The Cactus Eaters (21 page)

Night bled into day, day into night, and before we knew it we had scrambled up and over most of the passes on the John Muir Trail. We were heading through the soft loam of a forest when we ran into two women with short-cropped hair and slender packs. They seemed to be in their forties. One stopped us. “Watch out for Bear Creek,” she said. “It’s fast and cold. It almost knocked us off our feet. Somebody told me there’s supposed to be a bridge, but it’s gone.”

The warning unsettled me, although the idea of too much water seemed fantastical after all our dehydration crises in our first few weeks of the trail. Down in the hot country, I would have laughed in the face of anyone who warned me that rushing water could ever imperil us on the PCT. Danger from water? That would have sounded like dying of luxury, like choking to death on a Kobe beef and foie gras sandwich. When we got there, Bear Creek made a hollow sound like storm water through a drainpipe. The creek was fast, dark, and fifty feet across; leaves and twigs shot across its surface. Allison stood on the shore while I scooted my boots in the water to try it out. The creek was shallow near its banks, but when I took two steps forward, the bottom dropped until the water covered my ankles, my knees, my thighs. Soon I couldn’t see the lower half of my body anymore.

The creek’s bottom was a slick rock mantle. I tottered. Bear Creek smelled like algae, and Big Motherfucker bore down on me, shifting his weight from one shoulder to the other. I now
knew it was foolish to lash my pack so tightly to my back. Now if I fell face-first, Big Mofo would pin me to the bottom of the creek. The water tried to pull me down, but I grabbed tight to a boulder. When I at last worked up the nerve, I made a break for it, pushing myself off from the rock, taking ten giant steps toward the shore, and falling to my knees in the shallows on the other side. Now it was Allison’s turn.

I shouted at her to loosen her straps, but she couldn’t hear me. Soon, deep green water covered her up to the waist. The creek was drinking her. She was teetering and starting to cry. I shouted at her to hold still. Throwing off my pack and wading into the water, I kept wondering what the hell I would tell her father and mother if she went down and her pack held her under and I couldn’t lift her out of there. What would be the reason for her drowning? What, exactly, was in Canada? Without my pack, it was easier to fight the current. I splashed out to her, held out my arms, and she sloughed her pack off, right on top of me. I took hold of the bulky pack while she let go of the rock she was holding, swam with the current, and dogpaddled, in thrashing motions, toward the opposite shore. Without the ridiculous pack, she was buoyant, and crossed the creek without much trouble. In an instant, she was crawling up the bank, soaked and still crying. I put my arms around her back onshore.

“You saved my life,” Allison said later on.

I did not know what to say. As she continued to cry, I told her that Bear Creek was not a reasonable test, that it was damned hard. Those women had warned us about it for a reason. There ought to be a sign posted about the place. Just then, two young hikers with chisel chins and stripped-down backpacks approached from the other side. They were heading straight for the creek. I bellowed at them. “Be careful!” but they stomped on in, waded in the water, and cut straight through Bear Creek as if it were a municipal kiddie pool. In a flash, they
were finished, and marched right past us. “You’re right, that was tricky,” said the man in front.

Allison and I looked at each other in puzzlement as the cold sank into our skin and made us shiver. Was it just us, I wondered, turning every little inconvenience into a tragedy narrowly averted? If Bear Creek was so easy, why did those two women make such a fuss about it? We rested together awhile, and when Allison had dried herself, changed clothes, and thrown her garments in a fabric bag, we got as far from the sound of Bear Creek as we could.

On we walked, past nightfall. In our tent later, I could not help wondering if there was a tape-stop reality at work here, if Allison really had drowned and my unconsciousness, unable to process the truth, had manufactured a ghost-cloth Allison, quilted from memory. It occurred to me that my “knowing” of her was scattershot at best, that there were blanks. In a pinch I couldn’t say very much about her. I knew she had a temper, and was neat, and that most of our fights were about dishes on the floor, mold on the walls, my losing the keys. I could say she loved Chianti Ruffino and brown Italian sodas that scorched your tongue. I knew she wanted babies someday but I’d never asked if she wanted a boy or a girl, or more than one, or if she wanted them with me. I knew exactly how to amuse her, to the extent that she once almost laughed herself to death because of me. I once did a crazy dance on her kitchen floor, making her choke on a melon wedge, which required me to practice the Heimlich maneuver on her. So I guessed I’d saved her life twice, though I’d instigated both scenarios that made me have to save her life in the first place. I might also say that I regretted the times when I yelled at her so much that I made tears fall down her face, like that time in Albany, when we were crisscrossing the country in a caravan to reach this trail and she was in the car in front, speeding through rain, and because I did not want to lose sight of her, I sped, too, and the cop stopped both
of us, her first, then me. He gave us each eighty-dollar tickets, and I stood there in the rain, the water running down my face, yelling through Allison’s open window until she shook and cried, and now I wanted to tell the real Allison, or the ghost one, that this was shameful and that I would never yell at her like that again.

But when the first stroke of sun hit the tent the next morning, and she did not vanish like a ghost, I could no longer remember what it was that I wanted to say to her. I remembered the gist of it, but the words were in the wrong order. I tried very hard to piece them together, but it would have sounded silly or ham-fisted and wrong.

I wanted to get it exactly right.

I decided, once again, to let it wait.

W
e stomped down to Reds Meadow and took a shuttle up to the condo village of Mammoth Lakes, a scruffy enclave eight thousand feet above sea level in the eastern Sierra Nevada. My father, a burly, strapping man of sixty-eight, greeted us at the Sunshine Village condo with his bald pate and gap-toothed smile. He was dressed in a oversize red T-shirt that read
PICASSO
in cursive lettering. My mother and father were still skeptical of the trip. “We’re very proud of you,” my mother said. “But, really, you’ve done
enough
. You don’t have to do anymore of this to impress us.” In spite of their trepidations, they stuffed us with wine and ribs, took us to the movies, and to my surprise, boasted about us to every waiter and waitress. “Can you believe what my son has done?” my father said to hostesses, gear-shop employees, and even random people in the street.

At a fancy restaurant, Allison lost thirty dollars in a bet with my father. I can’t recall the subject of the bet, but my father told Allison that she would “never have to pay that money as long as you stick with my son forever.” It was the first intimation that
my family wanted us to get married. I could not help but look at Allison in a new light that weekend. I noticed the solicitous way she hiked up dusty switchbacks to Shadow Lake with my slow-moving father, staying close to him to make sure he did not topple—my father, like me, is rather top-heavy—and the gentle way she dealt with my nephews when they played roughhouse games with her, including Smell My Feet and No Mercy.

That week, wherever we went, everyone treated my girlfriend as if she were a part of the family. My sister-in-law winked and made rapid pointing gestures at Allison’s ring finger.

I was only twenty-six, and the thought of getting married still petrified me, but perhaps my family was right to put the idea in my head. Allison was more than my girlfriend. She wasn’t afraid of saying and doing most anything that came to her mind. She often did what I only thought of doing. It was like having a bullhorn attached to my head, trumpeting my interior thoughts to the world. Before we left Mammoth Lakes and returned to the trail, we stopped by the local KFC to fortify ourselves on lipids and rubbery meat. When we ordered up a bucket to go, the teenage cashier smirked. She said, “It’s dumb to eat this stuff. It’s full of saturated fats.” Allison looked at her, smiled, and said, “Yum. Saturated fats. Bring it on.” The teenager winced. The strange thing is I was thinking those words at the same time Allison said them. It felt as if the speech had started in my brain and come out of her mouth.

After we said our good-byes to my mother, father, and nephews, we marched north toward Sonora Pass, moving through a dappled valley full of lakes, snowfields, and painted-rock caves. Below us was a highway in shadow and the frozen form of Orphan Lake, black and blue with no creeks running in or out of it. Buzzards rode the thermals. They barely moved their wings as they wobbled above us. We pitched camp early and woke up the next day near Ebbetts Pass in a field of volcanic rubble forming outlandish shapes. Bat wings. Gorgon heads. Dream castles. All
the while, she told me stomach-churning tales full of so much gore that I wondered where she came up with all of this stuff. Perhaps she was a Viking in her previous life. Allison got a fiery look as she recounted the story of a Nantucket serial killer/journalist who dressed up like a whaler’s ghost so he could slaughter guests at a bed-and-breakfast with a rusty old harpoon and write about his own exploits for the local newspaper. At one point he impales a girl and boy in a claw-foot tub. Naturally, the journalist was never caught for his crimes. “In fact,” Allison said, “he even finagled a job at
The Boston Globe,
on the police beat.”

I could tell she’d made that story up on the spot. She never did any advanced scribbling. Maybe that’s what drew me to her in the first place—the power of improvisation. I always have to chart everything out. Diagram it. Draw myself a map. She seemed to have the ready answers to every threat to her comfort, whether it was boredom, shyster mechanics, or bullies at work. But that week we ran into a situation so disagreeable that it tested her powers to respond.

We were enjoying ourselves in the wind, high on a set of bumpy peaks, where I was telling her some halfhearted story about a goat-eating giant, when a storm snuck up on us, a drooling dark one with tendrils draping down. The wind picked up behind the clouds, shoving them forward, and then the weather started blowing sideways, speeding our steps as we rushed down the path toward Lost Lake. The rain cloud’s streamers were upon us now. Soaked straight through, we pitched an emergency camp at the edge of a parking lot on a dirt road near the whitecapped water. We knew it was stupid thing, to spend the night near a jeep track. If you camp near an access road, you’re in striking distance of off-road vehicle enthusiasts, who are usually shit-faced and bearing small-bore firearms. But the rain was thrumming, and our exhaustion left us with no other option. A few campers were there already, quite drunk, blasting oldies. They sang along to the Beach Boys’
“Don’t Worry, Baby” and Peter and Gordon’s “A World Without Love.” A red-faced man altered the words as he went along. Actually, he augmented them, by inserting the words
you bitch
at odd intervals. For example, he sang, “Don’t worry, baby! Everything’s gonna be all right…YOU BITCH!” Someone on the other side of the lake popped off three gunshots and hollered after each speeding bullet. The rounds made a metallic whoosh as they cut across the water.

“We should just pack our stuff and leave,” said Allison, in our tent. “Nothing is worth this. We might as well hike in the rain.”

“I think it’s too late for us to move,” I said. It was four, and I worried the path would shove us up onto the shoulders of some big mountain with no adequate flat spots. “I’m too tired to go anywhere.”

The evening wore on. Much to our surprise, the revelers settled. By nine, it was quiet. The rain stopped. I stepped outside the tent. A young man and his father were gathering their drenched supplies, bunching them into their arms and walking toward their pickup truck. “It’s about to get worse,” the father said. “We’re heading out.”

“We’re staying,” I said.

“I think you should leave, too.”

“There’s room enough for all of us,” I said.

The soft oldies continued, but the bitch-shouting man’s voice gave out. Allison and I went to sleep, and soon the water, lapping against itself, was the only sound. I was glad we’d ignored the advice of the young dad.

Through my dreams, I heard a mechanical rumble, metal teeth on metal teeth, a trembling like thunder, then a jolt on my shoulder, and Allison staring me in the face, shining her flashlight down on me as she shook me awake.

“Mwwuuhh? Good Lord,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “What time is it?”

“One thirty,” she said.

“What’s the matter?”

“We’re about to get run over!”

I opened my eyes with a start, in time to see a red light flood the tent. “It’s backup lights,” she said. “It’s a truck. Rolling right for us.”

I rose up in my sleeping bag and turned around. The noise was deafening: the “chunka-chunka” sound of a massive engine, the crunch of thick tires getting closer. We should have cut and run then, but we were frozen in the tent, unable to act. The truck finally stopped, its exhaust pipes belching into our tent vestibule. The truck door opened. Out came the sounds of clomping boots, people stamping around our tent. “If anyone moves outta there, we’ll hit ’em with this,” one of them said. I gaped at Allison. Were they talking about us? Allison wondered if they were trying to provoke and smoke us out, rousing us out of sleep to beat the shit out of us, or worse. We huddled against each other, sipping our Sharkleberry Finn Kool-Aid and hoping to God that whoever they were would just go away. But they kept on shouting, and soon we heard a knock-knock-thumpa-thumpa-bonk-bonk nearby. “They’re building something out there,” Allison said. “They’re putting up some big tent. All of them!” It sounded like they were erecting the World’s Fair on the shores of Lost Lake. In between their labors, they made a point of trailing their flashlights across the camp, straight into us. One of the men cleared his throat and began to bray, “Hey you guys,” he said. “I’m readin’ a really good new biography of W. C. Fields. It said he started out in vaudeville. Did you know that?”

“No. I had no idear.”

“Well, it’s true. One day he was supposed to wrestle a real bear onstage. He’s scared out of his mind, so the management gets this tough old guy to dress up as a bear instead. And the old guy starts beatin’ the shit outta W. C. Fields! Just whalin’ on him. After a while, W. C. Fields starts screamin’ for mercy. ‘Bring back the bear! Bring back the bear!’”

“I can’t believe this,” Allison said.

“Ya get it?” the man said. “Bring back the bear?”

“Oh man, I’m gonna get these idiots,” Allison said.

“Oh, I get it!” another of the men said. “Bring back the bear. Ah-haw-haw-haw-haaaaah!”

“But they’ll beat the crap out of us,” I said.

“No, they won’t,” Allison said. “I’m gonna get them. But not yet.”

“Did you know?” the first man said, “that a bear is a marsupial?”

“No, it’s not, you fuckin’ idiot, it’s an omnivore,” another man said.

We sat there, just taking it, while the redneck equivalent of the Discovery Channel kept blaring on outside. Allison was half Swiss, half Italian. The Swiss side of her was neutral, calm, nondemonstrative, but you did not want to fuck with the Italian side of her. When she made a vow of revenge against the cretins, you knew she’d follow through.

At five o’clock in the morning, it was on. By then, our tormentors had fallen into a drunken sleep. Allison emerged from her tent and let loose with the most horrible whooping cough I’d ever heard. “Brraaaaaaaaaaaaaaackhhhh,” she said, dredging up hidden reserves of imaginary phlegm. You might say this was an act of passive aggression, considering our tormentors were unconscious, but there was nothing passive about her behavior. She stood just a few feet away from their tent’s zippered entrance, clearing her throat with as many decibels as she could muster. All at once, the thugs woke up. We could hear them rustle, and moan. Part of me wished to God that Allison had had enough, that her revenge was over—I was scared they were going to thrash us—but she was just getting started.

“Hey,” she shouted. “Where are those goddamned tent poles? Where’s my fanny pack?” She tripped—deliberately—over pots and pans, and I kicked a few pieces of metallic gear
around to show some solidarity, even though I was terrified. At any moment the men could dog-pile all over us. Now she was taking up tent poles, using them as bats, and pretending that our pots and pans were softballs. “Pow. Plink.” Then she began to cough again, but much more violently, doubled over, turning red with the exertion.

“Oh, for the love of God,” the W. C. Fields monologuist moaned. “Doncha know what time it is? Lady, can’t ya take a cough drop?”

I could tell they were getting pretty riled up in that tent by now, fixing to bust our heads, and I knew it was only a matter of time. Allison paused for a moment, and we packed up our things and got ready to go. But even then, she wasn’t finished. She turned around, stood in front of the tent one last time, cupped her hands in front of her mouth, and bellowed, in the deepest voice she could muster, “Thanks a lot for keeping us up all night, you assholes!”

I braced for the worst, but silence followed. Allison stood there as if hoping something would happen. And then it occurred to me: the miscreants were scared. They were not coming after us. In fact, I wondered if they expected us to come after
them.
Perhaps they thought she was just crazy. Or maybe it was the fact that they hadn’t even taken a look at us. For all they knew, we had a Glock in our sleeping bag. In any case, there wasn’t a peep of protest as we stormed past their camp and vanished into the woods. Watching Allison stand up to the slobs made me feel clean. I’ve always had a hard time with bullies. In middle school, I tried to avoid them. I tried not to say anything to antagonize them. Some of them had it in for me ever since elementary school because I was part of the “Mentally Gifted Minors” program, hanging out with the brilliant dorks in the school portables, making stop-motion animated films, coming up with my own recipes, and inventing machines to save the planet, while my blond Cro-Magnon tormentors grunted and
pounded wooden blocks together in homeroom. But Allison never hid from bullies. The more I thought about this, the more I thought I needed her as my wife. If she wasn’t scared of wild animals, newspaper editors, KFC clerks, or drunk assholes in a car camp, she would have no problem standing up to real estate agents, Montessori teachers, or annoying Lamaze instructors. And so, I was convinced. As we shuffled through the woods, I knew for sure that Allison would one day become my wife.

But there is one aspect of marriage that nauseated and frightened me, no matter how much I thought about it. That aspect is called “compromise.” Allison and I still hadn’t figured out what to do about the fact that she wanted to get off the trail to make last-minute revisions to her anthology about doctors. She’d told me that we would have to give up at least a week of hiking time to do this, in spite of the fact that we were a month behind schedule. She wanted us to get off at the next major supply stop—Echo Lake—hitch a ride to Lake Tahoe, and take a bus from there to her aunt’s house near Sacramento. It was the one last significant interruption on our expedition to Canada. I dreaded this; we were in a groove, having finished 634 miles of trail. I still hoped Allison would just get off the trail by herself for a week and let me hike the next one hundred miles alone and then meet me in the next section. After all, it was
her
book, not mine. I knew full well that Allison had every right to work on her book off the trail, and that I
should
leave the trail with her. I fully supported her project. In fact, I had line-edited it. If I had been in her place, I would have insisted that she leave the trail with me to show solidarity. Walking the PCT did not diminish my ability to understand the difference between responsibility, compromise, and me-me selfishness. If anything, all those long hours in the woods had heightened my understanding of these things. It’s just that I was finding it harder to make the “right” choices in spite of this newfound clarity. By then I had convinced myself that the Pacific Crest Trail was my
only
chance
to feel mature and complete. Every step toward Canada was a step toward manhood. I feared that the trail, if I never finished it, would leave me stranded in a permanent kindergarten, like that freaky midget in
The Tin Drum
. But if the path was supposed to make me so “finished” and mature, how come I was starting to pitch fits and stomp around when I didn’t get what I wanted? It did not occur to me then that the trail was becoming more than just a path toward possible wisdom. At the same time, the footpath was turning into an alternate childhood and an extended leave of absence from rationality. The trail, in other words, was
trying
to teach me wisdom and mindfulness, but instead of listening, I was sticking my fingers in my ears and saying, “Blah, blah, blah.” The more I walked, the more I seemed to stand outside myself, observing my behavior, duly noting it, judging it, but doing absolutely nothing to intervene.