The Cactus Eaters (30 page)

I woke to a flooded tent but did not care. I leaned my head out and let the water wash me down. At that moment, less than two miles from the end of my California trail, my home state belonged to me for the first time. Just ahead in the mist to the north lay the San Gabriel Mountains, the mountains I’d crossed already. The blue-ridge outline was as sharp and clear as a paper cutout. As I thought back on eating a cactus, the good times and rages with Allison, the tortured stories of Doctor John, the lipstick sunsets, arthropods, and all those bottles of Tylenol, I knew that every one of those memories had led straight up to this. At that moment, it all seemed well worth the effort. “Now the whole state lies trussed up and salted like a pig in a freezer,” I said to my journal.

Allison was not there to see this happen. At my moment of triumph and self-realization, she was still stuck in the Midwest doing boring things, trying to find work, experiencing drudgery. In her most recent letter to me, which I carried in my backpack, she told me that she’d scraped up her car because she “spazzed out trying to get it into the garage because my
dad had set up this barricade of toxic chemical containers, so now part of the bumpers came loose in the front. He knows this wastrel drunk who has a body shop in a bad part of town who’s going to fix it for cheap.”

Her absence was the only hole in that moment. Standing next to a barbed-wire fence, I knew there was no more California left to walk.

This she would have liked.

She should have been there to see it all.

A
cloud, its belly full of thunder, followed me down the Devil’s Peak Trail. I had been alone on the trail in southern Oregon for two weeks, starting my push toward the Canadian border, and my mind was making figments, fooling me with visions and shapes in the underbrush and through openings in the trees. For the past few nights, something, perhaps a spirit, had been calling out of the black. I’d heard a cry in the woods, familiar but not quite human. It’s strange how fast you can get onto the Pacific Crest Trail and lose yourself in its world. After finishing up California, I’d taken a long bus ride from Southern California to Ashland, Oregon, begged a hitchhike ride to the trail head, and set out north on red volcanic soil, past the upraised fist of Pilot Rock. And here I was on the Devil’s Peak in Bigfoot country, trying to outrun a cloud, the dark shape above me holding steady, letting loose. Thunder made the foothills tremble. Out in the South Cascades, rainstorms can sneak up on you. How many times did I see shapes in the periphery, and nameless things move through the woods at night?

I started to wonder if the spirits were following me here, and whether all this solitude was turning my brain into pudding. With no one to talk to, I talked to whatever was on hand. Lodgepole pines. Shelf mushrooms. Rock formations. Every once in a while I’d pass a small herd of hikers out walking for the weekend, but for the most part it was me, alone, my boots sinking in five inches of pumice ash in the Oregon Desert, fending off the Clark’s nutcrackers who begged for food, and staring down at the mirror-flat expanse of Crater Lake with Wizard Island rising like a skullcap from the center of it. The lake lay in the deep hole that was once Mount Mazama, one of Oregon’s tallest mountains until a volcanic explosion caused it to collapse and fold into itself. Tourists, when I saw them, frightened me. One of them, near Crater Lake, wanted to take my picture, perhaps because I looked like a common ancestor, bent over and hollow-eyed, at a loss for words. It’s not that I was unhappy there or even lonely. On the contrary, most days were comfortable, the tread soft, the hills forgiving, the nights dreamless and short. The local peepers would lull me to sleep with their soft cries: “Tree-ark! Scree, scree, scree!” Sometimes these hidden beings would peep too loudly for my liking, and I’d scream for them to “shut up, please,” and they would do as I told them, zipping their little mouths—or mandibles, or whatever they had. Out in the Cascades, these unseen frogs and insects were the majority, and yet they respected me. I had no real complaints. It’s just that I wanted nothing to do with other humans anymore.

The scenery was so odd, I wondered if I was seeing things, making it all up. In Oregon I crossed creeks full of mineral sediments that stained the water white, making it look like lowfat milk. I climbed Mount Thielsen, “the lightning rod of the Cascades,” zapped so many times that electrical charges had fused the rock crystals on its summit, forming a murky glass. I was starting to camp in places that were peculiar, even for me.
On top of bushes, for example. I’d hoist the tent atop some piece of shrubbery and lie inside it, looking down at the world six feet below me. And there was no one there to tell me this was wrong. Even my gait was protosimian now, a lurch from side to side because of my awkward load. For the past couple of weeks, I’d been plopping sticks, rocks, and other heavy things into my backpack. Feeling bereft, missing my girlfriend, I decided to pack out representative samples of each trail section, including leaves and pebbles. I did this so I could stick these sundry objects into a box at the next trail junction and send them back home to Allison, so she could assemble her own miniature version of the trail. Maybe that’s not normal. In fact, Allison was starting to worry about my sanity. In her most recent missives—which I also carried around with me in my backpack—she told me to take a few deep breaths and center myself, and to fight all irrational impulses.

But her warnings could not stop me from crafting dolls from yellow-green moss that hung from hemlock branches or smearing huckleberry juice all over my hair, body, and T-shirt, for reasons that did not make sense even to me. She could not stop me from inventing imaginary hiking partners, such as Snoop Doggy Dogg. Up in the Cascades, they’ve got a strange little mountain called Three Fingered Jack. It looks like an upright glove with some digits snipped off. The spires are so slender and delicate that climbers who’ve stood on the top say they shivered underfoot. That afternoon I tried to engage Three Fingered Jack in a long conversation about a friend of mine who had poor dating judgment. I don’t know why this subject entered my head, but I found myself shouting into the nothingness. “Why does she have to be such a slut?” I screamed. “Why is she so stupid? Why doesn’t she realize these dirtbags are just using her? Why, why, why?”

I paused for a while, giving my throat a rest, and when I turned around, some guy was just sitting there on a rock smirking and listening. He held a thick leash fastened to the neck of a fat dog. The fat dog was impatient, wanting to continue the walk, but the guy was waiting for me to say more, as if this were some Off-Off-Broadway show and the intermission was over. “Go on,” he said. “This is cool.”

“I didn’t know anyone was listening to me!” I said.

I ran into the forest alone and embarrassed. Socialization is a series of corrective electric shocks administered for bad behavior. You learn from experience not to babble to yourself or say idiotic things that will bring cocktail parties to a standstill or make your girlfriend bar the door to her bedroom. In the woods, all corrections cease, and peculiar tendencies grow thick as kudzu. On the rare occasions when I saw people out on the trail, they hurried out of my way, as if I exuded a psychic smell they didn’t like. It wasn’t that I was lonely, exactly. Most of the time, the walking and the views filled me up just as much as
human companionship. But the more I hiked, the more adrift I felt. Once, I was standing murmuring on a hillside affording marvelous views of Mount Jefferson and other crags while taking a lengthy and seemingly solitary piss against a rock. A backpacker came up out of nowhere and said hi very loudly. The shock of his voice made me pull up my shorts while I was in the midst of peeing, leaving an enormous wet blotch on them while he started talking to me, on and on, as if nothing amiss had taken place. That day, I ran into several other southbound hikers, who talked to me so nonchalantly, as if they didn’t notice the enormous Africa-shaped stain on the crotch of my shorts, but I knew they were spreading rumors about me. I knew they were telling all passersby about the Crotch-stained Man heading north. And so I finally decided to hide from other hikers altogether. I would sit for hours by the sides of creeks watching the spasmodic motions of river otters. Sometimes I’d search the bushes for a river’s tributary and find it pulsing from the ground, then imagine swimming against the current until I reached the center of the earth. I pushed north. South Sister sagged with snow. Lava rocks rose in black tunnels, looking hot and moist in the sun, like fresh horseshit. It was as if the Belknap Crater, the cinder cone to the north, had disgorged this mess last week, not three millennia ago. I saw no vegetation on the lava field, only the occasional spider, laden with eggs, rappelling down a lava knob.

And all the while, I remembered Allison’s fears for my sanity, and remembered that in our phone conversations, I simply did not know what to say to her, that my mind was lost in the wilds of Oregon, that it was impossible to tell her about my experiences in a way that she could understand. And so she came to the conclusion that I was unglued, detaching myself from my life before and after the trail. On I hiked, toward Santiam Pass and its own history of detachment. It was originally named Hogg Pass, for Colonel E. T. Hogg, who tried to turn
the small Oregon town of Newport into a thriving metropolis. He claimed he would do so by running a railway line over the Cascades and across North America. The trouble was Mr. Hogg couldn’t stir up investor interest, so he tried to do the thing himself, hiring cheap Chinese labor to build eleven miles of track across the Cascade summit. When the task was over, Hogg told would-be investors that his railroad line had finally breached the Cascades. It was no lie—but what Hogg failed to tell them was that the line wasn’t connected to anything on either side. He never built the rest of his railway. Sharp-eyed walkers can still see those eleven miles of rails to nowhere rotting in the hills.

That, sometimes, is what my own trail felt like, a phantom rail, bound to strand me. Imagine feeling the most loneliness and most rapture you have ever felt, but the feelings are inseparable. It’s not that there was anything unpleasant about being in the Northwest alone. Quite the contrary. In truth, I will always remember those days as some of the happiest and most relaxing of my life. All the while I kept Allison’s letters in my pocket, each one of them a reminder. Sometimes she urged me to be as present as I could be on the trail. “You must…consecrate yourself wholly to each day as though a fire were raging in your hair,” she wrote, quoting the “Zen Master Dashimaru.” But then, in the same letter, she urged me to move to a big city with her.

I liked the fact that she wanted to think about location more than a dream job. And yet I could not bear the thought of a job. In the woods, it occurred to me for the first time that Allison was entering into settling-down mode, and that marriage and children were looming and inevitable. To my surprise, I realized that this thought did not appeal to me. I wasn’t ready to follow her to a nesting place. In fact, the more I walked alone into the woods, the more I became curious about screwing around, literally and figuratively. As much as I loved her, I couldn’t face the fact that my wild times were going to end. The closer I came to Canada, the more I longed for callow promiscuity.

My eye had started to wander a bit in the past year; during my break from the trail in central California, I’d flirted with attractive baristas and flaky female substitute teachers. I found myself drawn to women who were the anti-Allison. If Allison was forthright, curvy, and ambitious and was willing to eat any kind of food, then I longed for independently wealthy hippie girls with food allergies. If she represented stability, then I wanted someone unreliable, a woman who would get me into trouble. I loved Allison, but at the same time I sometimes wondered what it would be like to be “free,” whatever that meant.

When at last I reached Mount Hood, robed in glaciers and belching sulfur, I had been walking through Oregon for almost a month. Sometimes I would walk with loose, disorganized bands of walkers, usually a group out doing a small chunk of trail. In one of these humble collectives, I walked down the Columbia River Gorge on the Eagle Creek Trail, waterfalls smashing off the side, the trail routing me through a dark tunnel behind a cataract, alongside a drop so sheer
I grabbed hold of wet rusty chains to keep from falling. I stomped to the town of Cascade Locks, the lowest point of the trail, near sea level, and marched across the Bridge of the Gods, once a land bridge, now a steel span across the Columbia River, which rushed beneath my boots at eighty-eight million gallons an hour. From there I plunged ever deeper into the Cascades of southern Washington. Though I would like to rhapsodize about them, they hid themselves in fog, except for the broken remnants of Mount St. Helens, to the west, an obscene-looking thing, like a disembodied chicken claw. For the most part when I think of the Cascades, I think of things that I didn’t have to strain my eyes to see: horny toads, hemlock forests, buttes, lightning fires, sumps, ponds, fishermen on piers on backcountry lakes with gut buckets and cans of cheese bait, the watery flavor of a salmon berry, Clark’s nutcrackers grabbing Doritos from my hand, the puzzle-piece bark of a ponderosa pine, and the way brown mushrooms cupped rainwater like chalices. I think of elk, big as draught horses, flattening the bear grass in their rush up a canyon wall. One early evening, I sat in the shade of a madrone, behind a rhododendron stalk, and watched a pine marten slink across the trail. Mount Rainier rose up shining. I scaled the Goat Rocks, all that remained of another wrecked mountain, once as glorious as Mount Hood. There I watched white-bearded mountain goats a hundred feet away on talus blocks above the tree line. Something startled the goats. They turned and ran up an eighty-degree wall. Even the kids charged up it. I did not know that mountain goats have suction cups for feet, or that they make use of tiny toeholds in the rock. It looked to me like they were floating up that cliff face. They slipped one by one through a crack in the mountain.