The Cactus Eaters (20 page)

The branches blew and scratched at the tent that night. Out of the enfolding woods came the sounds of padding on bumpy feet. Pad pad pad pad. Gurgling stomachs waiting. Snoring sounds. Wet snurfling and belching. Watching us. Digestive noises, then something large, so close I could hear the sloshing juices in its gut, or was it Allison? Stomachs growling somewhere. Long shadows again. “Never again, no, never,” I said to myself. “Never again.” A pressing snout, a depression in the top of the tent, a scratch, and a distinct black shape—don’t scream—then nothing. Just wind. A dent, a scratch, a thump that woke me up, though I was barely sleeping. Just a pine cone. Something sniffing again. Where’s the flashlight? I pick it up, a Maglite, black and shiny, stuck between my front teeth and lit full blast. Is anything really there? Should I bop it over the head? Spaces compressed and expanded at night in camp on the trail. The flashlight seemed only to flatten the darkness. Then quiet. Nothing.

This pattern continued for some time: I kept hearing—or thinking I was hearing—gurgles, snorts, and scratchings. Allison’s stomach would make a frightening sound in the dark at three in the morning. Then morning came, in the smallest possible increments of lightness. On one such morning, deep in the woods, we were just getting under way when we came to a steep, steep cliff, practically vertical, off to one side of the trail. We saw a scraggly deer charge straight up the face of the cliff, bursting out of the forest, scaring the shit out of us, then up, up, up, rocks skidding beneath its hooves but it just kept going, going, apparently not caring if it broke its little neck. I gasped as
we watched it vanish up the wall. Then I turned to Allison.

“If the deer out here are this cocky, the bears out here must be tough bastards.”

The two of us turned to face the granite wall. We climbed all day. Between Allison’s stories and the valleys and shadow, the clouds and streams and days blurring into one another, I cannot pinpoint the day, the time, the week, or the exact spot that it happened. I can only say that a bear, some days later, burst from the trees to the side of the trail, about a hundred feet in front of us, making us both leap forward in surprise. It had the look in its eye. It saw and smelled us. The bear froze for a moment. I knew what would happen. It would chuff. It would paw. It would make a charge for our food. To my relief, the bear turned its back on us and started sniffing at the ground.

And then Allison ran right for it.

“What?” I screamed. “What the hell are you doing?”

She lifted her hands to the sky to make herself look bigger. She would not stop. She bowled herself straight at that bear, now about sixty feet away. Her backpack quaked behind her as she ran forward, boots kicking dust as she roared. “Git, git, git,” she said. “Git the fuck out of here.”

The bear looked like it didn’t even have a chance. It tore off through the woods so quickly that it hip-checked a sapling, making the tree shake like crazy.

The bear made a break for it, and melted like a ghost in the thicket.

W
e were almost through with our first month on the trail, and making headway, aiming north toward Yosemite National Park. We hiked through creek-soaked meadows and corn lily fields, on soft ground. I felt entitled, comfortable, smug, and a little bit macho now. After all, we’d just walked four hundred miles into the High Sierra from Southern California in spite of all the dire predictions about us. Allison looked even more scrumptious than before; the trail had sculpted her body, firming up her buttocks so much they looked like oversized fists. Her back was strong, and her legs were steel pinions. I was skinny and strapping for the first time ever, and starting to understand what Eddie meant when he said my body would get so trail-hard I could hold a Bic lighter to my feet and feel no pain.

The footpath in this section was remote; Kings Canyon, Sequoia, and Yosemite national parks made up the largest road-free open-space expanse in the lower forty-eight states. Walking through the seemingly endless forest gave rise to the illusion that
America was untamed, although a mere 2 percent of the United States fit the category of “wildlands.” Since we traveled cross-country on foot in the rawboned country, I felt a kinship with the snaggletooth mountain men of the nineteenth century. I’m talking about the first Anglo-Americans to reach this area in the 1820s, men with flintlock rifles as long as their arms, buckskin jackets, skinning knives, and hair that fell down their backs in braids. To the pelt-seeking profiteers of the western mountains, a balanced breakfast might include a root, a snail, leg of cougar, and a fine roasted dog. In these days of MapQuest, it’s strange to think that most lands between Missouri and the Pacific Coast were considered undiscovered country in the early nineteenth century, at least as far as white people were concerned. Travelers who ventured west of the Midwest were said to be “jumping off,” as if leaping from the far cliffs of the earth. Never mind that hundreds of thousands of Native Americans were pretty well settled in after millennia of living there, and never mind the leaky Spanish ships that had explored the coast of California as far north as Point Reyes, near present-day San Francisco, more than two and a half centuries earlier. As far as the Eastern establishment was concerned, the area where Allison and I were walking right now, and much of the Midwest, might as well have been on another planet. Thomas Jefferson, before the Lewis and Clark Expedition, speculated that woolly mammoths still tromped through the forests of Missouri, and no one thought he was insane when he wrote this in a popular book. Now there’s no place left for a mammoth to hide. Everything has been pinpointed, explored, duly noted. Still, I liked to pretend I was a pathfinder, a mountain man, and gritty. The frontier had been closed for more than a century. There were no more empty places on the American map, but that didn’t matter to me, not when there were so many empty places in the map of my brain.

I sometimes forgot that there was life outside the Pacific Crest Trail. I had everything I needed right here: female com
panionship, trees, stories, and even music. In the deepest woods, Allison entertained me with atonal renditions of death metal songs. One of her favorites was a Covenant song about Lucifer:

“Satan is his name,” she screeched as she hiked through a waterfall’s refreshing mist. “Across the bridge of death. There he waits in flames!”

Then she made a scary face. Sometimes she would bang her head, toss around her hair, or flash the sign of the Beast. Those were the good old times. In the midst of all this scenery and interesting music, I was starting to lose sight of the civilized world. But Allison sometimes ruined the spell by trying to engage me in serious discussions about our future in this “other” world, the one I could no longer picture. Lately, she could not stop thinking about jobs and other unmentionables.

“I miss the city sometimes,” she said. “I get so bored. Where do you think we’ll live when this is over? What do you think we’ll do? I’m thinking it might be cool to live near Boston. I’m thinking we might get jobs at the Quincy
Patriot Ledger.
It’s supposed to be a really good newspaper.”

“The Quincy
Patriot Ledger
?” I shot back. “Why do you want to talk about that stuff now out here, where it’s beautiful?”

“Whatever,” she said. “You shouldn’t make fun of me just because I know what I want to do with my life when this is over. I just want to go out and
do
things, you know?” We’d had this conversation many times before. “It’s okay to have ambitions,” she often told me. “I have a classmate from J-school, a friend of mine, who went to Germany to be a newsman and almost got blown up in a car bomb. The secret to that kind of success is drive.” Sometimes her work ethic baffled me. Before we left on the trail, I eavesdropped on her having a phone conversation in which she scolded a friend for whining about working occasional twelve-hour days. “Working twelve hours is not
that
bad,” she told the person on the end of the line. “It’s not that much more than eight.”

Unwanted talks about jobs and the future reminded me of a life I didn’t want to think about. Worst of all, Allison intimated several times that we would probably have to get off the trail for an extended period in the next couple of weeks. Her anthology was about to be published. The book editors had warned her that she must be available off the trail to go over the final edits. This meant we would have to leave the PCT for at least a week. Never mind that we were running late, never mind that winter storms would crush us if we dallied. But I blocked out all she said. As far as I was concerned, the world of jobs and responsibilities was becoming an abstraction. She might as well have been talking about lizards on the moon. The journey, and Allison, were the only things I could picture. There was nothing to do but walk the trail.

We spent one morning climbing to Glen Pass. After slipping and sliding on loose pebbles and ice, we reached the top, where the pale blue sky faded to pastel-pink above the mountains. Hundreds of feet below, spyglass lakes gleamed from a hundred sockets. Loose bits of rock gave way to snowfields and sentinel rocks stacked on top of one another, forming an ominous ridge. It was hard to fix my gaze on any object. My eyes moved back and forth from scattered forests to white cones, and ink-dark ponds between them.

Climbing down the other side, Allison and I saw a few hikers slouching uphill. One man was painfully alone. On his face was a look of total resentment. Though Allison gave him a supportive nod, I could not help but judge him. Clearly he did not know the rules of the backcountry, I thought, and now the trail was taking a switch to his velvety-soft behind. A few minutes later, several Brownie-age girls tromped past us with exterior-frame packs on their backs and genocide in their eyes. No one smiled. In a shady glen, we met a sweet and aging couple carrying a gadget that emitted a shrill sound similar to the “voice” of a male mosquito. “Somehow it drives the preg
nant girl mosquitoes away before they can bite us,” the man said. “It cost eight bucks and it works just great.” Allison and I were impressed, though I can’t say the same for the mosquitoes, which crawled all over the man and his wife.

After meeting these other hikers, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the age of access was such a good thing. Now that highways girdle America, it’s easier than ever to get yourself killed in the backcountry. Sometimes I feared for the safety and well-being of my fellow travelers, but I also laughed at them. After all, the Lois and Clark Expedition had walked here all the way from Los Angeles. Though it pains me to say this now, I felt superior to the rubes who drove in their minivans. Since I’d already gone through what they were experiencing then, I thought I’d earned the right to snigger at their travails. I assumed my own initiation was over.

Meanwhile, we kept meeting unlucky and credulous people who transformed John Muir’s Range of Light into their personal Mordor, a purgatory in the pines. One day, we met a sufferer who trumped all the rest.

We’d stopped for the evening in Woods Creek Camp, with several cleared tent spots close to the rushing waters. The camp was shady, under tall trees, with a view of the Woods Creek Suspension Bridge, which shimmied every time a hiker walked across it. The camp had bear boxes, so we didn’t have to worry about a marauding
Ursus americanus
for one night. We were hanging out by our tent, tying the rain flap down over the top of it, when we heard moaning sounds emanating from a nearby tent. The panting got faster. The fellow, I assumed, was spending some quality time with himself, but when he emerged from the tent, it was clear that he was grunting out of misery, not pleasure. He was shaking all over.

“Is something wrong?” Allison asked him.

“It’s not a question of something being wrong,” said the man we would come to call Oedipus Rex, behind his back of
course. Brown bangs winged into his eyes. “It’s a question of everything going wrong that can go wrong, and some things going wrong that could not go wrong.”

“Do you need any help?” Allison said. “We’ve got extra food. We were thinking of making s’mores.”

“S’mores?” The man grunted. “All I’ve got is ramen crumbs—and I’m almost out.”

Still shivering, he told us his sad story. He was from New York City. He wasn’t much into hiking or survivalism, but he’d heard about the glorious John Muir Trail and was curious. A few months ago, he’d won a round-trip first-class ticket to California. “I figured it was my chance to see something pretty,” he said, “so I decided to fly here and hike the JMT. The thing is I forgot my sunglasses. On Muir Pass, there’s snow on either side for over a mile and a half, and if you stare at the glare it’ll burn out your cornea. And that’s what I did. I got snow-blinded temporarily, seeing white. I finally got the idea to hold a piece of paper in front of my face with a slit in it to see through, but it’s hard to walk with a piece of paper in front of your face.”

“I’m so sorry,” Allison said.

“Anyways, I also realized that I’d forgotten my sunscreen, and another hiker gave me an extra bottle, but by that point I’d burned my hand so bad it got infected. After my hand got burned, I knew that things could not get worse, but guess what, they did. One night I forgot to stake my tent down. The wind swooped it up like a kite, and I had to chase it for a mile cross-country, over some steep shit, and then I scraped the fuck out of my knees.”

“Um,” I said, “we’ve got some disinfectant in a tube if you want…”

“Also, I didn’t bring a goddamned ice ax, so I had to climb Donahue Pass on my hands and knees, barehanded, in ice and snow, ’cause I wasn’t wearing any gloves. And then it turned out to be the wrong fucking pass.”

“Well,” Allison said, nodding her head in a sweet and encouraging way, while smiling and pointing to the man’s fancy-looking bait-and-tackle stash. Nothing brought out the gentle side of her like someone suffering. She couldn’t bear to see anyone in pain. “At least you’re getting fresh fish for dinner every night.”

“No, I’m not,” he said, annoyed. “I never learned to fish”

“Isn’t there anybody who can help you?” Allison said. “Don’t you have a hiking partner?”

“Nobody,” he said. “Ten days in the wild and I’ve lost my mind. I’ve started talking to squirrels. And the worst part of it, they’ve started talking back.”

I stood there for a while. For just a fraction of a second, I wondered what might happen to me if Allison left me behind and forced me to walk in the woods alone. Would I start hallucinating and singing with marsupials? America’s first Caucasian settlers thought the woods were a scary place where demons dwelled. Devils hid in the rocks. But I shook the thought out of my mind, reminding myself that it was this guy’s fault for being here alone, having a bad attitude, and being so unprepared.

The conversation petered out, and Allison and I took our leave of Oedipus Rex. For a while we sat outside our tent in stunned silence. We wondered to ourselves: How much effort would it take to transform this gentle garden into someone’s personal hell? Seeing Oedipus Rex made me redouble my efforts to enjoy every second of this experience.

The next day I felt sad that Oedipus Rex wasn’t enjoying his adventure the way we were. Thinking of his sad example made me revel in every rock cornice, every diamond of scattered light. The Lois and Clark Expedition pushed on, over slopes without trees, past boulders and a troop of marmots in the sun. The marmots looked like guinea pigs but were the size of small dogs, with russet-colored fur and the ability to stand on their hind legs while whistling through
O
-shaped mouths.
At the time I was sure they were greeting us, offering up the forest’s good tidings, but who knows what they were thinking? After all, marmots are inscrutable, and capable of rampages. They love to attack parked cars, gnaw holes in the cars’ tubing, and drink the coolant and brake fluid. The deadly chemicals do not harm them. I didn’t know this then.

As we continued our nature walk, Allison spied two Belding’s ground squirrels, living Beanie Babies chickering in the bushes, playing tag. They were cute, with their sniffy noses, furry bodies, and little arms bent forward in repose. I wished I could be one of them, so free and happy, cavorting in the bushes. I did not know at the time that they were furry sociopaths who practiced infanticide just for the protein and whose females would sometimes take the nurslings of other ground squirrels and murder them on the spot.
*
I moved through the lives of animals and the forests that contained them like a stranger who knew nothing of the language. My ignorance was pleasant. The hiking was steep and strenuous, but the living was easy. We watched a rabbit-eared mule deer in a field at sunset, and walked along the slow waters that wormed through the meadow at dusk. The air was as cool and dry as John Muir had promised in his diaries. Even when Allison slipped and fell on a muddy bank, the land reached up to receive her body like a cradle; her landing was soft. Our lives were an indulgent fantasy.

Below Muir Pass, a rock bowl held our own lake. It had no name that I knew of, so I named it after the Lois and Clark Expedition. Clouds got caught in the bowl. They misted themselves across our tent. That night we discussed only our silliest dreams. “You have a gift for baking,” Allison said. “You could
make pies.” She wondered if we might one day open up a bed-and-breakfast-brewery-bakeshop-bookstore and call it a B and B and B and B and B. I talked about dusting off a silly science fiction novel I wrote at sixteen, some dreadful
Narnia–Lord of the Rings
hybrid about a collection of magic books that control the Earth’s elements. The evil Umglots steal the books and plot world destruction. “Why not go back and rewrite that book and sell it?” Allison said. “It could be huge.”