The Cactus Eaters (5 page)

“Do you have any insect repellent,” Allison said in a saucy tone, “or is carrying bug juice over-packing?”

Todd just shook his head. “No bug juice. I don’t believe in putting chemicals on my body.”

Allison laughed out loud and caught my eye. “You must get sucked dry, then,” she said. “If I were you, I’d use the bug juice.” She turned to me, throwing me a supportive look. I smiled back. Allison and I were a team. Todd smiled, too. He reached in his pack and pulled out a full-body suit made of mosquito-proof mesh. He’d sewn it himself.

Sweet Elaine was lounging near Todd. She asked us if we’d done any other national scenic trails.

Allison told her we’d done a brief overnight practice hike on the Connecticut section of the Appalachian Trail and that it was a disaster. “We ran out of water. We had to suck on oranges. It was a gnarly situation.”

Sweet Elaine looked shocked. “You ran out of water on the AT? There’s so much water there. It’s like the ocean. The PCT is like a desert!”

I blushed. Todd looked even more annoyed now. “You guys have any experience out there at all?” he said. “How far do you really think you’re gonna get?”

“All the way,” I said. “All the way!” My words sounded hollow.

“Well, you guys sure picked a weird place to start,” Todd
said. He folded his maps and stuffed them in the side pocket of his shorts.

Allison and I went off to sleep in the spare room. Todd and Sweet Elaine were offered the living room but declined. They walked out to the lawn in front of Mark’s grandmother’s house, draped themselves beneath Todd’s trail tarp and slept under the stars.

T
he next morning, Todd left for the trail while Sweet Elaine drove back to Los Angeles. One day later, Allison said she felt a hundred percent better, and that all traces of the stomach bug had vanished. Mark drove us out to a place where the stables, dude ranches, and houses became more spread out, until there was nothing but dirt hills and crackling power lines. He was smiling hard now, and I wasn’t sure if he was confident in us all of a sudden or just happy to get us the hell out of his grandma’s bungalow.

On either side of the foothills rose blocks of rough sandstone, orange and red in the morning light. In the distance through the blue haze were low mountains, bald on top, pink from the sun. Mark killed the truck’s motor near a ranch house with a sign reading,
RED DUST RANCH
. A steer skull hung from a wire on a wooden arch. Its teeth were broken. Mark stopped on a pullout overlooking a valley. Allison and I stood in our blue neon shorts. No sounds intruded except for the crunch of our Vasque Sundowner boots on gravel and a few crows
cawing. Near the gravel pullout, I noticed a three-foot-wide footpath. A marker on the path’s edge, attached to a five-foot-tall post, read,
PACIFIC CREST TRAIL
. There was the PCT’s logo: shaggy pines and a snow-frosted mountain, but the land looked nothing like the picture on the marker, no snowcapped peaks, just a snakebitten valley the color of moleskin. The sign promised Eden. The scenery was straight out of Exodus.

My pack was so heavy I rested it on the ground, propped it up against the passenger door of Mark’s truck, squatted down in the dirt, lowered my shoulders beneath the support straps, cinched the straps tight against my pouching gut and pushed with my legs until I was standing up. It felt as if I had just done an ass-buster crunch at the gym back in Torrington. It takes six million steps to get to Canada. That’s six million ass-buster crunches.

Mark looked at me wistfully. “Maybe I didn’t take enough stuff out of that pack,” he said. “Are you comfortable?”

“Extremely comfortable,” I said. “It’s an internal frame pack that distributes the weight so evenly you don’t even feel it.”

“Really?” he said. “You’re leaning to one side.”

“No, I’m not,” I said.

Allison shouldered her pack. She grabbed hold of her support straps, took out her sun reflector hat and put it on. The hat had a creased brow and floppy top. Allison had an expression of openness and expectation. She smiled at me.

“Now, listen,” Mark said. “If something goes horribly wrong in the first hundred miles, try to get to a town somehow. Then call me up and I’ll come get you in my truck. My offer still stands after the first hundred miles—but it’d better be something really awful, and you’d better tell me about it in a really friendly voice.”

Then he reached around my neck to borrow my camera. Smiling, he cupped his hands to frame the shot. The picture would have shown a fresh-faced couple, clothes pressed, packs
clean. We probably wore expressions of fear and expectation as we stood by the sign and waved.

But no one would ever see the picture.

There was no film in the camera.

Mark drove away in his truck, leaving Allison and me standing next to the Pacific Crest Trail marker. Allison’s hair was tied in a thick ponytail, which stuck out from beneath her survival hat. Her white T-shirt was spotless, and so was her aquamarine sweatshirt made of synthetic fibers. Behind her, black mountains marched east across the broad valley, with a few foothills straggling just behind them. We would head north and cross the horizon line and the horizon beyond it until there were no horizons left. It was time to begin.

It was 6:15
A.M
. on June 17, nearly two months after most hikers start out on the Pacific Crest Trail. To our knowledge, we were the last through-hikers of the season. Ahead of us lay a 108-mile walk along the slopes of Liebre Mountain and down into the Mojave’s western edge. Soon the dust Mark’s truck kicked up, its diesel smell, and then, even the noise of it, were gone. It was just the two of us and the wind and the crows.

Time to take our first steps. I wondered if Allison would throw up again. Perhaps I would strain my hamstring, or space junk would fall from the clouds and crush us. I made a mental inventory. Ten pounds of chocolate and fruit gummi creatures from Trader Joe’s, check. Twelve freeze-dried dinners, check. Artisan-quality salami, check. Velveeta and noodles, check. Allison did a few yoga-style stretches, pivoting and waving her arms. I did a halfhearted knee bend and left it at that. Stretching is for pussies. I looked at Allison. “And so it begins,” I said, and we were off like a thundering herd of tortoises.

I took the first step. My boots crunched down on brittle grass. Then I took another step, over pebbles and loose earth. It seemed so cretinously simple. All you do is take one step and then another. “Repeat as often as necessary,” as it says on the
Luden’s cough drop container. This was going to be a snap. My pack was lashed to my back, a purple sandbag, and I felt the weight of it, in spite of Mark’s efforts to trim it down, but I didn’t care. I just smiled and thought, “We’re gonna show everybody.” I took another step until I had taken 10 steps and it was still easy. In short order, I’d taken 25 steps. It pleased me to think there were now only 5,999,975 more steps remaining. In fact, I wondered if I had taken the first steps too quickly, without being mindful enough. I stopped in my tracks and breathed.

“Why aren’t you moving?” said Allison, just behind me.

“I’m savoring,” I said.

I took another breath as we entered Angeles National Forest, with a trail marker at the boundary. We crossed a horse trail and headed north. The air smelled of sage. The trail rose into steep foothills speckled with juniper. Allison saw a coyote down in the valley and a swaying yucca stalk against the deep blue sky. She marveled at fat, poky ants covered with thick fuzz that weighed them down, making them stumble. Allison called them “rug ants.” The landscape looked sandy and broken.

Beyond the hills was the Sierra Pelona range. Allison’s fingers clutched her pack straps. In the distance behind us was Vasquez Rocks County Park, platforms of hunched sandstone. The rocks were the reputed hiding place of Tiburcio Vasquez, a bandit who terrorized California in the 1870s. I felt like a desperado myself, a wilderness gangster, with Allison as my moll. I wasn’t scared. There was nothing to fear out here, for we had two different kinds of insect spray. Vicious animals? I had a Swiss Army knife with which to stab them through and through. Water-borne illnesses? I had one of the most expensive water filters on the market. Getting lost? I had a thirteen-dollar compass. I had also brought a plastic odometer that clipped to my socks. It made a gratifying clackety-clack sound every time I took a step. This device would let us know how far we’d walked each day, down to one tenth of a mile.

The path passed close to a few outbuildings and small houses scattered across the steep countryside. Everywhere we looked, we saw no people but signs of human intrusion—a drainage culvert and deep scars on the hills left by dirt bikes. Our first section of the trail was not characteristic of the PCT as a whole, since the path would cross paved roads, come close to a reservoir, and on three occasions, pass through remote settlements. But we would be all on our own for day-long stretches, on mountain ridges as high as 4,500 feet above sea level. Golden light slanted through the foxtails, the oak trees dangled heavy branches over our heads, and fat lizards dragged their bellies on the ground. A jackrabbit jumped from bush to bush and ran north on the trail. He stopped for a moment. I saw the black veins in his ears. When the wind shook the limbs of an old pine tree, it sounded like a door opening on its hinges.

Allison and I had a strategy. We planned to walk for six days, rising at 6:00
A.M
. and walking until 6:00
P.M
., with some half-hour rest breaks thrown in. We would average, I hoped, sixteen miles a day. Most of the traverse would take place along the San Andreas Fault, actually, a thousand-mile-long network of parallel-running faults stretching from the Gulf of California to Cape Mendocino. Since the start of California’s recorded history, in the mid-eighteenth century, the fault system has produced more than one hundred big temblors, including the quake that flattened San Francisco in 1906. Even as we walked, seismic activity was displacing the land to the west of the fault line; as wedges of continental crust bump and grind against one another, the landmass is shoved northwestward, in increments of two inches each year. The earth here literally “strains against itself.”
*

The landscape here can cook you as well as knock you over.
Chaparral—vast stretches of evergreen bushes, some ten feet tall—grew so aggressively that they hemmed the trail, narrowing the path, forcing us to scrape through spiny leaves. It was hard work, battling plants, taking turns leading the way, bashing through the foliage with our ski-pole walking sticks. As we duked it out with plant life, I felt grateful that we didn’t own a house near here. These bushes have a symbiotic relationship with fire that goes back millions of years. Chaparral rises from its ashes; the seeds of certain types of chaparral will not germinate without intense heat, although this has not discouraged thousands of Californians from building homes in areas thick with this plant. Every time you turn on the news and read about another California brush fire that has claimed the lives of firefighters and turned mansions into crisps, you had better believe that chaparral played a role in the conflagration.

By noon, six hours into the journey, I was feeling disoriented from all the exertion. From the top of the highest hill we spied a reservoir in the distance and a dirt road scarred with bike tracks. Allison was sweating now. She joked around with me about Todd the Sasquatch probably getting lost out here somewhere, and how we would catch up with him soon and give his sorry ass a talking-to. She talked about him eating our trail dust. Allison took a long slow gulp of water from a bottle. As we entered the midafternoon, I smiled into the sun and took a look at the odometer to see how far we’d gone. It said that we had gone three miles. Piece of shit. No way we were going that slowly.

To take my mind off this minor annoyance, I asked Allison if she might be interested in a gourmet salami and cheese break. She nodded yes emphatically. “Then let the deliciousness begin,” I said, but when I reached in the food bag for the snacks, I hadn’t realized how the hot sun might alter the appearance of our victuals. The salami now looked like a mummified dog penis, or at least what I imagined such an object might look
like: black, curly, twisted, tapered, and not very appealing to eat. As for the cheddar, it was vile. Chalky on the inside, slippery on the outside, the cheese exuded a pus like substance. Allison and I decided to bury these deli items in the desert, an act that made us feel sheepish. We considered ourselves “low-impact” hikers, to the extent that we’d brought along a Ziploc bag to pack out our unmentionables, which would include soiled toilet paper, tampons, and the like. I could tell our minor act of pollution upset Allison, who was ecologically minded, but I convinced her that carrying smelly deli items in our backpacks was more demoralizing than the thought of polluting the Sierra Pelona.

“The coyotes will eat ’em, I guess,” she said.

We threw the salami and cheddar in a shallow grave.

I should have known this act would return to haunt me. I have finely tuned karma. When I do the slightest thing wrong, the Fates conspire, and gather their forces against me. When we arrived at our first, crucial water source at Bear Spring, it was a dirty trough, hidden by chaparral. I put my finger in the miniature pond. Lukewarm. There were several moths in there. One was dead. The other two were still alive, and they were not leaving this world quietly. They kicked and flailed like a swim aerobics class gone awry. Larvae plumped up like gnocchi in water the temperature of blood. Our filter was designed to block viruses and fungi smaller than a micron. It did not know quite what to make of water that had fist-sized islands of organic mucus floating in the middle of it. The filter winced. It made a small, discouraging sound.

“Buck up,” I said. “Do your fucking job.” But no water came out, no matter how hard I pumped. “Filter, you filter!” I commanded. “Don’t be like the odometer.”

Almost immediately the filter seized up and choked so violently on the water that Allison had to stop pumping. Unfazed, she removed a packet of denture tablets from her pack and handed them to me. Denture tablets? At first I thought she was
making a tart visual comment about my precocious senility. Then I remembered that denture tablets have a chemical that dissolves the muck that clogs water filters. Allison and I took turns soaking the filter components in a solution of tablets and water. It melted the crap right off, but every time we tried to filter more water, the gadget seized up again.

“Let’s just forget the filter for now,” Allison said. “We’ll drink what we have, and wait for a stream, and put some iodine tablets in our bottles to kill the critters.”

“But iodine tastes like rust,” I said. “It makes me nauseous.”

Allison smiled and pulled out a packet of Hi-C she’d saved just for the occasion. Her competence was starting to grate on me.

The nasty water seemed like enough of a punishment for our small transgression, but the trail wasn’t finished with its retribution. As we walked north, the PCT markers became scarce, as if an unseen hand had plucked the signposts from the ground. No doubt about it. Someone or something was fucking with us. We were lost, going around in circles until we finally wound up in a dark colonnade of trees. A seasonal spring seeped from a hill, poured through a clutch of wildflowers, and gathered in a puddle at our feet. Though the spring was too mucky to drink, it yielded a comforting sight: in the mud was a row of deep impressions full of black water. We shouted with relief, for there was no mistaking the size-thirteen footprints of Todd the Sasquatch. It’s not that we were eager to see him again, but his print suggested we were going the right way, and were close on his heels. After all that bragging, he was around the corner, going as slowly as we were. We decided to speed up and catch him, just to show him up. Allison took the lead, following the prints to a cottonwood overhang in the shade. But soon the ground went from muddy to bone hard. Todd’s prints disappeared, and Todd himself was nowhere to be seen. Side
paths went off in every direction. Ahead of us, down in a valley, Bouquet Reservoir lay to the northwest in shadows. Or was it southeast? Our guidebook directions did not correspond with the landscape. “Walk .2 miles uphill to a bend in the road,” they read. What bend? What road?