The Cactus Eaters (4 page)

The ranger yawned and showed her yellow teeth. “Is that right?” she said in the tone people use on telemarketers. “The Pacific Crest Trail? We see an awful lot of those.” She blithely added that the trail near the ranger station was “totally snowed over and impassible. No way you’ll make it without snowshoes and ice axes. Do you have snow gear on you?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, if I were you I’d start farther north a ways, in the lower elevations, somewhere near Agua Dulce. That’s fifty-five miles north of here, near the Antelope Valley.”

I was vaguely familiar with the place she was talking about. It was in a parched area of Los Angeles County, forty-four miles north of downtown L.A.

“But…” I said. “Isn’t that kind of in the desert?”

“Yeah,” the ranger said. “But at least there isn’t snow.”

“Then we’ll need directions to Agua Dulce,” Dad said.

But the ranger wasn’t looking at my mom and dad anymore, and her bored expression had melted away, replaced by a look of restrained horror, for there, outside the window, my girlfriend was on her hands and knees vomiting with abandon all over the landscaping.

Agua Dulce was not what I had in mind. For one thing, it was 454 miles north of the Mexican border. If we hiked to Canada from Agua Dulce, we’d have to come back at some point and make up all those missing miles. In the car, I was having a hard time processing all the new developments. I swore under my breath and kicked my boots together until Allison, still slumped over, with her hair hanging down, scolded me. “Stop freaking out, Dan,” she said. “
I’m
the one who’s not feeling well.”

To reach Agua Dulce, we sped past gated condo towns. Pale
mountains rose. While Wrightwood was cool, the desert sizzled. Waves of heat rose off the blacktop as we entered the parking lot of Vasquez Rocks County Park, Agua Dulce’s tourist attraction. Visitors crawled over sandstone shapes that jutted over the Antelope Valley. The rocks, supposedly, would be our starting point on our epic journey. My father stopped the car. Allison got out and sat on a flat-topped rock. She put her face in her hands.

“You sure about this, Daniel?” my mother said.

“I’ve never been so sure about anything in my life.”

“But why are you doing this?” she said.

“Because I want it very, very, very, very badly.”

“I know you do,” she said. “But wanting something very, very, very, very badly and actually getting it are two different things, Daniel.”

Allison was by my side. Even then she could have risen up and said, “Fuck this. Let’s go home.” Instead she sat in meek silence. I can only guess that she felt subsumed by the desires of others. A whole lot of concerns and neuroses were swirling through the air, and none of them had anything to do with her.

My father got out of the car and started helping me drag the packs from the trunk. “Boy oh boy,” he said. “These packs are monsters, young Daniel. Are you sure you need all this?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “It’s a long way to our next supply town.”

My mother gave Allison a brief worried look and whispered to me, “Is she all right, dear? Danny, do you want us to
do
something?”

I greeted the query with silence. I got a quick hug from Mom. Dad—who looked stricken—did not shake my hand. They sped out of the parking lot and were gone.

This was supposed to be a heroic moment. Even now, some part of me still thought we might start hiking that day. But
where would we walk? And from what energy source? What the hell had I done? Now I wished my parents would return to rescue us, but we had no cell phone, and neither did they. Allison and I lingered for an hour in the Vasquez Rocks parking lot, in a daze, watching jackrabbits leap and hornets chase each other in wild circles.

Now that it was too late, I was ready to take care of Allison. I left her alone and found a ranger office in the county park. The young female clerk let me use their phone for a local call. Allison and I had brought with us a set of “emergency contact numbers” supplied by Kirk and Eddie back in Connecticut, just in case something bad happened to us along the trail. “Just in case” was now. Among the names on the list was Mark, a postman who lived here in Agua Dulce. Eddie had told us that Mark was a PCT enthusiast who did everything he could to help hikers. I called his work number. Mark answered on the first ring. I asked if he might give us a ride to a motel. I told him Allison had vomited recently and was weak. Mark asked us why on earth we’d left for the trail today if Allison was sick. I had no ready answer. He asked if we needed a doctor. I told him what Allison had said—that she felt rotten but probably just needed some rest.

“Sure, I can help you out,” he said. “Your girlfriend had better be feeling hardy before you try that desert crossing. This is unusual, though. I’ve never had anybody need me to help them out before they’ve even set foot on the trail.”

I didn’t know how to respond.

True to his word, Mark was there soon, driving his mail truck. There were no hotels, motels, or a campground in Agua Dulce, so he drove us to Santa Clarita, a city of a hundred thousand people, twenty miles south. Mark was an Italian American in his early thirties, with olive skin and a bushy mustache. He told us he lived here to escape the constraints and bullshit of “normal career society.” He used to run a feed and seed store,
before becoming a mailman. Mark loaded up our packs for us. I could barely talk to him. Woozy, Allison tried to engage him in a conversation about a recent article she’d read about a mentally scrambled postal worker who gunned down all his coworkers. This led to some awkwardness as we squeezed into the truck. Mark drove us out to the Comfort Inn, on the edge of a busy road. “It’s a shame you didn’t do some hiking before staying at this place,” he said as I handed the clerk our credit card. “A week from now in the backcountry, this place would seem like a palace.”

In the lobby near the checkout counter, three spiky-haired rock climbers in Lycra outfits lounged in chairs. One gave me a thumbs-up sign. “Those look like serious backpacks,” said one of them. “You guys must be hardcore.”

We walked right past them without saying a word.

M
ark helped us drag our packs into the elevator and we rode to the second floor. We invited him into the room, where he shoved the gear against a wall. “Man, those packs are heavy,” he said. Allison lay on the king-size bed, under a Cubist portrait of what looked like chopped liver. The painting bothered me. I walked over and tried to remove it but someone had nailed it to the wall. Below the balcony of our second-floor room, a burly janitor dragged a net across the pool. Squinting in the sun, he skimmed bees and spiders from water the color of Mountain Dew. This is not how I had imagined our first day in the desert. Mark glanced at me. I could tell he was alarmed by the heaviness of our packs. I could also tell that he was going to give us a stern lecture about them, but I didn’t want to hear it. Allison lay back, grimacing, her hands placed gingerly over her stomach.

“Listen, I’ve just got to ask you something,” Mark said, leaning forward. “Does either one of you have any idea what it’s like out there?” He pointed, with his thumb, toward the black-
ribbed mountains out the window, jagged in the distance. The sinking sun had turned their edges red. For years, Mark had been a friend to Pacific Crest Trail hikers passing through Agua Dulce. He’d offered them free rides to a camping “super store” a half hour away from the trail, and picked their brains about backpacking. He’d already hiked small sections alone or with friends, and something, he said, always went wrong: sprained ankles, tick bites, loneliness, heat exhaustion, and sometimes all of the above. “I know from experience that this is going to be the most incredibly strenuous thing you’ve ever done,” Mark said. “With all this stuff, I’m sorry, but you will never make it. If she hadn’t gotten sick now? If you guys had just waltzed right out there? I mean, you could die out there with all this stuff.” He zeroed in on me and my backpack. “There’s no reason to bring something that large. Then you’re just tempted to stuff it full of things you don’t need. So let’s start getting rid of stuff right now.” I stared at Allison and she stared back. “Come on,” Mark said. “Let’s see everything you’re bringing, in a pile, on the floor.”

Allison threw me a baleful look. She sat up on the bed, reached over, and flopped two sacks of food and gear on the ground. Mark’s brown eyes narrowed when he saw two Swiss Army knives with beer openers, wine openers, magnifying glasses, and every kind of screwdriver head. He sighed when he saw a German lantern that weighed three pounds and needed four D-cell batteries. He whinnied when he saw our money belts, our wash towels torn in half to save weight, extra batteries for the lantern, and four toothbrushes with the handles lopped off to save even more weight. Next were thirty yards of Ace bandages, four unbreakable Lexan bowls, several spools of twine, a John McPhee anthology, four layers of insulated clothing, one large and putrefying sack of home-dehydrated apples the color of snot, and four bags of mock seafood pasta supreme with freeze-dried protein specks. But the item that puzzled
Mark the most was the kite. He turned it around and around in his hands. “Kite?” he said. “Kite? Tell me when, in the course of walking twenty-six hundred miles, over unbelievably steep terrain, would you have time to fly a kite?”

“Look,” I said, “Allison bought the kite for me at an Eddie Bauer store in Connecticut for my birthday. And we decided to take it along with us. We thought it would be…I don’t know, fun.” I pointed out the kite’s many attractive features, including five tassels, each six feet long, colored yellow, purple, pink, blue, and chartreuse. “See?” I said. “It’s made of parafoil, so it really doesn’t weigh very much. And…it’s collapsible.”

Mark reached over and threw the kite on the floor. I thought Allison was going to holler, but she was too weak to fight. Instead she leaned back on her puffy pillow and closed her eyes.

“See that kite?” Mark said. “That’s the first item in the ‘out pile.’ And everything that ends up in the outpile is going home to your mom and dad’s. Believe me, I’m doing you a favor.” He reached in our packs, grabbing item after item, as methodically as a robotic arm. He ripped our 526-page
Pacific Crest Trail, Volume I: California
guidebook into chunks, divided by chapter, and threw the sections into different piles.

“What are you doing?” I said. “That book cost me twenty-five dollars.”

“You carry only the guidebook pages you need for any one section. You send the rest of the pages ahead to yourself, at each supply stop. It’s a waste of weight and space. You’ve got to do this smart, guys, or you’ll be off the trail in a week.”

Soon food, spoons, and other gear formed a three-foot-high cone that leaned, at a perilous angle, against the coffee table. I was dumbstruck. Every pound that Mark took out of our packs filled me with fear. To me, every ounce of pack weight was a tether to civilization.

“Listen,” Mark said. “You’re going to burn through all your money before you even set foot on the trail. Why don’t I come
and get you tomorrow morning, and you can stay over at my grandma’s place out in Agua Dulce. Stay there with me as long as you like. Meanwhile, I’ll store all the camping stuff you don’t need, and later on you can mail it back to your parents.”

We said we’d take him up on his kind offer. Even so, I hoped, against reason, that he would have no more advice for us. I couldn’t bear to hear any more.

Later, we watched from the balcony as Mark, crouching beneath two big Hefty bags stuffed with our loot, said good-bye. Allison watched Mark shove the mess into his truck and drive off. She sat on the bed and stared at the spot on the floor where our gear used to be. Then she turned and whispered in my ear, “I can’t believe our kite is gone.”

M
ark honked his horn outside the motel the next day. He was at the wheel of a pickup truck with a sticker on the bumper reading,
SAVE A HORSE
,
RIDE A COWBOY
! We shouldered our packs, piled in, and drove to Mark’s grandma’s bungalow in a canyon full of chaparral, snakes, and silver sage. Allison was feeling better—she was taking in solid food and hadn’t puked since the motel, but she wasn’t strong enough to hike. I sat there, fidgety, on the carpet of Mark’s grandma’s living room feeling trapped, watching the big red sun rise over a neighbor’s cactus garden. That morning I felt stuck, longing for some outside force to kick-start our stalled adventure. I wanted some deus ex machina to sweep in and rescue us. It was at that moment I first saw The Book.

Ray Jardine’s
PCT Hiker’s Handbook
had a cover the color of peach yoghurt. Typeset in an awkward font, the book had the thrown-together quality of a smuggled document, a backcountry samizdat, something the authorities didn’t want you to see. Ray Jardine was a mountaineer, kayaker, long-distance
hiker, and inventor of The Friend, a spring-action camming device that had changed the face of rock climbing. Now he was starting a light-packing revolution on the Pacific Crest Trail. Jardine believed people could walk faster and be happier if they carried less than ten pounds of gear on their backs, including the weight of the pack. He urged his readers to hike in running shoes, or go barefoot for a spell, because “the nerves in the soles of our feet provide our brains with a wealth of tactile information.” Hikers should shun boots, because they can damage our feet. Eat gooey corn pasta in camp, Jardine said, because it is “rocket fuel” for your legs, and when you’re done with the meal, consider guzzling the cookwater to glean a few more carbohydrate calories. These strategies sounded wacky, but the results were indisputable. Most people take five to six months to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, but Jardine, in middle age, had knocked it off with Jenny, his sprightly wife, in less than three and a half months. That’s 2,650 miles in 100 days, in heat and snow and rain.

Mark walked in to the living room and caught me reading The Book. He must have noticed my vacant expression, my tongue pushed to the side of my mouth, my eyes bulging as I stared at the pages.

“I see you’ve found The Book,” he said. “Ray Jardine has some great ideas, but I’m not sure how much it will help you to read that now. It’s like a textbook. You can’t just sit down and absorb all that knowledge in one day.”

Mark explained that the book had inspired a lifestyle. In fact, some of the hardest-core followers of “The Ray Way” called themselves Jardi-Nazis. Apparently, the term had started out as a put-down aimed at Jardine’s most ardent fans. Essentially, it was a synonym for “joyless speed-walking freak.” In response, the Jardi-Nazis appropriated the term for themselves. Mark said these hikers had a few things in common: sculpted legs and buttocks and twiggy arms, because upper-
body muscles tend to atrophy on long-distance walks. To a Jardi-Nazi, every smidgen of pack weight mattered. Jardi-Nazis figured it was six million steps from Mexico to Canada, so if you brought along even one pound of useless crap, that would be six million pounds of useless crap, enough to kill a man.

Some Jardi-Nazis considered tents, sleeping bags, and stoves to be “useless crap.” Instead, they slept under lightweight tarps tied to tree branches. They trained for months before setting foot on the PCT. To a Jardi-Nazi, taking shortcuts or alternative routes was treasonous. Real Jardi-Nazis would rather choke on a bungee cord than road-walk even a quarter mile off the trail or take a ride to the next junction. Jardi-Nazis had ways of figuring out if other hikers lied about their accomplishments. One method was to look at rain-proof trail journals posted alongside the PCT; trail walkers were careful to sign in at every journal to authenticate their hikes. Skip a journal, and people might call you a cheater. One young man who had avoided a snowbound section of the High Sierra by taking a Greyhound was known forever as Mister Bus Man.
*

Mark seemed anxious to share more details about the Jardi-Nazis but he had something else on his mind. “Look,” he said, “we’ll resume this conversation when I get back. I’m heading out to pick up Todd. He’s another hiker who just came in off the PCT. He’s gonna crash here. Is it okay with you guys?”

“No problem,” I said, startled that there was a Pacific Crest hiker who had only just now reached Agua Dulce. “But that’s
kind of weird. I thought we were the very last ones in the season.”

Mark noticed my downcast expression. “Look,” he said, “you don’t have to read that book to hike the trail. Plenty of people hiked the PCT before Ray Jardine’s book came out.”

Mark left me sitting cross-legged on his grandmother’s carpet, looking at the book and wondering why no one had told me about it beforehand. Why hadn’t anyone told me that there was such a thing as “backpacking technique”? Why hadn’t someone told me there was only one “right way” to do the trail?

Somehow I pulled myself out of my trance. I had to be realistic. Reading the handbook now would only lead to impulsive, stupid mistakes. I put the book down and tried to stop thinking about it. Still, it was painful to think I’d be going out there without all the information I needed. I hoped, against reason, that this new guy, Todd, was not one of those goddamned Jardi-Nazis. In the state of mind I was in, meeting one of those cultists would probably derange me.

The door burst open ten minutes later. It was Mark in the company of Todd, lean and muscular, with a Paul Bunyan beard, a black mustache, and a battered survival hat with a broad brim and a bandanna safety-pinned to the back to block the sun’s rays. This stranger was tall, with a leathery tan, sneakers instead of boots, and a trim pack, perfectly symmetrical; no bed rolls or food sacks noodling off of it. He was so full of vigor, taking giant steps across the carpet, that you would never suspect he’d slogged 454 miles from the Mexican border to get here. The man looked like he was returning from a spa weekend.

“Good to meet you,” he said, heading toward me and Allison. “My name is Todd, but I call myself The Hydra, or Hydrox, like the cookie. Hydra is my trail name. I drink water all the time.” He beamed and shook my hand so painfully hard it
was like getting Rolfed. Todd the Hydra looked out the window and smiled at the waves of heat rising off the asphalt road. “Quite warm out there,” he said with a chuckle. He was sleek with a buoyant frame and ropey muscles. He seemed to fill the room as he moved through it, casting long shadows on the floor. He took a deep breath and sighed at all the stereo equipment and stacks of country CDs, the fuzzy carpet, the big box of muesli on the counter, and the shaggy houseplants. “This place is a palace,” he said.

Todd slid his pack off his shoulders and leaned it against the living room wall. He sat down on the carpet and pulled off his trail-battered sneakers. He got back up on his feet, taking massive strides in his ankle socks. What feet he had. Size-thirteen monsters, so big they reminded me of Bigfoot, feral humanoid of the Pacific Northwest. Allison watched him intently. I envied his strut, his way of loping through a room, making it his own. Then the door opened again and a woman—his girlfriend, I presumed—walked in and made my heart stop. She was carrying some of Todd’s gear and a shrink-wrapped platter of cookies. Her dark hair spilled to a crook in her back. She leaned forward to shake my hand. As she did, she arched her shoulders, and I could not help but notice the sun-browned cleavage pushing against her tank top. Shyly I asked for one of the cookies, which turned out, on further inspection, to be peanut-butter-and-chocolate Rice Krispies Treats. Todd handed me the platter. “Knock yourself out,” he said. While reaching for a gooey square, I noticed that his girlfriend had left a yellow Post-it message for Todd on top of the cookie pile. “You’re special,” it said.

“I’m Elaine,” the woman said.

“But I call her my Sweet Elaine,” Todd said, “because that’s what she is. She’s so sweet to me.”

“I meet him at every trail stop.”

“She sure does,” he said. “I tell you, she keeps my spirits up.”

Sweet Elaine giggled, leaving no doubt that the two of them had Yoga-esque pretzel-contortionist grinder sex at every junction. I loved Allison, and sure, we had just as much sex as most other well-scrubbed suburban New England couples. Still, it was hard not to envy a man whose relationship with his girlfriend seemed to consist solely of baked goods and fornication. Allison asked Todd about the
HYDRATE OR DIE
sticker on his pack; we were not aware at the time that it was the logo of the CamelBak company, which makes backpacks with built-in water pouches.

“Humans lose so much water out there and don’t even know it,” Todd said softly, his voice turning grave and low. “We’re the only mammals on the planet who can’t gauge our level of dehydration.” He pointed to the Jardine guidebook, open and dog-eared on the table. “That’s why you’ve got to drink all the time out there, and you should eat all the time, too. I eat three pounds a day on the trail. I eat like a horse.” To make room for all the food in his pack, Todd carried scant gear. He didn’t have a tent or sleeping bag, just a “bivy sack,” short for “bivouac sack,” which looked to me like a trash bag. He pulled this sack over himself to sleep at night, to keep out the elements. I wondered out loud if such a thing could work. “Good question,” he said, smiling. “It does keep me warm, for the most part, though I almost got hypothermia on Mount Baden Powell.” Todd pronounced
hypothermia
with slow satisfaction, as if recalling an especially tender cut of porterhouse.

“So,” I blurted out, “are you a Jardi-Nazi?”

There was silence for a moment. Todd raised his eyebrows, then shook his head and laughed. “Jardi-Nazi? Hmm. Would I call myself that? Hell, I don’t know. But I will tell you one thing. God bless the Jardi-Nazis. God bless ’em. I follow Ray Jardine’s advice to the last letter.”

“Can you show me some of your gear?” I said meekly.

“Sure,” he said. “I’d be glad to. Come here.” He fished out a white wrinkled garment. “Here, catch,” he said, tossing it in my direction. “That’s my white shirt for desert crossings. See the long sleeves? It keeps the ultraviolet rays out.” He reached in his pack and threw me two wrinkled balls of cotton material that were damp to the touch and smelled vaguely of garlic. “Those,” he said, “are trail socks.”

Perhaps I was oversensitive, but there was something about his thunderous voice, his confidence, his smug assurance, and his method of tossing his gear at my chest that put me on edge. But Todd returned to my good graces when he asked if I might take his picture with Mark, Sweet Elaine, and Allison. I was so flattered by this request that I tried to cast aside my reservations about him. They all stood together, smiling widely, getting ready, but when I pulled out my camera, Todd’s smile faded. He’d already shown me his camera, a dinky little point-and-shoot that weighed only a few ounces. My Pentax K1000, a gift from my father, weighed three pounds. It had a fabric case, a cross-your-heart carrying strap, and an Ugly American 30-to-75-millimeter zoom lens that looked like one of those over-the-shoulder things they shot at Russian choppers in Afghanistan. Todd scratched his beard, stared at the camera, and frowned.

“Holy shit,” he said. “That’s a big camera, my friend. How far do you guys think you’re really gonna get?”

“Uh, far,” I said, trying to sound strong.

“What do you guys want?” Todd said with an abruptness, and a change of tone, that took me by surprise. “Where do you really want to go?”

I stood there, unable to come up with a snappy comeback.

“Are you at a loss for words?” he said.

Allison and I threw each other pained looks.

During a lull in the conversation, when Todd was distracted talking to Mark, I took Allison aside and had a powwow with her outside, on the driveway.

“I think he’s making fun of us,” I said.

“Even out here,” she said, “you just can’t escape the macho thing, the whole he-man one-upsmanship thing.”

“I don’t like his attitude,” I said. “I don’t like him acting as if he knows everything and we’re just a couple of over-packed slobs. Well, we’ll show Mr. Fancy Pants. We’ll pass his dehydrated keister on the side of a Mojave sandbank.”

Allison smiled. “We have a mean streak that will serve us well,” she said. “And all he has is an ego as big as his feet.”

Allison and I were gunning for Todd now. Outside the house, keeping our voices down, we broke into a little Pacific Crest Trail–style gangsta rap, a hiker’s variation on NWA’s “Gangsta Gangsta.” We substituted the N-word with
hiker
, or more specifically,
hikah
, because it sounded more gangsta-rap authentic.

This exchange of lyrics cheered us up immensely. We were ready to go back inside and deal with Todd. He seemed to be waiting for us.

“When are you guys leaving?”

“The day after tomorrow,” Allison said. “Just as soon as I’m feeling better.”

“Are you psyched?” Todd said, brightening. “Are you psyched?”

Allison and I looked at each other and decided, tentatively, that maybe we were psyched.

“Aw right,” Todd shouted, throwing a fist in the air. “Aw right!”

As the sun turned to a murky sliver in the foothills above the house, Todd made out with Sweet Elaine in the kitchen behind a stack of muesli oat-cranberry cereal boxes. It was
getting close to 10:00
P.M
. When they emerged at last, messy-haired and flushed, Sweet Elaine was blushing, even in her ears. Todd kissed her again, gently, and said they had better turn in quickly because he was returning to the trail early the next morning.

“Won’t the sun be bad then?” Allison said.

“I’m prepared,” Todd said crisply, “to hike all day any day under most conditions. I wear the lightest garments possible. My sleeves block the sun. I don’t get sunburned.”