The Cactus Eaters (32 page)

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll take it easy with you for a little bit.”

The next morning, Todd and I and his two buddies were walking away from the misted lake, through Union Gap. “It’s pure insanity to run through a place like this,” Todd said. “Don’t you think so? I mean, what the hell’s the point? What would that prove? To rush through a place like this, and then it’s all
gone. Who knows what the future will bring? Who knows if you’ll even be in this place again?” I agreed—it was really very nice here, but it struck me that Todd hadn’t changed. It seemed he’d merely shifted, refocusing that same old fervor 180 degrees. As we walked on, at an inchworm’s pace, Todd stared at a distant summit and his eyes started watering. “Holy shit,” he said, his cheeks turning red. “That’s just unbelievable. Goddamn it, holy shit, it is almost…it’s almost fucking unbearable.” I remember thinking, why yes, it is a very pretty place, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “unbearable.”

But Todd wasn’t talking mountains. He was talking about his crotch. “I’ve got this weird pain,” he said, bending down, clutching his groin. He folded his hands on his belly. “I’ll tell you what this is, Dan. It’s a fucking hernia. It’s been acting up for a while, but never this badly. I’d laugh if it didn’t hurt so much, because it’s so goddamned funny, the fact that this has to happen now, after all this time, when I’m almost done with the trail.”

One of his friends stopped him then. “I hate to say it,” the man said, “but I think it’s time to get real. I don’t think you’re gonna finish the trail this year.”

Todd looked stricken at the thought of going home. But he seemed to know it was inevitable. “Yeah, you’re probably right,” he said. He was in no state to walk that day so we pitched an emergency camp in a clearing. In the evening Todd saw me struggle with a large food bag packed with candy treats. I had been splurging on sugar, with several pounds of Hershey’s Cookies and Mint, Snicker’s bars, and Mounds. Todd looked at my grub bag, with strewn-about junk-food wrappers, and grimaced. “Why did you want to bring all that junk on the trail, Dan?” he said. “Haven’t you learned anything?”

For just a second, the old boastful Todd had returned, and so had the old peevish Dan, the envious one who spread unkind nicknames around. His eyes flashed at me, my eyes flashed on
his, and for just a moment, the meanness came back, and with it, a gleeful sense of schadenfreude. But then he softened, and I softened, and we both backed off, and we smiled at each other. He pulled himself back into his tent. I wished him farewell, and the best of luck, and I really meant it.

But I was gone, heading north at first light, before they were even awake.

M
y 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail hike began in a desert and ended with a flood. A downpour came, and rarely let up for four days. Even the garter snakes and slugs dove for cover. Rain clouds sealed the mountains. I spent the night in a car camp, and watched the campers dig canals in the mud around their tents to channel the falling water into a lake below us. The muddy dikes burst, and the water spread out, washing over tents and people. A man tried to cook a meal in his tent that night to stay dry, but the flames seared a hole through the roof. The tent went up, and the man scrambled out of his miniature Hindenburg. The next morning I hiked on, and in rare moments when the rain stopped, I ran through the fields in search of large rocks in patches of sun. When I found one, I flung my tent and clothes across the boulders to dry.

One afternoon, the fog spilled from the mountains in a slow gravy, so thick you couldn’t see the treetops. Frogs flumped from puddle to puddle. Cold dampness sank into my shirt. The guidebook raved about Glacier Peak, known to Native Ameri
cans as Da Kobad, the Great White Mother Mountain. The mountain was just above the trail, according to the book, but there was nothing to see. The mist was so thick the trail could have led me straight through the streets of Elizabeth, New Jersey, and I’d have been none the wiser. In a clearing with the clouds close on, I’d had enough. I had no more dry clothes to wear, and every inch of me was mud-spattered. Such a waste, I thought, to pass through God’s country and find myself stuck in a cloud bank. I started bellowing to God, or whoever was listening. “Come on. This is a waste of my time. I’ve been through a lot to be here, and I’ve come all this way. I could have quit a thousand times but I didn’t, and the least you could do is give me one little lousy glimpse of the North Cascades. I don’t see why that’s so much to ask. Why don’t you do me a favor and make these fucking clouds lift, just for one second, so I can see something.”

I sighed at the futility of my tantrum, and regretted my use of the F bomb in a petition to God. I sat down on a boulder to rest my thoughts. And suddenly, the sky changed. The sun came out, and it looked as if someone had pulled the plug on the fog chamber. The rainstorm stopped, not incrementally, but dead. Clouds broke like smoke around Glacier Peak until the mountain lifted its head up high and assembled itself in patches of brightness, starting with the base, then rising to the middle, and tapering, until the whole mountain flashed like fire. Glacier Peak made a burning crown with the sun behind it. A pine forest spread across its base. As the sun came down on the trees below the mountain, the forest looked as if it were burning. As I stared at the peak, I could barely move or even breathe. After several minutes, when I’d regained my senses, I managed to reach in my pack and remove the lens of my monstrous Pentax K1000 camera, but an even coat of mist had pressed itself into the glass like a ghostly thumbprint. This moment wasn’t meant to be photographed.

I didn’t hike the rest of the day. I just staggered, and could not get the vision out of my mind, even when I sank in the fizz of Kennedy Hot Springs, which smelled like the Devil cooking breakfast, but I felt safe, in spite of the scent of eggs and rot around me. I was warm enough, though the rain was coming down hard again. Glacier Peak’s thermal vents heated the springs around me. The waters fizzed, and lulled me into semiconsciousness. My face was cold, and so were my shoulders, but the rest of me sank in warm murk. I slept in the water for hours.

My old life waited over the next horizon. I could not—would not—think about it. It would just happen, and I would deal with it then. For now, all I could think about was Dirty Dan, and the fact that his habitat was damned-near gone. Up ahead of me, the 2,650 miles of Pacific Crest Trail suddenly turned into fifteen miles, then ten, then nine, and before I knew it, it was the last day ever on the trail, in a meadow with the rain fly lying limp across my tent. Two mule deer stood in a clearing before me, ignoring the rain, ignoring me, chewing devil’s club thorns.

On the last day of the trail, I don’t remember the landscape, the trees, or even the quality of the trail tread. All I can remember was flying across that trail, unable to stop myself from running to the end, my backpack bashing against me as if trying to slow me down as I pushed myself faster. I wanted to be mindful of all this, savor the moment, and think about what it meant, but for some reason I could do none of those things, so I sprinted down the rows of final switchbacks, never slowing no matter how much my knees ached. And when I’d used up the last hairpin curve, the trail shot me out toward a clear-cut gap in the trees, marking the border between America and Canada. I found myself in a clearing, and there in the clearing was Monument 78, scraped-up, battleship gray, only four and a half feet tall and shaped like the Washington Monument.

Though I tried to restrain myself, I ran screaming toward
the monument, while wondering who might try to stop me now, and why this was easy after everything before it had been so hard. I half-expected a self-repatriated grizzly from British Columbia to sideswipe me at the last second. I accelerated, even faster, until I was only twenty feet from the monument, then fifteen feet, than five feet, then no feet at all. I reached out and touched that monument—in fact, I whapped it with my fist so it made a hollow
plong!
And then, for reasons that weren’t clear to me then, I burst into a loud Hebrew prayer, the Shma.

I must have sung the Shma fifty times before my voice quit. I threw down my pack and began to dance around Monument 78, shaking my shoulders, doing a rough jig. Think of the jitterbugging apes circling the black obelisk in the first scene of
2001: A Space Odyssey
. Beyond reason, I unscrewed my Nalgene bottle and dumped my last container of filtered spring water all over the monument, as if to consecrate it. I had no witnesses, no one to snap my picture. Instead of bemoaning this fact, I lifted off the obelisk’s detachable top to glance at the notes in the hollow base. Such was my exhaustion that I could barely lift the top. It nearly gave me groin-pull. Finally I set the top on the ground, and there in a hollow were hundreds of notes from hikers who had made it this far. Some were fresh. Others bore the smudges of a hundred thumbings.

Far up in the pile I found a note from Uphill Bill, the speed demon who’d traveled with me and Jayne through the clear-cuts south of Snoqualmie Pass.

“I finished the trail today as I started it: alone and uncertain,” Uphill Bill had written, in a note dated September 9.
“I learned much along the way about stamina, about mental toughness required for 20-plus mile days, about the beauty of the forest and the kindness of strangers. The most important and terrible lesson I learned too late. When one shows weakness before one’s inner demons, one pays a terrible price, as do those one professes to love. Happy trails and inner peace.”

Inner demons? I swallowed heavily. Why on earth had he finished the trail alone? Why wasn’t Jayne with him? I would find out, much later, secondhand, that Jayne and Bill were seen finishing the trail separately, and that Jayne was spotted all alone, crying, near Manning Park lodge. I also heard that the two of them boarded a bus together out of town. That’s all I ever got. I never found out what had caused the falling-out. A dozen other notes had similar existential anguish. “I’ve tried this wilderness lifestyle,” one read, “and I knew that in a perfect world it is all that would be asked of me, but the world is not perfect, so now I will be thrust back to a world that doesn’t know, doesn’t understand, and doesn’t care.”

“Wow,” I thought. “That was one sorry-ass hiker.” I looked around to see if he’d strung himself up in sight of Monument 78. Thank God, then, for the Gingerbread Man, who had left an open letter to all the hikers who came after him:

“I don’t get all this ‘hate to leave the trail’ mail,” he said. “People’s lives must really suck in the cities but if it wasn’t for civilization churning out dry food, light equipment, money, and the trail itself, we couldn’t even be here.” He ended his note with a poem.

I reread his note and snickered, while still waiting against hope for someone to come along and take my picture. Nothing doing. At last I sat down and left a little note of my own.

In retrospect, the note strikes me as glib. The truth is I had
no idea
what the moment meant then. When you cross a finish line, there is supposed to be that “Zap!” feeling, when the significance whams into you, knocking you over with its profundity. That did not happen at Monument 78. It would take months, years even, before I began to digest the moment. It was too big to see. I felt something there but couldn’t put a name to it. Nevertheless, I stuffed the note in the hollows of Monument 78, as if I’d figured it out already, as if I’d said all there was to say about it.

And I was just about to walk back in the woods when I remembered to lift the detachable top and put it back on the monument. Perhaps my hands were too sweaty from excitement, or maybe my arm strength failed me, but when I tried
to raise it back up, the top of the monument slipped from my hands and fell to earth with a great
bonk
. “Dammit!” I said. I seemed to have left quite a scrape and a dent, though it’s possible they were there already. Dropping a part of Monument 78 felt like a minor act of unintentional sacrilege. I vowed to make penance, perhaps by donating my time to the Pacific Crest Trail Association. But first I had to put the goddamned top back on the obelisk. This time, with every last strength in my legs and back, I hoisted the top in place. I circled the monument another time, partially to savor the moment, partially to search for additional damage.

Then my business with the Pacific Crest Trail was over. I pulled my pack onto my shoulders, drank the last drop from my almost-empty Nalgene bottle, and headed for civilization.