The Cactus Eaters (27 page)

A
t least we managed to finish the final section between Seiad Valley, California, and Ashland, Oregon.

Something about the impending loss of the trail made me notice what I’d blanked out before: the perfumed taste of a thimbleberry, the beads on a spider web after a rain, and the tops of the Cascades just managing to push through a gauze of mist. Allison and I crossed over the California-Oregon border in mid-October, close to a pasture containing splotchy cows and a single bull whose horns were scratched and whose huge penis drooped like a limp gastropod. The bored animal watched as we formed
O
s for
Oregon
with our stick-thin arms. I felt a twinge of sadness, knowing we’d never return to the trail once we left and got caught up in responsibilities, jobs, and the like. This meant that I’d never see this land again; nor would I relate to Allison in quite the same way again, with the trail and the forest framing our relationship, forcing us into simple roles: Allison manhandling maps and carving steps in snow walls, me building fires and scooping water from a brook. Suppose we
needed the trail, and its shared mission, to stay together? And what of the traditions we had, all the stupid songs we sang, and our Pacific Crest tales, stories told to pass the long hours, populated with characters we brought to life in the darkest woods. What of Frankie the Were-Deer, the NRA member who turned into a stag when the moon was full? What about Taffy the Horse, the deranged pony who drank Blue Curaçao margaritas to relax, and who fought the bad guys with lethal kicks to the head? Who would sing these heroes back into being when we were gone? And what would happen to our bylaws, our private language, exclusive to the Pacific Crest Trail? When Allison talked about a “nasty-steepie,” I knew she was describing a tortuous hill without end. When she warned me of “mean-greenies,” I knew that horseflies were descending. In the last bit of northbound trail, I sometimes felt that the two of us had formed an independent nation, population two, that held to its traditions and had seceded, all too briefly, from the Union.

How appropriate, then, that Allison and I were walking through an area whose population had tried and failed to break off into a nation unto itself. In that push toward Ashland, Oregon, we entered the “State of Jefferson,” a swath of northern California and southern Oregon that was once the target of an abortive secession uprising. In 1941, pistol-packing miners barricaded a highway and handed out copies of the Jefferson State declaration of independence, letting drivers know that they intended “to secede on Thursday until further notice.” The group had a national seal—a double cross to suggest that the federal and state governments had betrayed them by letting the roads rot, hampering efforts to mine and log the area. Though there was a prankish aspect to the proceedings—they must have known that it would take an act of Congress, and approval from Oregon and California’s legislatures, to create a new state—the movement reflected real animosities.

Today, antigovernment resentment remains in the State of Jefferson. These days it’s all about perceived bureaucratic restrictions on land use. Locals accuse the government of trampling their economic needs by restricting development that could harm the habitat of the local Coho salmon. Personally, I tend to side with the salmon and owls, and have long held the conviction that our government, if anything, is too passive and lax toward those who would gut our natural resources. There is a populist-conservative bent to the Jefferson uprising that goes against my sensibilities as a salamander-worshipping borderline Marxist. And yet, I must admit, I shared something with the State of Jefferson: the desire to stand apart from the rest of America, the wish to be left alone, and the conviction that independence is just a state of mind. To this I could add my suspicions that the urban world, the one I had left behind, held no place for me anymore, and yet I was coming to realize that the trail was a limited refuge that shut its doors when the good weather and money ran out. The Pacific Crest Trail is a lifestyle but not a livelihood. You need to get a job eventually, and that was the problem. While the skies got wetter, my Wells Fargo account was running as dry as a Mojave creek bed in July. For these reasons, our northward voyage came to a dead stop in Ashland, Oregon.

At first, we binged and ran wild in this college town near the Rogue River. Rogue Red Ale poured from bottomless pitchers. We stayed at a hostel full of longhairs who looked like us. Besides, we visited the city at a time when America’s pubescent population was going through a slob phase, involving Vans shoes, Pendleton jackets, and the worship of wildebeest-haired bands whose singers played songs about deadbeat fathers and heroin. Thanks to this trend, I received many compliments for the mixed-plaid ensemble I’d purchased from an Ashland thrift store for a buck o five. I’d conspired with Allison’s father to send her a foil-wrapped devil’s food birthday cake from Bill
Knapp’s, a restaurant chain based in Battle Creek, Michigan. The cake was stale when it arrived in Ashland—it was like a boulder with frosting on it—but Allison seemed to enjoy it anyhow. Still, I couldn’t stand the fact that our dream lay in pieces. And the more we lingered in town, the more Ashland pulled back its lips to show us its teeth. A vagrant approached on the street. With filthy hands he sketched Allison’s trail-toned figure in the air. A hippie girl with star-shaped glasses leaned out of a phone booth and belched right at me as I hurried past. And I thought to myself, “I quit the trail for this?”

It’s no wonder some people never quit the trail. It subsumes them. Certain nomads lose their minds when they settle in cities. Now I knew why. I would miss the constant motion, and the simple actions made meaningful in tandem. Though the trail narrows your choices—hike, sweat, piss, seek water, make love in a shady glen, eat too much rice pilaf, shit in the woods like a raccoon, repeat—it makes your existence more expansive somehow. Something about the trail rewrote our lives in boldface. I would miss skinny-dipping in moonlit lakes and being skinny, period. I would miss the lookie-loos coming up to us, marveling at our packs, and our telling them, “We walked all the way from Los Angeles to get here.” Hell, I’d even miss the guidebook, accurate to a fraction of a mile. If you got lost, it was your own goddamned fault. We’d complained about the book, and laughed many times at its descriptions of geologic “noses” and “Paleozoic pits.” But I’d grown accustomed to its voice. I now thought of the narrator as my life’s skipper. If only the authors had written instructions for the rest of my existence.

When you’ve lived in the woods for a while, even though it is excruciating sometimes, and even when it makes you sick, it becomes your life and blots out thoughts of the world that exists not far from the trail—the world that created and supplied the labor and technology that built the trail. The fact is major
cities and suburbs hedge the trail, and though you’re socked away, isolated, you’re never all that far from places like Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle, whose buildings and freeways lie out of sight behind the mountains walling in the trail, creating the illusion that this strip of forest is all there is in the world. But I didn’t like the thought of returning to any of those places, of jumping into my life again and “getting on with it”—all those details, deadlines, prescriptions, and sticky Post-it notes to plan my day. Besides, we’d spent enough time in the woods to worry all potential employers, who would notice the gaping crevasses in our résumés where jobs should have been. If we took temp work and sat around waiting for the snows to melt, devoting another year to finishing the trail, we would look undependable.

I didn’t care, but Allison sure did. She wanted to make her mark, be a journalist, fight corporate polluters, and poke the patriarchy in the snoot. She wanted to confront the forces of nastiness and greed, while I merely wanted to hide from them in the trees. By now, my attitude toward careers had devolved from mere apathy to total indifference. The only job that mattered anymore was the trail. I could no longer see anything beyond it. The trail had turned into a mountain that cast a shadow on everything that lay in front of it and behind it.

I can’t pinpoint when I—or we—decided to turn our shipwreck into a salvage operation. Alas, my memory is a slab of Jarlsberg cheese, rubbery and chockablock with holes. Unfortunately, my prosthetic memory—my diary from that period—has also been compromised. The same rain and snowstorms that knocked us off the trail turned many of my rantings into red and purple ink blobs. But at some point we decided not to give up, regardless of future costs. I can’t say exactly what triggered the turnaround. Perhaps I convinced Allison that one more year out of our life wasn’t too much to ask after all. Think of the sunk costs, of how much time and money we’d already
expended. Why not expend a little more? So what if we’d be unemployable? Who needs employment? Clearly we would have to give up the dream of through-hiking the trail all in one long season. But suppose we expanded our vision a bit and made the one-year trip into a two-year journey?

The plan came together like this: For the next few months we would hole up near Monterey, California, with my sister and brother-in-law, who kindly volunteered to host us rent free. There, in the unincorporated town of Prunedale, on the foggy side of the Central Coast, we would find gainful employment as substitute teachers. Sure, it would be hard, but it would also be fun, liberating young scholars from oppression, lifting their spirits with tales of snakes and survival. Then, when the snows cleared in June, Allison and I would take a bus back up to Ashland, Oregon, and walk arm in arm across Oregon and Washington, into Manning Park, British Columbia, where we would eat thick-cut bacon, fuck like wombats, buy a metric ton of maple syrup, and drink tankards of Labatt’s Blue Label until our brains went soft. I even planned to surprise Allison by breaking out a bottle of champagne when we reached Monument 78 at the finish line.

But first, before we returned to the Pacific Northwest, we had some unfinished business. You may recall that Allison and I had a great deal of difficulty getting out of the East Coast on time to start the PCT. While most hikers begin in late April, we didn’t get started on the trail until mid-June. To compensate for our extreme lateness, we’d given ourselves a head start by beginning the trek in Agua Dulce, California, a dude-ranch town 454 miles north of the trail’s southern terminus at the California-Mexico border. This meant that Allison and I would now have to make up that pesky section—we called it “the missing piece.” We decided it made sense to do this chunk that fall. It was now late-October, and we hoped to get back down to California in two or three weeks. By the time winter arrived,
we could say that we’d bagged all of the Golden State. It was all so simple, beautiful, fail-safe, and elegant. Besides, I was sure that we’d used up all our rotten luck by then.

Puffed with renewed confidence, Allison and I took our time getting back to the Southern California trail. In fact, we dawdled and stuffed our faces at various smorgasbords and checked in with countless loved ones. Time dribbled away. When at last we arrived in Agua Dulce, it was early November, and the skies were going gray. Even then, instead of racing off for the trail, we took our time, even looking up our old pal Mark the postman, who had saved our expedition from disaster half a year before.

“You’re real hikers now,” he said. We joked around and drank frothing mugs full of Zima, a then-popular beverage that tastes like a raunchy one-night stand involving a can of Fresca and a bottle of Everclear. Mark kept the salsa and chips flowing. “I can’t believe I’m sitting here looking at you,” he said. “I had no idea you guys would ever get to Ashland. I didn’t think you’d even make it to the next town alive.”

Allison and I looked at each other, loopy with Zima and mutual admiration. Later, I told her that the two of us just might make a career out of thwarting expectations.

“We may be dumb,” I said. “But we’re dumb like a couple of foxes.”

We felt smart, prepared, and confident when we got back on the PCT near Vasquez Rocks, sandstone formations leaning over the juniper-speckled foothills. The path soon left the desert and plunged south toward the San Gabriel Mountains. Last time we were here, the sun sizzled. This time, clouds blocked its rays. It was so mild we barely drank water. Trail-hardened desert rats, we slept on thin rolls of foam. Our boots were soft and broken in, and our feet had calluses as thick as Doc Martens’s floating soles. Though Allison still wept from the mysterious ache in her knee on the downhills, she powered up the
steep slopes like her uncle’s Willys Jeep in first gear. It was nice to notice the scenery for the first time, now that we weren’t focused at all times on not dying of thirst. We sang our favorite Smashing Pumpkins song, the one about the “greatest day I’ve ever known,” as we passed through the cool forests of Mount Baden Powell, named for the founder of the Boy Scouts, an organization designed to foster military discipline and love of the woods. Now we had both. I felt stripped down, ageless, and resilient. Allison was tight all over, tanned to perfection. She was straight-up blond now. Her face was creased with worry and vigilance the last time we were out here; now she wore a look of soft expectation.

We passed an afternoon in an ancient forest of limber pines, among the Earth’s oldest life forms. They grew in a riot of shapes, some skinny and doubled-over, others plump in the middle and tapered off on both sides like birdfeeder gourds. Tufts of green needles puffed into the sky. Roots, clearly visible, anchored the trees to earth in thick coils. It’s hard not to maintain a hushed silence in the presence of these beings. Christ was in kindergarten, and the Roman Empire dominated a quarter of the world’s population, when the oldest of the pines began to grow. But the sky was a most peculiar gray up here, and thick clouds obscured the mountains to the south, toward Mexico. Out here, in mid-November, a chill settled on the landscape. Later, after a long descent on a narrow path, we found ourselves blocked by a stink beetle, two inches long with black armor, its pointy ass aimed at us like a cannon. Entomologists call this a defensive strike posture; the beetle emits dissuasive stenches from its rear to ward off predators. I smelt nothing, but its posture made me feel unwelcome. He might have been trying to warn us. Soon afterward, two burly clouds, real bruisers, filled the sky. They moved in clumsy motions, elbowing each other out of the way.