The Cactus Eaters (33 page)

A
llison had wanted to meet me at Monument 78, but her knee now hurt so much she didn’t want to hike the eight miles into the forest to greet me. Instead we decided to meet at the Manning Park Lodge, where we’d booked a room for two nights. I’d arrived there well before she did, talking up the female clerks about my hike and converting some traveler’s checks to funny money with Queen Elizabeth’s pinched-nostril face on the bills. I loved the way the young ladies at the lodge gathered around me. It seemed to me that “Dirty Dan” exuded an irresistible psychic musk. When Allison pulled up to the lodge in her rented car, I practically mauled her, lifting her off the ground, kissing her, almost smothering her. Having her there beside me in the hotel room threw a light switch in my head. It seemed I hadn’t killed the Lois and Clark Expedition after all. Perhaps we were just on hold. When she pulled out a cool bottle of Korbel, I felt like a man who wanted for nothing.

When we filled the glasses and were getting ready to guzzle,
she turned to me and said, “Just one glass for me. That’s all I get today.”

“Say what?” I said, for we’d laid waste to armies of bottles in our time, lining up empties like toy soldiers.

“I’m on medication, remember?” she said. “I’ve got to choose my drinks carefully from now on.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “I forgot all about it.”

Allison sat on the bed, still smiling but arching her eyebrows at me. She turned away from me. Took a deep breath. “I’ve got something for you,” she said. She reached into her suitcase and pulled out construction paper flags of all three countries spanned by the Pacific Crest Trail: Mexico, America, and Canada. The eagle on the Mexican flag was bent over and slouching, like a vulture. I teased her about this. “Eagle?” I said. “That’s nothing but a buzzard.”

I expected her to bust up at this. This was innocent teasing, Lois and Clark style. She smiled but didn’t laugh. “I did the best I could,” she said. “At least it’s a raptor.”

This was minor stuff, I knew. A paper flag was nothing worth fighting over. But my words sounded funny to me that afternoon. Every sentence came out sharper, snarkier than I’d intended. I wasn’t Clark anymore. I wasn’t Dirty Dan, either. Now I was turning into an unnamed third party who existed outside the trail, and I had no idea what the hell this man was supposed to say or do or how he was supposed to behave when other people were around. Allison unrolled a T-shirt she’d had custom-made for me, showing the Pacific Crest Trail map in the front, and
DIRTY DAN
in bold letters on the back. I loved it, though it was a size too small, even for my trail-attenuated frame. I wore it anyhow, as not to hurt her feelings, but it squeezed me so tight it shrank my shoulders and pushed out the breasts I never knew I had. I forced myself to keep the shirt on me while we drove all around Manning Park in the rental car, blasting Green Day, Jimmy Buffett, and Sheryl Crow. We
headed out to the PCT trailhead one last time. Allison took a picture of me standing next to the turnoff sign. Limping badly, she even managed to lope a short way onto the access path leading to the trail that she would probably never finish in her lifetime. She managed a stiff smile. I clicked the shutter.

Back at the lodge I drowned in burgers, and though we clinked glasses of skunky Moosehead, and licked the foam from the top, and ordered shovelfuls of fries, incorrect thoughts flickered between each bite. I was thinking about Allison, and how she couldn’t be my drinking buddy anymore. Or my hiking buddy, either. What the hell would we do all day long, then? And what about all these damned calories? No miles to burn off the calories anymore.
And everything cost money all of a sudden. Every goddamned thing cost money now.
Allison filled up the rental car with princely priced gasoline. So expensive. Did they start rationing gas while I was out in the woods? I found myself feeling crowded out, even in that small, practically deserted settlement of Manning Park, longing for the emptiness of the forests. Back at the lodge, Allison sat on the bed. She threw a passel of multicolored leaflets on the bedspread. At first I wondered if it was another construction-paper flag she’d made to celebrate my walk. But when I looked closely, I saw that they were FAQ lists with information about her rheumatoid arthritis. “Could you please just take a quick scan at these when you get a chance?” she said. “They won’t take long to read. I just wanted to give you the basics.”

I picked them up and, absently, without thinking very much about what I was doing, began to fan my face with the pile. I stopped myself, set them back on the bed, and stared at the leaflets but not at the words printed on them.

“Could you please just read one of them?” she said.

“Now? I want to give these things my full attention, but I can’t now. I’m just not in that place right now. I guess it’s what they call a trail high.”

“Just take a look, for one moment.”

“No slack at all?” I said. “No slack time at all for a guy who just got off a national scenic trail?”

We left Manning Park and drove on out to Vancouver, walking around the rainy towns with one-way streets and salt air blowing thick off the Pacific. We were out near Gas Town one night, heading toward a restaurant. Allison was trying to talk to me. She said something about going fishing with her dad, about how they walked into cold rivers that wrapped around them to their waists and how the two of them had played Dolly Parton’s hits on a ghetto blaster. I listened in a glaze, enough for the words to register in my memory but not enough to react while she was saying them. The trail had stopped dead but I couldn’t see that then. I was still searching for the rest of it. You’d think the trail, after all those miles, could find some way to keep going north out of sheer will, if not inertia. I wondered what it would be like if I could find some northward spur of the trail and just keep going. And I thought of all those Civil War veterans who lost their context after the final battle, and sat around in their underwear all day, doing nothing, until they finally decided to recreate what they’d barely survived, dressing up in period uniforms with brass buttons cured in their own urine, then going out into a field and recreating Pickett’s Charge. Was that my future? Was my life’s sole event really over?

And what about
us
after the trail? I used to think of our wilderness march as a proving ground before we stood at the altar, in the synagogue or church, before a group of well-wishers. It still amazed me that we’d walked for five months without turning on each other. But now I wondered if the Lois and Clark Expedition could survive a life of normalcy, after what we’d done and seen. After all, it was extraordinary to walk a national scenic trail, but any old schmuck could get married. Between two hundred and three hundred people attempt a through-hike of the PCT on any given year. Only a fraction of
them succeed. In comparison, 2.3 million couples get hitched in the United States every year. If you break this down, it means that six thousand couples get married every day, a statistic that brings to mind H. L. Mencken’s observation that “no man [is] so repulsive that he can’t find a wife. Midgets, cripples, dirty men, hideous men, idiots—they are all dragged to the altar.”

We drove on to Seattle. Allison was hungry. She found an impressive bakery with a glass case over Napoleons, cream horns, and French-style doughnuts baked with real eggs. Allison bought a fat éclair and took a sharky bite from it before we were out the door. Without thinking, I blurted, “We’re not on the trail anymore. Do you know how many calories they put in one éclair?” I felt like an outside observer, listening to what I’d just said, and feeling put off, because I didn’t know who was talking anymore. Words were spoken, but not by me. Allison looked up at me, and then she looked down at the grease-flecked little doily that had held the éclair and now held only traces of its crème and the bitten-down chunk still remaining.

“Thanks for that,” she said. “Thank you very much.” She stuffed the remaining piece of éclair into the nearest garbage can.

Every would-be celebration felt like conspicuous consumption now, and Allison had to drag me everywhere. She took me to a “splurge” celebration meal in the kind of sushi restaurant where raw fish rides little boats in a miniature canal, like the passengers on the “It’s a Small World” ride. Every time you unburden the boat of a passenger—an ebi, a California roll, a slab of maguro—the bill goes up, up, up. She tried to talk to me in the hotel that night, her back to the door as if I might make a break for it. “Okay,” she said. “We need to go over a few things. We need to stop putting off these conversations just because every stressful subject makes you uncomfortable. I just need to figure out what we’re going to do, Dan. I can’t just sit here in limbo and hope everything works out all by itself.”

But we didn’t have The Talk that night, at my insistence.

I convinced her to go dancing instead.

Allison figured that a change of venue might do us some good. Get out of the city. Camp for a while. That way we could be closer together, and have a nice experience, and still save money, like I wanted. She drove the rental car along a fogbound freeway and out to the coast, straight up the on-ramp of a ferry that sailed us out to sea, past a pod of seals. Seagulls wheeled in our wake. When the boat reached Orcas Island, we drove off the ferry and onto a blacktop road past a breakwater and up to a wooded campsite in the hills. But when we crawled into the tent, I remembered all the downsizing I’d done on the trail. I’d replaced our spacious two-man Bullfrog nylon shelter with a single-man Northface survival tent. It was so cramped in there we barely slept, waking each other up, our faces smooshed against the mesh siding. The next morning, exhausted, we shoved our things into the trunk of the rental car. Allison still wanted to talk. We sat in the front seat of the rental. She was staring at me.

“I know what you want,” I said. “I know. And I’m still not ready to decide what we should do. I just have no idea. I don’t even know where the hell I want to
live
right now. My head is in too many places right now. I mean, I just got off a national scenic trail. I feel completely overwhelmed, like my brain’s back on the PCT somehow. Don’t you remember how it was when we got off the trail down near Mexico? Hanging out in San Diego? Starbucks everywhere, and all that concrete?”

“We can’t just keep putting off the conversation forever.”

“But we don’t
have
to talk about it
here,
where it’s beautiful. Why don’t we wait until we’re
off
the island to have the big old knock-down-drag-out, ‘where the hell are we going in our future’ conversation?”

“You know what, Dan? I’ve been sitting around for two years waiting for you to just get your shit together. I need you
to step up. This isn’t funny anymore. I’m sick of you just blanking out every time we talk about an unpleasant subject. You think it’s a ‘difficult’ situation, you think I’m being a ‘difficult’ girlfriend, now? Well, I can’t help it. Things are difficult. I need the best of you right now. You’re a pretty funny guy. So why don’t you cheer me up right now? Why can’t you be strong for me? Be funny for me.”

“I’m sick of things always being hard.”

“And you’ve been off the trail for all of one week.”

“I don’t want to move on just yet.”

“There’s no more trail.”

“But I don’t know what I want to do.”

“You’re gonna have to start figuring that out.”

“But I’m really scared.”

“You’re a coward,” she said.

We drove the car back on the ferry and wound up in Seattle, where Allison had booked a flight to take her home. I didn’t book a flight, though. I still did not know where I wanted to live, even for the next few weeks. I said I’d tell her very soon, when I was less confused, when I wasn’t “in transition” anymore. I couldn’t think properly, couldn’t will my mouth to say one thing to comfort her. That week, in Seattle, Allison was sitting in the next room, reading a freebie magazine we’d picked from a display case near a supermarket. I picked up the phone and made plans to have lunch with an ex-girlfriend in Seattle, hardly even realizing what I was doing or why. I flirted on the phone. Talked loudly. Couldn’t control the volume. My larynx was set on “speakerphone.” Allison heard the whole thing. “How could you?” she said. “When I’m sitting right there, bored, in the next room? Have you lost your mind, Dan? This isn’t even mean anymore. It’s just crazy. It feels like you’re doing everything you can think of to drive me away.”

“It’s just lunch,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

The next night, we booked ourselves into yet another
cheapskate motel, this one just outside the Seattle airport, on the free-shuttle route. This was the time for me to “step up” and say all the right things, but I couldn’t do it. The sheets were overstarched. They felt like concrete. I hate it when maids overstarch the sheets. You’d think they would give them a good rinse or something, soften them up a bit so a man could get some decent sleep. Allison left on a shuttle to her terminal the next morning, when the sun was barely up.

It didn’t seem right just to get on a plane after all that walking, so I hung around town awhile. I had lunch with my smart and pretty ex-girlfriend, who was finding herself, working in a bookstore. Same light blond hair, thick glasses, high cheekbones. She still favored natural cotton fabrics. We ate cheap pad Thai, mine with shrimp, hers with tumescent clots of tofu, because she was still a vegetarian. I thought I’d try to flirt with her a little. See how far I might get. Who knows? I’d never really gotten over her. Our relationship had always felt unfinished to me. I talked to her in some detail about the Pacific Crest Trail. Told her all the good anecdotes, but with Allison clipped out of every scene. It occurred to me that all my best stories were on the damned trail, and that Allison figured in a great many of them, and yet I didn’t say one word about her. My ex-girlfriend smiled at me in a familiar way.

“What’s funny?” I said.

“Oh, nothing,” she said. “It’s just that I never would have known that you got through with finishing this national trail unless you’d told me. There’s nothing about your face, or anything about you, that looks different. You look like the same Dan I knew from before. Only older.”