by Bill Walker
Every year she orders fifty cots to be set up under huge tarps in her backyard, along with two RV’s. One of the RV’s is outfitted with computers, kitchen facilities, and a shower (sign up on the wall), all operating on a backup generator she has installed. Because Agua Dulce has no post office she has turned her garage into a state-of-the art system for handling the many packages of food, shoes, equipment, maps, etc. Multiple washing machines and dryers are in constant use. Rather than a nightly charge, donations are into a jar on the honor system. All I can say is that I hope like heck she and her husband break even, because the expense is considerable.
The maximum stay is two nights, unless injured. It quickly became clear this rule was a necessary evil. Hikers get very comfortable here after 100 grueling miles through the desert, and don’t want to be thrust right back into the oven so soon. She regularly has to shush people on out of here, and back into the desert.
I didn’t fit in any of the available bunks, which visibly bothered Donna.
“Skywalker, set your tent up right here,” pointing to a plot of grass right in front of her house. The second night she found me an extra-long cot under one of the tents that, to my great surprise, I fit in.
The hiker box (where hikers throw away excess or dysfunctional gear) at the Saufleys blew my mind. Mountains of shoes, some of them looking like they had been worn just a few times, were stacked up in a huge box. The box just for New Balance shoes, the most widely worn brand on the trail, was especially bulging. Obviously, the desert had been hell on a lot more than just my feet.
Donna knew that. They immediately had me soaking my feet in a machine that soaks your feet in hot salt water. She also allowed me to stay an extra night, which you had to justify. She was determined that her place would be about getting you ready to hike—not partying. Unfortunately, others had some different ideas.
“Where did they all go?” Donna asked in surprise.
“They’re all doing the 24 beer thing,” somebody answered.
“What 24 beer thing?” Donna asked sharply.
“You know—the tradition where everybody drinks the 24 beers in 24 miles.”
“No, I don’t know about any 24 beer tradition,” Donna said, sounding alarmed.
A group of raging alpha males had been sitting around a circle that day drinking beers; someone had dreamt up the fantasy that PCT hikers traditionally try to drink 24 beers in the 24 mile stretch from the Saufleys to the legendary Anderson’s hostel.
“Chopper and Savior aren’t in that group, are they?” Donna quickly asked.
“Yes, they are,” somebody answered.
“I can’t believe it,” Donna visibly cringed.
I soon learned that Chopper and Savior’s mother had died several years ago in that exact section they were now hiking. She had gotten lost and died from hypothermia. Now her two accident-prone sons were attempting to drink 24 beers each, in the section where she had perished. Perhaps Donna had reason to worry.
“Skywalker, Skywalker, hey, which one is Skywalker?”
“Here I am.”
It was 4 o’clock in the morning, and it was a bit alarming to be awakened in such a frantic way. The previous night I had chatted extensively to an African-American former Special-Forces soldier named Pete. Between the cold fog that had blown in and the ample quantities of alcohol he had consumed, he couldn’t find me in the sea of cots.
“Where’s the trail go out of here?” Pete asked hurriedly. After groggily giving him a basic route, I asked, “You’re not going now, are you?”
“Yeah, I’ve got to catch up with those other guys.”
“Wait til’ morning and I’ll go with you,” I said.
“I’ve gotta’ go now,” Pete said, and hurried off in the thick fog.
However, it wasn’t to be the last I saw of him today. A few hours later, a car pulled up to the Saufleys. None other than Pete emerged, with blood pouring from his knee.
“What happened?”
“Got hit by a car,” Pete said matter-of-factly.
Donna immediately took over and had him icing his knee and a doctor’s appointment.
“Who did it?” someone asked him.
“Oh, it was just a bunch of kids,” he said offhandedly. “They didn’t see me. It’s all good, no worries.”
Pete’s calmness in this crucible earned him the trail name, No Pain.
No Pain then sat there regaling us with stories of his days in Special Ops, tumbling out of airplanes, drinking urine, you name it. He was also a veteran Appalachian Trail hiker.
“Last December, I’m in my tent in Shenandoah National Park eating a pizza,” he recounted. “A male bear comes busting in there—you know males don’t hibernate in the winter the way females do. The bear threw my ass right out of my tent and ate my pizza.”
To nobody’s surprise, No Pain was soon back on the trail.
Chapter 15
The Andersons
Amazingly, after all the people at the Saufleys, I again found myself alone in the desert. Immediately, I got lost near some power lines and walked up a hill before noticing the footprints I had been following had given out. I scurried around worriedly, before spotting a familiar oval-shaped PCT sign down the hill to the left. God knows what would have happened if I had been hiking drunk at night like that group last night.
Rattlesnakes are fish-in-water in the desert;
you couldn’t say the same about hikers.
While I didn’t come across many humans, I did see plenty that I wasn’t terribly keen to see. I turned a corner and there traveled a rattler, sloping off the trail. Twenty yards later another one lay coiled up in the middle of the trail. Immediately, I backed up, making sure I wasn’t getting too near the previous one. Then, I just ran around the coiled snake which remained lying there in the middle of the trail. There was no sudden uncoiling of a serpent like in Greek mythology.
Like every hiker, I was trying to develop a better idea in my mind of the most likely places where you’d spot rattlesnakes. I never was able to develop a reliable profile, but there was a clear pattern as to when I saw them. It almost always was late in the afternoon after the worst heat of the day. This, not coincidentally, is when hikers are most active.
I was absolutely rocked; it was possibly the most unbelievable site I ever have seen, and maybe ever will see.
It had been a pretty good foot day—maybe a seven out of ten. My simple focus had been on the water cache at mile 18 for the day.
I turned a bend in the trail and in a clump of bushes to the left was the desert version of a haunted house. The Andersons. They had hung goblins and skeletons in all the bushes. Better yet, they had stashed plentiful gallons of water.
I scanned the area for 200 yards in both directions looking for suitable campsites. Unfortunately, the only place my two-person tent would fit was right in the middle of the PCT. So I had waited until right before dark to erect it. Of course, cougars wander around all over at night, including occasionally on the trail. But I had the thin membrane of my tent to protect me from any misunderstanding with them.
In the middle of the night, I got out of my tent to urinate. When I happened to look up at the sky, I was suddenly seized. The stars shined in a bolder, clearer fashion than I could have ever imagined. It honestly felt as though I was scanning the wide-arc of the heavens with a powerful telescope. Like humans in desert settings through the ages, I felt stirred to my greatest depths.
It was Sunday morning, and everybody looked pretty much gone already. No, not as in gone to church. They were gone as in drunk. And they were just getting started.
“I’m not going to stay here for long,” was my first reaction.
I’d hitchhiked into Green Valley, California, site of the PCT-famous hostel, Casa de Luna.
“Skywalker, get a shirt on,” several hikers, looking like Turkish sultans, encouraged me.
Over to the side was a big rack of Hawaiian shirts. Most of the dozen-or-so hikers sitting here
had arrived knee-walking drunk yesterday morning, including five of them who had successfully completed the 24 beer challenge. Needless to say, they were retelling the whole story for the umpteenth time. Soon a middle-aged woman emerged from the house.
“Welcome, I’m Terrie,” she introduced herself. “I hear you’ve got a foot injury. She immediately set me up soaking my feet in salt water.
As we sat there chatting, somebody suddenly yelled, “Terrie, here he comes!”
I looked over and saw a police car slowly passing right by their driveway. In what was obviously a well-honed routine, Terrie quickly placed her cigarette in her mouth, dropped her drawers, and revealed her ample rear-end right at the policeman. I say policeman; he was really a police boy—all of probably about 23, but looked 18. He looked like a little kid stealing a glance at a Playboy Magazine, he was so saucer-eyed. I soon noticed he rode by several times a day; he was probably new and that earned him the assignment from headquarters to keep his eye on this place, Casa de Luna.
The counter-culture element on any hiking trail is bound to be strong. Normally, however, it was integrated with the more de rigueur aspects of hiking. Here, though, it was on full display. I had been too young for Woodstock and the Age of Aquarius, so I reckon this was the closest I’d ever get to it.
Romances were struck up in this free-for-all atmosphere. One free-spirited hiker with a striking resemblance to the 1960’s musician, Tiny Tim, became interested in a Canadian hiker named Josephine. He was not only successful, but other hikers gushed for hundreds of miles at his effortless style in winning over this shapely girl. Another guy, Five Dollar, who was a Mormon (although you would never know it!) began an incendiary relationship with a girl named Not a Chance. This was impressive for the simple reason she had previously rebuffed other chatty male hikers with the memorable words, Not a Chance.
One group of hikers packed up their backpacks every morning to head back to the trail. However, after eating the pancakes Joe Anderson cooked for everybody, somebody would always crack a beer, followed by the sounds of other beer cans being opened. The kiss of death was sitting in the black sofa that everybody labeled the vortex. The manager, Doug, who is the single most laid-back human I’ve ever had the privilege to meet and who has yet to ever be seen in public without a beer in his hand, would laugh at them and say, “You’re not going anywhere.” He was almost always right.
By late afternoon, they would make their last lame statement, “I’m leaving after taco salad tonight.”
Finally, after the trail-famous taco salad dinner and a few more beers, they would hoist their backpacks and head back to the Magical Forest (the Anderson’s backyard) to cowboy camp.
Honestly though, several hikers never seemed to recover psychologically from the whole experience. To them, this was the summit of the PCT, not Mount Whitney or Forrester Pass in the Sierras, or Manning Park in Canada. Every future trail town was a letdown to them after the Andersons. They talked about it repeatedly hereafter. Some even suspiciously got lost in the desert after leaving here and called Joe and Terrie to come pick them back up.
Joe and Terrie Anderson, themselves, have a miraculous, unequivocal love for smelly hikers, and their hostel is one of the worthwhile attractions of the PCT. Honest-to-God, I never felt so welcome anywhere besides home.
Chapter 16
The Mojave Desert
The Mojave is the most sterile and repulsive
desert I have ever seen.
John C. Fremont
You can meet the damndest people in the desert. By that same line of reasoning, the Mojave should have the damndest people of all. But you had better know how to get along with them. They can play key roles.
A 47-mile dry stretch on the PCT is broken up by one lone redoubt that hikers pass by. It is at a place called Desert Bazaar, and is also the official entry point into the Mojave Desert. I wandered up to Desert Bazaar alone in the middle of the afternoon wondering what I had just stumbled on. What greeted me was a scene out of the Wild, Wild West, including the façade of a saloon, jail, post office, and library. What is all this?
When I saw the garage was open, I wandered in there to seek refuge from the bullying wind. Here, I met the strangest person on the entire PCT.
“What are you at my house for?” came the question rifled at me.
“Uh, well,” I stammered, “I was hoping to stay here tonight before heading off into the Mojave tomorrow.”
“Where are you going to stay?” he fired back.
“I see the RV’s,” I answered, “but it doesn’t look like I fit in the beds.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? I’ve got a long bed in the jail,”
“Oh, yeah. Is there anybody in there?”
“Yeah,” he said, “some drunk has been staying in there, but I’m tired of feeding him. Tell him he can get going.”
“Do I need a key?”
“No, go on in there.”
I wandered straight over into the building marked JAIL. When I looked inside the bars there was a child-sized bed with a doll in it. Score one for the owner over naïve me.
When I got back in the garage, some cooked pasta was waiting. “You want some pasta?” he asked sharply. “Yeah, that would be great.”
“Give me some money,” he held out his hand.
We got that straightened out and he then offered me a bucket and salt water for soaking my feet. As I sat there eating pasta and soaking my feet I thought, this guy’s not so bad. But that’s when he moved in for the kill.
“You know the problem with hikers,” he barked at me.
“Where would I even begin,” I countered.
“They don’t share their women,” he responded with great certitude. “There were two couples that had both of my RV’s rocking all night last night. And you’ll never believe what they did.”
“What?” I wondered.
“They never invited me in there to participate.”
The gentleman with whom I was interlocuting was the owner, Richard Tatum. He was in his mid-sixties and a spitting image of the comedian, Don Rickles. But Rickles had always seemed to have a rational side to him. The fellow in front of me appeared stark mad.
“The one thing I can’t stand though,” Richard said, “is when people don’t give me the respect I deserve. Nobody disses Big Dick.”
“You hear what I’m saying?” he asked. “Do you understand?”
“Yeah,” I said mildly, wondering where this was going.
“I’m Big Dick,” Richard shouted. “Do you believe me?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Let me show you,” he said, unzipping his pants.
“That’s okay,” I quickly said.
“Take a look at Big Dick.”
“No,” I pleaded.
I jerked my head away just a split-second before Big Dick could directly display his badge of manhood to me. Close call.
Quickly, I decided a better place to seek refuge from the stiff wind was outside of the garage behind a car. Left Field soon walked up with that expectant look hikers adopt after being out in the desert for a few days.
“Hey Skywalker,” he said, “what are you doing sitting here?”
“Just getting everything straight in my backpack for tomorrow.”
“Is the owner in there?”
Left Field and I had maintained a running verbal battle for a good while now, which we both enjoyed. He was only 21 years old, but his every move bespoke, “I’m in command of things.”
I decided this was a good time to test his mettle.
“Sure, go check in with him,” I responded, but gave him no heads-up of what to expect.
Ten minutes later he walked out and looked at me with a mixture of amusement and shock.
“Is it just me,” he asked, “or is this guy batshit crazy?”
We laughed in unison as he kept looking at me for a specific response.
“Did he, uh?” I began to ask.
“Yeah,” he
nodded with his face flushed.
Left Field had finally met his match in Big Dick.
Fortunately, we were to see that there was a lot more to Big Dick than his initial raffish behavior. Without this lonely, windswept outpost to provide some relief, traversing the Mojave would be quite a bit more complicated for a PCT hiker. Given the overall harshness, it’s not surprising that quite the mercurial character is the Mojave’s gatekeeper.
“The Mojave Desert offers a blend of splendor, stark beauty, and vast expanses not found anywhere else in the country,” wrote the Defenders of Wildlife. All I can say is it takes an especially romantic person or organization to have such a love-love relationship with the Mojave Desert.
Nonetheless, millions of Americans have chosen to live here. Las Vegas, with a population of nearly two million, is the largest city in the Mojave; almost a million people in the eastern Los Angeles metropolitan area live within the boundaries of the Mojave as well. Millions more flock annually to see the Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park, the lowest point in the entire United States (-282 feet).
Temperatures in the same place can easily vary 80 degrees in one day. Readings below zero degrees are common in the winter, but in the summer temperatures can easily exceed 130 degrees. Annual rainfall is usually less than five inches. The environment is simply inhospitable to human life, except in those oases created by modern irrigation techniques. Heck, it’s even harsh to animals judging by how few you see out there. And the ones you see are almost all poisonous.
I was very reluctant to go out in the Mojave alone for fear of getting lost. Left Field had fled immediately after yesterday’s incident, and everybody was scattered.
