The Cactus Eaters (6 page)

I blamed the compass. It must be broken. Allison doubted that anything was wrong with it. The compass was a well-made piece of gear with a sapphire bearing and notches of declination. I did not know what a point of declination was, or why the bearings were made of sapphires. I’d assumed these were good things because the compass cost so much more than the competition. Besides, a person could not be lost while holding a compass that cost thirteen dollars. And yet the reservoir would not keep still. It lay to the north one moment, then the east, then south. The compass needle bobbed and wobbled like a dowsing stick. Perhaps our compass was cursed. I remembered the narrow little salesman who had sold it to us four months before, back East. He had pouches under his eyes. “The Pacific Crest Trail?” he’d said. “Yeah, I tried to hike that thing in ’eighty-five. Tore a ligament the very first day. Then I drank some bad water. Got the trots so bad my friends had to carry me out of there. That’ll be thirteen dollars. Would you like a bag?” As I tried to figure out where we were, I wondered if his soul inhabited our compass, causing the needle to twist every which way but the right direction.

Allison had a determined look as she stood behind me. “Will you show me the map and compass?” she said.

“No,” I said.

“Why?”

“I can figure it out.”

“I can help.”

“I don’t need any help.”

I now understand that the compass was working just fine. The trouble was I couldn’t read the goddamned thing. I had
no idea that you were supposed to find north first, and then use north to extrapolate the other directions. Adding to our troubles, the Pacific Crest Trail’s route had changed recently, because of right-of-way conflicts, and the guidebook company had printed out a pamphlet of revisions. We were carrying the pamphlet with us on the trail, but for reasons I still can’t comprehend, we did not consult these new, improved directions. What if hours passed, days, and we still hadn’t found the trail? I imagined a search party of men shouting our names through bullhorns, bloodhounds sniffing the earth, chopper blades thwacking, and Mark the postman’s look of pity when the authorities brought us back to his grandmother’s house. The local press would turn on us like Dobermans. They would run front-page stories and cutesy alliterative headlines at our expense:
DESERT DIMWITS RESCUED TWO MILES FROM TOWN
.

“Dan?” Allison said. “Would you please hand me that compass now?”

“I just want to keep walking.”

“Where?” she said. “Come on. Show me your map. And your compass.”

Her demanding voice took me by surprise. There’s no word for it in the English language, this feeling of solipsism, when you believe the world revolves around your incompetence. If I couldn’t understand a compass, how the hell could anybody else? Nevertheless, I handed it over to her. At 4:00
P.M
. she stood before me in a sweat-wicking vest, face to the sun, bottom lip puffed with authority, arms bent. Though I resented, and was confused by, her bossy insistence, she looked sexy as hell then. She held the map up in front of her face, laid the compass directly on top of it, and pivoted, until the shape and angle of the reservoir on the map lined up with the shape and the angle of the reservoir in front of us. “That’s it,” she said. “We’re too far east. All we do is backtrack ten minutes and we’ll hit the trail. We just took some dumb turn.”

We found the trail in an instant. I threw my arms around the PCT marker and kissed it. Allison took a celebratory picture of me with the still-filmless camera. On we walked. It was a relief, and a disappointment, to be back on the trail. After all, feeling silly in front of Allison was only marginally better than feeling lost. A few days before, I’d resented her for dragging down our nature walk with all her panicking and vomiting. Now I was the one dragging her down, and I somehow resented her for this, too. “Never mind,” I told myself. “One of these days I’ll even the score by getting us out of a bad situation.” I had more pressing matters to deal with now. We had to find camp and cook our first trail meal.

The sun completed its arc across the cloudless sky. At sunset we stood on a windblown hill covered with waist-high foxtails. We had gone just over six miles, execrable by long-distance hiking standards. As the sky grew dark, we made a rough camp and fell into prescribed gender roles, Allison slaving over the stove pot while I sat on a stump “erecting” the tent. When she fired up the stove, a swirling pillar of flame leapt up and singed the hairs off one of her arms. She did not flinch. The wind blew out the flame. She relit the stove. It took sixteen minutes for our organic bunny-shaped Annie’s macaroni noodles to boil, and when they were done, they were so rubbery and tasteless that we nibbled only a few of them and threw the rest at a spiny plant. The desert had numbed our appetites anyhow. The sun fell away, catching us in the dark as we stomped through our strewn pots and camp junk.

After climbing into our tent, Allison lay awake for a while, admitting she was scared of “weirdos” coming after us. But she soon drifted to sleep in her mummy bag, leaving me behind. I’d barely settled in when her snoring began, her wet
kromps
and
sherbert
whinnies blending with the calls of distant coyotes. Allison, even while unconscious, was running with the wolves, upstaging me with her sylvan femininity. Still, I loved watching
her that night, feeling protective as I saw the rise and fall of her body within the sleeping bag. I tried not to be too hard on myself. I knew we’d cover more miles the next day. But when I closed my eyes, I saw six million steps to Canada laid out like ties on a railroad track to the moon. The average long-distance walker travels twelve to fourteen miles a day starting out, then builds to sixteen to twenty miles a day. If you’re gifted at walking, you might hit twenty-five, thirty, even forty miles a day on the trail. I could not stop the racing thoughts about Todd the Sasquatch somewhere out there, tearing up the foothills while exuding massive amounts of man sweat. Stomping all over the American West with his freakish feet. Mastering the learning curve. Making the big miles.

H
enry Miller once wrote that a land can haunt you even if you don’t know the past that lies beneath it. When traveling through Greece, he would find himself “profoundly disturbed, shaken to the roots, and by what? By associations born of my knowledge of ancient events? Scarcely, since I have but the scantiest knowledge of Greek history and even that is thoroughly confused…No, as with the sacred places, so with the murderous spots. The record of events is written into the earth.” And so it was on our second day, when we made a slow descent down a steep-edged ravine into San Francisquito Canyon, a stomp through green gulches, repeating, repeating, like a desolation screensaver. Allison took the lead position that day. Her bright blue backpack rose up high above her head, and reached so far below her waist that when I viewed her from behind, only her boots were visible. Watching her wobble, I felt guilty that she was carrying such a big load, and worried it would wear her down. She had been having a bit of knee pain on the steeper descents. Every so often, I’d stop, take
some of her gear or water, and stuff it into my pack, which was now crammed to the bursting point. Mark had, indeed, done us a favor by taking so much of our stuff from the packs, but they were still very heavy, in spite of his best efforts. Our pack weight, once suicidal, was now merely ridiculous.

Most of the time we were in the blasting sun, but sometimes we found a lovely surprise, a colonnade through the boughs of hanging trees, or a wall of fragrant flowers shaped like trumpets, stars, and baseball gloves. Already I felt the first day’s growth of beard, the scratch of it against my fingers. It made me feel steely. We pushed our way down to the canyon and to the highway across the trail. No other hikers there, no cars along the blacktop striped across the ravine. Plumes of smoke rose from distant forests to the north. We walked along the two-lane road awhile, until we arrived at a small and sparsely manned Department of Agriculture fire station. Four firefighters stood by the cooler, their faces smeared. The first humans we’d seen in twenty-four hours had been out extinguishing a minor but difficult-to-reach wildcat blaze in the hills. One of them, a cherubic fellow with grease spots on his dungarees, asked where we’d started.

“Agua Dulce,” Allison said, her face full of expectation, as if she sensed an awed response was coming, something along the lines of “Holy shit, you walked all the way from Agua Dulce?”

“Agua Dulce,” the firefighter grunted. “So you only just started.”

We asked him if he’d seen our “friend” Todd the Sasquatch. The firefighter said Todd had passed there more than two days ago. Allison and I frowned. Todd was practically sprinting.

The firefighters loaded our canteens with sweet water out of the cooler, and let us camp for the night on a patch of grass behind the fire station. That night Allison cooked us freeze-dried couscous. We read in the dark in our sleeping bags with our headlamps. As the sun sank and the ravines faded to black,
an absolute quiet came over the yard near the fire station. I felt uneasy for no reason at all.

To borrow a phrase from Henry Miller, the canyon was “a murderous spot,” though I didn’t know it then. William Mulholland, chief water engineer for the city of Los Angeles through most of the 1920s, had his fall here. Now that I know his story, I feel a certain kinship with him. Both of us came to California to remake ourselves. The circumstances were a bit different; I moved back after a long absence, while Mulholland, born in Ireland, made his way out west to find his fortunes in the goldfields, a scheme that never panned out. I could sympathize with his desire to impose his will on a landscape, to make it conform to his plans. Mulholland, in his prime, had a prize-fighter’s nose and a scrub brush for a mustache. Arriving in Los Angeles in 1877, he found work pulling weeds, garbage, and branches out of ditches in the hot sun. Some might consider this a demeaning job, but he was proud, even arrogant, in his labors. When a supervisor stopped by and asked him his name, Mulholland told him to mind his own goddamned business and let him do his job. Impressed by his cheekiness, the boss promoted him.

Mulholland was fond of his work and loved his town. Looking back on those days, he wrote, the “world was my oyster and I was just opening it. Los Angeles was a place after my own heart.” L.A. had once been a backwater slum, cut off from the gold rush spoils that turned San Francisco into a boomtown in the 1840s. Los Angeles had no port. Until the 1870s, the city didn’t even have a rail link to the rest of America. But when Mulholland gazed upon Los Angeles, he saw a great American city in the making. He was sure it could be a contender, if not for one incontrovertible fact: two thirds of the water in California was concentrated in the northern third of the state. Southern California was essentially a desert, and L.A. sat on its edges, with the anemic L.A. River dribbling through town. Mean
while, all that precious moisture was just sitting up in northern California. Mulholland thought this was a dreadful waste.

Mulholland, after becoming L.A.’s water chief, was a relentless cheerleader for a 250-mile aqueduct, the largest engineering feat since Roman times. The structure—dismissively known as “Mulholland’s Ditch”—siphoned water by gravity feed from the Owens River, beneath the High Sierra’s eastern edge. Mulholland’s project turned Los Angeles green, with circling sprinklers, swimming pools, and jungles sprouting from Hollywood back lots. Six years after the aqueduct’s completion in 1913, the population of L.A. doubled, to two hundred thousand. By 1922, the population had surpassed 500,000.

Los Angeles’s success happened on the backs of Owens Valley farmers, who now realized that Mulholland and his cronies had misrepresented themselves while coaxing ranchers into selling parcels with the best water rights. Mulholland’s project bled the water tables dry. His aqueduct had a striking if unintended consequence: all those gallons of diverted water turned Owens Valley so barren that Hollywood producers started using it to film low-budget oaters starring Buck Jones and Hoot Gibson.

Owens Valley farmers were furious when they found out their lush pastureland was being turned into a nouveau desert. They filed lawsuits and took up arms. Saboteurs staged spectacular attacks on the aqueduct, blowing up sixteen-and forty-foot chunks of it, prompting Mulholland to bring in an army of Tommy gun–and Winchester rifle–slinging “detectives,” with shoot-to-kill orders. The attacks hastened plans to build a massive water storage facility far from the tensions of Owens Valley. Mulholland chose a spot close to where Allison and I spent the night, San Francisquito Canyon, where an army of workers took two years to build an arch support dam 180 feet high and 600 feet long. By spring of 1928, St. Francis Dam was filled to capacity.

That night, in our campground near the fire station, I stayed up for a while, leaning from the tent, looking at the violet clouds. Unable to sleep, I wandered the field and stared up at the black rock bowl that surrounded us. Fire ants, perhaps smelling the minty Dr. Bronner’s soap I’d used to bathe that night, crawled from their nest and took wet chomps out of my ankles. Each bite burned like a hot needle. At midnight, the clouds cracked open and moonlight spilled across our campsite, a great flood filling the canyon, until the waves of white and yellow washed over our tent.

On March 12, 1928, Mulholland’s men noticed a crack in the dam and a brown trickle of water. Mulholland told his men to put some caulking in the crack and go home. He wasn’t about to lose sleep over a chink in his fail-safe creation. Three minutes to midnight, the dam exploded. As it roared down the valley, the twelve billion gallons of water carried with it a moving wall of mud, dirt, and concrete blocks piled seventy feet high and rolling at thirty miles an hour. Floodwaters smashed through Piru, Fillmore, Bardsdale, Santa Paula, and Saticoy. The black mass crashed into its victims with such force that it ripped their clothes away. Floodwaters swallowed farms, work camps, and apiaries and cut a two-mile-wide, seventy-mile-long swath from the canyon to the ocean. Chunks of dam washed up on beaches two hundred miles west. Four hundred people drowned that night.

The arch-support dam was reduced to rubble, and so was Mulholland’s reputation.

Mulholland tried to blame the dam’s failure on saboteurs, but the jury at a coroner’s inquest hearing did not believe him. Instead, the jurors blamed “a monolithic chain of command” that gave Mulholland almost total control over the dam’s construction. They ruled that the dam had collapsed because of “the failure of the rock formations upon which it was built.” Mulholland had overestimated himself and underestimated a
shifting landscape. The valley’s secret history destroyed him; he had no way of knowing that he’d built his dam against a slow-motion landslide that had been shifting and slipping since ancient times. Mulholland avoided criminal charges, but he resigned in disgrace. Before he came to this canyon, he was one of the most powerful men in California. By the time he left this place, he said that he “envied the dead.”

I recall the evening’s strangeness, the traces of fire, and the smoke leaking up from the hills. I had a strong sense of being walled into the bottom of a valley, and the land containing me, along with its past and its stories, as I fell into a deep sleep.

As usual, I dreamed of spirits.