The Cactus Eaters (19 page)

“We’ll only slow you down,” I said.

“Well, okay then,” he said. “But maybe I’ll see you down the trail somewhere. Maybe you’ll catch up to me.”

“Maybe,” I said. “We just might.”

Allison, the realist, laughed. “Like that would ever happen,” she said.

We shook hands with him. Wolf turned around to walk up a canyon wall. He was out of our sight in no time at all.

I
walk because I want to be cool. I walk because I want to be a rebel.

All my life, I’ve shied away from doing cool things. I’m talking about swearing in public, taking drugs, slutting, and engaging in displays of primal rage. It’s not that there was any law against doing any of these things, except the drugs. It’s just that I was a nerd.

Growing up in a seaside town in Southern California, I had a large group of friends, all nerds. Studious and polite, they defined the boundaries of my world. In high school, we never got into any trouble. I thought we were being cheeky when we drove out to Spires, a chain restaurant in Torrance that stays open until midnight. Some nights, when our blood was up, we would stay out as late as ten thirty at night and eat a platter of popcorn shrimp. If we really felt like pressing the boundaries of societal norms, we ordered the Monte Cristo, which is basically a French toast sandwich, with ham, cheese, and powdered sugar on the top. Sometimes, we would stay out as late as eleven, sipping fountain drinks and ordering milkshakes, without even telling our parents, because, gosh darn it, they didn’t need to know. At the time, I thought this was as rebellious as a
teen could be. Consequently I was shocked—shocked!—many years later when I found out that all the other boys at my high school were smoking pot, snorting coke, and getting blowjobs on catamarans. How come they’d never invited me to even one of these parties? Where did they get the drugs? How did they keep the catamarans from tipping over? I tried to visualize these parties, but they were unimaginable. To me, a party was an occasion in which people gathered to play Pictionary or Yahtzee and perhaps consume some Hawaiian Punch. So how did these wild parties work? What did they look like? Did they start off with Pictionary and Hawaiian Punch and somehow transition, gradually, into the sex and drinking? Or was there no transition? Did some appointed person stand up at the party, in an awkward moment, and announce what was going to happen? “Hey everybody! It’s eleven
P.M
. Put down that Yahtzee set. It’s time for the drugs and the soulless fucking to begin!”

Don’t get me wrong. I smoked pot a few times but felt nothing but forgetful, craving Beer Nuts, and convinced that everyone on earth was out to beat the shit out of me. In other words, it had no affect on me whatsoever. Once, at an outdoor music festival with my sister, Edie, I decided to join the counterculture once and for all. Unbeknownst to my protective sister, I bought a hash-infused granola bar from a freak in a dashiki. The granola burned in my stomach and made me dance shirtless to long-haired bands with names like Pele Juju and Leftover Salmon. Soon I was sitting in a lawn chair watching the landscape flash red and green and blue. Edie found me and stood over me shouting, “Dan, are you okay?” I might have asked her the same question, considering that my sister’s head had inflated to twenty-five times its normal size and was rotating on its axis. Didn’t that hurt?

I spent the rest of the festival hiding in my tent moaning and groaning. That day, the drugged cookie let me down. The next morning I was the same person I’d ever been, but with one
more ridiculous new experience behind me. That’s the problem with drugs. If you’re a nerd, you might hope against hope that drugs will make you into something you’re not. “Nerd plus drugs equals cool.” But most of the time, there is no transformation. The nerd merely becomes hyphenated. “Nerd plus drugs equals drug-taking nerd.”

But now, at last, I had reason to feel ecstatic. I was truly rebelling, like never before. I had stopped bathing. My beard was blood red and messianic. I had stories to tell. I had a gorgeous girlfriend, and with every sweaty mile, she looked more like an Amazon. The sun had bleached out every dirty part of her dirty-blond hair; it was pure gold and yellow now. Besides, we had reached central California, and had finished 12.1888 percent of the trip. Only 87.8112 percent remained. We felt unstoppable.

Still, I had no idea what to expect from Cedar Grove. The last time we’d left the trail for a supply town, the locals had treated us like rubes, thieves, and arsonists. We were hungry. Cedar Grove was a campground, hotel, and RV resort along the three-pronged Kings River. A sprawling wooden building housed a lodge we couldn’t afford, a tasty if overpriced café/ snack bar, and a grocery that was decent if you ignored the night crawlers that throbbed in plastic containers near the food items. A crowd gathered around us at the resort café, where we sat pile-driving pie, turkey, and ice cream down our throats. At first I wondered if they would mock us, but it soon became clear that we were rock stars. An old woman from Brooklyn in a black overcoat and pink scarf came up to see us. Our every utterance about trail life made her swoon with curiosity and worry.

“Oh, it’s so interesting,” she cooed. “My son did a cross-country bike trip once and it helped him get a job ’cause his employers all wished they’d done the same thing. But I worried about him all the time. I hope you’re not being reckless. You
drinking enough water? You wearing sunscreen? You’re both so fair-skinned.”

Allison laughed when the old woman went away. “New Yorkers are so fascinated with anyone who’s not like them,” she said, shaking her head.

It was true. The New Yorker regarded us as fascinating but not entirely sentient objects of curiosity, as if we were bioluminescent toads in a cardboard box. But I didn’t mind being someone else’s pleasure toad. All my life, I’d craved attention. Now so many people had so many questions that it became difficult to shove fistfuls of potatoes down my throat. Since we were so late in the Pacific Crest Trail hiking season, there were no other smelly through-hikers to elbow their way into our spotlight. Another couple was hanging out in the café, but few people were interested in them. For one, they were fresh-faced, not haggard like us. The young man and his girlfriend had heavy packs but looked like they hadn’t spent much time in the woods. We’d overheard them saying they were walking from Mount Whitney to the Oregon border, laden with gourmet foods. They were taking it easy, going seven miles a day. Moments later, they slipped into the forest. Soon they left my consciousness altogether.

For once, I was full of stories, and everybody listened. Attention was like oxygen. I gulped it down so fast it made me lightheaded. Even Allison started hamming it up, believing in our legend. A pale-faced boy sidled over and asked for a look at her scrapes and bruises. “Look at this,” she said, rolling up the sock of her right foot to show the boy her blood blister, red and livid, straight out of a medical textbook. “Nice, huh?” she said.

The boy’s eyes opened wide. “Don’t die,” he said.

Everyone, all of a sudden, thought the trip was worthwhile and amazing, and we did nothing to discourage this view. So many people thought we were bad asses that I believed it, too.
A Virginia family, including three luscious Southern belles with creamy skin and tapered noses, walked over and mobbed me. The girls chattered and interrupted one another in catty but charming ways in an effort to talk to me. For a moment I wondered if Lee’s Press-on Nails would be the weapon of choice in a blood fight for my attentions. Soon the hot girls found other amusements, and less attractive well-wishers took their place. “Back off. Pick a number,” I wanted to shout.

Heady with the crowd’s adoration, Allison and I retired to our tent at sunset, where we had wild, if muffled, celebration sex with the rain cover draped above the tent. Famous people need privacy, too. We filled my sleeping bag, and our Northface Bullfrog tent, with our egos and naked vastness. In my mind’s eye, we were a pair of 757-pound Sumo wrestlers grappling each other in the darkness. The feeling that we were larger than life, and an inspiration for others, only got stronger when we were lying there afterward in each other’s arms watching the sky go black through the mesh lining in the tent. Bit by bit, after Allison nodded off to sleep, I began to hear other couples across the campground groaning and panting with desire. We seemed to have triggered a bacchanalia of lust that blew through the grove. A geeky, standoffish Eurotrash couple, whom we had met hours before, now filled Cedar Grove with loud Esperanto grunts and gurgles rising from their tent. “Kwok, yok, yarooog!” they snorted. A few minutes later, through the opening in our tent, I saw that the Euro-couple, in a shameless move, had emerged, all sweaty, from their tents, well aware that half the campsite was watching them. They looked like a pair of contortionist dancers taking their sweaty bows in the moonglow. Allison lay mop-headed across my shoulder. She was bathed in the red tint of a Winnebago’s beer lights. Children ran wild through the woods. Generators whirred. Out of the distance came the faint, amplified drone of someone giving a “ranger talk” at the
outdoor amphitheater about “what animals do when people aren’t around.” The wind picked up. I fell asleep.

The next morning we felt so buzzed from confidence that we did something we dared not consider before: we streamlined the expedition. We took Draconian measures to lighten the pack load, getting rid of our inflatable Therm-a-Rest mattresses and our extra sweaters. If Todd the Sasquatch, the Gingerbread Man, and Wolf could hike with so little, then dammit, so could we. Feeling like Jardi-Nazis, we swaggered through the campfire convoys of Cedar Grove. I sat down on a bench and wrote a letter to my good friend James, the North Carolina journalist who had suggested we hike the trail in the first place. When he first said it, it seemed like a joke. Now I wanted to let him know that his grand escape plan had worked out after all.

I wrote:

• 1. I’ll probably have to shave my ever-growing brown-red beard. That’ll take a week right there.
  
• 2. Clean my fingernails—that will take a month.
  
• 3. Have my belongings, and myself, dry-cleaned.
  
• 4. Perhaps seek employment.
  
• 5. Eat nonstop until I gain back the fifteen pounds I lost. (Not kidding. I look downright cadaverous.)
  

After mailing the letter at the Cedar Grove resort, I came across the young couple I’d recognized from the day before at the café, the ones who were hoping to walk from Whitney to the California-Oregon border. Immediately I noticed that a small crowd had gathered around them. It made me envious and annoyed. Who the hell were they to steal my limelight? Suddenly I noticed that their once-bulging backpacks looked empty.

“What the hell?” I said. “What did this? And why are you back so soon?”

“Bear,” the man said, shaking his head.

T
he man, tall, rangy, and handsome, in his early twenties, looked only moderately bummed out. He didn’t act like a man who had just been mugged and humiliated by a mammal.

“So what happened?” I said.

“Well,” he said, “I know we’re supposed to only camp in places that have those bear-proof food lockers. But we overshot it and didn’t feel like backtracking. We tried to hang our food up in a tree. We hung it up as high as we could, but I guess we did a bad job. The bear just climbed right up and knocked it down and ate our stuff. We banged pots and pans and screamed, and it just gave us a look like, ‘What, are you crazy?’ and took off with all the food. He got our organic cheese. Our breads. He got all our snacks.” The man shrugged, sighed, and smiled. “That bear must’ve needed that food way more than we do,” he said with a dreamy expression. “Lorraine and I appreciate our blessings. We aren’t subsistence. We’ve got good teaching jobs. We don’t have to eat grubs or go eating diapers to get by. The way I figure, when that bear came after our food, it was
karma. That bear got some great stuff. I was just giving back something to nature.”

While I appreciated his kindness, I wondered if bears would be quite so forgiving if they were to switch places with us humans. My general feeling is that the bears, given half a chance, would wipe us off the globe. A squirt of fear ran up my spinal cord. Suddenly I remembered all those warning signs posted throughout Cedar Grove. I didn’t want to go out there and get my food swiped by a bear. I’d heard horror stories of bears chasing people until they dropped their backpacks. Allison and I had entered the realm of the Hairy Other, the dark master that lurks in the woods. The Hairy Other is bigger than you. He hides his bulk in the underbrush, or beneath a stand of pines, and though you may not see or smell him, he sure as hell sees and smells you. There are six hundred thousand black bears in thirty-seven states. Each one ranges over five square miles to gather its food. The chances of walking into any reasonably remote forest and not seeing one are slim. I knew black bears attack people rarely. They’re too busy sucking down chipmunks, marmots, beehives, blueberries, thimbleberries, rose hips, hazelnuts, dogwood, and plums to want to take a bite out of our hairy asses.
*
But attacks do happen. A starving bear can and will administer a sucking chest wound. If a six-hundred-pound bear that can run as fast as a pony comes bowling after you on the trail, what the hell are you supposed to do?

“If the bear comes after you for your food, don’t resist,” the man said. “Sometimes the bear will do a fake-charge, to make you drop your stuff. They know what scares you. Usually it’s just a bluff-charge, but you never know. Don’t fight him off. Once the bear gets your food, it’s his.”

From that moment on, Allison and I could not seem to escape the signs of bears at Cedar Grove: hooded trash cans with security latches, written warnings, pictures of scraggly blackies all over the men’s room, creating the impression that one of them might come up from behind you while you’re taking a piss and scalp you where you stood. Quiet as a cat, the bear waits in shadows as you stumble around the bathroom, searching for something—anything—on which to dry your hands. You ask yourself: Where are the paper towels? Where the hell is the automatic hand drier? Thinking you are all alone, you don’t feel the least bit self-conscious as you shake, shake, shake, then zip up your pants. Slowly, methodically, the blackie unfurls the two-inch nonretractable claws that will soon rip your face off. The last thought that goes through the oblivious murk of your mind, mere moments before your brains are scattered like confetti all over the bathroom walls, is “Why do those last drops always fall down your pants?”

I knew, in the rational part of me, that black bears got the worst of it in their stand-offs with humans. Among the many indignities they face: a multimillion-dollar black market trade, originating in Asian countries, trafficking in black bear body parts. American poachers shoot black bears dead, then remove their gall bladders, which are shipped, via middlemen, to unscrupulous pharmacists, who buy them for as much as three thousand dollars a pop and use them in phony “cures” for impotence, cancer, and rheumatism. Bear bile, sold by the gram, has a higher street value than cocaine. And you don’t need to be a poacher to harm a bear. Campers who toy with them by offering them food and garbage, and then snapping their pictures, seal their doom. If a marauding bear, enticed by human smells, loses its fear and starts prowling campgrounds, harassing humans, and busting into cars, rangers will relocate or “put down” the animal. But those guilty feelings did not make me less fearful. The fact was Allison and I would be helpless out there.

That afternoon I asked a frowning backcountry ranger about “bear troubles” in that area. He had a gigantic beige hat and Oakley-type reflective glasses. He kept a shotgun as long as his arm mounted in the dash of his patrol car. The ranger told us that bears can recognize the shape of a food-storage cooler. The object’s particular look and color translate as food. This thoughtful abstraction can drive bears to bust open a window or unhinge a car door to get at its contents. I didn’t believe the ranger until he showed me a fistful of photographs: a car whose insides looked like they had been attacked with the business end of an industrial food processor, and a van with fat hunks of upholstery puffing out of tears in the backseat. There were nibbles all over the furnishings. It wasn’t hard to extrapolate. Those nibbles could be all over us. “The fact is [bears are] unpredictable, and a lot of ’em around here have lost all fear of humans,” the ranger said. “And that’s not a good thing when you’re sleeping out in the woods. Never, and I do mean never, sleep in a camp that doesn’t have bear-proof boxes for your food. And never, never take your food into your tents with you at night. They’ll go after toothpaste. They’ll go after underarm deodorant. They’ll even go after bug spray. They’ll eat damn near anything.”

“So what am I supposed to do?” I said.

“Show respect,” the ranger said. “Leave ’em alone. And stay out of their way.”

That’s all very well and good, I wanted to say. But suppose we blunder into a mama and her cubs? What then?

Back in the woods with Allison, farther north on the trail, in a dark stretch of a secluded section of the Sierra Nevada, I kept hearing burbling sounds all around me. No, it couldn’t be a bear, I kept saying. Maybe it’s just yesterday’s rice pilaf. It was getting late in the afternoon. We walked through a stand of strange trees, their bases as black and plump as potbellied stoves. The slanted red light fell on the trees, making them look hot
to the touch. Allison was not helping matters. To pass the hours in the forest, she’d started telling me a series of “Pacific Crest Tales,” penny dreadfuls she invented on the spot. She made a good case that these tales helped us climb steep switchbacks. They took away the occasional pain and boredom of hiking. The trouble was, I was already on edge from fear of bears—and her tales were always horror stories, ending with geysers of blood. In most cases, the victims were insipid men. One of her stories was about a family reunion in a creaky old cabin on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

“See, the family was drinking, having a great time, except for the crazy older brother. The family had him locked in a stinky basement with rats crawling all over it because he was so insane. So he’s down there for twelve years, eating rats, going crazier and crazier. His skin is bright white ’cause he’s never in the sunshine. So there they are, having a great old time, when the older brother starts screaming and begging for mercy from the basement. Won’t somebody please help meeeeeeeee? So the family is getting really drunk, and the younger brother is going to the bathroom, where he hears the sound coming up from the floorboards—somebody pleeeeeeeeeeease help meeeeeeeeeeeee. I am so lonely. Would somebody come downstairs and keep me company? Please. I haven’t seen the light of day for over a dozen years. I promise not to harm any of you.’ So the younger brother can’t stand the guilt anymore. What’s the worst that can happen? He unlocks the deadbolt from the basement door. Then he takes down the main lock, and then the other lock, and finally the last latch on the door. His family has no idea where he is. They think he’s on the toilet or something. ‘Hello, is anybody down there? Hellooooooooooo?’ He walks downstairs on creaky steps and he hears nothing at all. And he sees nothing ’cause it’s pitch black. And suddenly he sees a glowing shape, glowing, moving toward him. And it’s the white glowing skin of his older brother, smiling, smiling.
‘Helllooooooooooooo? Are you gonna hurt me?’ says the younger brother? ‘Are you gonna do anything mean to me?’ And the older brother says, ‘It’s okay, nothing’s gonna harm you, nothing’s gonna harm you.’ And then he grabs his little brother by the throat. Cuts his throat. Chops off every single one of his fingers. Cuts off his toes. Cuts off his nose. And then he cuts off his dick!”

Allison, it seemed to me, said that last line with an unnecessary amount of relish.

“Cuts off his dick?” I said. “Did you just say cuts off his dick? And that’s the end of the story?”

“There is no more,” she said.

I knew she was a big joker. I knew she had a morbid sense of humor that could surface all of a sudden, in the darnedest of places. But it was dark outside. And there was no one around but the two of us, and somewhere in the back of my mind was the suspicion that Allison, perhaps, was one truly sick individual, and now I was going camping with her. And it made me worry. Between bears and Allison, there was nowhere to run. Allison’s imagination was a fertile crescent of disgusting images. She was a Scheherazade of horror. The scary stories just kept popping up out of her, fully formed.

That night, as we first started thinking about a potential campsite, I was pondering, in particular, the dirty basement and screaming brother, the flashing razor, the severed penis lying in the basement dust. I was pondering the rats that the pale brother ate for dinner. Suddenly a hairy shape broke from the bushes near the Pacific Crest Trail, a rolling shape, low, fat, ungainly, but moving with great speed toward Allison and me at first, then whirling away, so fast, in a blur of pine needles and dust. Its hair was black, but not all of it. On the tips of its back I spied a flash of cinnamon and a shade of murky gray near its wet muzzle. It took me a moment to realize this was not a figment from Allison’s sick mind.

“Oh my God,” I shouted. “Bear! Bear!”

And then it was gone. Quiet again. How big was it? I couldn’t say. I caught only a suggestion of haunches, a trace of shoulder, but I’d seen my first wild bear, moving among us, a pair of eyes, a well of dark brown as deep as our ancestral past. It’s just not the same when you see a bear in a zoo, bored, fast asleep, pacing, or sitting there belching and yawning. When you see one in the woods, it somehow makes the forest revert from background to foreground. The forest seems to rise and engulf you. Was he there all along, watching? As we hiked farther into the dark, we came to a campground with a bear-proof food storage locker for campers. We shuddered, for it was padlocked to a thick tree and covered with nasty scratches, top to bottom. Something big and hairy and hungry had really wanted that food. Should we stop here for the night? Should we call it a day? But somehow, when you’re hiking a 2,650-mile trail, the greed for mile-bagging can get the best of you. You forget to stop when you really should. You press on and on.

And all the while, I kept thinking about the Hairy Other, the watcher in the woods. For as long as there have been humans in America, there have been bears in the forest. In the course of those fifteen millennia in which people of one sort or other have occupied this landmass, men and women have reduced our monsters and our wilderness with spear, repeating rifle, shotgun, ax, and bulldozer. The great forests are gone. The mega fauna are extinct. But the woods still had the power to resurrect a strange, almost supernatural fear. It must have been a familiar feeling to the cavemen equivalent of Dan and Allison, traipsing through these woods in the Pleistocene era in loincloths, while clutching bone-frame tents and spears made from flaked-off rock points. Cave-Dan and Proto-Allison must have been fucking terrified. Back then, the two-thousand-pound short-faced bear roamed freely across the United States. When it reared up on its hind legs and roared to the sky, the beast was
11.5 feet tall from his hind legs to his skull. That’s twice the size of a modern Kodiak bear. Think of a carnivore at the pointy end of the food pyramid, a beast so powerful that nothing, except a mastodon, would stand up to him. There was something direct about these creatures. Unlike black bears or grizzlies, they were not pigeon-toed, which meant they didn’t waddle. No, they just came right at you in a straight line, and they didn’t mess around with nuts, roots, and berries, either. The short-faced bear ate nothing but bloody meat. A black bear would be no match for one of these goliaths, which could have popped one into its mouth like a petit four. But a black bear could still weigh six hundred pounds and climb a hundred-foot pine tree in thirty seconds flat. We had to keep our wits about us out here.

Every night in the Sierra Nevada we hoped to find another camp with a bear box. But on some nights we miscalculated. On one such night we wound up camped beside a creek beneath a high cliff. We built a fire. Bats hurtled through the twilight. We debated tying our food stash to a tree, so high up that no blackie could get at it. But then we thought about those two airheads back in Cedar Grove who did the same thing and got screwed. There is a documented case in Yosemite National Park in which a bear climbed a tree, jumped off one of the branches, grabbed a bear bag on the way down in midair, and then came to a rolling stop on the ground twenty feet below. For all these reasons, I did something you’re never supposed to do: In open defiance of the scary ranger at Cedar Grove, I stuck the food bag between Allison and me and slept with my ice ax near the opening of the tent, with the following idea: if a bear stuck its greasy filthy maw inside our tent and tried to get at our food I would stand and fight, to the death if I had to. I got the idea from reading a section of
The PCT Hiker’s Handbook,
by hikers’ guru Ray Jardine, who said he slept with his food, though he was extremely cautious to stay well away
from designated campsites that would attract bears. “In PCT environs,” Jardine writes, “I sleep with my food, prepared to guard it without compromise. At night I keep my flashlight near at hand, lest I take a blind swat at porkie…. And I do not suffer the misconception that my nocturnal bliss is inviolate. I fall asleep prepared to rise and assert my position.”