The Cactus Eaters (29 page)

I wanted to savor every moment of this, no matter how my tick bites scratched and my muscles throbbed. I tried to stay up as late as I could, but sleep took me in no time at all.

W
e spent the winter in my sister and brother-in-law’s house in Prunedale, California, overlooking a eucalyptus grove a quick drive away from a slough full of otters, seals, and egrets. Together we worked as substitute teachers at a high school that bordered a field of cows, with a swamp beyond it. Some students were the scions of middle-and upper-middle-class San Jose bedroom commuters. Others were the sons and daughters of migrant workers who labored in chemical-laden strawberry, Brussels sprouts, and artichoke fields. I was a bit frightened of the job. I feared karmic justice, considering that I had laughed so hard at dithering subs when I was in middle school. Then again, it was the best way to earn eighty dollars a day with no training or know-how whatsoever. To get an “emergency credential” for the job, we only had to pay $150 to the state and take a test that a Rhesus monkey could have passed, no problem. We needed money to get back on the trail. Allison and I signed up to sub at elementary, middle, and high schools in California’s Central Coast. How terrible could it be?

My friend James, the fellow who’d suggested that we hike the trail in the first place, suggested I’d lost my mind when I told him of our latest plan. “Have you ever worked with high school kids before?” he wrote to me in a postcard. “They’re bastards, astonishingly immature, even though they look like they should know better. Be firm and don’t hesitate to shoot them if they act up in class. That way the rest of the kids will respect you. They’ll make a movie about you…starring Dan and Allison as two wild people who teach California school-kids about gorp and burning turds in the wilderness.”

But our love for the trail was so strong that we were willing to do just about anything. Besides, I fantasized that the kids would love me and find me cool. My own substitute teachers were old, gawky, out of touch. No wonder the kids set buckets of water over doors to douse them or give them concussions, whichever came first. I would be the “cool” sub everyone loved. In fact, I would teach them a form of radical liberation pedagogy, in which they would stand up to the forces that kept them down. I would let the students in on the fact that I had been there, too. I knew what it was like to be a teenager under the jackboot of conformity. I imagined the speeches I would give them. “Listen,” I would say. “I know it hurts. I know adolescence is hard. And sometimes you’ve just got to go out there and represent.” I would bring hipness back to the classroom. My adventures in the woods would awe the children. They would respect the fact that I liked Snoop Dogg, Green Day, and A Tribe Called Quest. Maybe I would even inspire them by standing on my desk like Robin Williams in
Dead Poets Society.

As it turns out, I never stood on a desk, though in one instance I crouched beneath one while my lively young charges threw bolts, nails, crumpled papers, and plastic sections from an electronics kit. They took mysterious “bathroom breaks” en masse, and then showed up to class twenty minutes later,
smelling like a Black Uhuru concert. They called me New Age Hippie, Miss White, Snow White, Faggot, and Poindexter. They laughed heartily at my Abercrombie and Fitch sweaters. “Never mind,” I told myself. “Let kids be kids.” I knew that deep down they respected me, that they honored me, and that I was getting through to them and making a difference. For example, when a strapping young lad named Elijah came up to me during track-and-field and said, “Fuck you, Mr. White, you better watch out,” I took comfort in the fact that he had called me “Mister.”

Nevertheless, the job began to rattle me a bit. The inane lesson plans. The use of
Casper the Friendly Ghost
and
Scooby-Doo
videotapes to drug elementary schoolers into semiconsciousness, because the teachers couldn’t come up with any compelling ideas. Once, a group of students cajoled me into letting them play “clean pop music” during class. “I swear, Mr. White. There aint no bad words in this one,” they said. Then I pressed the Play button on the ghetto blaster, and out came the following ditty:

Allison didn’t have it much better. While her kindergarteners were cooperative and cute, she found the high schoolers harder to manage. Once, when she was forced to teach, of all things, auto body shop, the full-time teacher left a time-filler lesson plan demanding that his students draw a picture of and describe an invention that would help the human race in a profound way. One student presented to the class a hand-drawn portrait of a dildo-equipped sex machine “ribbed for her pleasure.” On another occasion, Allison had to contend with a plucky girl in a home economics class. When Allison reprimanded a young lady who had flung an egg at another
girl, the girl, who did not speak much English, knew enough of our mother tongue to call my beloved a “focking beech.” After a few weeks of this, we started asking ourselves how badly we wanted the trail. Stress gnawed us. If the PCT had taken over our lives, did that mean the importance of getting back to the trail outweighed all other considerations? It was too big a question to answer, so we distracted ourselves by watching pelicans skim the shallows of the slough and seals lounging in pods on the shores of brackish streams.

But increasingly, Allison worried about her bum knee. Sometimes we would take day hikes far up into the Santa Cruz Mountains, to ogle the misted redwoods and pet a few banana slugs, which looked like slices of overripe mango. Even on those short walks, her knee burned with pain. After a while, she began to wonder what the hell was going on with her health. In spite of her bouts with pain, we’d been acting as if getting back on the trail was a sure thing. In fact we even had one of our inevitable knock-down logistical fights. Allison wanted to attend two weddings at the same time we were supposed to be walking to Washington. But the knee situation was a constant concern now, and the two of us could not figure out what was causing her so much agony. A fabric knee brace did little good.

At last, Allison went to see a doctor in nearby Salinas, who assured her that all was well and that she could hike the trail no problem. But the pain soon returned, worse than before. “This is getting ridiculous,” she said. “I can’t screw around with this anymore. I need to talk to a doctor who knows what the hell he’s talking about.” Fed up with the local quacks, Allison decided to book a flight back to the Midwest to see a specialist near her hometown. I didn’t want her to leave, but she needed reliable answers, and she wasn’t getting any in Prunedale.

One day she called me up from her parents’ house, and I could tell from the tone of her voice that she’d spoken to the
doctors and that this was no “bum knee,” no simple injury that could be taken care of with a quick shot of cortisone. I could tell bad news was coming; I just didn’t know what kind.

“So here’s the deal,” she said. “It looks like I won’t be able to hike the rest of California. Unless things get better, I won’t be able to hike the Pacific Northwest, either. I just got back from the doctor. He told me I have rheumatoid arthritis, Dan. It’s a chronic disease. Basically, my body is attacking itself. Remember all those times in the woods when the pain was driving me crazy? That’s why. It’s attacking the cartilage in my knees.”

“But…” I said. “Did the trail cause this?”

“We don’t know for sure,” she said. “But the doctors say I was born with this, that it was waiting to happen.”

I had to take a breath, and focus, because one of my sister’s dogs was licking my face in concern, while my brother-in-law’s espresso machine was spluttering, and French horns were warbling on National Public Radio. I could not believe it. So this was it? What was going to happen to my girlfriend? Did this mean that her health was going to pieces? Was the Lois and Clark Expedition over now? No more “missing piece”? No more march to Washington State? Did this mean that Allison could never get back and finish the Pacific Crest Trail, after bagging 1,488 miles of it with me?

I had so many thoughts going on that I couldn’t formulate a response.

“Dan?” she said. “Why aren’t you saying anything? Look. My doctor thinks he can get it into remission, maybe, but he doesn’t know if I’ll ever be able to go hiking long-distance again.”

As we talked, I kept wincing and swallowing hard, remembering how I’d rushed her so often on the trail, even when she was limping, and how I’d lost patience with her for taking long rest breaks and slowing down the pace, and had accused her of dragging me down. I thought of all the times I’d prayed
I could hike the trail alone. Now I felt as though the fates had stored every wrongful wish and set them into motion against me. Now the decisions I’d been avoiding—how to drum up some reliable health insurance, where to get a job, where would we live—were right around the next corner.

“Dan, are you there? I need to know that you’re listening to me, Dan. Basically, there’s a problem with the membrane lining my joints; it’s inflamed. The cells are releasing an enzyme into my joints, and now it’s chewing into my cartilage, and when it chews through the cartilage, it’ll eat into the joint bone itself. I can’t believe this is happening to my body, Dan. I know this is really hard for you, but whatever is going through your head, I really need you to just push it aside and be there for me.” She told me that the time she’d set aside for “marching on Washington” would now be occupied with a full-time job search that she had planned to put on hold until the trip was over. “I have no choice but find work as soon as I can,” she said, her voice suddenly taking on a sharper tone. “I’m gonna need the medical benefits, Dan. I don’t want to sponge off my mom and dad.”

I offered to fly out there and be with her, though I will admit that the offer was halfhearted. I hated to think about what was happening to Allison. At the same time, my single-minded fixation on the trail was, if anything, even stronger now that we had been off it for a while, and had worked so hard to earn money to get back on it. I swore to her that we would resume our relationship, that I would do everything I could for her, if she just let me hike that one missing piece of California. Then we’d take it from there. I told her I would try, very hard, to find a strong horse to carry her across the Pacific Northwest with me if the doctors said she couldn’t hike the last piece with me. This offer was silly from the very beginning; I knew that even then. It would have been impossible to rent a horse for a thousand miles, and besides, Allison was horse-phobic; but
these things didn’t stop me from bringing up this possibility, and hoping she’d take comfort in my crazy idea. And so it was settled. I would hike a portion of the trail all by myself, and as soon as possible—it was mid-June now and getting hotter every day in Southern California. I had to act now. “I’ll do this thing as fast as I can, and then, I swear, we’ll regroup,” I said.

The thoughts in my head ran against one another. On the one hand, I was exhilarated at the chance to prove myself, alone, out there. At the same time, the quest would not be the same without her, and I couldn’t help but wonder how I would survive without her decision-making, without our Democracy of Two. The prospect frightened me, but I was much more scared
not
to do the missing piece and nag myself about what might have been. And so I prepared to set out alone for the Southern California hinterlands, a two-hundred-mile expanse past remote deserts and parched mountains in late June, when ground temperatures would soar to 105 degrees Fahrenheit.

While buying food and getting ready in Prunedale, I ran into one of my kinder students, a bleached-blond fellow who had taken pity on me and helped where others had hindered, who had offered assistance while others had offered only spit wads. I wished him well, gave him a back slap, and told him of my big plans.

He looked at me balefully.

“Be careful out there,” he said. “You could die, Mr. White.”

T
he trail was right back where I’d left it in Warner Springs, waiting like a king snake in the high grass. A half-eaten mouse lay dead in the dirt, a look of astonishment on its face. It was mid-June. The trail passed through an expanse of high grass over undulating terrain with rock platforms. San Gorgonio Mountain came into focus to the north, a snow sliver on top, as I pushed north, leaning into the sort of hill that could give a man heat prostration. The Pacific Crest Trail’s steepness is legendary. Only 300 miles of its 2,650-mile length are anything close to level, while the rest of it has grades that can make you topple over. In fact, if you were to take all the elevation gain and loss and add it up, it would equate to fifty vertical miles straight up and fifty miles straight back down again.

As I pressed into the slope, Allison was there like a living ghost just behind me. On the trail she used to sneak up and cover my shadow with hers. It was a game; our heads and torsos connected, then split apart like an amoeba. The trail was always a shared experience, an opportunity for us to collect anecdotes
so we could enthrall or bore other people with our trail tales. I liked the way we interrupted each other when sharing some memory about the outdoors, goosing and correcting each other’s stories while friends listened with strained patience. “No, Allison, we saw that bear on Pickle Peak, not Warthog Meadow, and no, it was four inches of snow that fell on us that afternoon up on Asshole Mountain, not five inches. What’s the matter with you?” Now that it was just me, the landscape seemed more impatient, the wind hitting me directly, as if Allison’s absence had removed a buffer between me and the outdoors. The quiet was unsettling.

Small sounds, when they came at all, made me jump: a hawk’s
skreek
as it dove for something hidden in the grass, and the
brrrrrr-brrrrr
of a hummingbird as it lanced a flower. That afternoon, in my twenty-three-mile push to the first water source, I missed Allison, but there was nothing I could do about that. Brainless quail bumped bellies and screeched. Instinctively I stopped and got out of the way so Allison could have a laugh at their expense. But of course, there was no one there. It comforted me to know that she wouldn’t have liked the scarce signposts, the sticky-eyed lizards and dry heat pressing into her from above and below like a panini maker. But sometimes I wondered if there was a benefit to her leaving the expedition, and to my being out there alone. With Allison there all the time to keep things from careening off the tracks, it was hard to know whether I was autonomous or a dependent putz reliant on her judgment. Sometimes, hiking with her, I had wondered what it would have been like to have a “straight-up” Pacific Crest Trail experience with no one else to blame. No vetting of decisions, no debating over trail intersections and campsites. All the glory and failure would have been mine.

My first water source was an enormous white tank near a stand of ragged cottonwoods, twenty-three miles from where my dad dropped me off. It was a slog but I made it, beating
the sunset by a few minutes. The desert settled down for the night: western fence lizards scuttled while hawks preened in the bushes. Above them, the water tower rose like a military pillbox. That night, I awoke and sat up in my sleeping bag, scared to oversleep. General Patton trained his troops in the deserts to the east of here, urging them through the box canyons and knee-cutting shrubs. That’s what it was like the next day: war games, trying to outwit the sun, hiding from it under trees and rocks. You didn’t even whisper when the sun came looking for you like a searchlight. In a way it was glorious, the relentless watching of the red ball as it sank, the feeling that I had outwitted the sun, that it couldn’t touch me as I took up my pack at twilight and hiked until darkness.

Dangerous war games left no room for error, though I made one the next day, out of exhaustion. I’d decided not to leave the trail for a guidebook-recommended water stop at Tunnel Spring. This is not a place where you can count on the land when your canteen runs dry. Out here, every plant and animal is monomaniacal when it comes to finding moisture. The trail travels close to the Colorado Desert, where there’s a plant called the honey mesquite, which can shoot its taproots up to 160 feet down into the ground to look for water. But I was lazy that day. The access trail to the water looked too steep, overgrown, and not worth the bother. The guidebook mentioned other low-quality and unreliable water sources just north of there. I figured it was worth the chance. Who needs good-quality water anyhow? At this point, I wasn’t picky. But two hours later I’d found no water of any kind. Fresh out of liquid, with bone-dry Nalgene bottles in my hands, I sat on a flat rock and laughed at myself for a while. Another water crisis? You’d think I would have learned by now.

I backtracked a ways and scanned the maps for water sources I might have overlooked. This consumed an hour and a half, as the sweat poured out as if from a spigot. It became hard to
concentrate, and the day turned into a daydream machine, so intense it was hard to know what was real and what was a figment. Crows descended, but they did not look or sound like any crows I’d ever seen. These were harsher when they screamed, and they wore gray armbands. I could no longer control my thoughts. I could not stop thinking about icy cold Otter Pops, frozen tubes of fruit-flavored slime popular in the 1970s, each one named for an otter who had changed history: Sir Isaac Lime. Little Orphan Orange. Poncho Punch. Alexander the Grape. Rip Van Lemon. Looey Blooey Raspberry. Strawberry Shortkook. I would have paid any price for an Otter Pop or, for that matter, a Rocket Pop or a quick lick off a Creamsicle, but out in the badlands, there was no Good Humor man, no oasis, no waterfalls, and no date palms.

I ran down a spur trail toward a water tower, but embankments and thick brush sealed it away. The tank might as well have been hiding behind a wall lined with concertina wire. At last the trail bottomed out beneath a shade tree. “Allison would be so disgusted to see me like this,” I thought, “the way I’m panicking. Just making it worse.” Another hour passed, and feeling there was no other recourse, I started to pray. If you’ve ever prayed for something, and thought perchance that God was answering back, you may have stopped yourself at some point and thought, “Well, yes, but it’s probably not God speaking. Chances are, it’s just me talking to myself, and I’m merely using the idea of God as a metaphysical Mortimer Snerd or Howdy Doody, a cosmic ventriloquist’s dummy.” But when you’re incoherent and tired, the line between God as your puppet and God speaking for Himself gets blurred. In any case, when I got down on my knees on hard soil and prayed to the Lord, begged him to take pity on a wretch such as me and create some water the way He did from hard rock in the Old Testament, the booming voice took me by surprise.

“What the Hell do you want?” God said.

“Save me,” I said.

“Now let me get this straight,” the voice said, in a snippy tone. “You’re out in the middle of a desert, in the middle of June.”

“Uh…” I said.

“And you spent hundreds of dollars to be standing where you are right now, in the middle of this wasteland. You could be home with your girlfriend. You know what it costs for a round-trip plane ticket to Chicago? Two hundred and sixty dollars. And how much money did you spend on all that backpacking junk you bought last week? Seven hundred and eighty dollars.”

“Actually, the bill came out to be six seventy,” I said. “I got a rebate on the Ridgerest. They let me trade it back in for a—”

“Shut the fuck
up
,” the voice said. “My point is you’ve chosen to be here, right now, in the middle of a fucking heat wave. That’s
your
choice, my friend. You want to know what Allison is doing at this moment? Filling out job applications. Watching TV commercials. Learning all about salad shooters and fifteen-minute Abdominizers. She’s putting ice on her knee right now. I bet you can’t even remember which knee. And not only that, you overshot that waterhole even though the guidebook tells you, very specifically, where the water can be found. And now you’re saying save me?”

“Yes. That is precisely what I’m saying.”

“Save yourself.”

“You must save me,” I said, more harshly than I intended.

“I’ve got a pile of paperwork like you wouldn’t believe,” the voice said.

“But if you’re so busy, why are you taking the time to talk to me right now? Why don’t you just wave your hand and make some fucking water?”

“Don’t make me put the phone down!” the voice said.

“PLEASE!”

There was silence and a dial tone, and that’s when I first saw the puddle. It appeared through a clearing in the trees, a lake of muck three feet in diameter. This would be my water source. The mud was the consistency of a very runny milkshake. There was no way my filter could handle it without breaking down, so why bother? Then it struck me. Allison had told me her brother once drank standing mud from a hole in the ground during a survival training class, and though it was foul, he lived. I reached in the puddle and scooped a handful of the goo into my mouth. The taste was chalky-sour, with notes of beagle’s breath, terracotta, and soiled diapers. It brought tears to my eyes. There was no way I could drink the mud, not to save my life. It was time to try the water filter.

I pulled out my new pocket filter, a different brand than the ones that let me down. It came highly recommended by the Gingerbread Man and was rumored to be unbreakable, a warhorse in the desert. Now it was my last hope. I scooped a trench in the mud hole with a piece of bark and let the water press up from the ground. I waited for some of the brackish crud to recede, and then I inserted the intake tube. “This will not work,” I thought. After two powerful squirts of water, the filter seized up as I predicted. I took off my brand-new
RESPECT MOTHER EARTH
T-shirt with howling wolves and chirping eagles on it. I unscrewed the filter, took out the filth-frosted cylinder, and swabbed it clean with the T-shirt. I pumped. The Katadyn yielded a few strong squirts and clogged once more. I repeated the process. Swab. Pump. Clog. Mosquitoes feathered my arms, but now I didn’t care. Two hours later, the filter was still pumping away, filling my bottles bit by bit, refusing to break down. “Saved,” I said. “Thank you. Thanks for this!” to myself, the filter, and whomever else was listening.

And since no one was there to tell me otherwise, I took that mud-soaked shirt and put it on me, wearing it until the mud dried. Laden with fresh water, I hauled myself up Spitler
Mountain, and marched into a sunset over Idyllwild. I let my water filter sit at a place of honor on the boulder where I ate my dinner. Backlit climbers hung from the rocks. I watched from above, and set my tent on the steep drop. Bats wheeled. Somewhere north, through an orange haze, the end of California was waiting for me. The Devil’s Slide Trail took me up the San Jacinto Mountains to an intersection with the white fir–lined Fuller Ride Trail, which made a staggering number of switchbacks down to San Gorgonio Pass.

With reluctance I took the first steps down from the high country, for the San Jacinto range had been my haven from the heat. To the east and far below lay land so desolate that movie companies used the landscape to duplicate the Sahara in early silent pictures. The path plunged downhill, beneath a bridge and past concrete pinions under Interstate 10, which crossed California from east to west. An abandoned condo complex lay in ruins. Eighty miles to the finish line. I crossed close to Palm Desert and the sun-white jaw of some animal, white to match the stones. Up I went, past an electricity farm, and fat rocks stacked in a staircase. A dirt road bumped along a brook. The water, when I dipped my hands in, was warm enough to brew tea. The heat hit me hard then. I had to rest. Once I found a shade tree near the creek, I could barely move. The hot air took my breath away. Sometimes branches of leafless trees pulsed red and black like retinal flashes. I worked up enough energy to take a picture of myself right then. I snapped it right at the time when a wave of exhaustion hit me so hard that I came close to blacking out. I can’t say why I took the picture. Maybe I just wanted to remember exactly what it looked like at the moment when the trees started flashing in my eyes. Puffy face. Empty expression. Survival hat mushed into my hair. A pickup approached on the rough road. A trailer swayed behind it. I sank hard against a rock and propped my pack against a tree. Two cowboys rode side by side in the cab.

“Nothing’s supposed to move out here,” one said. “Don’t you know it’s a hundred degrees out?”

I could barely respond.

“Hey,” one of the men said. “I got a mad bull inside this trailer, his name is Tyler, and he’s pissed off at me ’cause I’ve been chasing him around all day. I’m going to let Tyler out right where you’re standing. I’d appreciate it if you hiked on ’cause he won’t like it if he sees you.”

Before I knew it, it was happening. The cowboy was out of the truck. He unlocked the trailer. Tyler trundled out, balls jangling. He was coming for me with eyes so empty they might as well have been floating in the stewpot already. He was only twenty-odd feet away from me, but I didn’t get out of his way. The sun was overhead now, and it hung me up; impossible to move. The heat hung him up, too. Beyond caring, the bull wobbled past me without so much as a glance. He lowered his anvil head, walked to the warm stream, and drank. No rest for a bull. The sun dried the shade right out from under him.

It had been a week and a half now. Thirty miles to go, and I’d eaten my food down, except for the crumbs in a Planter’s bag. I was running on water alone. Deep in the San Bernardinos, day-trippers camped near me. One of them hacked down a sapling with an axe right there as I watched. I asked one of them for a bit of water, seeing that he had two huge containers of Sparkletts. “No,” was all he said. Keep moving.

On the last day, a long valley appeared. Two fish struggled in an isolated tributary of Deep Creek, in water the color of an untended terrarium. A third fish floated belly-up in murk. Cracks filigreed the dried mud near the tributary. Their outlet was gone. Trapped. None of those fish was going to make it out of there alive. None of my business, though. I kept on moving. The creek rushed far below me, then closer, with a few nudist guys with SlimJim phalluses and sunburned knees taking cat baths. I wanted to bathe, too, but heeded the guidebook’s warn
ings about Deep Creek amoebic encephalitis, a condition that can crawl up your nose underwater and turn your brain into head cheese. Walk on. The creeks dripped beneath me. Lower down in the valley, I tried to ignore the spray-painted graffiti on the rocks:
CARLOS LOVES LINDA
.
CRIPS FOUR EVER
.
KIL MOTHER FOKKERS
. Ahead were a reservoir’s sloping walls, resembling the mount of a stolen pyramid. The berm overlooked an expanse of sand so fine that it covered me when I spread my tent on it. A stream flowed past, full of reeds and dark brush. Beavers left V-shaped wakes in fading lines. They pushed offshore with paddle tails and nosed their snouts above the water. The sky grew dark. All night beavers cannonballed off the banks. Rain fell in streaks. The sky turned the color of old canvas. Clouds threw forks of light that shone on the beavers for fractions of a second. The air turned cold as the night winds picked up.