The Cactus Eaters (18 page)

To save what remained of the woods, he wrote voluminously about mountains and forests. His rhapsodic prose is often ridiculed today, but Muir’s haters fail to understand the cunning strategy behind the rosy description: he was inviting readers to sympathize with the humanized trees, bears, and chipmunks, while placing loggers and shepherds in the role of serial killers. In the words of the essayist William Cronon, John Muir recast the woods as a kind of “domestic sublime,” a safe place where the forest is church and the animals, gentle parishioners. In doing so, Muir also created the impression that the woods were a refuge, offering an escape hatch for anyone with sturdy legs.

Muir’s writings made me feel better about the fact that I had no place in the suburban world, that I failed at sports, did not know how to talk to girls, and wore goofy ensembles: mixed plaids, Keds in insane colors, and corduroy slacks, long
before their second coming and redemption. Muir’s writings helped me forgive myself for being shy to the point of paralysis, wearing my hair in an accidental mullet, brown storm clouds drifting over my ears. Muir, as a young lad, wasn’t much of a ladies’ man, either. He didn’t get married until later in life, and the thought of this comforted me at high school dances, where girls assembled in Conestoga wagon circle formations, Belinda Carlisle–style Go-Go’s skirts flashing in the strobe lights, while I slouched alone, delivering lame pickup lines to any girl who dared to stray from her protective circle: “Would you like to maybe visit the concession stand for Reese’s Pieces? Or perhaps, if you want, a soft drink?”

It was nice to know the Jeffrey pines, dormant volcanoes, and Belding’s ground squirrels awaited my return every summer, offering strength and distraction, even in the throes of my obsession with Millicent Wong, who didn’t love me in return, though I stalked her so diligently and gave her an avalanche of achingly nondemonstrative greeting cards—“I want to be friends with you, okay?” I even tried to ply her with decorative roses I’d made by hand from bread dough, Elmer’s glue, red lacquer, paper, and toothpicks. The woods helped me forget my degrading date with Sarah Jane Hitt, who was willful and self-possessed, in spite of the cruel classmates who ranked her among the toadliest girls in the school. At evening’s end I tried to kiss and paw her just because I thought kissing and pawing were what you had to do on a date, even when the revulsion was clearly mutual. This dream of wilderness stayed with me throughout college, and set the stage for my love with Allison, who shared my enthusiasm for all wild things, mushrooms, strange plants, sudden rainstorms, and open pastures under the Berkshire Mountains.

But that day, up on Forester Pass, I couldn’t help but feel exasperated with my idol, and unworthy when I thought of him. I could not understand why his recipe for redemption did
not work with me. His safe, domesticated woods were turning me black and blue. His calm benedictions could not stop me from getting bitch-slapped like raw pizza dough against the cold Sierra rock. My clothes were soaked through, and I had nothing to eat but nut crumbs, nasty oat bars, and dehydrated dinners in my rucksack. Mountains were bullies, the clouds overwhelmed me, and the trees made me feel like an ear mite. How could Muir feel so strong and proud in a landscape that only made me feel absurd? How could Muir survive on “essences and crumbs,” with a pack as “insubstantial as a squirrel’s tail,” while I felt hungry and weak?

While I longed for lobster, Muir subsisted on rock-hard bread and tea, seeing no need for fancier foods, not when the glaciers all around him ate nothing but “hills and sunbeams.” The woods were Muir’s pleasure garden. Dangerous thunderstorms were “jubilees of waters.” During a near-death experience on Mount Ritter, his life “blazed forth…with preternatural clearness.” Hypothermic evenings on winter snowscapes were an excuse for Muir to dance the Highland jig to keep warm. He even enjoyed running around during earthquakes. Danger was his tonic. He never carried a gun, and he never suffered a snakebite, a bear bite, or a spell of sickness in the forests.

And that, I suppose, was the difference between Muir and me. I had wanted to follow him here but I didn’t know how. My childhood miseries were ordinary. My sufferings were fairly standard. Muir had had all the physical and mental hardship he could stand before he ever set foot out here. I wanted to see what he saw, feel what he felt, but I just couldn’t. If Muir were out hiking down Forester with us that day, he would have had a hard time comprehending my panic attack. He would have been up there tripping and falling and laughing it up with the Wolf, and if he had taken the time to look back at me, he would have snorted at my “morbid fears.” Muir once derided those who become sick with fear “as soon as they find
themselves with nature, even in the kindest and wildest of her solitudes, like very sick children afraid of their mothers.”

His retreating vision escaped me at every turn.

His ghost was here, but I could never quite grasp it.

It was time to head down to Gangrene Lake. Halfway down the slopes, with pebbles in my socks, and my ears ringing from all the times I’d fallen through the melting ice, I came to the realization that things could not get any scarier, or more dangerous, on the Pacific Crest Trail. Then I had a realization: I could not remember if I’d paid my latest health insurance premium two months before. Had I or hadn’t I?

Allison and I were self-insured through an expensive program called COBRA, available through the newspaper we’d quit. The program made me quite suspicious, and not just because it shared a name with the seventh deadliest snake on the planet. I also objected to the fact that the insurance covered almost nothing except hospitalization for grievous injury. Up until now, it had never occurred to me that COBRA could be good for anything. Now the likelihood of such injuries was increasing with every second as Wolf led us down a nonexistent steep pathway toward purgatory. Under the pale white light, chloroformed by ugly clouds, the dank lake winked like the eye of Beelzebub. Allison was still behind me, and now the rocks she was raining down were as big as bricks. Good God, I said to myself. Now I really mustn’t get hurt. I prayed to God that Allison wouldn’t fall down and crack her skull. If that happened, she would find out that I’d bungled the insurance and then there would be hell to pay. “Go down on your heels,” Allison roared, and I had no idea what she meant. “Heels, heels, heels, walk on your heels.”

“How?” I screamed.

In small increments, the bottom of the valley grew closer until we arrived at the slimy ice around the lake. Any hasty or ill-considered move would send us falling into its fetid waters.
We had to cross one last stretch of dangerous late-afternoon slush on a near-vertical stretch of slope. I slipped. My boots sank to the ankles in the dark lake, filling my socks with cold water.

When at last we arrived at the Pacific Crest Trail, Allison and I covered each other with kisses, wrapped our arms around each other, and roared.

“Welcome to the Range of Light,” Allison said.

The two of us took a moment to stare down at the Bubb’s Creek Canyon. Polished walls gleamed. There was a dry emptiness to the sky above the pink-brown mountains and the U-shaped sweep of pines between them. All around us was the rush and push of life in the canyon. This was the type of expanse that could move any heart, including Wolf’s. He had a transfixed look as his eyes caught the orange beginnings of a Sierra sunset. I wondered what he was going to tell us. He sat on a slab of rock in the reddening light, his head bowed before the scenery’s majesty. He alternated his gaze between the valley and us. I could tell he was winding himself up, choosing just the right words to pin down this golden moment.

“Know what?” he said. “Snickers taste like shit. Not just Snickers but all chocolate. But the thing is I still eat Snickers because they give me so much energy.”

He reached in his backpack and offered us a couple of ass-squashed Snickers that looked like they’d been run over by an eighteen-wheeler. Some of the bars were hanging halfway out of their wrapping; they had that white, skanky look that chocolate gets when it melts and hardens a dozen times or more. If I had been anything short of starving, I would have rejected his offer. But Allison and I were tired, relieved, and glad to have survived the “easy” way. I grabbed hold of a candy bar and forced it so hard down my throat that I ingested stray bits of wrapper. Allison smiled through the lip gloss of low-quality melted chocolate. The sun was sinking. Rangers might be lurking here, ready to bust us for our lack of a wilderness permit.
We followed Wolf as he guided us down from the Gangrene Lake toward the dark forest where we’d camp for the night.

John Muir’s Range of Light became a range of darkness as the sun fell through the gap in the valley. Through the pines, we heard a rasping sound as if the forest were clearing its throat. The noise came from a weak stream, boulders rising from its bed. The sunset’s colors drained into Center Basin Creek. Reds and oranges swirled in the stream, even as the sky turned gray. Tired and disoriented, none of us wished to slosh through knee-deep water, but camp was on the other side. Wolf had a plan. Bending over in pine shadows, he lifted up a piece of twisted wood, nine feet long, and threw it over the water. It winged through the air like a javelin and came to rest in the mud, with opposite ends on either bank. “This will be our bridge,” Wolf said. “I’ll test it out first.”

Wolf walked in spider steps. The wood boinged beneath his feet, but he made it across. “Now you go, Madame,” he said to Allison.

“Mademoiselle,” she said. “I’m not married.”

Wolf looked stricken but held the stick as Allison walked in delicate steps. I watched with lustful intent. She now had incredible legs from hiking 323.4 miles so far in our journey. Sure, I was exhausted, but when you’re in your twenties, no amount of panic, fears, stenches, muscle ache, or self-recrimination can dampen the need for sexual gratification. In your twenties you will always clear the table for sex, even if you’ve just staggered home from surgery. If only Wolf hadn’t been there; we could have retired to some shady bower by the river and dispelled our tension.

Allison made it to the other side. My turn to cross.

“Is it okay to walk on this thing?” I said to Wolf and Allison. “It looks sorta sketchy.”

Allison believed that people should make their own decisions without constant hand-holding from other people, and
just shrugged. Wolf had a glazed “huh?” on his face. I stepped on the bridge. It cracked and splintered.

“Um…” Wolf said.

I wagged my arms to hold steady. The bridge buckled.

“Um, you might want to jump,” Wolf said.

The bridge snapped like a pretzel stick beneath my boots. Down I went, chest first, into the water, my knees knocking into slimy pebbles, my backpack bonking my shoulders and skull. Water soaked my shorts. Wolf looked down at me, puzzled. For a while I lay there in the stream, drenched and angry. I got up and shook the water off me like a dog. “Look what you did! This is all your fault,” I wanted to say.

Back on the trail, I passed Wolf, not speaking to him even when he asked if I was okay. We kept walking in cold darkness.

Allison was watching me. “You look terrible,” she said.

I grunted.

We camped. Allison and I ate the last meal in our reserve, something sweet and sloshy, with tofu pellets and roachy raisins. She didn’t like the fact that I was sulking and using my tumble in the creek as an excuse to take a long rest break while she cooked and cleaned. She didn’t like the fact that I was snubbing Wolf. “You’d better check on him, make sure he’s okay,” she said, chafing the stockpot with a filthy rag.

I grunted again, and stood for a while at the edge of camp, watching the moon climb like a round white bear through the tallest branches. When I’d collected myself, I looked for Wolf, and soon found him sitting Indian-style in his windbreaker, leaning toward his fish-can stove full of burning leaves. He was eating Top Ramen, original flavor, the blue-white wrapper lying on his shoes. He hugged his knees.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” he said.

There was silence for a long awkward while. Night birds filled it with their trills.

“I just wanted to thank you for all you’ve done,” I said. “We never would have gotten down Forester Pass in one piece if it weren’t for you.”

“Mmm,” Wolf said.

“I mean it,” I said.

“You would’ve done the same for me.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “But really, I didn’t do anything for you at all.”

“Your thanks is enough,” he said, as if to signal the end of this discussion.

The breakup moment came fast the next day. We arrived so quickly at the portentous intersection that I hadn’t prepared a speech. Wolf wanted us to keep plugging along with him somehow. As he stood there, a bank of clouds passed over the cliff face, creating the woozy illusion that the landscape was about to fold over and topple on us. I was at a loss, so I thanked Wolf again. There is always an element of self-laceration and hairshirt-wearing when you give thanks. It’s a way of recognizing kindness and, at the same time, expunging guilt. And there is always something about parting ways with someone that turns us all into Hare Krishnas for five minutes. When we leave someone behind, and know we will never see him again, we bathe that person in the perishable milk of loving kindness. Wolf, I now realized, was a brave and decent man without irony or cowardice, two of the mankind’s worst afflictions. Wolf had tried to do right by us. Now he was about to be erased from our lives, and this knowledge made me appreciate the qualities that under other circumstances might have stung like nettles. He hadn’t given us any trail names, or any particular comfort, but at least he’d shown me that you could take your life’s disappointments with you into the forest and turn them into something else. Your heartbreak probably won’t go away, but at least you can convert part of it
into fuel to get you up and over the next mountain and back down again.

“Um,” Wolf said, “you don’t have to go down to Cedar Grove. You could eat my food.”