The Cactus Eaters (25 page)

He just looked blankly at me and said, “If it storms, come back. Treat you breakfast, treat you dinner.” We walked off, and he shouted after us, “Send a Christmas card.”

Allison and I stomped on to the Milt Kenney Trail, up a steep hill, and though I sensed he was looking as we faded up into the hillside, I did not look back.

We were the last hikers of the season, meaning that our leaving would condemn Milt to loneliness for the next half-
year. I tried not to think about this as we pressed on, looking at the sky.

We lunched that afternoon in front of Mount Shasta, 14,161 feet above sea level. That day, a pair of semi-attached lenticular clouds hovered above the cone. The mountain is a reliable producer of these Frisbee-shaped mist formations. Smokers of exceptional marijuana and budding herbalists believe the clouds serve as a cloak for UFOs, according to a study of Shasta’s “spiritual pilgrims.” Indeed, one of the clouds resembled the spaceship from
The Day the Earth Stood Still
. Allison and I ate lunch, and she snapped a picture of me holding the Swiss Army knife, chopping tomatoes while my log-moss beard dangled from my chin. I looked stringy and rangy like a red coyote, my Lois and Clark Expedition Day-Glo cap tilted backward. The sky was an unapologetic blue, making Allison squint. Shasta dominates the land. Rising more than ten thousand feet above its forested base, the mountain is visible for about two hundred of the trail’s zigging, zagging miles. From where I stood, I saw three of the mountain’s five glaciers, hurting my eyes through polarized lenses. Native Americans believed the mountain was the palace of Skell, who dropped from the heavens to take up residency there. When I squinted at the ice fields, I made out the shape of tapering fingers down the mountainside. The glaciers near the top suggested a wrist. The overall effect was that of a giant hand reaching from the sky. I rested for a moment—woozy for no reason, no power in my legs, my chest seeming to compress. Allison did not notice that something was wrong. We had been making up crazy stories about the mountains, explaining that Shasta had a “cocaine problem,” and that its glaciers were made out of “nose candy.” She was caught up in this game, creating imagined histories of every mountain on the horizon, even as a mysterious nausea overtook me. I was overcome, and thought for a moment that I might pass out.

I staggered down a slope, staring at Shasta as it grabbed up
the sunlight. The ominous plug of Back Butte rose from behind the mountain. I was lost in my thoughts, wondering about the magnetic pull of Shasta, and what it was doing to my body, when a thirty-five-ish man with wild eyes came jogging over to us on the path. The man was not right in the head. Heading toward us, he sang along with a radio station that played only in his mind. As he ran forward, he leaned toward Shasta, as if there were a receiver in his brain decoding the mountain’s scrambled messages. The man wore athletic shorts, running shoes, and a metal-colored jacket. When Allison smiled at him and asked what brought him to such a place, he explained that his girlfriend had two-timed him and that he had called her a “fucking liar” right to her face. His heart was broken and he was here to heal. “I want an audience with Saint Germain,” he said.

The man told us that “all mountains have distinct personalities” and that Shasta is “a place that receives God’s energy, a very special place.” He’d seen a photo in a local bookstore of Shasta with a bolt of purple light shooting from its rock. “I know it was real,” he said. “There was no trick photography in that picture.” He told us he was there to stay, and would never return to the life he’d abandoned. “Want to know what I do for work? I live. I live for a living.” We refused his repeated offers to hike with him back to town and eat vegetables out of the trunk of his car, but he didn’t seem offended. He told us that it was no matter, that there was all kinds of nourishment in these mountains, and that we were about to find out for ourselves that Shasta was “a very powerful place.” He waved good-bye and ran south down the trail to Castella.

As he ran off, I wondered if it wasn’t all in my head, if the mountain could drive a man mad. But it was hard to know for sure, especially considering that so many people who visit Shasta are crazy already. A group called the I AM Foundation uses Shasta as a staging ground for a pageant celebrating the life of Christ, sans unpleasant bits, such as the Crucifixion. About
five thousand people crowded the mountain’s meadows in 1987 to celebrate harmonic convergence, when the celestial bodies line up in the heavens like so many duckpins. Quite a few of them left crystals in Panther Spring in honor of Saint Germain. Park rangers accused them of despoiling meadows, building altars illegally, and causing erosion. Other Shasta pilgrims believed the mountain was a safe home for seven-foot-tall deities that are benevolent, mysterious and, like them, blindingly Caucasian. These mysterious people are known as Lemurians, modern-day descendants of a race that lived in an Atlantis-like utopia for thousands of years but fled to Shasta’s subterranean chambers when their stronghold, Mu, sank in the Pacific Ocean after a volcanic cataclysm. These people fly through the sky in airborne boats, wear white vestments, and have ESP. They’ve got walnut-shaped sensory organs protruding from their heads, and marvelous physiques, which came in handy for their ancestors when they sculpted Easter Island’s totem faces. The Lemurians were said to have porcelain complexions, in spite of the fact that they lived on a continent that served as a land bridge between India and Africa. Above all else, these people were supposed to have been very nice. As far as ethereal creatures were concerned, Lemurians were the salt of the earth. Milt Kenney, if he were two or three feet taller and had blue skin, would have fit right in.

If the spirits of kindness existed out here, so did the spirits of nastiness. Storms billowed up to cover the mountain, but Shasta revealed itself again at sunset. This time it was red and yellow, and the square snow patches looked like windows into the volcano and the fire inside it. The night was uncommonly cold, so much so that no amount of bundling and cuddling could take the edge off the chill. The water in our bottles froze. The next day, when we rose from our tents, every step felt like twenty steps. Small distances were treks in themselves. That week in the backcountry, our path crossed a deep creek. On a steep bank above the water, pitcher plants bobbed in the wind.
Dark marks branched across their throats like veins, which shone green and red with the sun behind them. Lobes in their throats give off perfume that lures flies, who climb down the tubes in search of food. When the flies turn around to leave, stiff-backed spines block their exit. The insects weaken, starve, and tumble into pools of liquid. Microorganisms melt the flies into a tonic for the plant.

As we walked among the plants, trampling a latticework of ferns, I felt woozy, cornered, dissolving. Refuges can turn into traps in an instant. The land steepens against you, and the trees rise up to seal you in. Something was going on inside my body but I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t feel sick just yet, but I was, as Allison said, “immunocompromised,” vulnerable to infection, sapped of strength but having no idea of the cause.

“What the hell is going on?” I said to her. “You think someone served us a sneezeburger in Dunsmuir? Did we eat without washing our hands?”

She shook her head as the path pushed into the darker forests, where hemlocks grew in thickets. The path was narrow and the forest impenetrable. The trees had thrown their roots around the boulders and tethered themselves to the slopes. The Pacific Crest Trail was a spool of yarn through the boundlessness. The forest slouched. Shasta shone its firelight through gaps in the trees.

This part of the Pacific Crest Trail marked our entryway to the Klamath Mountains, which extended from the northwest corner of California into Oregon. Once attached like a conjoined twin to the northern Sierra Nevada range, the Klamath began to pull apart from its sister 130 million years ago. Scientists discovered the mountains were kin when they compared the fossils of marine creatures etched in their slopes. Long ago, the Klamaths were islands in a sea that sealed over the Cascades to the north. I walked as if I, too, were underwater. Like the Klamaths, which are squat compared to the Sierra Nevada, and receive a deluge of rainwater
that makes them wear away more quickly than any other place on earth, I was ground down, eroding with every mile.

The trail wiggled all over the place as if trying to befuddle us. Such mischief is not uncommon for the PCT. If you were to draw a straight line between Canada and Mexico, it would be only 1,000 miles long, and yet the PCT takes 2,650 miles to go the same distance. Sometimes along the way, the trail seemed to derail itself and run off course. Rather than shooting north, it turned west and even went south for a while, as if giving up and hightailing it to Mexico. The path pushed us into the Trinity Alps, vast limpets and barnacles clinging to California’s northern tip. The dominant feature was the snow cone form of Thompson Peak, at 9,002 feet, the tallest Alp, with glaciers fixed to its sides.

We spent one night at Siphon Lake in the Russian Wilderness, a gray expanse with a brown pipe rotting on the bottom. Mosquitoes buzzed the tent flap’s mesh door. Allison watched over me, trying to squeeze the sickness out of me, pressing her body against me, sticking a thermometer into my mouth. The tent turned into a fog chamber. Allison kept asking if I was okay. Her voice echoed, her image replicated, until Allison turned into a harem of good-looking Italian women, a banquet of curves, long necks and blond hair, and yet I had no sex drive at all, and the tent was waltzing around me.

Next morning we decided to press on to the north and get out of these woods, rest up, and find an access road to civilization at the nearest opportunity—but we didn’t know the lay of the land. Even now, my memories of the forest come back in a stony haze. Allison kept begging me to just turn around and backtrack to a road near Scott Mountain, where we could try to flag down a ride, but the idea of going backward on the trail still seemed unthinkable to me, no matter how sick I was. My stubbornness prevailed. But now the landscape was blurry. Waterdog Lake spun around in the sun. We passed a rutted
dirt road. A motor broke the silence. Two hunters on three-wheel off-road vehicles bumped past us, toting rifles. The first was ruddy, about fifty, with a calm smile and a deep sunburn. His nose peeled, revealing a second layer of skin. His baseball cap had a cartoon showing two dancing containers of booze and the message
I LIKE BIG JUGS
. Mr. Big Jugs told us that Etna Summit was the most reliable access to a close-by town off the trail, but the summit was fourteen miles away, with many uphill miles. He and his friend waved as they raced down the dirt road in search of big game, and, presumably, even bigger jugs.

The feeling of walking on the bottom of the ocean intensified when we slipped on the serpentine soil. Allison pressed her hand to the cool stone and traced the coiled shapes of fossilized trilobites, underwater sow bugs stamped into the cliffs. Mr. Big Jugs had mentioned other access route options, but Allison and I didn’t want to risk it; the antifreeze liquid in our latest compass had leaked out somehow, leaving the needle stranded, ruining our guidance system, and we didn’t want to make a mistake. I checked the map. The names of nearby lakes were sinister: Poison Lake. Deadfall Lake. Man Eaten Lake. Toad Lake. Kleaver Lake. Every time we stopped to rest near one of these lakes, I witnessed natural acts of thuggishness and cruelty. At one pond, a fish leapt up to suck a moth down from the water’s surface. Another moth fell in the drink. Somehow it managed to escape another fish, but then a water nymph rose from the bottom, grabbed the moth, beat the shit out of it, mauled it with its tail for good measure, and dragged it screaming into the murk. It was dreadful, like watching a talent show of sadistic animal behavior emceed by Annie Dillard. Some people find inspiration in nature’s violence, but this display made me sick. In my diary I chided nature for “unnecessary roughness.”

As I walked on, with Allison growing more worried about me, I began to pray, talking to my stomach, talking to my virus, trying to use Old Gipper encouragements to halt my illness. “I
will hold this thing back with food,” I told Allison. “I can persevere. I can win.” But all the while, I sensed that this virus, and the weather, had more determination and relentlessness than I could muster. I ate and drank as much as I could but lacked the moxie to make it all the way to the summit in one day. And yet we could not afford to camp out here in the cold for much longer. Though it was still hard to gauge the seriousness of what I had, if we did not somehow drag ourselves out of the woods, this illness was about to get a whole lot worse.

That night we were camped somewhere in the Klamath National Forest. It felt like some of my strength had somehow returned, and for a while, in camp, I was sure that the mystery bug was finished with its business inside of me, and yet I could not be too sure. It was a cool, clear evening in the high country. Allison fired the stove while I traipsed across a rocky finger leading me out into a night-black lake. I decided to filter some water from the shallows. Just as I’d done hundreds of times before, I dropped the intake tube—attached to a floatation device—into the water and started pumping. Suddenly, the water near the lake shore stirred and frothed with motion; a dozen salamanders, black, flat, and staring, moved across the lake. In silent motion the six-inch shadow people surrounded my filter and closed in on it, the circle growing smaller.

The first one, with an orange belly, swam forward and kissed the filter’s intake valve in an open-mouthed, sleazy way. Then, to my surprise, a second salamander rose up, knocked the first salamander out of the way, and mounted my filter’s intake tube, grabbing onto the flotation sponge with all fours and thrusting itself right into it. After a while it let go and floated back into the pond. Salamanders kept bubbling up to take the previous one’s place. I’m not naive. I knew what was really going on here. The salamanders were attempting intercourse with my water filter or using it as part of a group masturbation ritual. I was not about to sit back and let them get away with it. “
Stop
it!
” I roared at the salamanders, but they would not listen. In a savage gesture, I yanked the intake tube as hard as I could and sent the salamanders flying backward into the deep—“
Fuck off!
”—but they kept coming back for more. Soon the lake shallows squirmed in
Caligula
contortions, salamander limbs and torsos thrashing and splashing as they mounted my water filter again and again. Clearly, this was not a battle I was going to win. It was time to retreat to my campsite.