The Cactus Eaters (15 page)

Next morning, I couldn’t get Hiram’s harangue out of my head. I felt he’d misjudged us. It irked me, to have come all this way and have people get the wrong idea about us. And it occurred to me that this experience might not necessarily fill other people with awe after all. I could no longer assume that walking the trail would change the way people regarded me or, if it did change the way they looked at me, that the change was necessarily a good thing. If this was so, it was silly to chalk this up as an achievement to inspire other people. Was that the point? As my dad liked to say, “This trail is yours alone, young Daniel. You can’t put it on your résumé.”

If that was the case, we might as well enjoy it more, especially now that the desert was over and the mountains had begun. And so, when Allison expressed interest in buying a fishing rod, I backed her up enthusiastically. Hiram was right. Why rush this, and eat lousy food, for the sake of wowing everyone when they might not be wowed? Let’s take it easy and live off the land. Besides, we’d packed too many baggies of homemade granola. It was delicious straight out of the oven. Now, one month later, I dreaded the kitty-litter clumps of oats, the terse raisins, the bitter elbows of old cashews.

And Allison loved fishing, though she barely knew how. She associated it, for some reason, with her father. They squabbled sometimes, but it was something they enjoyed doing together.
She wanted him to teach her to whip her line in an S-curve over her head and make the fly alight on the lake like a real bug. We were going on about all this when Virginia overheard us. “I’m going down to Bakersfield today anyhow for supplies,” she said. “You want to come along? We’ll stop at this fishing place I know.”

Allison looked like a child then. She smiled in a way that still fills me with an ache when I think about it. Before we knew it, we were bouncing along in Virginia’s sod-colored Blazer, down a road above a vast drop, no guardrail in sight, speeding down mountain roads above the copperhead curl of the Kern River. We stopped at the fishing place by the riverside. Allison searched the aisles. The owners indulged her, thinking she was Virginia’s daughter, and Virginia said nothing to correct this. Allison found a black shiny thing, four segments folding into themselves like an opera spyglass, so compact you could barely tell it was a fishing rod. “Look at this,” she said to me, holding it close to my face. It was her first telescoping Shakespeare pole. After we drove back to camp, without another thought, I took the granola from our backpack and threw it straight into the nearest Dumpster. We wouldn’t need that crap anyhow.

Everything was going to be slower, and Allison would catch fish every night. That is how it was going to be, I thought, as we lit out from Kennedy Meadows the next day, toward a snowbound horizon, passing fishermen up to their waists in the Kern River, then up into a scorched wood, a forest of poles and skeletons with no arms. So the handyman hadn’t been lying. The smell lingered in our nostrils. So one of our kind had done this to the forest? Allison and I vowed not to strew toilet paper all over the place, not to burn the woods down. We decided to be ambassadors for the PCT.

Once we made our way out of the forest of ashes, the trail changed. In bare feet to spare our socks, we stepped through cold creeks and walked across meadows full of shooting stars
and toad song. As a precaution we’d packed ice axes, two and a half feet of blue aluminum with metal claws. You can use the duckbill part of the handle to dig stairs in a snow wall. You use the sharp end to bite into the ice if your legs slip out from under you. The new gear and clothes made me feel like a beetle, wobbling on stumpy legs. Big Motherfucker sagged with the weight of himself. Swaying on his hinges, he groaned.

But the land is beautiful enough to make you disregard gravity. One day out in the mountains, you are halfway across a meadow, and something comes creeping. You glance at the muscles in your lover’s right calf and notice, for the first time, the length of her sunburned neck and the way she lopes when she walks across a meadow, the way she presses her nose into every mountain aster and columbine. You pull her toward you. Before you know it, the two of you are falling, just off the trail near the edge of a forest. Dried sweat makes your clothes stiff; you take them off. Your feet are swollen from the elevation; it takes too long to remove your boots so you give up; you leave them on. Soon you’re on your back; your head is resting on a sequoia root. Her eyes are closed now, and her hair is blowing all over the place. A pine cone presses your back, then rolls up your neck and works itself into your hair. You are together just off the trail that has confused you, forced you to fight, and led you to a poison spring with uranium in it. All the worries about mile-bagging, all the obsessive thoughts about reaching Canada: your lust crushes these things. You lie in uncomfortable pebbles afterward. For a long while you stay where you are, on the ground. Lying there, dazed, you snap away at the telescoping branches of the trees above you with your Pentax K1000 camera because you want to preserve the way you looked up through the trees and into the blue, from this exact angle. You don’t want to forget again, the way you forgot in the desert.

We lost Allison’s fishing rod somewhere in the high country. I can’t remember where the hell we lost that thing. Most
likely it was out in a backcountry camp near a row of boulders and a ribbon of clear water. It would be easier to remember where we lost it if she’d ever had the chance to use it. That way I could look back on the maps and remember such-and-such lake, where she caught a trout, and come up with a rough approximation. I have little to go on, but I remember the moment when she discovered it was missing.

We were a few miles north of camp one day. On a whim, she’d searched her pack and found it gone. We backtracked to our camp or the place she thought was our camp, for there were dozens of tent-flattened spots like the one we’d used for the night. When we got there, we found nothing but thigh-high grass, boulders, and a stream full of thimble fish, the sun shining clear to their bones. She searched one row of sites while I searched another. “It’s black, remember,” she said. “The rod is black. I might have lost it in the dark.” I watched her down-turned eyes as she scanned the landscape. “Are you sure we lost it here?” I said.

She said nothing. Neither one of us knew for sure that she’d misplaced the rod here, and we both knew why. I’d promised to slow the pace, let her take afternoons off and fish, but it never happened. I said we’d “slackpack,” but old fears and ambitions came up. I was concerned that steep snow, slippery glaciers, and rough climbing would impede our progress, so I’d tried to compensate by rushing us through the flatter terrain. Since she’d rarely even handled the fishing rod, we could not say for sure that it went missing in this place, instead of a hundred other places. We searched for a half hour. A ranger went past, then another hiker. Allison told them that it was a “telescoping Shakespeare, brand-new,” and to “look out” for it. She turned to me. “You told me we were going to take it easy,” she said. “You told me I was going to catch fish for supper.” Judging from the just-so tone of her voice, this was a declarative statement, not an accusation. “I wanted it,” she said. “I thought we
were gonna go fishing out here.” I had no idea what to say, so I shrugged. She took one last look at the place she thought might have been our camp, and then she cinched up her pack and headed north on the Pacific Crest Trail.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She said nothing.

I followed close behind her.

O
ne week in the backcountry, close to the most popular base camp for Mount Whitney, Allison and I were sweating our way up a long set of switchbacks, our eyes on a diamond patch of sky above the treetops, a sign the climb would be over soon. We walked all day up steep ridges, then marveled at the views from the top. Directly in front of us, to the south, the tallest peaks caught the drifting sunlight. Scattered lakes in the foreground lay in shadow; they looked like holes punched from the scenery, through which the sky above the distant peaks shone. In the forest that day, I tended to lose myself in thought. I had been to these woods before. After one more week of walking, we were set to arrive at Mammoth Lakes, the resort where my family vacationed for one week each year. I came to think of this area as my refuge, sealed away from the rest of my adolescence.

I came of age in a chichi golf and beach town in California, a Jewish boy trapped in a blond eugenics experiment. Socially awkward, smelly, and bitter beyond my years, I spent large amounts of time in the basement of our house conducting
unclean experiments on high school classmates, rendered in modeling clay. I would sculpt body cavities in the Play-Doh figures and stuff them with Play-Doh spleens, intestines, hearts enclosed in toothpick rib cages. Then, after a trial by a kangaroo court, I would sentence the green and purple homecoming queens, football players, surfer dudes, and stoners’ wall denizens to have their insides torn out by my plastic Yoda action figurine. Disembowel them he did. I formed an alternate world in my family home’s dank basement, where I constructed a balsa-wood dollhouse and placed a bread-dough figurine of myself in a balsa-wood BarcaLounger. While normal kids were heading to the prom, my alternate-reality Dan watched television and listened to XTC’s “English Settlement” with his harem of scantily clad bread-dough lady friends, who would scratch and cat-fight and compete for his attention in ways that struck him as inappropriate but flattering. “Dan, oh Dan, would you like some more ginger ale?”

Aside from my Gumby killing sprees in the basement, and my imagined marathon sex binges with my stable of Play-Doh princesses, my family’s annual trips to the Eastern Sierra became my greatest joy. In those years, the woods became my counterlife. My father would pack up our striped bile-colored Ford station wagon full of external frame packs, sucrose pellets, Tang, squeeze cheese, and freeze-dried astronaut ice cream. The road trips up to Mammoth Lakes were often frightful. Coyotes, with murder in their eyes, walked across the parking lot of the Carl’s Junior in Mojave, sniffing Dumpsters, eying young children and dogs. On one trip, the car’s radiator gave out on the long crawl up Highway 395, emitting a rancid-butter smell like burned Pop Tarts. But the mountains, when we reached them, were unlike anything I’d seen, great blocks of unbroken stone on dun-colored platforms with rusted rubble on their shoulders. They seemed to shoot vertically up above the Owens Valley. In the distance, cinder cones loomed red and
sinister. Mount Ritter and the Minaret Mountains broke the sky with their black spires.

How I loved and despised those trips. The Sierra dished out delights and torture in equal proportions, in a system so carefully calibrated that I learned to regard intense pleasures with wistfulness. Every lovely lake and tarn concealed colonies of mosquitoes, warm clouds of them descending from nowhere. They lit on my calves and shoulders and wrists to punch my flesh with their twirling stylets, to suck and poke and gouge. Those clouds chased me from camp to camp as if linked to my head like speech bubbles in a cartoon.

No moment in the High Sierra went unpunctured. There was always a twist, an irony, a catch. During one of my reveries, on a scenic pullout on a high trail, where the air had a tangy Pine-Sol scent and views dropped away to a V-shaped valley full of wildflowers, a pack mule farted in my face. The foul whoosh went on for about fifteen seconds. I could not take it. And yet I learned to live with the balance, the yin and yang of comfort and pain, pleasure, smells, and disappointment.

It’s not that the woods made me feel competent; quite the opposite. It’s just that the woods made everyone in my family feel like an idiot. They were a great equalizer. Even my older brother, a strawberry-blond sadist with a weakness for Ayn Rand, was reduced to a wood louse by the sequoias. Out in the woods, he screamed with fright when yellow jackets swarmed around him. Once, while he was already panicking, I informed him that these stinging creatures were attracted to the glare of his brightly colored windbreaker, though who knows if this was true. I never claimed to be an entomologist. Out in the forest, during a sudden storm over the Minarets, my brother scanned the sky with rabbity eyes, searching for the lightning bolt I dearly hoped would roast him in his boots. That’s what I loved so much about the High Sierra. It was a reliable producer of long-lasting and delicious memories.

I recall long nights eating crunchy dehydrated meatballs, which amazed and disgusted me: Who knew that scientists could freeze-dry gristle? Dehydrated carrots grew to four times their normal size in hot water. My father flinched when he saw the carrots, for they reminded him of his childhood, in which he was forced to eat slimy root vegetables. The carrots scared me, too, because they looked like mutant orange leeches flinging themselves from the pot with crazed insistency. Sleeping was fitful, and for good reason. In those days before ultra-lightweight North Face equipment, we used cheapo nylon deathtraps known as “pup tents,” with not one but two poles propped—for reasons I still can’t understand—on the inside of the tent, to hold up the roof. If I so much as rolled over in my sleeping bag, or even fidgeted, the heavy steel poles would come crashing down on my skull.

Mornings, however, were bright and pleasant. Skies were pink and purple and shot through with blue mist. Father would crawl out at seven thirty in the morning, in near-frozen temperatures, exposed knees knocking as he crouched in his mummy jacket vest—which, strangely, left his hairy arms completely bare to the elements—and light the fire. Then he’d stumble around for wood to make the fire larger. How strange to see him there, this streetwise New Yorker who grew up to be an electrical engineer and a wealthy man, who spent so many daylight hours away from home, troubleshooting or out on the road, now playing paterfamilias in Stone Age conditions, subjecting himself to inconveniences and low-level discomforts. “Young Daniel,” he would say to me, in a booming voice, “get a log,” and I’d make my way through the underbrush in search of kindling. For a shining moment I felt like a Walton. We had prunes, Ritz crackers, vacuum-sealed hash browns, and a stick of Hickory Farms smoked summer sausage big enough to inflict blunt trauma. For a short while, I had all I could ever need.

Distracted and nostalgic, I led Allison to a wrong turn,
down into a pine forest, which turned out to be an equestrian route to a trailhead, where some PCT hikers try to hitch a ride out to Lone Pine for supplies. We had just discovered our error and were turning around, hiking back to the place where we lost the trail, when a skinny man hurried toward us with a baffled expression on his bearded face. From a distance his legs looked hairless, as if he’d Naired them down. They flashed in the sun like scissors. On his back was a pack not much bigger than your average weekend warrior’s, but filthy. I figured he would blow right past us. Instead he stopped and stood in the way.

“Hey you,” he said when he saw our packs, ice axes lashed to the bottom. His skin had a dull sheen, slimey from sweat. “You the couple in front of me?” he said. “The Lois and Clark Expedition? Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail?”

Allison and I looked at each other. I nodded warily at the stranger. We were no longer very surprised when people we’d never met knew our trail names. The PCT has an amazingly proficient telegraph of gossip and innuendo, fueled by trail journals and occasional southbound hikers who tell the army of northbounders about everyone they’ve met en route. In a sense, the PCT has its own Internet.

“Mmm-hmmm,” the stranger said, sizing us up. He had a tight little fuzz beard. His small eyes squinted through spectacle frames. “Tell me,” he said, “did you lose a shit shovel seventy-five miles ago?”

I felt my face turn crimson. Yes, as a matter of fact, we’d lost that cat hole shovel somewhere in the southern Sierra, forcing us to scratch out our constitutional trenches with various branches and rocks. I nodded sheepishly.

“Huh?” he said, as though he hadn’t heard me. “You lose some toilet paper, too?”

I blushed again. Well, yes, as a matter of fact, we’d also lost some toilet paper quite a while ago, forcing us, for a brief
period, to scratch our bottoms with various leaves and branches.

“And a bedroll?”

“No,” I said. “We did not lose a bedroll.”

“Huh?” he said. “Okay, so the bedroll isn’t yours, but you should be more careful next time. It’s not good to, you know, toss your stuff all over the place. This”—he interrupted himself, gesturing toward the foxtail pines and their jigsaw puzzle bark the color of chocolate—“this is not a dump.”

“I will be more careful,” I said.

“What? Okay, yeah, you should try to be more careful.”

We all stood in awkward silence for a while. Then he smiled. “So…” he said, “anyways, everybody calls me the Wolf. You heading to Canada?” After hearing our answer, he jumped in and continued. “Yeah, I can walk forty miles in one day. We’re late in the season, I know, but I’ll push on through even if it’s snowing in the north, even if I’ve got to do the trail in snowshoes. And when I get to that finish line, I’m gonna drink a dry beer.” Wolf meant this literally; he insisted that he was in possession of a dehydrated “malt beverage” that foamed up when you added water.

Allison smiled. “You can’t dehydrate alcohol,” she said calmly.

Wolf would not be dissuaded. He insisted that it was an actual beer. He kept staring at us, smirking, tilting his head in birdlike motions. I could tell he was waiting for something to happen. I felt like I was on a stage, unable to remember my lines.

“You’re overpacked,” he said at last, pointing at Big Motherfucker.

Oh, so that was the cue. I was supposed to comment on his puny backpack. Not wanting to be a Grinch, I played along. “Wow. It’s amazing to me that you can hike the PCT with that little pack,” I said. “How do you do it?”

He handed me his pack, which weighed next to nothing. In it I found a weatherproof bivouac sack, a fistful of Dots
candies, marshmallows, and cinnamon bears in a Ziploc bag, a few packets of regular-flavor Top Ramen, and several squashed Snickers bars. I kept pawing through his pack. He had no tent, no sleeping bag, no Ridgerest, not even a compass. He didn’t have maps, either. “What the hell?” I said. “Are you crazy?” It’s one thing to hike the Appalachian Trail mapless. It has easy-to-find markers on trees. But the PCT is not nearly as well marked, with many confounding intersections. What if he got stranded or injured? “Where’s the guidebook?” I said.

“I hate the guidebook. It’s expensive and a waste, so I typed up this thing.” Wolf reached into his shorts pocket and handed me a well-thumbed booklet of data, crudely stapled, with mileage figures in rows and basic information about water sources. “I’m thinking of printing up copies so other people can use it. So. Anyways. As much as I’d love to chat with you guys, I’ve got to get to Lone Pine and back. Chances are I’ll sneak past your campsite in the middle of the night and you won’t see me. That’s how I got my name, Wolf. I can hike forty miles day if I want, but sometimes I get turned around and end up going in the wrong direction. One night, on the Appalachian Trail, I got so lost I snuck into camp at midnight. Some lady saw me and got scared. She thought I was a wolf.”

“So…” I said, “You must be one of those crazy Jardi-Nazis.”

He smirked. “Not one of those,” he replied. “That Ray Jardine is way overpacked.”

He waved good-bye and raced down the horse trail and was out of sight behind the trees.

The next day, Allison and I set off on a seventeen-mile round trip to the top of Mt. Whitney and back, four thousand feet up, four thousand feet down again. The Whitney round trip is not part of the PCT route, but we couldn’t resist. Those who hike up the summit from Crabtree Meadows need no technical skills. You just walk up. It is, as John Muir said, a mule
road. First the two of us put up the tent and stashed our gear at the lush base camp. At the time we just wanted views and the bragging rights. But Mount Whitney has always been one of my favorite peaks for psychological reasons. Unlike Mount Hood and Mount Rainier, Whitney doesn’t try to be showy or bossy, dominating the landscape for hundreds of miles. Whitney has no fetching pyramid symmetry, no shapely figure that might look good on a beer can or pop bottle. Whitney isn’t even the tallest mountain in America. It’s merely the tallest in the contiguous forty-eight states. That qualifier condemns it to eternal also-ran status. As magnificent as it is, the mountain is also a little pathetic. On top of this, the mountain has been subject to one indignity after another.

Seventy years after white explorers had named most of the dominant West Coast peaks, Whitney sat in the darkness of obscurity, waiting around for someone to notice. Part of the problem is its location and surroundings. Unlike Mount Hood, which has no competition for miles around, Whitney is nothing but the highest spoke on a range of sawteeth. From the San Joaquin Valley, you can’t see the peak at all. In the past century, many a man has tried and failed to reach its summit, not because the climb was all that difficult, but for the simple fact that they could not find the goddamned thing. Clarence King, celebrated geologist and outdoorsman, made a two-day trek toward Whitney, past tumbling boulders, over hazardous slopes, shredding his shoes as he made his way to “the highest peak.” He arrived on July 6, 1864, only to look up and see two peaks that were significantly higher. Seven years later, he dragged his sorry carcass up the “real” Mount Whitney and was, by one account, “immensely pleased with himself.” For two years he glowed with the knowledge that he’d conquered America’s loftiest summit. Then, on August 4, 1873, during a meeting of the California Academy of Sciences, he dropped a bomb: in somber tones, he reflected about the arduous trek,
and the mules he rode to “the highest crest of the peak southwest of Lone Pine, which for over three years has been known by the name of Mount Whitney…I know this peak well.” Unfortunately, he added, “This peak is not Mount Whitney.”
*
On September 19, 1873, King stood, at last, on the true Mount Whitney, only to find that three local fisherman had beaten him to the task by a month. King, who went on to become the first chief of the United States Geological Survey, was not the only great Californian to get confused. No less an explorer and mountaineer than John Muir set his sights on Whitney in 1873, only to climb Mount Langley by mistake.