The Cactus Eaters (8 page)

H
ow did he find us here, in the spot where our path vanished in a twist of rabbit brush, a spool of concertina wire to my left, a culvert to my right? He must have been following for some time, hiding in the shadows. He slowed as he advanced. A light-refracting patina of sunburn and crud had turned him orange. In his right hand he carried a ski pole, in the other, a tattered plastic sack. I braced myself for what would happen next. He’d beg for loose change, come at us with a knife he’d whittled from a spoon, or try to drink our stove fuel. I straightened up and looked him dead on in the face. Out here, in the desert, I had to keep my chin high, push my chest out, and never show the slightest fear.

“Dan and Allison!” the hobo roared. I almost wet my pants.

How the hell did he know our names? Evasive action came to mind, but I deliberately muddied my thoughts—when your antagonist might be psychic, you dare not reveal the plan, not even to yourself—but what to do? He was getting closer. “Dan
and Allison” he yowled. “I’ve been waiting seventy miles to say those words.”

Jesus Christ, I thought to myself. Seventy miles? So it was true, he’d been following us. I turned to Allison to corroborate my fear, but her facial expression drifted somewhere between amusement and torpor. I took another close look at the stranger, and slowly, gradually, came the realization, like waking from a nightmare. The man was not a beggar, drunk, or hobo. He was a Pacific Crest Trail hiker. Still, he was an odd one, even for my subgroup. He wore a blue bandanna around his head, babushka-style, and wraparound shades, the kind you see on cataract patients at the beach. His pack leaned to one side. He had a filthy foam-rubber sleeping pad and a bunched-up sleeping bag strapped to it. The man had a constant smile, as if delighted at his odor and his entourage of gnats. With no prompting, he announced, “I am the Gingerbread Man.”

“And we are lost,” Allison said.

“Yeeee-haw!” the Gingerbread Man said, as if our being lost were the funniest joke he’d heard in a while. He had a Texas accent, thick as Karo syrup. “Mark the postman told me all about you.”

“Oh no,” Allison said. “What did Mark say?”

“Too bad you guys didn’t hike the Appalachian Trail first. It passes through towns. Lots of water sources. Great training trail. Very forgiving. They’ve got piped-in water and shelters. The Pacific Crest Trail’s very unforgiving. It doesn’t let you make mistakes.”

“We only make mistakes,” Allison said. “This is way more hardship than we thought.”

“Hardship,” said the Gingerbread Man, saying the word slowly, savoring it. “Hardship is what it’s all about.”

He offered to be our guide through the mountains. When I asked if this would inconvenience him, or exhaust him if we
ended up hiking until sundown, he let out another deafening yee-haw. “I could hike all day and all night if you want!”

Without waiting for us to announce our decision, the Gingerbread Man began to move at a fast pace up a hill leading into the Tehachapis, with Allison tagging close behind him. I fell behind. A wind picked up. I could see them talking but could not hear them. I felt a surge of surprising jealousy as Allison raced forward to keep up with him, her head cocked close to his as he shared a revelation. She giggled. And yet, as I hurried, I couldn’t tell which one of them was making me more jealous: Allison, for her school-girl enthusiasm, or the Gingerbread Man, for sharing some tidbit with her. I was relieved when we stopped to filter water at Cottonwood Creek, a pipe-fed trough. We headed up treeless switchbacks. The tread grew faint as we walked ever higher into the hills above the Mojave, now an expanse of white glare to the east.

The desert dropped out from under us as we rose up a series of crumbled-rock foothills, moving in and out of canyons full of scraggly live-oak bushes, with flies rising off the branches like smoke. The Gingerbread Man followed six-inch survey stakes pounded in the hard ground. A few stray Joshua trees reached with crooked arms. The Gingerbread Man, without even pausing for breath, reached in his pack and pulled out a dairy-free snack. He had wheat-germ Pop Tart knockoffs, corn chips, and a bag filled with some kind of dried fruit or vegetable that looked like small shrunken heads. Many of his food items looked like their expiration date had run out long ago. This turned out to be true. “Some of this stuff I’ve had in my pack since Mexico,” he said. “And that was five hundred miles ago!”

Pumped up with vegan energy, he surged ahead. Allison, taking a breather, motioned me to pass her on a high switchback. Then it was my turn to listen to him, while wondering how a person could walk more than three miles an hour
uphill, with a limp and a sack of junk in his arms. Normally Allison and I walked only two miles an hour. The Gingerbread Man planned to walk twenty miles that day. Normally we did fifteen. I had to jog-walk to keep up, sweating. We reached a ravine, and he left me in the dust as he scrambled up the sides to “bag” a lump of sandstone rising twenty feet off the ridge. “Ooooooh-weeeeeee,” he screamed. Astride the lump, he shot his arms in the sky in his best Christ pose. With its black gullies, punishing switchbacks, and hills, the land looked like the sort of stark backdrop against which they might shoot a low-rent Bible film. With Allison well behind us now, he climbed down and paused in front of a shaggy plant with a licorice smell. He undid his shorts, yanked them halfway down, and peed, like a riot hose, all over the shrub, while bellowing, “Live again, desert plant. I water thee!” We could hear Allison trying to catch up, mumbling something derogatory about the desert all around us. She was following close behind me, and I was right behind the Gingerbread Man, and then we were all hiking together, as fast as we could go, when the Gingerbread Man suddenly stopped in front of us, and I had to stop in my tracks to avoid a three-way pileup in the desert. He whirled around and started chanting about the desert’s wonderful attributes.

“Your clothes dry fast here! You can wear tennis shoes instead of boots! You don’t need a big tent! Let’s hear it for the desert!”

And right then and there, he started clapping for the wasteland. I clapped, too. I didn’t want to be rude.

It was a peculiar display, but I couldn’t help myself. I was starting to like him now, against my better judgment. The Gingerbread Man, it seemed, was the Nerd King of the desert, the man who knew how to find all the water, who tried to help his fellow hikers, and had even developed his own technique to immobilize a tick. All you have to do, he later explained, is pinch it in a certain place “to paralyze it temporarily, and feed it
to ant lions, who love to drag them screaming into their lairs.” His bursts of arcane wisdom made me more forgiving when he strutted around braying Edward Abbey–esque observations about every juniper bush and crested lizard. Besides, he made Allison and me feel taken care of for the first time on the trail. She turned to me at one point and said, “No matter what happens, we’re not gonna die in this section.”

The Gingerbread Man was a bike messenger who, though he was thirty-two—six years older than us, impossibly old it seemed—lived with his mom and dad in Houston. “Amazing,” Allison whispered in my ear. “Where does the guy get all his energy?” The Gingerbread Man told us he had a crush on a woman and was trying to woo her with letters he composed while camped on lonely hillsides. Allison asked if the woman liked him back. He just smiled in a dopey way. We offered to mail the letter for him at Tehachapi, but he wasn’t through with it. “I want to get it right,” he said. “I’m an Aries. That means I’ve got to do something in a thorough way. I’ve got to finish what I start.” That, he said, is why he kayaked the Mississippi, where ships threatened to squash him like a water bug, and biked through Death Valley in summer. To pay for these excursions, he did odd jobs, working hard at a parcel service but often finding fault with the bosses, whom he did not refer to as “sons of bitches,” preferring the gender-nonspecific “sons of bastards,” which questioned their birthrights without impugning their mamas.

A few hours after we started our power walk with him, he paused at an anonymous hill where the PCT tread disappeared. “Oh, noooo, an intersection,” he howled, and then laughed. When at last he found the trail, he stooped down and picked up a few jagged rocks and piled them up, starting with the widest rock and working up, adding smaller rocks as the tower rose. “It’s a cairn,” he said. “That way folks behind us will know which way to go.” Leaving signs was his responsibility, he said, because the trail was a brotherhood. “I always leave a sign,” he
said. “The trail here’s so primitive.” He squinted into the wind. “You’ve got to pretend that you’re the guys who built the trail. You’ve got to learn to think like they do.”

When Allison got tired and fell far behind again, the Gingerbread Man and I took a break in the shade of Tylerhorse Canyon, lined with stout junipers and pines with cones in fishhook shapes. “Better find ourselves a nice piece of real estate. Gotta wait for the woman,” he said. I laughed a little at his seemingly chauvinistic comment. I asked him about his trail nickname. He said it came from a folktale about a cookie boy who outruns all his pursuers. At last he dead-ends at a river, where a fox gives him a ride across and then submerges bit by bit until the cookie boy is forced to stand on the fox’s snout. Then the fox devours him. What a lousy ending. You run fast, do your best, then fall for a stupid trick and die. But the Gingerbread Man didn’t look as though he took this depressing lesson to heart. For one thing, he seemed insane, not in a threatening way but in the manner of a man whose devotion to something larger than himself had rewired his brain. He had the never-ending smile of someone who’d cashed in his marbles for something more important.

The Gingerbread Man pulled a needle from a pine and stuck it between his teeth, letting it linger. It was a fine, clear day. He bit the needle and fixed his gaze southeast toward the snow-topped pyramids above the desert floor. San Gorgonio Mountain and Mount San Jacinto formed a wall to the south. “Hellacious view,” he said. We slouched in the shade, lying with no thoughts of getting up, swatting yellow jackets as the Gingerbread Man launched into a rant against the USDA food pyramid. He believed most Americans had been brainwashed “by bureaucrats trying to make you believe there’s a proven human necessity, or for that matter, digestibility, of milk after weaning, especially from other species.” He railed about the dairy industry and the federal government in general. “You know,” he said, “that’s the reason I came here in the first place.”

“To get away from milk?” I asked below my breath.

He winced. The Gingerbread Man believed humans had, for far too long, “denied the animal nature of our bodies.” He articulated this philosophy in a series of op ed pieces he’d written for his hometown weekly newsletter. After years of conventional living, he’d had enough of a government that, in his view, was forcing the public to eat “wimpy, pre-chewed food” like burgers, fries, and shakes. “Meanwhile, the government tells you that fruits and vegetables are rabbit foods for nerds. This only makes sense when you understand that by America’s standards, car-driving, car-dependent couch potatoes have a higher virility status than conscientious walkers.”

Allison caught up at last. The sun, fiery a moment ago, was lower in the sky now. She limped. I got up, dusted myself off, and comforted her. “I’ll cook dinner for you tonight,” I promised, without telling her that dinner would probably be a dismal brick of Big Bill’s Beans and Rice, a blob of freeze-dried crud that could cramp the bowels of Satan himself. Allison staggered toward the Gingerbread Man. There were tears in her eyes from the blisters and discomfort. “Just look at you with your pathetic blister walk!” he said when he saw her. Allison recoiled in shock, but then she doubled up, laughing so hard she forgot to start up crying again.

But the laughter died down as the day wore on. Soon we were wheezing and scrambling, forcing ourselves to gulp water and walk at the same time, lest we lose the Gingerbread Man. He took only one five-minute break per hour. By 5:00
P.M
., it was all we could do to catch a glimpse of his skinny retreating backside. Mercifully, at 6:00
P.M
., he decided we’d all had enough and looked for a place for us to sleep.

“Set your tent down wherever you want,” he said as the sun sank below the blades of a wind-energy farm, blades spinning in the breeze, whirring. The sun glinted, like beach glass, on something shiny in the desert far below us. “I bet you guys want
your privacy,” he said as he watched a distant town fade in the dark. “Set up wherever you like.” The Gingerbread Man smiled, sat on a flat-topped rock overlooking the ridge, and crossed his arms over his chest as the sun went away. He reached in his bag and took out miniature versions of the Mexican, U.S., and Canadian flags—a reference to the PCT connecting the borders of three countries—and twirled them in his hands, humming softly to himself and grinning.

Soon it was dinnertime. Cooking dinner was the usual ordeal, with Allison concentrating hard as the water began to warm up. The Gingerbread Man carried no stove. He ate his food cold. After a while, he pulled himself into his tent, little more than a glorified sleeping container with a metal frame to hold it up. He was ready for bed by the time our water was boiling.

I woke up at three in the morning and stepped outside my tent. The Milky Way was frozen foxfire. Satellites blinked. I kept thinking about the Gingerbread Man’s peculiar limp. Allison had mumbled something about him telling her the story behind it, about how he had kicked some rock or heavy box in a fit of anger. It surprised me that someone like him, a gentle spirit, would lash out in such a way and hurt himself. It got me thinking, once again, about the reasons for these expeditions, for difficult trips, and wondering if everyone brought along some kind of internal or external injury. Perhaps those wounds are the motivating factors. I’d posed the same question to myself but could not get a straight answer. Was it some unspoken childhood trauma that had brought me here? Or was it the accumulation of those niggling little memories I could never forget, like the one of that goose that went insane and mauled me in that petting zoo in Virginia?