The Cactus Eaters (13 page)

She may very well have been joking around, but in the state of mind I was in, my first reaction was, “Wow. Way to go, Allison. What a smart idea!” In fact, I helped her, killing five meat bees and arranging them in the dirt, in a rough pentagram. It seemed perfectly rational, even necessary at the time. I thought, “We’re sending a clear message that we will not tolerate being attacked by meat bees for one minute longer.”

O
ut on the Pacific Crest Trail, I gave a personal name to every piece of our backpacking gear. This was necessary for the Lois and Clark Expedition’s survival. My flirtation with paganism had gotten me only so far, while my spells and incantations wore off quickly. Even the meat bees eventually figured out our ruse and began to attack again, sucking more blood as if to make up for lost time. I decided to try a different strategy. It was time to make our gadgets human, so we could communicate with them more effectively. By giving each gizmo a personal moniker, I could coo at it and cajole it into doing its job well and never stabbing us in the back when we needed it on our side.

Each piece of gear had grown into its name as we hiked along. Odie was our odometer. R2-D2 was our “rolling resupply bucket,” which we mailed ahead to ourselves at every post office along the trail route. An emptied-out frosting container liberated from a Safeway supermarket in Prunedale, California, R2-D2 carried the Excedrin, foot ointment, powdered Ga
torade, sanitary napkins, guidebook chunks, and condoms we needed for each section of the trail. Even my backpack had a name: Big Motherfucker, or Big Mofo, for short. He got his name because he had 5,925 cubic inches of manly packing space. Big Mofo was so damned big you could stick a toaster oven, two photo albums, a Sparkletts bottle, and a Waring blender in his belly and still have room for seven sacks of Cooler Ranch Doritos. My special favorite was Betty, a leakproof fabric water container, able to hold as much as four king-size canteens. After I bought her at an outdoors store, I took her home and filled her with tap water. She puffed up, getting big out in front and sticking out in the back in a way that somehow reminded me of Betty Boop. I always knew we could rely on Betty. Her manufacturers said she was 100 percent guaranteed. I trusted her so much that I filled her to the brim and let her ride inside Big Mofo, right on the top, above our food bags and clothes.

It happened one late afternoon while Allison and I were walking on a trench on the bottom of the ocean. That is what it looked like on the flats south of the Scodie Mountains. Sand bars branched into the bushes. Wiry plants waved on the sides of the path. Lizards darted from rock to rock like sculpins. I was feeling pretty good about the trail that day, joking around, and Allison seemed to have forgiven me for the snake-induced “this campsite sucks and why are you so goddamned slow” incident from earlier in the week. In fact, we were throwing around the terms of endearment we used only when on very good terms. I called her Ratface. She called me Fishbody. To us, these were encrypted declarations of true intimacy and affection, made more meaningful by the fact that an outsider would have thought these names degrading.

The foreign environment entranced me. We did not belong here. Without sunscreen, survival hats, or water, we would have perished soon. Betty, our water bag, was our diving bell, a bal
last to stop us from floating up into the sun. It amazed me to think we could travel unscathed through a place like this as long as our bottles stayed full. Since our water crises were over for good, I could now enjoy the beauty of this place on its own terms. Swallows knifed the air for insects. Piñon pines formed islands of green. As we rose up a hill, Allison noticed a stain of clear water on the back of Big Motherfucker.

“Hey, Fishbody, you’re sweating like a pig,” she said as we made our way up a steep trail on a mule-colored foothill, a featureless hump that looked just like the entrance to a municipal landfill. I smiled at her “pig” reference. Our first date just so happened to be at an agricultural fair in Goshen, Connecticut, where the two of us spent the afternoon watching the greased pig races, eating funnel cakes, and riding the pukers. Allison was so beautiful at the fair, with her glowing eyes and her blond hair blowing all over the place, that I could not look her in the face. I had to excuse myself a half-dozen times and visit the Porta-Cans because my heart was pounding and my nervous bladder kept filling. Who would have guessed that two years later I’d be walking up a steep ridge with the same woman, our breath smelling just like the Goshen Fair poultry enclosure, our shirts looking as though we’d used them to swab down the contestants in the 4-H heifer exhibition? Allison, as usual, was right. I was sweating to an unusual degree. I stopped and took off Big Mofo, who was sopping wet and strangely light. I looked inside. Water covered our food bags and our clothes. Water dripped on my sleeping bag compartment. Somehow, that morning, Betty’s screw-on cap had popped off. Now it would not screw back on again. Two thirds of our water was gone, and the next reliable water was fifteen miles away. It was late in the day, so we would have to bed down for the night, conserve water, then make a push for it next morning. Besides, everything was soaked. I grabbed Betty by the neck, lifted her out of Big Mofo, and started to throttle her.

“How could you do this to us?” I screamed. “How could you?” I called Betty a stinking hag and a worthless piece of crap. Finally, I called her a whore. The name stuck. Betty the Waterbag, from there on in, would be known as Betty the Whore. This new name made me and Allison feel a whole lot better about the situation, but the name did not erase the fact that we were in danger again. For the next hour, we made Betty the Whore the scapebag of all that had gone wrong in our journey. I grabbed Betty the Whore by the neck and held her aloft, partly to keep the remaining water from dribbling out and partly to strangle her, to make her scream with pain.

We had another four hours of daylight to go, so we marched on. I started to lose the plot after a while, to thunder at no one in particular, and tighten my grip around Betty’s nylon neck. Allison tried as hard as she could to distract me. We often filled the trail hours by talking about old jobs. Long before we met, she’d worked as a waitress in the kind of restaurants where waiters kiss their fingertips while telling customers about the specials. Allison told me all about the way she used to gargle red wine, swishing it from cheek to cheek as it changed flavors in her mouth. “You know how to tell a lousy bottle of wine?” she said. “That’s when you sniff it and you detect barnyard.” She explained to me that good vines must be “tortured in subsistence soil to grow the best grapes. They must suffer to thrive.” It started to get dark. The air had a citrus-salty smell, slightly carbonated, with notes of sagebrush with yeasty overtones. We walked through scrub brush. The light was red and faint. Our water bag was running so low we would have just enough to get us through the evening and the next morning.

At times like this, you’d think deep thoughts would come to a man’s mind. You’d think he’d get right down to business and start asking the big
whys
and the big
ifs
and the big
whats
. You’d think he’d take this time to inventory his list of sins and get right with God. But, no. Inanities enter the human brain.
You may try to will deep thoughts and important questions into your head but they just won’t come. Instead you start analyzing the lyrics of the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” though you hate that song so much that you once fled from a diner where it was playing on the jukebox, and were almost run over by a truck. Walking up a windswept hill, you are troubled by the fact that the guests at Hotel California can “check out” anytime they like but they can “never leave,” which implies a 100 percent occupancy rate, so it makes no sense that there would be “plenty of room,” at the hotel, or any room left at all. You wonder if the Eagles had a game plan for all those extra guests. You figure there must be foldaway beds, but it torments you that Don Henley never mentions this in the song.

It also occurs to you, somewhere on this windblown ridge, that there are people in this world who really love backpacking. There are people in this world who go backpacking by choice. And it occurs to you that you and Allison are here by choice.

We were still hiking at the time of day when shadows lose their shape and run straight into one other, making one big shadow. We hiked toward a phantom radio tower, due north, saucer-equipped, high on a crag. A stripe of quartzite ran across a hill near the trail. In the almost-dark, minerals in the quartzite glowed like white teeth. As we passed the hills, I looked to my right, due east, at the glowing dunes of the desert, the great big swallowing nothing out there. The view was lovely enough to make me stop in my tracks, and yet it chilled me to stare at eastern ridges marching toward the Nevada border. “It could get me just like that,” I kept muttering to myself. “It’s gonna get me just like that.”

“What’s gonna get you?” Allison said, squeezing my arm. “Nothing’s gonna get you, Fishbody.”

A bluish light settled on the top of the tallest dune, and the light rose, wavelike, from the sand. The glow receded. My mouth felt as though it had just bit into an underripe per
simmon, that suck-mouthed feeling, as if every bit of moisture were receding. We walked in the moonlight at the time of night when every twig looks like a snake. The moon turned pines into penitents frozen in their stations, arms bent in front of them. Allison picked a spot of flat earth beneath a pine and declared it ours. There, under the branches, we pitched Freddy, the Bullfrog tent, and found enough string cheese to make a rough dinner. Seam-sealed and vacuum-packed, the cheese had lasted several days in hot weather without going bad, though its texture was snotty and unpleasant. Allison took out our headlamp, fastened it to her skull, and flicked it on. Light shone on our thumb-stained maps. The next unreliable spring was five miles away. The moon was bright that night; it washed the stars away on all sides, but a few of them had escaped to the outer edges of the sky. Allison stared at a fixed point beyond the stars. I looked at her and wondered if this was the wrong dream. If it was the right dream it wouldn’t be this hard.

I tried to cheer myself up by glancing up at the Big Dipper, glow dots in cruciform. Allison leaned into my shoulder. I remembered what a teacher had told me, long ago, about the Big Dipper. As long as there have been people on Earth, and no matter where they were living on this planet, it’s always been a good sign. The Big Dipper is the one superstition that everyone can agree on. If you’re in a desert somewhere, and you look up and find the Dipper, it means you’ll wake next day and find good water. You might be thirsty, but the Dipper’s always full. It’s a universally accepted concept.

I found out years later that everything I knew about the Dipper was wrong. The Big Dipper, in various parts of the world, is not thought of as a dipper at all. In modern Europe, people think the Dipper is a cart. Egyptians look up and see a bull’s thigh. Others think it’s a bear. And the Dipper changes all the time. Human beings have lived on this earth in some stoop-shouldered form or other for millions of years. At the dawn of
evolution, the Dipper formation didn’t look anything like it does now. Timothy Ferris, in his book,
Seeing in the Dark
, says that the Dipper, a hundred thousand years ago, had a “squarer bowl and a straight handle like a primitive implement.” In a million years, when Allison and I will have ceased to exist even at the microparticle level, the dipper won’t exist, either. I crawled in our tent and cuddled with Allison, then uncuddled, because her bare legs, smooth in Tehachapi, were getting stubbly. We slept on different sides of the tent. When I woke up, the Dipper was gone. The white sky had washed it away.

We rose up that morning and walked into the foothills to look for the water for the better part of the morning, on dirt roads. We searched under rocks, behind piñon pines, and under hills. I don’t know how much time passed, and when at last we found the meager water, it wasn’t much of a relief. The two of us were sticky and tired, and the usual silty water was only a puddle, barely enough to quench us.

“It’s our dream,” Allison said, staring at the murk. “But it’s just not worth this amount of anguish. You know what just kills me? We did everything right this time, and it’s not good enough.”

This time we hadn’t screwed anything up. Equipment failure is an act of God. If we were going to quit anywhere, this was the logical place, right here, near a grove of thirsty pines. The Lois and Clark Expedition had gone far enough, it seemed. Eventually, we’d have to emerge from the woods and get jobs again. And did we really want to spend our vacation time bent over at another water hole, slurping mud, while mean greenies chewed holes in our legs?

But the two of us could not will ourselves to quit. It is possible to make a momentous decision without knowing why. Perhaps we feared that if we quit then, we would leave the trail before figuring out why we’d tried to hike it in the first place. At the time, Allison, sitting by the waterhole, said that we had been
“shamed” into sticking with our plan, but I now suspect she had other motivations. As I’ve mentioned, she was a feminist of sorts. Perhaps her trail was a kind of protest, a boot kick in the crotch of backcountry patriarchy. Allison was one of only a half a dozen women walking the PCT that year, and dozens of men walked it that year. She often wondered out loud about all the “sexism” and the “macho shit” that pervaded hiker culture.

She had a valid point. A woman came up with the original idea for a PCT, and yet the trail, in some ways, was a sausage party. Even Allison sometimes talked about her experience from a masculine perspective. She spoke of the asceticism and humility that comes from walking a hundred miles a week and eating dried-food meals that she called “C-rats,” a military term. She was coming to appreciate the discipline that the trail was giving her, and the way the trail helped her draw from reserves of feral flintiness. Her body, once soft, was finding its true shape. The hike changed her every day. She often said she was “amazed at the transformation” when she looked in a motel mirror. She was surprised at her resiliency, and so was I; in spite of her cranky knee, which still caused her pain, she just kept chalking up miles. California was helping her claim something for herself. “How many women can say they’ve walked across California?” she told me one day.