The Cactus Eaters (35 page)

It took a considerable amount of debt, boredom, and unemployment to bring me back from my long daze. My recovery was far from smooth. In the months after my Pacific Crest Meltdown, I found ungainful employment at temp agencies, which tried to slot me into corporate offices. I tried hard, but my behavior got in the way. I filled out time cards with a large black crayon, pilfered office supplies, and hit on a sleepy-eyed, bosomy coworker named Genevieve. I tried to woo her by giving her Bigfoot sculptures I’d fashioned out of faux fur, Coke bottles, doll’s eyes, and oversize paper clips. They fired me quickly; the supervisor asked me to stay away from the office.

“But what about the mess on the desk?” I said.

“We’ll take care of it,” she assured me.

Adapting to my old life was a struggle for Dirty Dan. The disassociations, and social blunders, kept creeping up. One of my friends took me to a sushi bar on Pacific Avenue, where I placed a large glop of wasabi into my mouth, forgetting that it wasn’t pistachio sorbet. I sprinted for the washroom, with magma-hot horseradish drooling from my mouth. Afterward, we took a wild ride in my car, driving around downtown Santa Cruz. When she asked me what the hell I was doing, I told her that I was “looking for my car.”

“You’re
in
it,” she said.

As soon as I was feeling more reasonable, I launched a bid to get my sanity back. I started by laying siege to the ridiculous gewgaws and tinctures I’d amassed since washing up in Santa Cruz. I uncorked every accursed tincture of St. John’s Wort, milk thistle, and melatonin and dumped it down the toilet where it belonged. I loaded my voodoo candles and smiling
Buddha onyxes into the nearest Dumpster. I filled out a job application, this time without a crayon in my hand. I cleaned up the room I’d trashed and apologized to the friends I’d freaked out. And one summer day, I even worked up the nerve to call Allison, not to get her back, plead for sympathy, or even apologize, but just to let her know how I was doing.

“It’s nice to hear your voice,” she said, and I unloaded on her, giving her the unexpurgated version of my post-trail spinout. It was an easy talk, no motive or quest.

“All I can say is, I’m not surprised,” she said, in reference to my confession about my 192-hour sleeplessness. “You always had so much energy.” We talked about everything and nothing, her freelancing, her reporting gig out in the Midwest, what it was like to be off the trail. And then, very casually, around the halfway point of our talk, she dropped in the name of a man she’d met. Somewhere between the beginning and ending of my temporary lunacy, she’d fallen in love. “We get along really well,” she said. “You and I had some good times, but it just wasn’t worth it.” We hung up after a while. The conversation had dribbled away. It didn’t even feel like two exes talking. It felt like easy friends who had parted company and were probably not going to speak again, not out of rancor but from circumstance, distance, and sheer inertia. When I hung up the phone, our conversation left no residue. It was all done now.

I moved on, at least from Allison. The trail never really left my head—it’s still there—and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The trail did not bring about all of the behaviors that some people clump together when they think of “Dan White”: my loud monologues when I think no one is around, or my occasional bouts of vigilance, as if every street corner might conceal a cactus waiting to stick it to me. But the trail at least reinforced these behaviors. For six years after the trail, I even toted a gallon bottle of water for fear of dehydration, even in cities. Sometimes I still do.

But the trail didn’t just turn me into an occasional head case. The trail also gave me my first story, and exposed me to something larger than myself. I now have a certain kind of “hardship” as a frame of reference, along with a willingness to admit that most of the hardships I encountered on and off the trail were self-inflicted. It had been
my
decision to be there. I could have quit any time. The fact that I did
not
quit means something to me. I’m not suggesting that I’m brave. After all, a lot of people have hiked the same trail without significant problems. You might even say that I went with much trepidation where hundreds had gone before. I’m not suggesting that I’m a competent outdoorsman, either. A couple of years ago, after I wrote an article about hiking through a remote section of Maine without a map, a woman wrote me a letter assuring me that I was a “disgrace to the national backpacking community.” She had a point, but perhaps getting lost is the final frontier. If I had known what the hell I was doing upon embarking on the PCT, my finishing the trail would not have been significant. The fact that I winged it but did not die still moves me. I’ll never be as fast or as light as a Jardi-Nazi, but I’m tenacious as the ticks that bit me in the Laguna Mountains. More than ten years have passed since I set foot out of Agua Dulce with Allison and Big Motherfucker. Since then, I fell in love again. My wife and I have been married for three years now. Big Motherfucker is with me still. I’ve resisted the impulse to send him out to Gregory Backpacks to have him fixed up. He retains all the scars, mouse bites, and duct-tape patch jobs he sustained on the trail. Though I’ve washed him twice since then, Big Motherfucker still bears the rank aroma of the PCT.

The odor reminds me of what I learned. The trail was a harsh teacher, and most of the lessons had nothing to do with backpacking. Now I have a yardstick to measure beauty, all ugliness, slack times, good times, and privation. When a snowdrift buries my car on the streets of Manhattan, or my wife and I are
squawking about a bill or a misunderstanding, or my writing students are panicking about their essays, or my upstairs neighbor wakes me up at 4:15
A.M
., pounding away at his girlfriend on the hardwood floor while emitting nasal quacking noises, I think to myself, “Well, yeah, but I drank mud. I ate a fuckin’
cactus
.” Most people, upon meeting me, would never suspect I come from an ultrawealthy suburb. I don’t expect black-truffle shavings on my chocolate sundaes. In fact, I expect all worthwhile things to be a slog, whether we’re talking about marriage, trying to get published, moving my car back and forth across the street to stay ahead of the sweeper, looking for jobs in academia, searching for aircon units on Craigslist, or doing battle with Manhattan’s parking police.

While the PCT provided me with a framework for my life, the trail did not improve my hiking style. I still get lost constantly, even at the mall. I visit the woods almost every week. But every walk I take is the un-trail. I no longer freight each walk with grand expectations. I would never hike a national scenic trail again—nor do I have any desire to make up the piece I missed, near Seiad Valley, when I accepted a hitchhike just south of town. If I tried to walk another long trail, I would most likely die. My backcountry luck ran out a long time ago. These days, I’m less likely to moon over the PCT or try to sneak it into every conversation. And yet the PCT left me with nostalgia I’ve never felt for, say, college or high school. When I look out the window at a set of low-lying mountains twenty miles off, I remember what it was like to stand in a valley and stare off at some distant escarpment and know I’d be walking around up there, looking for a campsite, by the time the sun went down. Sometimes I find myself falling backward until I’m on it again. For a long while after the trail, I had a dream with variations, sometimes twice a week. The setup was always the same. I’m out on a trail that passes through a cleft in a granite ridge, so high up only dwarf trees and krummholz grow
there. There’s a young couple out on the trail just north of me, hiking slowly. There are scattered clouds, but now they’re bunching together, making a storm, and so I walk faster, even though experience tells me I can’t outrun a storm. I catch up to the couple without even trying. For some reason, they can’t see me. They look right through me as if I were made out of Saran Wrap. The man and woman make their way to a rocky bowl containing a lake. The lake has no name, so they name it after themselves, for a laugh. Now the couple has stopped for the night. They sit down cross-legged and cook supper: protein chunks bobbing around in a slippery liquid. Their meal smells nasty, and yet they slurp it up. My eyes settle on the woman. She’s pretty, with blond hair and burnished skin. The man grunts as he tends the stove. His beard is full of dirt and gunk, but the woman doesn’t seem to care. She’s looking at him as if he’s handsome. It’s getting cold out here. She leads him into the tent. After a while I hear muttering and murmurs, and I watch the motions and silhouettes of their sleeping bags clumped together. After a while, the tent goes still, the sky turns black, and when it becomes too cold for me to stay out here any longer, I leave them be, and retreat down the ridge alone.

No moon is out, but the trail announces itself in a ribbon of light that takes me down the valley.

T
his is a work of narrative nonfiction. I have tried to recapture my mind-set and Pacific Crest Trail experiences as accurately as I could, with the help from my often comprehensive, sometimes less than comprehensive, and sometimes threadbare diary entries. I have had to contend with the fact that some of the diary entries are exhaustive and chronological (such as the cactus-biting scene), while others are scattered pieces, written in a hurry and out of sequence. I consulted my boxes of slides, post-trail interviews, and an early “Vomit Draft,” in which I attempted (perhaps unwisely) to fill in the blanks in the diaries and “narrativize” an otherwise random-seeming bunch of strange events. The early draft has been helpful in the sense that it caulked a few cracks in my diary—it’s strange how one can remember items that aren’t in any journal, and how a journal can “remember” forgotten anecdotes—and frustrating in the sense that I wrote the rough version so quickly after coming home from the trail that it suffered from tunnel-vision, instant-replay contextualization attempts, and storytelling blus
ter. In the past few years I’ve had to triangulate between memory, images, the PCT guidebooks, and various (and sometimes conflicting) versions of the written record, including diaries, the “rough-cut” version, and a peculiar comic book/graphic novel version of the trek, which I crafted in order to frame events in time and space. This “final” version is an attempt to square this draft with other versions. In many instances the dialogue is close to verbatim—for example, the disturbing exchange with Oedipus Rex in the High Sierra section, the back-and-forth with Milt Kenney (reinforced by subsequent interviews), and my Tehachapi crossing with the Gingerbread Man. In other instances I am relying only on the power (such as it is) of memory while consulting correspondence and memories of habitual conversation topics, conversational tics, speech patterns, mannerisms, and so on. Where possible, I’ve tried to square my memories of various lakes and cloud formations and volcanic protuberances with slides, pictures, and YouTube images while filling in a few gaps of ignorance (e.g., biography, natural history) with book reading and databases. If I’ve misdescribed any of the personages here, or if any shrub, arthropod, woodland mammal, or lizard feels misrepresented here, or if I’ve transported any creatures to the wrong ecosystem or life zone, the fault lies with the author, not the sources. In some cases I have identified trail “characters” only by their trail names. In some instances I have changed names for reasons of privacy. Above all else, this is my vision of the trail. If you hike it, you will most likely not eat a cactus or watch in horror as your water filter is violated by a bunch of amphibians. Consider yourself lucky.

W
ith love and gratitude to my wife, Amy. My
Cactus
diaries and rough drafts would be sprouting poisonous mushrooms under my desk without your unflagging support. Thank you for encouraging me to follow my dreams and crisscrossing this country with me twice. (Not on foot!)

With love and appreciation to Mom and Dad.

With love and gratitude to Doug and Edie Achterman: You were our cheering section throughout the Manhattan Project and beyond.

I would like to extend an enormous “thank you” to Patricia O’Toole for her invaluable friendship, insight, and wisdom, and for convincing me to take a worthwhile risk. I am extremely lucky to have such a mentor. (Also, thanks for the helmet!)

Many thanks to my agent, Kris Dahl, at ICM for her work on
Cactus
, and to Michael Signorelli at HarperCollins for his attention and care (and to John Williams for believing in this project). Thanks to all of my talented fel
low workshoppers (and while they are too numerous to mention by name), I want to give a shout-out to Bronwen Dickey for being the first to read through the completed version and offering “instant feedback” suggestions. Thanks to Paul Douglass, coordinator of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University, and to Martha Heasley Cox for her generous endow-ment of the Steinbeck Fellowship, which helped me finish this book and nail down the P.S. materials. I’m grateful for the shaping hand of Richard Locke, for the first-rate workshops of Michael Scammell and Leslie Sharpe, and to Phillip Lopate for his unvarnished feedback. (An additional thanks to professors Locke and O’Toole for cheering on our class at the School of the Arts thesis readings; both of your enthusiastic presences made a huge difference for all of us. It was much appreciated!) Thanks to Dave Howard for brotherhood, friendship, and guidance, to James Shiffer for coming up with this crazy plan in the first place (and for saving the correspondence that I used in several sections of the text), to Peggy Townsend and Shmuel Thaler, who took a gander at the “rough cut,” to Didi Dayton, Will Zilliacus, Shawn Parker, and Whitney Grummon for their friendship and encouragement, and to Scott Williamson, uber-hiker, for his sound advice. I am grateful to Phil Sexton for information pertaining to the unfortunate Elisha Stephens (see the P.S. for additional readings and information sources on Stephens), and to all of the hard-working, boundlessly creative students in my Fall 2006 undergraduate writing class at Columbia. That class turned into a kind of “laboratory of ideas” that helped inspire this book’s deep ecology and man-in-relation-to-nature themes. Many thanks to the staff at the California history room at the Martin Luther King Library at SJSU, and to all the real-life heroes who helped with my expedition—in particular, the tireless Wolf
and the endlessly inventive Gingerbread Man. While writing this, I found inspiration in the writings of Ray Jardine (I hope some day to live up to his lightpacking example). Many thanks to Angela Ballard and the Pacific Crest Trail Association, and all the Trail Angels—in particular, the late Mily Kenney of Castella, California, the “mayor” of the Pacific Crest Trail.