The Cactus Eaters (9 page)

It was during a family vacation. The goose seemed so sweet at first. I fed him a nice big piece of stale bread, and it seemed like we were sharing a moment. Then, out of nowhere,
came the goosey fury, the white eyes bulging, the orange beak stabbing as I fled screaming. The goose accelerated—he was fast as hell—and I found myself cornered near the Shetland pony enclosure. No one in my family helped. They just stood there smiling, pointing, snapping so many photos that I could stack the snapshots together now, make a flip-book, and watch the attack unfold in real time fifteen years later. Is that what this trail was all about? Tending to psychic wounds inflicted by poultry?

I had gone back to sleep in the tent, half awake, half dreaming, still processing the petting-zoo memory, when a loud braying noise woke me up. The sky was purple, the sun wasn’t up, and yet the Gingerbread Man was ready to walk, with our without us. “Up, time to leave!” he shouted. I emerged from my tent. Allison and I doddered into the cold, taking down our tent as fast as we could, but the Gingerbread Man grew impatient—there were miles to cover—and he left without a word. We ran to catch up, our shirts halfway off, our packs hanging off one shoulder. “No more,” I said to myself between gasps. “This just isn’t worth it.” This was not going to work. I felt as if we’d met someone who might one day be a good friend of ours, and yet sometimes I wanted to stick out my boot and trip him. I appreciated his leadership and guidance, and the way the outdoors seemed benevolent when we were with him, but I longed for self-determination, to hike at my own pace and put the trail in my hands again. Besides, we were hungry, and our packs were full of wrappers, used toilet paper, and other trash that we needed to discard.

We broke up with the Gingerbread Man about ten miles later, or he broke up with us. He had enough provisions so he didn’t need to reload in Tehachapi, our destination. The trail was like that sometimes, a turnstile where you never knew who would take the next man’s place. “I can never hike with anybody for too long,” the Gingerbread Man had said. “After a while we always split up on the trail. There was a guy who
hiked with me last week. The most fastidious hiker I’ve ever met. His trail name’s Doctor John. He had to have his bootlaces perfect before he started out every morning. I’m probably the only hiker who could deal with hiking with him for long.”

Before leaving us, Gingerbread Man told us it was time we got a proper trail name. “I came up with it last night before I went to sleep,” he said as we sat for a while by a stream flowing like a miracle through the bulrushes near the trail, “I’m thinking you should call yourselves the Lois and Clark Expedition, since you’re reporters and all. What do you think?”

Allison and I looked at each other, for we knew he’d bestowed upon us a great favor. At that moment, “Dan and Allison” fell to our feet like a molted snakeskin. We were real explorers now. In one instant, the Gingerbread Man had elevated our trip from mere nature walk to full-fledged “expedition.” To get a trail name from a respected hiker is like passing an audition. Once you get a name, you become a “trail character,” with full membership in the backpackers’ cult, a shambling procession of hermits and acolytes making its slow way north toward Monument 78. Besides, we were lucky to get a great trail name. I’ve known some people who got seriously screwed with their trail monikers. Take, for example, the widely disliked physician who became known as Doctor Dickhead.

That morning, the Gingerbread Man walked us close to the highway shoulder. We didn’t know what to say to each other. It’s awkward to share a trail with someone, then go around a bend, reach a junction, and know you’ll never see him again. He reached in his pack, pulled out a container of translucent goo, and insisted we slosh some on our armpits. “Smells like Ivory,” he said. “That way you won’t worry about stinking up the car when you hitchhike.” We turned to watch him limp into the foothills, his backpack leaning.

In a moment the Gingerbread Man was gone behind a stand of high reeds.

T
he vision of the Gingerbread Man lingered long after he left us. He proved by example that people who succeed on the Pacific Crest Trail aren’t necessarily strapping or macho like Todd the Sasquatch. Gawky folks with strange sunglasses and chicken legs can do just fine out there, too. The trail doesn’t care if you’re awkward. The trail doesn’t judge you if you’re the kind of guy who received more than his share of wedgies, swirlies, and wet willies in middle school. To succeed on the trail, you don’t have to be muscular or cute. All you have to do is join the brotherhood and form a secret pact with all the lizards and coyotes. You must accept a certain amount of chaos and confusion as givens, and figure out how to incorporate these things into your life without losing your mind. You must not be uptight or selfish. You’ve got to leave a cairn of piled stones so the next guy won’t get lost. The wilderness is not out to hurt you. The trail isn’t out to harm you, either. You just have to become one with the trail, while channeling the collective unconsciousness of those who dwell on this gentle footpath. Or something like that.

In any case, I felt renewed, invigorated, when we left the trail and reached the shoulder of the two-lane Tehachapi Willow Springs Road near a field of dried-out poppies. My only fear was getting from the trailhead to town in one piece. I mean that literally. I’d never hitchhiked in my life. All the newspaper horror stories I’d read about hitchhiking came to mind. They all had an opening paragraph along the lines of “Dan and Allison were a fresh-faced couple. They thought they could thumb their way to Tehachapi.” Second paragraph: “But they never made it. Their blowtorch-singed, rat-nibbled remains were found in a Dumpster in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.” But Tehachapi was 9.4 miles west of the Pacific Crest Trail. We were starving for burgers, anxious to get supplies, and had no option other than hitchhiking. Car after car whooshed past. Allison hopped up and down, waving a sign reading
WEST
. She threw in a go-go kick, to no avail. I asked her to “show a little leg,” but she pointed out that perverts were the last people we wanted to attract, and besides, she was already wearing shorts. I wagged my thumb all over the place. Drivers just made faces and sped up. At last a white step van with a blue
HANDICAPPED
card slid to the shoulder and rolled to a stop.

The side door swung open. Behind the wheel sat a sixty-ish woman, heavyset and smelling of cloves. She wore her long ponytail beneath a straw hat. A crested bird with an orange beak stood on the armrest to the right of the driver’s seat. “Come in,” the woman said. “I’m Samantha and this is Barry. She indicated a white cockatoo sitting in the passenger seat. He’s quite a talker.” Barry said nothing. We shoved the packs in the back. The woman was a paraplegic. Although the car had a regular steering wheel, the brake and accelerator were mounted below the dashboard; it looked like the controls on an Atari video game. We pulled the door closed. Samantha put the joystick to the floor and the four of us took off like a dustbowl hurricane. After 109 miles and 10 days on the trail, the pitch-forward
sensation of motion thrilled me. Allison opened the window a crack and the wind ruffled her sweat-stiffened hair.

The Tehachapi Mountains were brawny and tan in the sun, their folds hiding stables and settlements. On the hills, electricity-generating windmills spun. We sped past them on the way to the city, just below the mountain range of the same name at the southern boundary of the San Joaquin Valley, a jumping-off point to the southern end of Sierra Nevada, the 430-mile-long granite batholith to the north. Here, forty miles from Bakersfield, we would reconnect, rest up, and prepare to take on one more section of pig-dirt desert, frying-pan sunshine, and chaparral foothills before entering John Muir’s range of light. We were heading to a town of many identities, on the edges of steep terrain where Kawaisu Indians had hunted game and gathered piñon nuts. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Kawaisu now—they’re lost to time—but they left behind a name:
Tehachapi,
or
Tihacipia,
or
Tah-ee-chay-Pah,
depending on your phonetics skills. Historians can’t agree on the meaning. They’ve interpreted
Tehachapi
to mean “hard-climbing place,” “sweet water,” “windy place,” “cold place,” and “place of many acorns.”

For us, every meaning was appropriate: hard climbing to be here, the sweet waters of rest and pent-up sex, the cold wind against the van and the promise of long-awaited gorging on burgers and pancakes. Randy Travis’s nasal tenor oozed from the tape deck. We all sang along with the tune, with the bird screaming, “Grackety grack shit,” in the background. Allison smiled at the wind and the weepy sound of the steel guitar. I smiled, too, though I felt a twinge of something unexplainable. The song, the stranger, the sing-along. It was all too perfect, like that moment inside the Conestoga wagon circle in the purple midnight of a cowboy movie, where one of the fellas says, “It’s just a little too quiet out there, aint it?” What was the catch? Where was the trick? The PCT can work that way, make you
think a wrong turn is around the next bend, even when the going is clear. Then I realized I was being silly, thinking too much. It was time to relax.

Samantha let us out in “Old Town Tehachapi,” a street of low-slung Western-style buildings near a train depot–themed park with green grass and kids climbing on unused trains standing about like statuary. The street had a dusty look as if the buildings could use a splash of paint or a few words of encouragement, and some of the buildings had flimsy wooden railings, the kind that cowboys are always crashing through in Western-movie fight scenes. It was exciting to us: antiques shops, Laundromats, food, possibility. We checked into a motel. The place was run by an owlish lady who couldn’t give one rip about our hike, our room was close to the railroad tracks, the furniture was dingy, and the walls had fist-size holes in them, but who cares? To us, it was the Waldorf Astoria.

“Oh my God, running water,” Allison said from the bathroom. The shower was sensational, hot water pulsing, our dirt twirling down the drain like Janet Leigh’s blood in
Psycho.

True, we’d been out in the wilderness for only ten days before coming to town, but desert hiking can warp your perspective, making time stretch out like taffy. We’d allowed the desert to chasten us a bit, and take the edge off our itchy lust for each other. Sun and dust suck the chi force out of man and woman. After a while, you forget you are lovers. There’s nothing like a twenty-nine-dollar-a-night motel to make you remember. After two hot showers each, Allison and I could hardly wait to make love in the creaky bed. Allison’s wet towel fell to the ground. She was all sunburned neck and blond hair, and with her skin washed clean, she’d never looked more beautiful. Before the trail, both of us lacked muscle tone and color. She now looked longer and taller than usual, as if the bed elongated her as she lay there beneath a poorly rendered oil painting of a chuck wagon charging across a bleak and smeary tundra. The
bed bucked and wobbled beneath us, rusty coils squeaking. I felt very much in love then, as if the two of us were celebrating a trial that had made us stronger as a couple, a Mojave litmus test. Afterward, we lay in bed with no thoughts of ever getting up again. The original plan was to spend one night in Tehachapi, then take off early the next morning. But we had so much to do, and were having such a good time, that we decided to prolong our stay.

Next morning the two of us, all showered up and blissed out, took a stroll through town. I was stupidly happy, my arm around my girl, my hand pinching her bottom. Retrieving our first supply of gear and food at the local post office was a joyous experience. It was hard to contain myself when the postal clerk stooped to hoist a twenty-five-pound cardboard box of loot that Allison’s parents had mailed to us general delivery from the Midwest. I stabbed it twice in the belly with my Swiss Army knife; out came Snickers, Ziploc bags of espresso-spiked chocolate mousse powder, Farley’s Gummi Dinosaurs, dried cherries from Michigan, freeze-dried meals, and DEET spray in plastic bottles. We walked to the other side of town, where we found a wondrous assortment of monolithic, predatory, slave-wage–paying chain stores selling every conceivable kind of lotion, gummi creature, and body wash. One of them had a whole aisle dedicated entirely to scrunchies. There we bought lanolin for our feet, deodorant for our armpits, and moleskin for our blisters.

By then, it was time for brunch. Stout cowboys left a diner, one hand on their guts, the other greeting us with a two-fingered wave, a rural peace sign gesture, in which they propped up their Stetsons with a thumb and forefinger. We waved back. Their satisfied expressions led us to try the diner, which was packed with people, its walls lined with black-and-white photos of a quake that jackhammered the town in 1952. Ravenous, we ducked in and found a booth.

On the trail, it is possible to eat six thousand calories worth of food every day and lose weight. That’s why layovers in towns are a sanctioned form of exercise bulimia. In town, hikers can gorge on burgers, shakes, and anything else they please. I had heard stories about a PCT hiker who ate a stick of butter, peeling it like a banana. I felt even hungrier when I saw the people in the diner. They ate like wood chippers. All around were the sounds of smacking mouths. We ordered eggs over hard, biscuits in gravy, and sausages on the side. In towns, you expect to see fellow PCT hikers pigging out. Perhaps that’s why I noticed a thin man in the corner of the diner, alone, ignoring his orange juice while an egg congealed on his plate. Why was he not joining in on the gluttony? His joylessness made him stand out like the shy one at an orgy.

There he sat, slouching but meticulous, picking at some unseen annoyance in his beard. A lentil? A bug? His plaid shirt and khaki shorts were beige from washed-out mud and desert dust. His skin was tan, and his pack was covered with dirt. No doubt, he was a Pacific Crest Trail hiker, and yet this realization did not fill me with joy. His woeful countenance made me want to turn away. I wondered why he looked lethargic and depressed as he leaned into his juice and sniffed the rim of the glass. He kept glancing toward us and frowning, but when I’d look back, he’d stare at the table top as if embarrassed. The stranger winced. At last he rose and made his way toward us, a twiggy figure passing rows of fat bodies. “Dan and Allison? Is it you?” he said. He leaned over our biscuits. “Did you meet the Gingerbread Man? We hiked together but we broke up, as hiking partners, I mean. He left me a note, saying you’d gone to town, so I found you. I know it’s you. Remember Mark the postman, back in Agua Dulce? He said you were nice but a little unprepared.” He gave me his right hand. His fingers were cool and tapered. “I’m Doctor John,” he said. “But I’m only a doctor in the Ph.D. sense. Mathematics, actually. I kept look
ing over at you, trying to get your attention. You kept looking away. It seemed like you were trying to avoid me.” His voice was squeaky.

“That isn’t true,” I said, suddenly vaguely remembering that the Gingerbread Man had warned us of a fussy and difficult hiker coming up behind us. Allison smiled up at him, but I didn’t like this intrusion. All I wanted was to be alone with my girlfriend. I wished we were in our motel room again, making the bed rattle and squeak. “Pleased to meet you,” Allison said. She rose halfway out of her seat to shake his hand. “How are you doing?”

“Well…” he said as he sat down at the table, across from me, next to Allison. “I’m all right, I guess. Actually, it’s been very hard. I haven’t been doing the trail. The trail has been doing me. I can never quite figure out how much water to bring. Water is so heavy, so I never end up drinking quite enough. Just the other day I was hiking and it was quite warm outside, hot, actually, and my pee, pardon my language, my urine was getting very dark, turning pink, and after a while I could barely urinate at all. I finally came across a bottle of water that someone had left behind, and I thought, well, should I drink it? Should I take this? Suppose someone else needs it more than I do? And then I thought to myself, well, who needs it more than I do? Who? And then I started to cry.”

There’s nothing as miserable as being thirsty in a desert. I understood this as well as anyone. But why did he have to talk about pee while we were eating? Perhaps I’m oversensitive but I can’t bear it when people talk about snot, pee, blood, sweat, mucous, musk, ejaculate, excreta, or the particulars of animal husbandry while I’m enjoying my breakfast.

“And in that dehydrated state of mind,” Doctor John said, continuing with his story, “I almost stepped on a rattlesnake. Anyway, there it was, right on the trail, in the middle there, tongue flickering away, and I didn’t realize I was about to step
on him, not until my boot was hanging in space. In midair I somehow managed to switch my stride to a standing long jump. Up and over the snake I flew.”

I sighed, sensing what was coming. This man—seemingly depressive, struggling with every step of the trail—would want to team up with the Lois and Clark Expedition. And I could tell, even after our brief exchange, that this would be disastrous for all three of us. Morale was of the utmost importance at this part of our journey. Allison and I had just gone through a difficult introduction to the PCT. Somehow we had made it through and found happiness in Tehachapi, but our joy was as fragile as the wings of a ghost moth. I had to take care not to let hardship put a damper on our sex life and well-being at this juncture. I did not want a fifth wheel on our expedition, especially one with fatalistic tendencies and a preternatural eagerness to talk about bodily functions.

“I have a poem I made up,” Doctor John said. “It helps me forget about my feet, which are in agony all the time. Would you like to hear it?”

“Um…” I said.

“It goes like this,” Doctor John said. “My feet can not harm me / How can they harm me? / When my feet, my feet, my feet do not exist.” He rested a hand on Allison’s shoulder and said, “I’ll be right back. Save me my place at the table. I might be gone for a while. I’m going to the rest room. In fact, I may be sitting down in there.”