The Cactus Eaters (23 page)

My amusement faded when the singing stopped. In my diary I recorded an “inexplicable sadness and irritability that rose out of nowhere, as if the grave past of the place made me feel that way.” At the time I wondered if these emotions were something received, as if the thoughts were floating in the air above the highway long before we got there. While the feelings were real enough, I now wonder if the word
Donner
, emblazoned on the highway signs, was enough to set off an emotional depth charge. Perhaps my brain was responding to a name that forces travelers to remember when most of North America was a trackless expanse of trees and mountains, so vast and hidden that devils and serpents could conceal themselves there. A man passing through this terrain would fear for his life and sanity. The forces there might kill him or turn him into something less than human.

The Donner Party—actually, several families traveling together—rolled west from Little Sandy River in July 1846. Their starting place was present-day Wyoming. Not all of the emigrants fit the stereotype of cash-strapped pioneers hoping to improve their fortunes. Some rode in wagons bulging with silks and mahogany cabinets. One wagon was pimped out with a sheet-iron stove, a browsing library, a full-length mirror, and a second story containing a bedroom. Most wagons needed two or three oxen to pull them across the prairie, but this “Palace Car,” a kind of Big Motherfucker on wheels, required four. Tamsen Donner, the family matriarch, stowed a ten-thousand-dollar nest egg in her quilt. She wanted to use the money to found a school in California. Patrick Breen, a well-to-do farmer, rolled with an entourage of fine horses, cows, and Towser, the family dog. Poor Towser! But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Though Allison and I had laughed at the emigrants in our song, the more I learned about them later on, the more my giggles became stifled. The Donner Party tests the theorem that tragedy plus time equals comedy. Consider that they were credulous and overpacked small-town dwellers who had no outdoor survival training. They left too late in the year and yet they took long rest stops and tried to make up for this by taking an unproven “shortcut” that wasted even more time. They fought needlessly and thuggishly, exploding into rages when they should have stayed calm. All I can say is, “Sounds familiar.” Historians believe the Donner Party was doomed the moment they decided to follow the advice of Lansford Hastings—a lawyer, naturally—who told them they could chop out three hundred miles, nearly a month of travel time, by taking a “cutoff” that would route them through the Great Salt Lake Desert. Hastings wasn’t rolling with the party, so he wasn’t there when the emigrants were hacking their way through the trackless and damned-near-impenetrable Wasatch Mountains, cursing his name all the while. Pushing west, they left the Palace
Wagon to rot in the sand, but it was too late. By the time they reached present-day Reno, it was late October, and the emigrants looked up with foreboding at the Sierra Nevada massif, and the ominous gray clouds above it. Instead of rushing west to stay ahead of winter, they rested for five days at Truckee Meadows, then headed up into the mountains, running into an unseasonable storm that forced them back from the summit where Allison and I now stood. Up to their shoulders in white, the travelers decided to bivouac for the winter, not as one unit but in squabbling factions camped along an eight-mile stretch of forest. Hunger gnawed at them as they settled into shanties and lean-tos left by the Stephens party. To hold off hunger, they devoured pack mules, oxen, grass, pine twig soup, shoe leather, wagon axle grease, and ox hides boiled down to a nauseating paste. They consumed all the dogs, including poor Towser.

Strange, how infamy is such a prodigious diarist. The Stephens party left behind scant records of its exploits, but the Donner Party members either kept journals or submitted to extensive interviews about their ordeal later on. That is how we know that the trapped emigrants first entertained the notion of cannibalism on, of all dates, Christmas Eve. In late December a group of pioneers sliced the meat off the arms and legs of Patrick Dolan, already dead of exposure and hunger. As they ate him for supper, they held their gazes away from one another and cried in the firelight. Cabins turned into charnel houses. Human brains boiled in a cauldron. Two Miwok Indians named Luis and Salvador were part of a relief party sent out to help the stranded emigrants; they were shot at close range and devoured. Only thirty-nine of the eighty-seven party members survived the six-month ordeal. The rest perished en route on the trail, in the frozen mountains, or on the way out of the wilderness.

I found it hard to get the Donners out of my mind in northern California, not because they were monsters but because they were not. For the most part they were ordinary people.
In the words of California historian Kevin Starr, “Taken collectively, the Donner party was Everyman in a morality play of frontier disintegration.”
*
Unlike Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, and other cannibals who haunt our popular culture, the Donner Party members weren’t crazy. If they were capable of atrocities, any one of us is capable of those same atrocities, under the right circumstances. “Cannibalism is not a psychology that erupts in psychotic individuals but is a universal adaptive strategy that is evolutionarily sound,” writes Lewis Petrinovich, UC Riverside professor emeritus of psychology. “The cannibal is within all of us.”

Allison and I were weary and grouchy after leaving Donner Summit. Seven miles later we arrived at a clearing beneath a steep and wooded hill. There we found an unlocked and unmanned Sierra Club hut, set aside for long-distance hikers and cross-country skiers. The windows of this A-frame had a baleful look, as if they had borne witness to tragedy. We had to enter the hut on a staircase that bypassed the first floor and rose straight up to the second story; I later found out that the builders added this unusual design feature because of harsh winters, when snows almost always swallow the whole first floor. Shelters are rare on the trail; the elements are so harsh out there that most shacks would get knocked down in a year or two. But this one had strong bones. It was thick and sturdy, though the inside was dingy and uncomfortable; previous occupants had trashed the place and left graffiti, or dopy self-affirmations, on most of the walls. Cans and squirrel baffles dangled from ropes nailed to the roof.

Soon it was dark out. There were no lights in the hut, so we bumbled about with our Maglites, constantly bumping our
shins into things. Allison sat for a while in front of a latticed window staring at Cassiopeia, the star formation named for a treacherous queen. She insulted Neptune when she claimed her daughter, Andromeda, was more beautiful than the Sea Nymphs. The gods tied Andromeda to a rock and sent out a sea monster to devour her. Perseus showed up just in time to kill the monster, but the gods weren’t finished with Cassiopeia. When she died, they flung her up in the sky and turned her into stars—but with a catch. Sometimes when you see her, she’s upright and proper in a chair. Other times, the chair is upside down. In those moments, Cassiopeia is in disgrace, with the blood rushing to her head. She’s remembered, but for the wrong reasons.

While Allison stared at the stars, I went downstairs to check out the basement. I found more graffiti, a long table, and a dog-eared Bible. My fingers settled on the following passage: “A man’s life consists not in the abundance of things which he possesses, for what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his soul?” I kept my finger on the passage for a while. The quote struck me as relevant but for murky reasons. It applied to me, but I did not yet know how or why.

That night we slept in bunks pressed close to the roof. We killed our flashlights and lay there in the darkness on wooden platforms in our sleeping bags, our heads lying inches away from the rooftop. “To lose his soul.” The words kept repeating as the night went from dark to black and the sounds began. I heard rumbling, scratching, rustles. Sometimes I thought I heard footsteps. I sat up on the cot while Allison kept on sleeping. Ghosts to me are not an abstraction. I don’t believe in them, but I fear them. As a boy on vacation in the High Sierra, I once stole a rock from an abandoned mine near Mammoth Lakes. From then on, twice a month for a year, miners visited me in my sleep, and even in my daydreams. Their eyes were rotted out. I shut my eyes to block them out, but I still heard
their bones clank. This kept happening until I actually returned to Mammoth, the very next summer, and put the rock back where it belonged. The visions stopped. They say ghosts want our attention. Ghosts are like stars. The light source died long ago, and yet you can still see them glowing. Chances are it was probably just squirrels, raccoons, or opossums moving through the hut that evening. My rational mind knew this. It was just varmints, nothing more, and yet I kept thinking there was a person outside, or what used to be a person, standing there, just a few feet away from where we were sleeping that night, fiddling with the knobs, trying to get in.

T
he Lois and Clark Expedition was on the move. We splashed through streams, made our way through a clearcut forest, and entered a land that smelled like rotten eggs. In Lassen Volcanic National Park, steam rose from vents in the banks of Boiling Springs Lake. It was the second week of September, and time to celebrate. We had walked just under a thousand miles together, in seventy days, since leaving Agua Dulce. A butterfly lit on Allison’s head and rolled out its tongue like a party streamer. “I love it here,” she said.

Some tourists stood next to us, gagging on fumes, putting hankies over their faces, but we didn’t mind the smell. We couldn’t believe that our feet alone had brought us here. Now we had nine supply towns behind us: Agua Dulce. Tehachapi. Kennedy Meadows. Reds Meadow. Tuolomne Meadows. Echo Lake. Sierra City. Old Station. Belden Town. Next on the list was Castella, close to Mount Shasta. Allison wanted to linger in Lassen, but there wasn’t time. Though we were making great progress, it was early fall, and we had good reason to move fast.
The weather was just starting to turn. By the time we crossed into the South Cascades, it was late September, and the sky had a gray pall. And we weren’t the only ones hurrying. Bears were out there, getting ready for winter. Everywhere we went, I sensed them watching.

Out in a desolate part of the Modoc Plateau, in a place called Hat Creek Rim, the water tasted of cinders. We walked among the stilt-legged ruins of a fire tower. We were hurrying toward Canada, taking shorter breaks. Once, that week, we were walking through a meadow; wild onions splashed pink and red, giving off a strong odor. Allison picked a sprig to save for our mac-and-cheese that night. That’s when we saw a bear in repose, two hundred feet across the field, head down, back arched, a cinnamon stripe on its fur. I stepped on a twig. The bear whirled and ran away. We followed to get a glimpse. He ran up the nearest tree, hook-climbing it with his two-inch claws. After making his way thirty feet up, he stopped dead, all three hundred pounds of him. The bear held fast to the trunk and bundled his rump against the air. Allison stepped into his shadow. The bear could have dropped down and squashed her then, but he did not move. I aimed the telephoto lens at him and clicked, again and again. When I was finished, we left him hanging in the tree.

Bears once frightened us. Not now. The more I studied them, the more they seemed ridiculous. In a letter home that week, I wrote that bears “look like bloated overfed Labrador retrievers. We’re not that scared of them (anymore). They are oversized raccoons with fat asses.” I felt sorry for black bears, and sometimes pitied myself for being born too late. The last wild wilderness was just about gone. California was once home to a hundred thousand grizzlies. They lived in chaparral foothills, on mountains, in deserts, and out on the beaches. Native Americans forged an uneasy truce with them. Some tribes thought the grizzlies were just another variety of human
being. Then came the Californios, forty-niners, and ranchers, who fought wars against grizzlies with rifles, lassoes, whaling guns, and lances dipped in strychnine.
Ursus horriblus
lived in California for millions of years. It took six decades, the lifespan of a single bear, to wipe them all away.
*
The last known Golden State grizzly was gunned down in 1922 in the foothills of Fresno County, apparently for sniffing too close to a sheep enclosure. Nowadays, California is the only state whose official animal is stone dead within its borders. The grizzly was a menace and pest when he lived. Now that he’s gone, he is a totem on savings-and-loan buildings and Hollister Brand fashion T-shirts. If you glance at the Great Seal of California, the griz looks like a neutered Chihuahua. He’s bending in front of Minerva with an expression of accommodating weakness. He looks as if he expects the goddess of wisdom to drop-kick him into the San Francisco Bay.

That day we headed north toward, of all places, Grizzly Peak. On the one hand, it was comforting to walk without worrying about an animal that could strip the bones from our backs without provocation. On the other hand, the grizzly’s absence made the forest feel like a terrarium with the disagreeable elements removed. If black bears—those wimps—were the standard-bearer of hairy otherness in this wilderness, what kind of wilderness was it, anyhow? And did
wilderness
have meaning anymore? And so I became a quiet stalker of black bears, convinced they were tame and silly, not truly wild.

It happened on September 17, north of Lassen, in a logged-out section of trail. I was hiking ahead of Allison. As I rounded a curve in the trail, I arrived at a sculpture of an adult bear. The statue seemed to be made of marble. It had a vacant expression.
The poorly designed artwork was the biggest non sequitur I’d seen on the PCT. I was deeply offended. Why would someone take the time to sculpt and sand down and set up this marble lump and plant it right in the middle of the PCT, where a hiker might run right into it? And what, exactly, was the sculptor trying to prove? Was the artwork an expression of guilt? I was getting myself all worked up and annoyed when the statue, suddenly, moved. Then it turned to look at me. Glare at me. Snort at me. The statue was not a statue, but a
real fucking bear
who had been resting in the middle of the trail. He was not polished stone, but flesh, hair, and black eyes filled with something between hatred and mere annoyance. The bear huffed once, then dashed into the woods.

“Oh my God,” I cried out.

Allison caught up to me. My breathing was fast and sharp. It was hard to speak. I explained to her what had happened.

She looked disappointed. “I didn’t get a chance to see it,” she said. “You’re always out front. You always scare everything away.”

She was right. I felt guilty about frightening away all the quality wildlife. And so we decided to stalk that black bear on the Pacific Crest Trail. We got very quiet. We tiptoed through the woods. I’d heard many ranger warnings against this behavior. Never sneak up on an animal. Never enter its “defense perimeter.” But I didn’t care. At the time, my behavior did not seem, in the least, retarded. I thought we were just being cheeky.

On we walked, in search of the Miracle Statue Bear. The trail cut across the side of a steep and pine-covered hillside. To the left of the trail was a slanting forest. We walked for fifteen minutes and saw no sign of the beast. Allison took the lead. She saw nothing; she was getting frustrated, so we called off the search. “Forget it,” she said. “Let’s just walk on.” And so we did. Allison stayed about ten paces ahead of me, to make sure she got
the best look at all the good fauna. Suddenly, she stopped and stared at something I couldn’t see. She smiled. She was looking down, off the left of the trail, at something just below her in the forest, about twenty feet away. “How cute,” she said. Then the color drained from her. I heard a sound like a bloodhound, but louder and full of reverb, as if the dog were baying into a hollow tube. Something just off the trail was calling out to us in a rage. “Ha-ruff-squonk,” it said. “Huffa-huffa SQUONK. Ha-ruff-SQUONK!” Allison turned to me and said, in a soft and wavering voice, “We’d better get the fuck out of here.”

“What do you see?” I said.

“Let’s just get out of here,” she said. She started shaking. She walked backward, slowly, while keeping her gaze focused on the copse of quaking trees just below the trail, and a huge brown shape just behind it. The thing kept snorting, the trees kept quivering, and I knew, all at once, that we were about to get mauled. Thrashed. Bitten everywhere.

“What are you doing?” I said. “Why are you walking? Let’s run!”

“No,” she said. “Don’t. They can run faster than us.
Don’t
try it. They can’t resist a chase.”

“But I don’t want to just stand here like a fucking idiot…”

“Don’t run
,” she said again.

Fine. I did as she said. I took several giant steps backward, slowly, methodically, still staring at the trees, and lifting up my arms so the bear would think I was larger and would be afraid. Then I took another giant step back. So did Allison. We did this for several minutes. Then, we ran. We ran like crazy. We ran as if someone had set us both on fire. We tore up that hillside, running until our lungs ached, running until the lactic acid burned in our legs.

“So,” I said, between gasps. “What the hell did you see?”

“Cute cubs,” she explained as she ran. “Two of them. Cute little furry things. Round little fuzzy ears. And then…”

That was all I needed to know. We kept running. “This,” she exclaimed, “is the most frightened that I have ever been because of an animal.”

When we arrived at the top of the steep slope, we were out of breath. We glanced down at the forest far beneath us, to see if the bear was pursuing us. She wasn’t. In fact, it took us a while to spot her. Allison saw her first, below us in the woods beside the trail. She was nosing her cubs one by one up a tree, her vast and hairy rump pointed in our direction, as if inviting us to kiss it.

So maybe I was wrong. Maybe the woods were sending me a little message. “Back the fuck
up
,” the forest seemed to say. “Perhaps we’re not as wild as we used to be, but we’re wild enough for you.” I sat there with Allison in a pile of wet leaves, still pumped with adrenaline, but relieved that the forest had let me off easy. I vowed to be more respectful next time. I vowed not to mix it up with any more woodland creatures until we hit Canada. From now on, I’d avoid confrontation with the mindless fauna of the forest.

But it was already too late to avoid confrontation.

A much smaller monster, one we couldn’t even see, was lying in ambush for us in the woods of the Pacific Northwest.