The Cactus Eaters (24 page)

I
n late September, we entered the kingdom of Shasta, a sleeping stratovolcano in the South Cascades. We were now just 230 trail miles south of the Oregon border. Allison and I were entering a time of year when the weather was getting colder. The sky swirled with odd colors: gunmetal gray, off-white, tooth-plaque yellow, brown, and blue, and yet this did not bother me. In the past few weeks, we’d faced down near-horrible disasters, and some deus ex machina always showed up at the last moment to save us. Allison had taken some severe headers face first into the rocky soil, but she’d always caught herself in time. In another instance, hogging the map and directions, she was so spooked by a gaggle of wicked quail that she very nearly fell off a cliff. But she somehow caught herself. Nature could be frightening and unpredictable, but we seemed to have luck on our side. How else could we have escaped from Mama Bear? Now, in Northern California, I just wanted that luck to hold out for a while. The kingdom of Shasta was our final obstacle before we finished all of Northern California. By
every indication, our journey was going smoothly now. Never mind the disturbing legends I’d heard about Shasta. According to Native American tradition, it’s taboo to cross into the mountain’s sacred kingdom. Vengeful beings occupy the waters and rocks, where they stand sentry against any human who dares to trespass on or desecrate the land. Wayfarers who travel above the tree line are especially vulnerable to this race of spirit beings. The name Native Americans gave to these little people is the same word they used for “pain.”

According to author and California cultural historian Philip Fradkin, Shasta crowns a region that attracts more myths and legends than any other part of California. Allison knew a bit about the stories. She’d mentioned a thirteenth-century mystic named St. Germain, whose wraithlike presence haunts Panther Creek near Shasta. Allison and I shared an interest in the occult. When we were first dating, in rural Connecticut, we gave impromptu tarot readings at parties. With our limited knowledge of tarot rules, we misinterpreted the cards, which led us to tell my already anxious downstairs neighbor that he was going to die very soon. Allison and I once traveled to the remains of an allegedly haunted settlement called Dudleytown, near Cornwall, Connecticut. The silence was unearthly there. Even the birds were quiet. Allison discovered a tree with a human face—a lump for a nose, two knobs for eyes, and sap crying out of them. It made me wonder if trees could imprison human souls. Allison had asked me, that day in Dudleytown, if I believed in the landscapes of evil. As we left the ruins of that colonial town, we talked about the powers of good and ill that resided in certain forests.

I have always been superstitious. I suppose, in the back of my mind, I was concerned about the region of Shasta, and whether the powers within the landscape would work for or against us. Still, I felt nothing but hope and excitement as we hiked into Castella, a former lumber town and railroad settlement in the
heart of the Sacramento River Canyon. Castella is exalted by hikers because of Milt Kenney, the most famous “trail angel” to live near the trail. Milt earned his reputation as “Mayor of the Trail” by helping an average of sixty hikers per season for the past twenty years. We were looking forward to meeting him. Allison and I were also aware of Castella’s reputation as a place for the “halfway blues.” Although it’s only 210 miles from the Oregon border, many hikers get demoralized because of a sign at the Castle Crags Campground saying
MEXICAN BORDER
, 1,487
MILES
.
CANADIAN BORDER
, 1,113
MILES
. Something about the sign can make a man feel small; the task at hand is nearly as enormous as what you’ve already accomplished.

Perhaps that’s why, historically speaking, trail couples break up at Castella. The task makes you reflect on your partner’s flaws as if through the lens of an electron microscope. But it comforted me that Allison, by now, knew all of my weirdnesses and hadn’t dumped me. She now took it for granted that I lost or broke crucial pieces of gear—the flashlight gone AWOL in a river, the shit shovel dropped in a ravine, and the thermometer I sat on until the mercury leaked. She once caught me using my dirty nether garments, which I referred to as “undie-pants,” as eye pillows to block the moonlight as I slept. This did not seem to bother her. Over the past month, I’d noticed, with some distaste, that she was starting to pee standing up without taking her backpack off, and that she sometimes peed directly off the trail. This no longer struck me as bestial. Our moods were often disparate, with one of us happy and burbling, the other bored or despondent, but I accepted this. I tried very hard to pay more attention to her, not to call out military cadences when she fell behind or to cut short her well-earned breaks. I tried active listening, and to let her get in at least six consecutive sentences before making the conversation all about me. Besides, I was learning to tend to her, take care of her, elevate her knee, and feed her Excedrins, tortilla chips, and bean
dip when she was in pain. I still knew how to make her laugh. For her sake, I was trying to be stoic, and complaining less. In every way, I was trying to give her more reasons not to take off into the woods by herself.

Allison’s parents, wondering how we were faring, had sent us a
Far Side
cartoon showing two explorers stumbling through the hills. The man in the front is singing, “My knapsack on my back, valderi, valdera, valderi, valdera, ha, ha, ha!” The man in the back is muttering, “God, I hate him.” The caption reads, “More tension on the Lewis and Clark Expedition.” But by now the trail was running out of ideas to hamper our expedition. We were ruthless, skinny, stripped down, fierce. After making so much progress, we couldn’t wait to celebrate with the most famous trail angel of them all. He would be the good-luck charm we needed to push us all the way into Canada.

In the heart of Castella, beneath the sharp granite crest of Castle Crags, Ammirati’s Market was open, so Allison and I ducked in to inquire about Milt Kenney, but he wasn’t there. I asked a store clerk where he might be found. The clerk placed a call, murmured something into the receiver, and a moment later, a navy Oldsmobile Sedan came rolling up to the market. An old man, five foot three, with a stained-felt porkpie, trousers, and a maroon cardigan got out of the car and stood in front of us. He had rheumy eyes, leathery skin, and a smile that belonged on the face of a young boy, not an eighty-four-year-old man. He’d unbuttoned his sweater to reveal a T-shirt with a Pacific Crest Trail map printed across it. The shirt listed the names of all trail supply stops along the route, including Castella, which lay an inch above the old man’s sternum.

Milt Kenney gave us the litany he’d recited to hundreds of other hikers over the years. The words sounded broken in from being said so many times. “Hullo, I’m Milt Kenney and I’ve been greeting the hikers now for twenty years.” His voice was plummy. He extended his hand, and his grip was as crushing as
everybody had warned. “So what do you need? Where would you like to go? I can drive you anywhere you want. Treat you lunch? Treat you breakfast?” He said these words without slavishness, and smiled with confidence, as if his offers of generosity were a power he wielded over strangers.

Allison and I looked at each other. We were thrilled to meet a trail celebrity, but I felt sheepish about accepting favors, perhaps because I’d spent the past decade in New England small towns, where you could be curled up frozen on the pavement, turning blue, and passersby wouldn’t stop to offer you so much as a small cup of lukewarm broth. It felt weird to hear someone peddling altruism, as if kindness were something to be hard-sold, a zirconium bracelet on late night TV. But refusing his offers of help would have been crueler than sponging off him. So the decision was made. “Throw your stuff in the car,” he said, and we obliged.

Allison and I piled into the backseat. As Milt stepped on the accelerator, and pulled out on to the highway, he admitted that his eyesight was not the greatest. He drove conservatively, but by no means timidly, as he confessed: “Don’t know if I’ll get to drive hikers around in the future.” The speed crept up on the odometer—forty-five, fifty, fifty-five, sixty. “Depends on the cataracts. I don’t know how long my eyes will hold, and that’d be a shame.” Allison’s hand dug into the armrest as Milt’s car swept beneath the Castle Crags, swirled with mist and built like the spires of Oz. Milt laughed as he glanced up at the Crags. “Told my nephew I built those rocks up there and he believed me.”

Milt drove us six miles up the road to Dunsmuir, near the Sacramento River. The whole town was peeling and sad and set close to the ground, but Milt said it was a hiker’s Fantasyland, with all the food you can eat. He took us to the Burger Barn near the center of the historic railroad town and shouted out to the half-empty place, “Hey, look, I’ve got two more!”
We found a table and Milt ordered us a pair of “Barn Buster Burgers,” enormous ground round discuses smeared with mayo. While we sat there, gulping wet meat, Milt smiled, leaned forward, and said, “It tickles me to watch you eat.” In between urging us to order more food, he told us about himself. Three-quarters Swiss, one-quarter Karuk Indian, Milt was born in Clear Creek, nine miles from Happy Camp, California. As a child, he kept a bear cub as a pet and walked to school through the woods eight miles each way. He worked as a forester in northern California, felling and cutting lumber. For thirty-nine years he was married to Florence, the founder of a local school. They skied, hiked, and danced every week. “She was my buddy, my best friend. I loved her so.” He bought her a heart-shaped gold nugget. In 1979 she had a heart attack and died. “It was real sudden,” he said. “I did not want to live.” He was so grief-stricken, his daughter, Adele, wondered if he would last the year. Winter pinochle games were the only respite from his loneliness. “I didn’t know what to do with myself,” he said. “But then I saw that hikers were coming through town and saw that they were good people. I decided to help them. I treat a lot of ’em dinner, treat ’em lunch, and some of ’em treat me. Some people think what I do is pretty silly, but most think it’s great. Most of ’em think I’m doing all right.”

When he was younger he danced with hikers. He told us stories about holding court in a nearby saloon, dancing across the floor with women a third of his age. “I’d dance ’em down!” he said. “They’d tire out after a while, and I’d still be dancing.” He liked the company and the recognition. Milt showed Allison a folder of press clippings about himself, and pointed out a story in which the reporter had bungled Milt’s age. In pencil, Milt had scribbled the correct number in the margin. He loved his modest legend and the “trail mayor” title, and the fact that the Forest Service had named a 0.9-mile spur trail, from the Castella campground to the Pacific Crest Trail, after him.
Outside the diner, Allison asked me to take a picture of her and Milt. I snapped a slide of Allison throwing back her hair, her long white neck exposed. She’s smiling flirtatiously, open-mouthed, as she leans in and jabs Milt in the sternum, right on the place where his T-shirt says
CASTELLA
. Milt recoils and laughs at the same time like the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

Milt took us to a local laundry room in Dunsmuir, and waited for our loads to wash and dry. Then he took us to a drug store, where he was shocked by how much chocolate and gooey pectin treats we shoved into our grub sacks. “You two eat more candy than any hikers I’ve ever seen,” he noted. When we were back in the Oldsmobile, or walking around Dunsmuir with Milt, an opiate calm settled on him. He smiled at all times when he was with us. But at one point that day, when Allison and I walked into a Dunsmuir bank, where we changed traveler’s checks, I saw Milt’s reflection backward through the bank’s glass doors, when he was standing there outside the Oldsmobile and didn’t know I was spying on him. He looked emptied-out, drooping like an old carnation, but when we walked out of the bank and got in the car, with us in the back, he straightened up. His face looked full again.

That night in camp, Allison and I leafed through a journal left behind for PCT hikers to sign. In it were some not-very-good poems that hikers had written for Milt Kenney. They were gooey, and if memory serves, at least one of them used the word
did
to pad out the stanzas, as in, “Milt, you did take me in, and you did treat me as though I were kin,” and “Milt, you made me feel at home when into Castella as a stranger I did roam.” But in spite of their thudding didness, the poems seemed sincere. In fact, the awfulness increased their power. Their uniformly low quality suggested that people adored Milt so much that they could not voice this feeling gracefully or coherently. That evening, Allison wrote a poem in Milt’s honor. It was truly terrible. And yet there may have been a downside
to Milt’s kindness, according to another journal entry, which included a disturbing cartoon. It showed a hiker hanging in a web screaming. A spider with a porkpie hat was closing in on him. In the web were dangling treats that lured the hiker toward a slow, sticky death: cheeseburgers and fries, hung at intervals in the matrix. “Someone help me!” the cartoon hiker cries. “I’m caught in the Milt Kenney web.” I understood the feeling. Why would anyone want to go back into the woods after meeting Milt Kenney? There was something about him that made you want to quit the damned trail and hang out with him forever.

The next day, Milt Kenney swung around to see us again in the campground. He handed us plum tomatoes plucked from his garden. He stood in front of us with his hands in his pockets, and this time he would not smile, even when we posed him in front of the sign for the steep, nearly mile-long spur trail. With his chin resting on the Milt Kenney Trail sign, he told us we should think about not leaving. “You don’t have to go away so soon,” he said. “Most hikers stay three, four days. Why, I had one hiker stay a week. You stayed a day. That’s a very short amount of time compared to most hikers.”

He looked downcast. I explained to him that the weather could turn on us if we did not hike northward as fast as we could, and that we had spent a lot of time and effort trying to beat the snowstorms and reach Canada before it was too late. “It could storm any second,” I said.