The Cactus Eaters (7 page)

O
ne morning on the trail, three days after we left Agua Dulce, I woke up and looked at the bruised-orange sky. We were out in the Angeles National Forest, not far from Lake Hughes. The sun and moon were out. It was cold outside, and yet there were patches of warm air. I lurched around camp, half asleep. Fat ants pottered about. I saw traces of scavengers. A night mouse had chewed a hole in my backpack’s lumbar-support pad and gnawed through a strap. Thank God I still had a twenty-five-yard spool of duct tape in my fanny pack. In the desert dirt I sat, cursing the night mouse, fixing my pack, shooing the rug ants away. After a while I let them be. They waddled aimlessly, carrying nothing. Their unhurried purposelessness soothed me.

Allison emerged from the tent, a leg, a torso, a mop of hair. She smiled at me and yawned. We woke up exhausted and ate our sloppy breakfast of Grape-Nuts, chocolate chips, and almonds floating in iodized stream water mixed with nonfat dehydrated milk powder. It took us two hours to pack up our
camp. Tired and disoriented, the two of us bounced down the trail into a box canyon. Our heads were full of sleep. No wonder we screwed up again. Around noon, after four hours of hiking, we took a wrong turn near Maxwell Truck Road, near Upper Shake Campground, and wound up in a copse of black oak. We heard the crunch of gravel. There was something in the bushes.

“You hear that?” said Allison, who was out in front. “I swear I heard footsteps.”

She pointed into the canyon. Footsteps getting louder. Something slipping and sliding in the sand, heading for us.

This was an unlovely branch of trail. One recent nature-walk book had described the section as “pig ugly” and “a punishment.” There was no reason a pleasure walker would be here now, in mid-June, unless he were stupid or crazy.

Allison smiled and squinted. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” she said, “if it turned out to be that idiot Todd, after all? Going the wrong way.”

We laughed, puffed our chests, and bellowed like Tarzan to imitate Todd. But when we rounded the corner, it was most definitely not Todd. For one thing there were two of them, two men with blank expressions and pencil-thin mustaches. They seemed to be in their late thirties to early forties, with greasy remnants of hair. It was noon, the hottest sun of the day, but they were wearing long-sleeved buttoned-down shirts and slacks the color of Italian nougat. Their heads looked like sweaty thumbs. The men were twenty yards apart but heading in opposite directions, fanning out. They were having some trouble moving forward. Both wore patent leather shoes, pointy in the fronts. No traction. They skidded on the gravel. The fat one ran to us while his thinner companion ran up a firebreak, a vertical slash in the hills to keep wildcat blazes from leaping. Then he stood on the hill, where he bent down and removed a pair of binoculars from his pants pocket. The fat one came closer,
sweating. His stomach shoved up against his Oxford shirt, as if trying to break free.

“Where’d you park?” he said. “Where’s your car?

“No car,” I said.

“We walked,” Allison said.

“What do you mean you walked?” the man said, stepping into our space, close enough for us to smell his sweat and a whiff of cologne. “What you got in there?” he said, pointing to our swollen packs.

“A stove,” I said. “Our maps.”

“What else? Where’s your car? Where’d you park? What’s in the bags?”

“We’re telling the truth,” I said. “We’re Pacific Crest Trail hikers. We took a wrong turn. And we thought you could tell us how to get back to the turnoff.”

Could that work? Bring the man to our side by asking directions? Allison looked blank. I had no proof the fat man was a threat, nothing but a gut feeling from his bulging stomach, his attitude, his questions, his clothes, the cologne. And those terrible shoes.

“I asked where you parked,” the man said, sharply.

Huh? Was he deaf? “We walked,” I said again. “From Agua Dulce.”

He shook his head and smiled. “I been all over this valley,” he said. “And I never heard of no Agua Dulce.”

The man put his fat fingers in his mouth and signaled to his friend with three shrill toots. The second man, now fifty feet away, whirled and ran down the hill toward us. It was time to get the hell out of there. We “ran” as best we could, but our packs weighed us down. We “ran” in a way that reminded me, at the time, of crustaceans. The scrambling for purchase, the wild motions, the lack of any real forward momentum. As we ran, I thought of hobbled lobsters and crabs on Xanax. These were not similes but the actual images I saw in my brain as we
headed for the bushes. My heart was pounding. My tongue felt stiff. We ran through a muddy puddle and got gook all over our boots. Allison led the way. She had astonishing lower-body strength, and though she went slowly, she moved with a measured relentlessness. Allison was leader for now, and I was too frightened to care. I backed her up, occasionally turning, stopping to see if I could hear the men pursuing us. I couldn’t tell; it was hard to hear anything above the blood thumping in my ears. A chaparral hedge grew high enough for us to do a duck-and-cover. “This is where we’ll make our stand,” I said.

I reached in my pack and pulled out a canister of pepper spray I’d bought for $15.75 at a pharmacy in Winsted, Connecticut. You’re supposed to go to the local community college and take a two-hour evening class, led by a community service officer, on how to use the spray. Then they give you a permit. I hadn’t bothered with all that bureaucratic tedium. I thought it would be a no-brainer. Allison looked pale and uncomfortable. She crouched behind me. At that moment I felt unworthy of having any woman crouch behind me, especially Allison. I crouched behind her. It became unclear who was crouching behind whom. All the crouching was making me queasy. “Those men are in cahoots,” Allison whispered to me, emphatically, and though I was scared, my brain also noted that this was the first time I’d ever heard anyone use
cahoots
in a conversation. Allison’s hands rifled through my pack to find the pepper spray directions, which, for some reason, had been socked away in a separate compartment. She found them in the fanny pack.

“Congratulations,” said the directions. “You have purchased a truly unique combination of tear gas and pepper solution. Security and satisfaction are yours.” The directions were astonishingly detailed. They had two columns on the bottom, comparing the ingredients of this cheap generic pepper spray and that of actual Mace.
Mace,
as it turns out, is a registered trade
mark. How interesting, I thought, but found it unfortunate that the directions didn’t tell me what part was the trigger and what part was the aperture, where the squirts come out of. The wind blew up through the valley, straight into our faces, and the chances of macing ourselves were becoming very large.

I was afraid then. Aside from the spray, all I had to defend myself was a Swiss Army knife with an awful lot of peanut butter on the blade. I’d bought the knife in Zermatt, Switzerland, on a high school senior-class trip, in a store that specialized in sculptures of gnomes, Matterhorn desk implements, and plush animals with milky, pleading eyes. The knife came with a special holder to protect it from scratches. It also had my name,
DANIEL MURRAY WHITE
, power-stenciled on the handle. I’d always been so proud of it, and never let anyone touch it, and stashed it away with my Steiff piglets and
Star Wars
figurines, though it now occurred to me that this knife, at that moment, may have been the wimpiest weapon in the world, if not the universe. I pictured us screaming on the ground from spraying ourselves with the generic pepper solution while the men laughed and stole our stuff and killed us ever so slowly, Jif peanut butter blending with our blood as they cut our throats with that sissy knife.

“You hear anyone moving out there?” Allison said.

I listened. The desert had gone silent. Nothing, not even a breeze.

I sat there, holding the generic pepper spray. Twirling it in my hands like an amulet. Barely breathing, we sat together behind the chokecherry bush, the sun in our faces as we waited for the men. We checked our watches. Ten minutes had passed since we made our retreat. Where the hell were they, anyhow, and would they ever show up? I decided to do a recon maneuver, poking my head above the hedge, while waving, in a threatening manner, the Baggie that contained the pepper spray. The idea was they’d see the Baggie, be scared, and go away. Still, nothing happened. Perhaps I’d frightened them off
already. We stepped from behind the hedge. Still nothing. In the distance we heard the vroom of an engine. Allison and I looked down from our rock overhang. Below us, on the trucking road, the fat and thin man were crammed into the cab of a pickup truck. Five other men were sitting on the flatbed. They were staring up the hill in our direction. Talking among themselves and glaring. At last they drove down the trucking road and were gone in a cloud of brown dust. After a while of staring at the dust, listening to the truck sounds fading, we decided the threat was over. “Who the hell were those people?” Allison said. We ran through all possibilities, from contract killers to Jehovah’s Witnesses. We took a few minutes to let our pulses return to normal. Then, when we were certain the men were gone, we decided to resume our walk to Canada—but first we had to find the intersection where we’d messed up in the first place. Allison said we should split up.

“But they might come back.”

“I really don’t think they’re coming back,” she said. “If you hear anything, get the hell out of there. Let’s meet back here in ten minutes.”

I left my pack in the bushes and walked down the trucking road while Allison climbed through arm-cutting bushes in front of a barbed-wire fence. I ran down the dirt road looking for a trail sign. I was moving along with the sun in my eyes, wearing my torn-up Gregory Backpacks T-shirt, holding a half-empty quart bottle. I ran, my eyes watering, looking for the white marker. In the distance I saw a distinct pole a quarter mile down the road. It seemed to be a Pacific Crest Trail marker. I whooped. But when I arrived, panting, I found it was just a yucca plant swaying, its white diamond-shaped tuft a dead ringer for a three-pointed PCT sign.

I stood there disappointed as the ground began to vibrate, lightly. Then came the rumbling sound, the motor, the crunch of wheels, the returning car, the men coming up the road toward
me. I froze as the sound grew louder, sharper. I could make out the sound of a shot transmission, a muffler coughing, voices. Yucca plants and rocks walled me in on either side. I’d left the generic pepper spray in my backpack. All I had, by way of a weapon, was half a twig I’d found on the ground. No time to run. All I could do was stand there, facing forward, and try to look psychotic. Fortunately my appearance was frightening already. I had not showered in three days. Dirt and sweat gummed my hair, making it stand on end as if by electrocution. Smears of Knorr Swiss instant chocolate mousse, from the previous night’s dinner, stained my lower lip. Now, in the desert sun, the stains probably looked fecal.

The vehicle kept getting closer, on the other side of a bend. I could not see it yet, but the noise was increasing. It rounded the corner and I started swearing, using every foul word in my arsenal, while standing in the road with my arms waving. I gnashed my teeth and waved the twig. And it occurred to me, only gradually, that I was glaring and snarling and shaking a twig at the startled occupants of a sad and wheezy pickup truck, a late 1970s model with a banged-up bumper hanging on as if by a thread. The driver was a Mexican man, too sun-beaten and wrinkled to be a minute under seventy-nine. I was surprised he had a driver’s license anymore. His cowboy hat kept his face and neck in shadow. In back were three boys, two of them teenagers, the other, kindergarten-age. The littlest wore a white T-shirt with the Calypso-singing crab from a Disney cartoon. He was cringing.

“I’m sorry,” I said to all of them. “I thought you were somebody else.”

“What are you doing out here?” the old man said in halting English.

“I’m a Pacific Crest Trail hiker,” I said.

There was a long and ponderous silence. Finally the old man started barking orders at the kids in back. “Give him a
refresca
,” he demanded. “Right now.” A skinny arm reached out and handed me a Coke. I grabbed for the can, brushing the kid’s hand by accident, and he yanked back the hand so fast, as if by electric shock, that he dropped the unopened Coke in the dirt on the ground. The can rolled as the car lurched past me. The wheels crunched up the hill, just as Allison came stumbling out from between two yucca plants. “Are you okay?” she said, kicking up dirt as she moved toward me. “What the hell happened? I heard a noise. I thought those guys came back and got you. What did you say to them?”

Her voice trailed off when she saw the can of Coke. She fixed me with that gaze of hers, the one that never missed anything.

I handed her the Coke. She opened it. It made a sound just like a gunshot.

T
he Pacific Crest Trail guidebook warned us all about it on page 157. “That part of the Mojave traversed by the PCT is now tamed by crisscrossing roads and dotted with homes and ranches, eliminating dangers of dying like French Legionnaires with parched throats and watery dreams. Still the Mojave Desert stretch of the PCT can broil your mind, blister your feet, and turn your mouth to dust.”

On mile 62, about a week after we set out from Agua Dulce, we came to the shimmering grid. Ahead of us was a flat outback with dirt roads running through it and no one driving on them. One of those dirt roads was the Pacific Crest Trail. On either side of the road, creosote plants grew in evenly spaced clumps. Their sweet smell hung in the air. Creosote had an eerie symmetry, an evenly spaced emptiness between each clump of leaves and branches. Their tap roots secreted poisons. Rain washed the toxins into hard soil, killing every other plant that tried to get a toehold. Something about the grid, the spaces between plants, the barbed wire and broken fence posts, made
us lose perspective. We walked on, arriving at ghost streets with names like “270th Street,” heading in an unwavering direction toward limbo. Behind us, nothing receded. In front of us, nothing got bigger. Foothills would not budge. Mountains held fast to their position. Traffic lights were red and green votives in the distance. Allison limped. Her shadow dragged like a black anchor.

In the Mojave, moving things, like us, were reduced to stillness, while inanimate objects ran loose and wild. Tumbleweeds moved of their own volition, blocking the path, chasing us down. They leapt over fences and piled on top of us. They were as full of mischief as vegetable matter could ever be. Allison drop-kicked one and it shattered in the wind. Her blood was up that day. She was in a fighting mood. The landscape was teasing us here. Goading us. Fast-moving water, bound for Los Angeles, flowed tightrope straight beside the road. Here was the Los Angeles Reservoir, its water out of reach beneath a concrete slope behind barbed wire and warning signs:
NO TRESPASSING–DANGER–DO NOT ENTER
. After a while, we couldn’t see the water anymore; it was locked in a pipe across the desert, and then the pipe itself slipped underground, a sandworm returning to its burrow. Millions of gallons of cold Sierra water moved beneath our boots, every gallon sealed away.

In the middle of the road, a dirt hump rose three feet up like an allergic reaction. Allison kicked dirt clods and broke the quiet by naming the tallest peaks with me. “That’s Mount Fatso. And that one must be Mount Kilimanjaro,” she said. The mountains moved in closer. Their white-sediment tops formed a chalk line in the sky. Allison was full of hyperkinetic energy. She’d often told me the trip would be an escape, a pause from her life of ambitions and journalistic responsibilities. She was here for the ecology, for the chance to squash wildflowers in her journal, but there were no flowers here, no rivers to cross. They called this place Antelope Valley, but we saw no ante
lopes. She held her ski-pole walking stick like a club as she stomped, her hair blowing beneath her solar-reflective survival hat. Her war march drew me forward. In civilization she kept a tidy apartment, was particular about her appearance, and had lists of every little thing. I liked the entropy that was setting in now. I liked not knowing how far she might devolve. Women rarely realize that their men find displays of primitivism and aggression endlessly alluring, so long as they aren’t directed at them.

We walked the road until we saw a geodesic house on the edge of a settlement. A middle-aged man with a stained shirt stood behind a fence. He had a wizard’s beard, a dreadlock swinging from his chin. When he smiled, I couldn’t tell if it was from sympathy or if he was making fun of us. His dog, the size of a small rhinoceros, stuck his head through a hole in the fence and barked. When I asked if we might make it to Canada, the man smiled and said, “You’re last. You’re too late.” He filled our bottles and drained our hopes, or tried to. “Yes, we were too late,” I thought. Too late to stop, too late to go home. A Los Angeles Water and Power truck rolled toward us. The heavyset driver, his collar soaked in sweat, his eyes half closed to the sun, shouted for us to get in.

Allison threw me a pained look, for it was more than 30 miles over steep terrain before we would arrive at the turnoff to Tehachapi, our first supply city, 111 miles from Agua Dulce.

“We’re not getting in,” she said.

“No rides,” I said.

No cheating. No shortcuts. We knew how much that hitchhike would cost. It was a question of merit, of needing to earn and deserve the satisfaction we’d have when we finished this thing. If we missed one bit of the trail, we might miss out on that “something golden” that Kirk and Eddie had promised, whatever the hell it was. We waved the driver away. He made a “you must be crazy” gesture, but we pressed on, beneath a
trestle of dripping pipes. Rust-tinted water spilled on piles of garbage. The plastic receiver of a toy phone lay in the dust.

Allison wanted to hear some music to break the quiet. She asked me to scat like Louis Armstrong and grunt like Conway Twitty. She bellowed out a few dance hits. In the lower registers she sounded like a moose or a dying dugong. In the middle range, her voice was mechanical and screechy, metal on metal, car engines dying slow deaths on desert highways. Sometimes on the trail, Allison and I let loose with a little gangsta rap to enliven things. We sang selections from NWA’s
Straight Outta Compton
, trading verses. On some occasions, Allison would be Ice Cube and I would be Eazy-E. Other times I’d be Doctor Dre or one of NWA’s pathetic second bananas, MC Ren or DJ Yella. If I timed it properly, and picked the right parts of the songs when we alternated verses, I could trick Allison, an ardent feminist, into reciting the most appalling and misogynist lines.

Then she’d get mad and laugh and try to make it clear that her reaction was ironic in a feminist way. It was amusing for a while, but no amount of singing and scatting could compensate for our utter dislocation. Along the rock-strewn trail, pit bulls ran loops around mobile homes behind concrete and barbed wire. A Confederate flag flapped in the wind. The owners, by living there, had realized their dreams of secession.

It was hard to believe this place was only an hour’s drive north from downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood, Universal Studios, and for that matter, Compton. It was late June, and we were seventy miles closer to Canada now, which seemed
like progress, until we remembered the Pacific Crest Trail was 2,650 miles long. Each subsection, which hikers refer to as a “leg,” is elephantine: Southern California is 648 miles; Central California is 505 miles; northern California, 567; Oregon, 450; Washington, 500. Of all those sections, the Mojave is the most blown-out and haunted-looking. Even the cows seemed possessed, staring at us with bovine menace while drooling from both sides of their mouths. We never saw anyone tend them. The bulls had horns as long as your forearm, and pointy penises, big as Wiffle ball bats, flopping in the cross breeze.

The way was straight and hypnotic. As we trekked, Allison limping, my sunglasses rattling, it made me wonder what some borax prospector’s ghost, his skin the color of roast salmon, might think to see us wandering out here with no weapons, one compact kit, twelve king-size Snickers bars, and no definable sense of purpose. Passing through the landscape, I thought about all the other explorers who had come this way. We were about to intersect with the ghostly tracks of John Charles Fremont, whose expeditions and travel writings set off an avalanche of emigration into the West. He made his way to the Antelope Valley in 1844. Fremont claimed he was out west to study geography, wildlife, and plants. Actually, his journey had much more to do with dreams of conquest. One dead giveaway was the fact that most flower-sniffing nature expeditions don’t require a Howitzer, four pistols, 33 carbines, forty men, five kegs of gunpowder, and five hundred pounds of ammo.

Two years before President James K. Polk declared war on Mexico, Fremont was doing his part to drum up support for seizing California, calling attention to its fertile soil, hospitable temperatures, and fetching flora. But in spite of all his firepower, Fremont felt edgy in the Mojave. He sugarcoated many of his travelogues, but even he couldn’t spin the wasteland before him. He was disgusted and nervous to see horse skeletons picked clean by buzzards, and human bodies in the dirt. The
Mojave was, he declared, “the most sterile and repulsive desert I have ever seen.”

His fearful entries about the desert made me wonder about the myth of the self-made conquering hero. Although he cultivated a lone-wolf image, Fremont was dependent on his wife, Jessie Benton Fremont, arguably braver than he was. As a young woman, Jessie shocked her prim Missouri family by butchering her tresses and dressing as an army officer. After marrying Fremont, she grew her hair out again, but she found an outlet for her he-man fantasies by rewriting her husband’s memoirs, turning them into swashbuckling adventure stories that would appeal to the masses. Her gambit paid off: Fremont’s travelogues were bestsellers.
*
I could understand Fremont’s attraction to Jessie, and his reliance on her. Allison started out as hapless on this trail, vomiting her guts out, threatening to delay our trip indefinitely. Now she was becoming my surrogate backbone, my prosthetic brain. I hated to think about what might happen if Allison up and quit this trail and left me alone out here. I knew it was a ridiculous notion. She was in it for the duration. Still, this place put me on edge, and I couldn’t help but wonder how I’d fare out here by myself.

In most sections of the trail, you are days from the nearest town, and all on your own if anything goes wrong. This section was in the middle of nowhere, and yet there were outposts scattered along the desert floor. If we needed help we could have walked into the brush and pounded on the door of someone’s aluminum home. But our safety net was about to end. The Pacific Crest Trail route is ever-changing. The guidebook publishers try to compensate for this by sending out annual revision pamphlets, giving backpackers the latest instructions for
changes and diversions. But Allison and I, for some reason, did not have the most updated directions through the nearly waterless territory that lay just to the north of us. The Tehachapi Mountains, row upon row of coffee-stained wisdom teeth in the distance, were our problem now. Essentially, we would be walking blind into those foothills.

With no reliable signs to guide us, we took some comfort in the form of the Joshua trees, which Fremont unfairly maligned as “stiff and ungraceful…The most repulsive tree in the vegetable kingdom.” Each Joshua tree had layer upon layer of spiked growths peeled back as if unseen hands were trying to reach something deep inside them. At the end of each branch were foot-long bayonets in clusters, the spines folded down the trunk to make armor. Allison and I took snapshots of each other and tried to find shade beneath the Joshua trees’ arms when the sun cut out through the cloud layers and burst into flame. The Joshuas enchanted us with their pretzel-logic shapes, even as they counted our steps, for Joshua trees define the borders of the Mojave. When you no longer see them, you know you’ve found your way out of the desert. In fact, I’m surprised Fremont, “The Pathfinder,” wasn’t more grateful to Joshua trees for guiding him out of the wasteland.

But the Joshua trees couldn’t tell us whether we were still on the PCT or not. Trail markers were becoming rare. Some were shot through with bullet holes or decapitated. Most, it seemed, had been stolen. For all we knew, we were the last hikers of the season. We were about to leave this dirt road for a path into the foothills. No one would find us staggering around up there.

The next reliable water was more than seven miles away, at Cottonwood Creek, according to my best calculations. Given our track record for screwing up out here, I knew we would overshoot that water. If we wound up lost in the Tehachapis, it could take us days to fight our way to the other side. Why not turn back this instant? What about the goal was stronger than
fear? I wanted to ask Allison this question but could not bring myself to say the words. Allison looked up at the dry Tehachapis, which were just ahead of us. She pointed at them with her thumb and remarked that we were going “straight up that” with no way of knowing if we were heading the right way, which meant we wouldn’t know where to find water or how to reach the highway on the other side. The trail was not even a trail anymore; we followed plastic markers sticking feebly out of the ground.

In the early afternoon we arrived at a wall, the concrete surface covered with graffiti, including a red-and-black helmeted racer, his front wheel pointed to the sky. And just when I thought the Mojave could not throw out any more riddles, I heard crunching footsteps in the bushes. I whirled to see a thin man, six feet tall, dirty and limping, coming straight for us. Dust clouds rose behind him. He moved with speed and determination, though he dragged one leg behind him like a branch.

And he was laughing.