The Cactus Eaters

by Dan White

  I asked Allison if she would hike it with me. Her answer was an immediate yes. Leaving her job didn’t concern her in the least. She disliked it anyhow and was sure she would find better things. I was more nervous about leaving the newspaper. It was the first gig I’d had that didn’t involve saying “paper or plastic” all day. Allison wanted to be an environmental journalist. She was hoping to take on the polluters and slimy politicians, and make a name for herself. But first she wanted to go out and see a few wild places before they were ruined forever. “When will we ever have this chance again?” she said. She vowed to bring her notebooks, press wildflowers, make field notes, and climb some mountains on the way.

  By then we were sold on the idea, but we still wanted more information. Through a friend of a friend at the newspaper, we got hooked up with two veteran PCT hikers living in northwest Connecticut. Eddie was a twenty-two-year-old auto mechanic fresh off the trail. Kirk, a teacher in his forties with a dark tan and a rangy body, had hiked the trail several years before and was full of missionary zeal for the outdoors.

  Eddie invited me, Allison, and Kirk to his house one night for a PCT slideshow. He was lanky with a toddler’s face, thick glasses, and stringy hair that touched his shoulders. I remember looking at him and Kirk and thinking, “Those bodies have walked across a continent.” I envied their repose and power. Eddie killed the lights. The living room wall disappeared, and in its place a forest grew. The room turned into an Alpine realm of Belding’s ground squirrels and black bears. Glaciers glowed above a U-shaped valley. Huckleberries plumped in the sun. How I wished I could walk through the wall into the chill of a lake with minarets reflected on its surface.

  The slide-show’s glare played in Allison’s eyes. As more slides shone against the wall, Eddie told us the trail remade him and that it would remake us. “You’ll become different people. You’ll hitchhike all the time. You’ll do things you never imagined. Your feet will get so hard you could hold a lighter to ’em and feel nothing.”

  Eddie walked across the room to fiddle with the errant projector. As he walked, he belched loudly and unapologetically. Listening to his gaseous eructation, I wondered if the trail made people regress, like in that movie Altered States, where William Hurt locks himself in a floatation chamber and comes out a baboon. The idea appealed to me. Eddie hit the lights again and told us the trail would wear out at least two pairs of the sturdiest hiking boots and that we would drink two gallons of water each per day in the hottest sections. “That’s sixteen pounds of water every day,” he said. In one section we’d hike forty miles without seeing a stream, so we’d have to carry all the missing water on our backs with us.

  The two hikers told us the logistics. To complete the trail, we would have to divide it into twenty-five segments ranging in length from 84 to 150 miles. At the beginning and end of each segment, we would leave the forest and resupply ourselves at designated towns close to the trail. We’d have to mail twenty-five box loads of dried nonperishable food to ourselves, marked GENERAL DELIVERY to post offices near the trailheads. Mail clerks would hold the boxes for up to two weeks. “Make sure somebody reliable sends the boxes for you, so you don’t starve,” Eddie said. He told us it would cost us twenty dollars to send each box: a total of five hundred dollars just for shipping. Considering that the contents of each food box would cost us roughly forty dollars, our food bill alone for the whole trip would be more than a thousand dollars. Kirk and Eddie also gave us a comprehensive list of “trail angels” who lived in the supply towns. These good Samaritans let hikers sleep in their homes for free, offered rides, and even cached water into the desert for trekkers. Eddie told us how to use a cheap ski pole as a hiking stick and to shake bushes to ward off venomous snakes. He urged us to cram as many calories as we could each day in the High Sierra because the uphills were brutal. “Eat Stovetop Stuffing with margarine dumped in there,” he said. “I knew some guy who ate nothing but freeze-dried Mountain House dinners every day. Ended up looking like a Somalian.”

  “How long will this take?” Allison said. Eddie told us that if we threw down sixteen-mile days we could make it to Canada in six months. If we could manage twenty-mile days, we might do it in five, even if we included some layover days in towns. All this advice led up to the big message, a speech that would rattle in my head like loose change long after the night was over:

  “There will be highs and lows,” Kirk said in a low voice. “In the North Cascades, it rained on me for eight days. It was enough to make a person quit, but I didn’t. In a hike like this, the most important preparation has nothing to do with logistics or gear or any of that. It’s all mental. You have to get out there expecting the worst: rain, injuries, boredom. We get these internal clocks in our heads—they’re left over from our childhoods—telling us we should be back in school in September. You get antsy when the weather changes, when the days get shorter and you start asking yourself, What am I doing here? Just realize there are gonna be bad times out there. Expect them. Remember, there’s something you both want to get out of all this. Those hardships—the rain, all the rest of it—will make you a better person in the end.”

  Kirk and Eddie must have used the word hardship a dozen times that night. I heard it, but it didn’t sink in. All of their warnings sounded like abstractions when I was sitting in a living room, on a sofa, watching images of meadows and happy elk.

  “Listen,” Kirk said as Allison and I were getting up to leave, “if you ever get the urge to quit, I want you to think about this first: Never quit on a down moment. Never make your resolution to quit in a town. Never decide to quit during an eight-day stretch of hard rain. If you must quit, make the decision during four straight sunny days. Make the decision when you’re feeling great. Don’t decide to quit when you have blisters. Wait til they heal. Maybe you have a legitimate reason to quit, but it’s easy to be biased, so easy to let a bad moment influence your decision to give up. Most people will regret quitting for a long time. You may decide it’s not for you, but don’t quit because you hate rain; don’t quit because you hate blisters. I love the outdoors. I love adventure, but not everybody does. It’s one thing to read about adventure. It’s quite another to experience it, to have it happening all around you.” Kirk cleared his throat and a strange look came across his face, something that looked like regret. “Everything’s simple out there,” he said. “You can get your life, your house, your right and wrong in order out there. And if your house is not in order and you don’t know it, you’ll sure as hell find that out. You can get straight on a trip like this. Hopefully there’s something really truly golden that comes out of it.”

  Something golden. That’s all I needed to hear, in spite of the fact that Eddie and Kirk never really explained what that something golden was. In the early stage of my infatuation with this epic western journey, it never occurred to me that I might be falling in love not with a trail but with a vision of it, with all dangers and hardships erased from the picture. Sometimes ignorance is more than bliss. Sometimes ignorance is the catalyst you need to change your life.

  Chapter 4

  Blue Crabs, Green Woman

  The night before Allison and I took off for the Pacific Crest Trail, my workmates threw a farewell party for us, with beer, card games, and food. It was odd, though. Everyone seemed nervous, including a couple who told me they were concerned that Allison and I were going to die. I was bothered by the fact that our friends called this celebration the Dan-and-Allison Donner Party. I knew a bit about the snowbound cannibals trapped in the northern Sierra Nevada in 1846. I was aware of the fact that they roasted and ate each other less than five miles from where Allison and I would be walking in a few months’ time. Most of the Donner Party’s exploits, including the preparation of human jerky, and the use of brains to make a rich broth, took place near what is now I-80, the highway Allison and I would use to travel from the East Coast to California. I was wary of bad signs. If Allison and I wound up snowbound up in the mountains, and if
I died but she lived, and if rescue workers found her huddled in a shanty near a lake with my butt cheeks roasting on an open fire, some enterprising newspaper reporter was going to find out about the Donner-themed going-away party and have a field day with the “devastating irony.”

  In spite of this misgiving, I felt for the most part terrific as we rolled out of town. As the church steeples and apartment buildings of Torrington receded in my rearview, I wanted to scream with happiness. We were getting out. The court reporter was wrong. You can escape from Devil’s Island after all. And so we whipped across the country, getting three speeding tickets along the way. Some people might find it fatuous to drive 3,200 miles across America for the sake of crossing America on foot in an entirely different direction. But for me, speeding through the hills of Iowa and rolling through Wyoming gave Allison and me something in common with the pioneers, beat poets, and Easy Riders who had traveled before us. We were rebels now. The economy was flabby. The country was receding, compromising its values and ambitions, except for us. People were holding on to jobs they hated for fear of never finding anything else. Except for us. For once in my life, I was sticking it to The Man. Good-bye to jobs. Good-bye to corporations, bathing, and respectable living. Now I was going to grow a beard and live in the dirt with my woman for six months. Perhaps the Real World would be waiting when the trail was over. But who knows? Maybe we would never go home. Maybe we would stay in the woods forever.

  It took us a week to reach my parents’ home outside of Los Angeles, where we planned to rest for a while before driving two hours into the mountains to meet the Pacific Crest Trail. At my childhood house, a 3,200-square-foot A-frame about a mile from the Santa Monica Bay, Allison and I stayed a few days, going over our itinerary and taking trips to Trader Joe’s in Redondo Beach to buy cashews and fruit gummies. Everything was going smoothly until the morning we were supposed to leave. All of a sudden, Allison doubled over, sick. Puzzled and concerned, I assumed it was something she’d eaten. Allison did not have a nervous stomach. I wondered out loud if it was the blue crabs we’d scarfed down twenty-four hours before at a grimy seafood shack on the Redondo Beach Pier, where you walk up to the tank, select a twitching crustacean, and wait on a bench while a slob in a bib steams the creature to death. Then you smash it with a mallet and dip it in vinegar sauce. This seafood is enjoyable if you try not to think about the fact that crabs live their lives in total darkness, in filth, dining on excrement. But if the crabs made Allison ill, why did I feel fine? Then I remembered that we hadn’t shared our crabs that day. We’d bought separate ones. Maybe Allison had eaten a poisoned crab. I voiced this theory out loud.

  “Maybe there was some sickness in your crab,” I said. “Fish diseases can make you really sick.”

  “Ew, Dan, that’s disgusting,” Allison said. Later, she ducked into one of the downstairs bathrooms. “Please! Please don’t mention fish diseases again.” She vomited (she would vomit twice that day), washed her mouth, gargled with toothpaste, drank cold water, and lay down. I feared the worst, but Allison seemed to recover quickly. After a while, it seemed the nausea had passed. We decided to stick to the schedule, leave my parents’ house and drive to the trail that day anyhow. We threw our packs in the car and sped toward Wrightwood, six thousand feet above sea level, in the San Gabriel Mountains, eighty miles northeast of my parents’ house. When we reached the San Gabriels, the landscape was piney, the air dry and cool. The car whipped past cabins with satellite dishes on the roof. I glanced at Allison, sitting to my right looking stoic, her mouth clenched, her white legs showing beneath her polypropylene shorts. She had given me quite a scare at my parents’ house, but now she looked hardier. She was stone-faced, but it did not concern me. Maybe she just needed coffee.

  But there was no time for Starbucks. We were in a mad rush. Because of the trail’s enormous length, most hikers start the journey in late April, to stay ahead of storms that slam the Pacific Northwest in September or October, depending on the year. It had taken us forever to get out of Connecticut that summer. The reason was Allison’s ambitions. In her spare time she’d compiled and edited a book in which eighteen doctors shared stories about their first years of practice. Allison was, justifiably, proud of the anthology, but finishing the project, while holding down her day job, took several months longer than she’d expected. I resented the delays, in part because I wanted to start the trail so badly and in part because I was jealous. She was moving ahead in her life, while my job experience, aside from my stint as a cub reporter, consisted of flipping burgers at a seaside amusement park, bagging groceries, scrubbing toilets, and operating a manual forklift. Now it was mid-June—almost two months after most PCT hikers began their journeys at the Mexico-California border.

  For that reason, we had fiddled with our itinerary to give ourselves the best possible chance of finishing the trail. Instead of starting at Mexico, we would begin 360 miles north of the Mexican border. From there we would walk 2,300 miles to Canada, then take a bus back to our starting point in late fall. PCT hikers call this sort of schedule a “Flip-Flop.” By mid-October, the foothills of Southern California would be mild and pleasant. We would make up the missing piece by heading south to Mexico. The plan was elegant, original, and even more important, fail-safe.

  I glanced over at Allison to see how she was doing. She was slouching, closing her eyes. I supposed she was just pensive, thinking about the journey. I couldn’t blame her. This was our big moment. We were about to break free from our old lives at last. I loved the fact that Allison and I were in charge of every aspect of our journey, doing it on our own terms. I was just about to prove wrong all the people who thought we’d never make it out here.

  My mom and dad were among the doubters. They thought our dream of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was inexplicable, and maybe even asinine. They wanted to know if our six-month nature walk was a substitute for genuine achievement, a stand-in for a law degree, grad school, or buying a house. They wanted to know if we’d even discussed who would be leader and follower or how to delegate decisions. My parents found it peculiar that Allison and I, who had never lived together in an apartment with showers and a fridge, were now setting out to do the same thing in a four-by-six tent in a place where vultures outnumbered people. This especially rattled my father, who said he didn’t see the point of our putting ourselves in danger on purpose. He worried that we wouldn’t be carrying cell phones, radios, or walkie-talkies. And though my father didn’t say this out loud, I believe he had a problem with the idea of our spending thousands of dollars to create what he considered to be a false hardship. My father grew up poor on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His father, Abram, was a tailor, his mother, Yetta, a dress maker. Abram got a tooth infection. There were no antibiotics, and he died. Yetta died nine years later in a mental hospital on Ward’s Island. My father was a ward of the state until he was sixteen. He got pawned off on a foster family who didn’t love him. And I’m sure he wanted to know who in his right mind would want to go out and try to make things hard for himself on purpose?

  While I loved and respected my father, he did not understand what I was trying to do out there. His circumstances were too different. My dad had had a chance to triumph over adversity. He fought his way out of his ghetto hell, joined the army, and bought a house with help from the GI Bill. My father became the president of a successful high-tech security company in Southern California. He moved our family to a seaside suburb where monster homes crouched in the foothills and feral peacocks shrieked from the treetops. I admired his rise from poverty, but my dad did not realize that his success had turned me into a capitulating blob. I was untested and pale, born on the plateau that he had sweated to reach. As a result, I felt unmotivated. I had never been given the opportunity to have a loveless, miserable childhood like he had.

  To transform myself from man-boy to man, I had to retreat into the wild, undergo a grand transformation in the outdoors, with Allison to keep me company, serve as my sideki
ck and helpmate, and attest to my grand achievements. If I walked all six million steps of the Pacific Crest Trail, I would be a hero. Though I’d always been competitive, in my twenty-six years I’d never done anything noteworthy. Though I wanted to wow and inspire people with my physical prowess, I was awful at sports. Still am. My baseball teammates once cornered me in the dugout, threatened to box my ears and rip my hair out in clumps because I blew the big game for them. They didn’t make good on their threats, but elementary school never felt safe again. I was so tired of feeling weak. I wanted to start my life over by tracking bears through the Cascades and washing my face in a stream spilling off a thousand-year-old glacier. Some people say you must find beauty and meaning in ordinary life: parking meters, traffic lights, envelopes, or wedges of barbecued chicken stuck between someone’s teeth. I never shared this appreciation for the mundane. I needed deserts and mountains to remake me.

  Still, even rugged adventurers like us must make certain small concessions. I must confess that Allison and I were not entirely alone in the car. In fact, my father was driving while my mother sat in the front by his side, with a pile of road maps in her lap. Waiting around for a hitchhike or a bus ride would have wasted precious time. Besides, there is nothing shameful about accepting small favors from your parents.

  “Danny, sweetheart?” said Mom, a petite woman in her sixties who wore dark sunglasses and Gordian knots of sterling silver in her earlobes. Mom wore snappy outfits, even when driving through wastelands. There was not a speck of dust on her tennis whites. “Danny?” she said. “Darling? Earth to Daniel? Would you like some grapes?”

  “They’re cold, young Daniel,” my dad said. My parents’ grape offer, though tender and heartfelt, jolted me out of my reverie. But this was nothing compared to the shock I got when I turned to Allison and noticed that her face was pale, with an ominous blue tint. There was no way she was sick again. The Los Angeles Basin smog had spilled into the foothills that morning. Maybe the light refraction from all that pollution had imparted the zombie color to her cheeks and neck. But the inversion layer had nothing to do with it. She looked terrible, and now she was moaning. I asked her if she was okay, but didn’t ask if she wanted to go back home, nor did I insist that my parents turn the car around. I didn’t want them to think of us as unprepared. Stopping the journey at that point would have proved right their suspicions that our trip was ridiculous.