keep hikers away. Those who dared trespass on the property complained of sentries taking potshots at them. Finally, the trail’s managers started condemnation proceedings against the ranch. The owners relented, but the trail through Tejon is ugly and waterless.

This holdup robbed Rogers of a moment he had been waiting for most of his life. He died in April 1992, after making one last push to set up some much-needed water supply stops in the Mojave Desert section of the footpath, just north of Tejon Ranch. The final “golden spike” was pounded into the Pacific Crest Trail in June 1993.

O
ne hundred miles south of the High Sierra, we entered a buffer zone between the chaparral foothills to the south and the highest peaks to the north. It felt as if the desert and the mountains were casting spells on us from opposite directions. At the same time, I entered a buffer zone between actually speaking with my girlfriend and merely grunting at her. In retrospect, this was understandable. She no longer trusted me because of the cactus incident. Because of the same incident, I no longer trusted the outdoors. The day we entered Jawbone Canyon Road, south of the Piute Mountain range, I gesticulated a lot, and sometimes snorted. Sometimes she tried to engage me in conversation, but I refused. Throughout the week, instead of saying, “Allison, would you please hand me that bottle,” or “Allison, would you offer me a bite of that lemon-ginger Pemmican Bar?” I’d point and say something approximate, such as “Unk.”

It’s not that we were fighting, exactly. It’s just that we were slipping backward into a Pleistocene frame of mind, our hair
matted, our body odors indescribable. I tried to bond with the woods, the way the Gingerbread Man did. But what did I get for my bonding attempt, save for a row of perforations on my tongue and a lot of strange notions in my brain? Life out here was becoming too random. I was on high alert now, edgy and anxious. For this reason, I began to modify my notions about God and spirituality, and wonder if paganism was my only protection from the chaos and overwhelming power of nature.

As a Jewish man, I knew that pagan worship was an offense serious enough to merit inclusion in the Ten Commandments. God, in a quote from the Torah, reports that he is God, and that there is “none else.” That statement provides no wiggle room to worship Buddha, Krishna, or the sprites that inhabit twigs. And yet, as we marched, I thought it might be smart to diversify my belief system. Maybe if I prayed hard enough to
all
of the spirits, I could get Allison, and the wilderness, back on my side again. At the same time, I was scared to pray to the one and true God of my Jewish beliefs. After all, why would a God who self-identifies as “awesome” care about our walk to Canada? Why not appeal to something lower and more accessible? It would be hyperbolic for me to say that I became an actual pagan out there, but I certainly flirted with this belief system. While I didn’t entirely believe in the wraiths and faeries of the wilderness, I wasn’t about to discount them, either. After making sure that Allison was too far behind me to see me throwing food away, I reached into my fanny pack and removed the best of my remaining snacks: a small stick of Dove Bar dark chocolate. I unwrapped the chocolate and rolled it around between my thumb and forefinger, until I had formed a glob. Though I wanted, desperately, to eat it, I chucked it off a sandstone cliff as a sacrifice to whoever was listening.

“Oh, spirits,” I cried. “If you are out there, I call upon you from the rocks, the sand, the creek’s sandy bottom. Take this snack and enjoy it. I offer this food to you with the following
beseechment. No more sun, no more bugs, no more uphill. Please show mercy on us, O spirits, for we have had enough.”

I threw the snack over the cliff, watching it bounce into a shrub with a “plop.” This strategy did not work. I prayed for downhill but got uphill. I prayed for shade and got sun.

A few miles later, Allison and I found ourselves at a spur trail mentioned in the guidebook as a route toward fresh water. We took the uphill turn, climbing a path full of dried-mud hummocks, and a few oak trees drooping along the sides of us, until we reached a trough of reasonably potable water. I decided to filter and purify a few liters to drink on the spot, but when I set myself up, and put the filter intake valve in the water, I heard a splash. Allison had sat down beside me, taken off her boots and socks, and plunked her black-bottomed feet in the water I was trying to purify. She sat with a beatific expression, massaging her calves. I threw her a look, but she did not notice. She sighed and swabbed her feet, and palmed the cold water all over her toes and heels. Soon her feet were as white as frog bellies. They left a film on the water. “This does not augur well for us,” I said to myself as I continued to filter the water. “This does not speak of our ability to compromise.”

Late that afternoon, we descended along the steppelike rock formations known as St. John Ridge, a rolling set of bowls and humps. The ridge overlooked a valley strewn with mining debris. Here among the bitterbrush were boulders shaped like human molars. Some of them had cavities so wide I could have placed my fist inside them. The land looked like the aftermath of a fight between giants. I was daydreaming, walking way out in front of Allison, empty of thought, floating, when I heard a sound like a hundred maracas, so clamorous that I leaped. Ten feet in front of me, a rattlesnake coiled. Only the tongue and rattle moved. The serpent was fat in the middle, suggesting it had just eaten or was in the family way. My fear was like a mild form of electrocution, and yet the serpent was beautiful: the
diamond pattern of its skin, the parallel segments of its rattle, the languorous curves of its coils. In my diary I would note that my fear of the snake was “undeniably primal, pulled straight from the unconsciousness of my ancestry,” though that observation, in retrospect, was peculiar, considering my ancestry lies in Eastern Europe, where my forbearers were bakers, butchers, and rabbis who lived in Cossack-haunted shtetls where Jews beyond the pale were shot for no reason, and where the absence of rattlesnakes must have been cold comfort.

And yet the noise triggered something buried—dare I say, primitive—in me. Allison finally caught up and saw the snake. She looked nervous but restrained, taking a step back and then freezing. The effect on me was much more powerful. I was scared and yet I had an unexplainable urge to jump on the snake, wrestle with it, maybe even fling it around my shoulders like a feather boa. I did not know it at the time, but my reaction was perfectly normal and reasonable for a man. A snake researcher at the University of California at Berkeley told me later that rattlesnakes often trigger an aggressive behavioral response in men, but not so much in women. Most female snakebite victims get chomped on the ankle or foot because they stumble across the creature. But scores of men get bites on the neck and the hand, the elbow and shoulder, because they pick up the snakes, dance around with them, toss them in the air, or start throttling them. I restrained myself from embracing or strangling the snake, but the adrenaline stole through me with no release. In a few moments the snake became tired of us and poured itself into a hole in the ground. With slow steps, we passed its hiding place and continued on our way. But the uncomfortable feeling would not go away. We hiked almost nonstop that day, until the sun was all but gone.

It would have been smart to search for a campsite before dark, but hunger for Canada made us push on. We found ourselves high on a windblown ridge long after sunset, watching
the tops of distant peaks turn to fins in the twilight, floating over the cloud banks. Soon we could not see where we were going at all. Even our flashlight did nothing but poke holes in the black. Allison chose the surface of a flat, cliffhanging boulder as our emergency camp. Instead of protesting, I just went on autopilot, knowing I was still in trouble and should keep my mouth closed. I started pitching the tent, throwing down my gear. Allison chose the left side of the flat rock, and unrolled her sleeping bag, her foam pad, her trail pillow. Somehow I got the side with the bump, which smushed against my face, even when I plumped and fluffed my Therm-a-Rest pillow, and set it on top of the protruding rock.

That evening, during a flashlight-assisted bathroom break, I made a few other discoveries about Allison’s chosen camp. Allison had selected a spot near a hole in the ground overflowing with ants. The boulder seemed unstable. I could not tell if our rock was anchored to the cliff. For all I knew, if we fidgeted too much, or crawled to the end of the boulder, the rock might unfasten itself and drop into the black, taking me, Allison, the lump, and the ants with it. I woke up several times that night. Allison’s stomach made cracking sounds, like a boulder loosening itself from a mountainside. Morning came after an eternity. Allison woke up long after I did. She crawled out of the tent. Through the tent’s open vestibule I could see ants in our stockpot, nibbling the cremains of our pilaf supper. I had no idea how the ants had worked up the appetite to eat our food. Along with our communication skills, our cooking prowess had deteriorated over the past few weeks. I drowned our meals in too much water, while Allison sometimes scorched them. In my diary, I noted that she was becoming “more of an arsonist than a chef.” Irritation rose inside me. Adrenaline from the snake encounter still pumped through my bloodstream. After days of near-silence and monosyllabic grunts, spiteful sentences came out of my mouth.

“Wow,” my mouth said. “What an unbelievable camp that was, on the edge of a cliff face, with a big rock sticking into my head. That’s what I would call a desperation campsite, when there’s
no
other option, even though there were a hundred other spots where we could have camped.” I said a lot of other things about the ridiculousness of our tent spot, and how a thousand other places would have been more suitable. I also accused her of being a slowpoke, of “always wanting to take it easy,” of dragging down the expedition. I said all these things in a sarcastic tone that reflected my exhaustion and irritation. I knew full well that these accusations would hurt her pride, and yet I couldn’t stop myself.

Even as I muttered these things, I blamed the snake. If we hadn’t encountered the serpent, I wouldn’t have been so agitated. The snake hadn’t bitten me, and yet I was in the throes of its psychic venom. But it was impossible to explain this to her, so I didn’t even try. Her face had already gone blank, and she turned her back on me. She squashed a bunch of things into her pack, tossed the pack on her shoulders, tightened her support strap, straightened her back, and starting running northward, away from me, down the trail, toward Canada. I could not believe what I was seeing. Yes, I had spoken out of line, but Allison was overreacting. Besides, she had taken some of the best snacks. “I am sorry, I take it back!” I shouted to the wind, but she could not hear.

Working as fast as I could, I took down the tent, mashed the tent poles together, grabbed the rest of our camp, and stuffed it into the pack. Without even buckling the support pad, with the pack hanging off my right shoulder, I started running after her, hollering for her to wait up a bit. “All-lisss-onnn!” I roared, but she was tearing down the ridge, kicking dust, knocking over stones. I hollered for her to stop or at least slow it up a bit. She did neither. Now, since there was no way she could hear me, I could say exactly what was on my mind. “You’re not
being rational!” I screamed. “Come on! You can stop running now!” She merely accelerated. Insects ticked in my ears. Down I jogged under Pinyon Mountain. She was out of sight now.

Plants threw fork-shaped shadows at me. A desert owl swooped above me, wings spread, its head a tufted discus. Down I ran, on a trail crisscrossed with dirt bike tread, to a place where the Pacific Crest Trail met a dirt road. There, at the bottom, was Allison, in a crouch, laughing inexplicably. She was resting there, hands on her knees. I took a step forward to see if she would retreat, but she acted as if she did not notice me. She was smiling at a note that seemed to be addressed to her. I got close enough to read over her shoulder. The note was scribbled on a torn-out page from a Gary Larson
Far Side
desk calendar. The cartoon showed a man, bearded and thin, clawing his way over sand dunes, tongue lolling, his body dragging. A billboard taunts from a distance. It shows a picture of a canteen, sloshing with water. “Hey, Lois and Clark Expedition,” the note read. “I miss you guys. Hey, Clark, I miss your stories of newsroom life in Connecticut. Lois, I miss your pathetic blister walk. If you guys need water, tank up at the seeping spring. Take a left on the dirt road and walk down canyon for half a mile. The spring flows just under the road near the first tree you will see. To get to the water you’ll need to push aside the cow chips.”

I knew we could use the water. I hadn’t filtered much at the water source, and we’d consumed most of it. The two of us said nothing as we pushed our way down the path to a lone tree. Though Allison did not look at me, and though she walked close to me, but separate from me, I was grateful to the Gingerbread Man. He’d created a distraction, forced Allison to stop, made her laugh, disarmed her, and told her where the water could be found. Perhaps she was biding her time, or she’d used up her rage on the run, but she spoke not a word against me as we walked.

We hadn’t gone for very long when we saw two sun-black
ened towers of black dried cow patties, four feet high. Each pile was a feat of construction, the larger pieces anchoring the structure, the smaller and svelter pieces of crap adding a tapering effect, reminding me of the towers on Antonio Gaudi’s Church of the Holy Family. Beneath one of the larger and fatter cow chips, the Gingerbread Man had placed yet another note addressed to us: this one had a drawing of an arrow, and one word:
Water!
We walked in the direction of the arrow. There, just a few feet from the note, fresh water shone through the invasive thistles. We laughed at the sight of it. We did not say much for the rest of the day, but I thought we were on the road to making up, until late that night in our tent, when Allison was writing in the pages of her diary, pressing down so hard I could hear her pen tearing the paper. “Can’t we get along? Can’t we?” I asked myself before I nodded off.

When we rose up the next morning and continued our trek through hard, hot country, we were too tired to keep fighting or make up in earnest. The days continued like this. At last, we reached a strained détente. I knew we would be fine, that the insanity and magic thinking and weirdness should be over soon.

But one afternoon, on a spit of sand along a creek, Allison stopped to cook a meal in the middle of the trail. She sat on the hard-packed dirt and sand. She removed the cooking unit, pumped the fuel with a hand crank, twisted the intake valve, reached down, dropped a match, and watched the orange flames rise. She lowered a pan of water onto the flames and covered it with foil to trap the heat. There, in the half shade, she started to cook a packet of vacuum-packed gnocchi. She sat there, rocking in contentment, watching pasta bob and pitch. As she studied the bubbles, a swarm of meat bees descended, cumbersome creatures with a green cast to their wings. Allison ripped them from the sky, making a popping noise, like bubble-package wrapping, as she crushed them one by one. She did
this in an angry but graceful way, reminding me of King Kong’s final scene, when he’s standing on the Empire State Building tearing biplanes out of the sky. Allison took three dead bugs and arranged them facedown in the dirt on the creek’s bank. The backs of their wings, and their rear legs, pointed toward Heaven. “I put those bees there as a warning to the other meat bees,” she said. She smiled, as if it were obvious. “See,” she continued, “the other meat bees are gonna fly over us and see the bodies of their friends. They’ll be so scared they won’t want to bite us anymore.”