The Cactus Eaters

by Dan White

  “Why aren’t you moving?” said Allison, just behind me.

  “I’m savoring,” I said.

  I took another breath as we entered Angeles National Forest, with a trail marker at the boundary. We crossed a horse trail and headed north. The air smelled of sage. The trail rose into steep foothills speckled with juniper. Allison saw a coyote down in the valley and a swaying yucca stalk against the deep blue sky. She marveled at fat, poky ants covered with thick fuzz that weighed them down, making them stumble. Allison called them “rug ants.” The landscape looked sandy and broken.

  Beyond the hills was the Sierra Pelona range. Allison’s fingers clutched her pack straps. In the distance behind us was Vasquez Rocks County Park, platforms of hunched sandstone. The rocks were the reputed hiding place of Tiburcio Vasquez, a bandit who terrorized California in the 1870s. I felt like a desperado myself, a wilderness gangster, with Allison as my moll. I wasn’t scared. There was nothing to fear out here, for we had two different kinds of insect spray. Vicious animals? I had a Swiss Army knife with which to stab them through and through. Water-borne illnesses? I had one of the most expensive water filters on the market. Getting lost? I had a thirteen-dollar compass. I had also brought a plastic odometer that clipped to my socks. It made a gratifying clackety-clack sound every time I took a step. This device would let us know how far we’d walked each day, down to one tenth of a mile.

  The path passed close to a few outbuildings and small houses scattered across the steep countryside. Everywhere we looked, we saw no people but signs of human intrusion—a drainage culvert and deep scars on the hills left by dirt bikes. Our first section of the trail was not characteristic of the PCT as a whole, since the path would cross paved roads, come close to a reservoir, and on three occasions, pass through remote settlements. But we would be all on our own for day-long stretches, on mountain ridges as high as 4,500 feet above sea level. Golden light slanted through the foxtails, the oak trees dangled heavy branches over our heads, and fat lizards dragged their bellies on the ground. A jackrabbit jumped from bush to bush and ran north on the trail. He stopped for a moment. I saw the black veins in his ears. When the wind shook the limbs of an old pine tree, it sounded like a door opening on its hinges.

  Allison and I had a strategy. We planned to walk for six days, rising at 6:00 A.M. and walking until 6:00 P.M., with some half-hour rest breaks thrown in. We would average, I hoped, sixteen miles a day. Most of the traverse would take place along the San Andreas Fault, actually, a thousand-mile-long network of parallel-running faults stretching from the Gulf of California to Cape Mendocino. Since the start of California’s recorded history, in the mid-eighteenth century, the fault system has produced more than one hundred big temblors, including the quake that flattened San Francisco in 1906. Even as we walked, seismic activity was displacing the land to the west of the fault line; as wedges of continental crust bump and grind against one another, the landmass is shoved northwestward, in increments of two inches each year. The earth here literally “strains against itself.”*

  The landscape here can cook you as well as knock you over. Chaparral—vast stretches of evergreen bushes, some ten feet tall—grew so aggressively that they hemmed the trail, narrowing the path, forcing us to scrape through spiny leaves. It was hard work, battling plants, taking turns leading the way, bashing through the foliage with our ski-pole walking sticks. As we duked it out with plant life, I felt grateful that we didn’t own a house near here. These bushes have a symbiotic relationship with fire that goes back millions of years. Chaparral rises from its ashes; the seeds of certain types of chaparral will not germinate without intense heat, although this has not discouraged thousands of Californians from building homes in areas thick with this plant. Every time you turn on the news and read about another California brush fire that has claimed the lives of firefighters and turned mansions into crisps, you had better believe that chaparral played a role in the conflagration.

  By noon, six hours into the journey, I was feeling disoriented from all the exertion. From the top of the highest hill we spied a reservoir in the distance and a dirt road scarred with bike tracks. Allison was sweating now. She joked around with me about Todd the Sasquatch probably getting lost out here somewhere, and how we would catch up with him soon and give his sorry ass a talking-to. She talked about him eating our trail dust. Allison took a long slow gulp of water from a bottle. As we entered the midafternoon, I smiled into the sun and took a look at the odometer to see how far we’d gone. It said that we had gone three miles. Piece of shit. No way we were going that slowly.

  To take my mind off this minor annoyance, I asked Allison if she might be interested in a gourmet salami and cheese break. She nodded yes emphatically. “Then let the deliciousness begin,” I said, but when I reached in the food bag for the snacks, I hadn’t realized how the hot sun might alter the appearance of our victuals. The salami now looked like a mummified dog penis, or at least what I imagined such an object might look like: black, curly, twisted, tapered, and not very appealing to eat. As for the cheddar, it was vile. Chalky on the inside, slippery on the outside, the cheese exuded a pus like substance. Allison and I decided to bury these deli items in the desert, an act that made us feel sheepish. We considered ourselves “low-impact” hikers, to the extent that we’d brought along a Ziploc bag to pack out our unmentionables, which would include soiled toilet paper, tampons, and the like. I could tell our minor act of pollution upset Allison, who was ecologically minded, but I convinced her that carrying smelly deli items in our backpacks was more demoralizing than the thought of polluting the Sierra Pelona.

  “The coyotes will eat ’em, I guess,” she said.

  We threw the salami and cheddar in a shallow grave.

  I should have known this act would return to haunt me. I have finely tuned karma. When I do the slightest thing wrong, the Fates conspire, and gather their forces against me. When we arrived at our first, crucial water source at Bear Spring, it was a dirty trough, hidden by chaparral. I put my finger in the miniature pond. Lukewarm. There were several moths in there. One was dead. The other two were still alive, and they were not leaving this world quietly. They kicked and flailed like a swim aerobics class gone awry. Larvae plumped up like gnocchi in water the temperature of blood. Our filter was designed to block viruses and fungi smaller than a micron. It did not know quite what to make of water that had fist-sized islands of organic mucus floating in the middle of it. The filter winced. It made a small, discouraging sound.

  “Buck up,” I said. “Do your fucking job.” But no water came out, no matter how hard I pumped. “Filter, you filter!” I commanded. “Don’t be like the odometer.”

  Almost immediately the filter seized up and choked so violently on the water that Allison had to stop pumping. Unfazed, she removed a packet of denture tablets from her pack and handed them to me. Denture tablets? At first I thought she was making a tart visual comment about my precocious senility. Then I remembered that denture tablets have a chemical that dissolves the muck that clogs water filters. Allison and I took turns soaking the filter components in a solution of tablets and water. It melted the crap right off, but every time we tried to filter more water, the gadget seized up again.

  “Let’s just forget the filter for now,” Allison said. “We’ll drink what we have, and wait for a stream, and put some iodine tablets in our bottles to kill the critters.”

  “But iodine tastes like rust,” I said. “It makes me nauseous.”

  Allison smiled and pulled out a packet of Hi-C she’d saved just for the occasion. Her competence was starting to grate on me.

  The nasty water seemed like enough of a punishment for our small transgression, but the trail wasn’t finished with its retribution. As we walked north, the PCT markers became scarce, as if an unseen hand had plucked the signposts from the ground. No doubt about it. Someone or something was fucking with us. We were lost, going around in circles until we finally wound up in a dark colonnade of trees. A s
easonal spring seeped from a hill, poured through a clutch of wildflowers, and gathered in a puddle at our feet. Though the spring was too mucky to drink, it yielded a comforting sight: in the mud was a row of deep impressions full of black water. We shouted with relief, for there was no mistaking the size-thirteen footprints of Todd the Sasquatch. It’s not that we were eager to see him again, but his print suggested we were going the right way, and were close on his heels. After all that bragging, he was around the corner, going as slowly as we were. We decided to speed up and catch him, just to show him up. Allison took the lead, following the prints to a cottonwood overhang in the shade. But soon the ground went from muddy to bone hard. Todd’s prints disappeared, and Todd himself was nowhere to be seen. Side paths went off in every direction. Ahead of us, down in a valley, Bouquet Reservoir lay to the northwest in shadows. Or was it southeast? Our guidebook directions did not correspond with the landscape. “Walk .2 miles uphill to a bend in the road,” they read. What bend? What road?

  I blamed the compass. It must be broken. Allison doubted that anything was wrong with it. The compass was a well-made piece of gear with a sapphire bearing and notches of declination. I did not know what a point of declination was, or why the bearings were made of sapphires. I’d assumed these were good things because the compass cost so much more than the competition. Besides, a person could not be lost while holding a compass that cost thirteen dollars. And yet the reservoir would not keep still. It lay to the north one moment, then the east, then south. The compass needle bobbed and wobbled like a dowsing stick. Perhaps our compass was cursed. I remembered the narrow little salesman who had sold it to us four months before, back East. He had pouches under his eyes. “The Pacific Crest Trail?” he’d said. “Yeah, I tried to hike that thing in ’eighty-five. Tore a ligament the very first day. Then I drank some bad water. Got the trots so bad my friends had to carry me out of there. That’ll be thirteen dollars. Would you like a bag?” As I tried to figure out where we were, I wondered if his soul inhabited our compass, causing the needle to twist every which way but the right direction.

  Allison had a determined look as she stood behind me. “Will you show me the map and compass?” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I can figure it out.”

  “I can help.”

  “I don’t need any help.”

  I now understand that the compass was working just fine. The trouble was I couldn’t read the goddamned thing. I had no idea that you were supposed to find north first, and then use north to extrapolate the other directions. Adding to our troubles, the Pacific Crest Trail’s route had changed recently, because of right-of-way conflicts, and the guidebook company had printed out a pamphlet of revisions. We were carrying the pamphlet with us on the trail, but for reasons I still can’t comprehend, we did not consult these new, improved directions. What if hours passed, days, and we still hadn’t found the trail? I imagined a search party of men shouting our names through bullhorns, bloodhounds sniffing the earth, chopper blades thwacking, and Mark the postman’s look of pity when the authorities brought us back to his grandmother’s house. The local press would turn on us like Dobermans. They would run front-page stories and cutesy alliterative headlines at our expense: DESERT DIMWITS RESCUED TWO MILES FROM TOWN.

  “Dan?” Allison said. “Would you please hand me that compass now?”

  “I just want to keep walking.”

  “Where?” she said. “Come on. Show me your map. And your compass.”

  Her demanding voice took me by surprise. There’s no word for it in the English language, this feeling of solipsism, when you believe the world revolves around your incompetence. If I couldn’t understand a compass, how the hell could anybody else? Nevertheless, I handed it over to her. At 4:00 P.M. she stood before me in a sweat-wicking vest, face to the sun, bottom lip puffed with authority, arms bent. Though I resented, and was confused by, her bossy insistence, she looked sexy as hell then. She held the map up in front of her face, laid the compass directly on top of it, and pivoted, until the shape and angle of the reservoir on the map lined up with the shape and the angle of the reservoir in front of us. “That’s it,” she said. “We’re too far east. All we do is backtrack ten minutes and we’ll hit the trail. We just took some dumb turn.”

  We found the trail in an instant. I threw my arms around the PCT marker and kissed it. Allison took a celebratory picture of me with the still-filmless camera. On we walked. It was a relief, and a disappointment, to be back on the trail. After all, feeling silly in front of Allison was only marginally better than feeling lost. A few days before, I’d resented her for dragging down our nature walk with all her panicking and vomiting. Now I was the one dragging her down, and I somehow resented her for this, too. “Never mind,” I told myself. “One of these days I’ll even the score by getting us out of a bad situation.” I had more pressing matters to deal with now. We had to find camp and cook our first trail meal.

  The sun completed its arc across the cloudless sky. At sunset we stood on a windblown hill covered with waist-high foxtails. We had gone just over six miles, execrable by long-distance hiking standards. As the sky grew dark, we made a rough camp and fell into prescribed gender roles, Allison slaving over the stove pot while I sat on a stump “erecting” the tent. When she fired up the stove, a swirling pillar of flame leapt up and singed the hairs off one of her arms. She did not flinch. The wind blew out the flame. She relit the stove. It took sixteen minutes for our organic bunny-shaped Annie’s macaroni noodles to boil, and when they were done, they were so rubbery and tasteless that we nibbled only a few of them and threw the rest at a spiny plant. The desert had numbed our appetites anyhow. The sun fell away, catching us in the dark as we stomped through our strewn pots and camp junk.

  After climbing into our tent, Allison lay awake for a while, admitting she was scared of “weirdos” coming after us. But she soon drifted to sleep in her mummy bag, leaving me behind. I’d barely settled in when her snoring began, her wet kromps and sherbert whinnies blending with the calls of distant coyotes. Allison, even while unconscious, was running with the wolves, upstaging me with her sylvan femininity. Still, I loved watching her that night, feeling protective as I saw the rise and fall of her body within the sleeping bag. I tried not to be too hard on myself. I knew we’d cover more miles the next day. But when I closed my eyes, I saw six million steps to Canada laid out like ties on a railroad track to the moon. The average long-distance walker travels twelve to fourteen miles a day starting out, then builds to sixteen to twenty miles a day. If you’re gifted at walking, you might hit twenty-five, thirty, even forty miles a day on the trail. I could not stop the racing thoughts about Todd the Sasquatch somewhere out there, tearing up the foothills while exuding massive amounts of man sweat. Stomping all over the American West with his freakish feet. Mastering the learning curve. Making the big miles.

  *Philip L. Fradkin, The Seven States of California: A Natural and Human History, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995, p. 273.

  Chapter 8

  Mulholland Falls

  Henry Miller once wrote that a land can haunt you even if you don’t know the past that lies beneath it. When traveling through Greece, he would find himself “profoundly disturbed, shaken to the roots, and by what? By associations born of my knowledge of ancient events? Scarcely, since I have but the scantiest knowledge of Greek history and even that is thoroughly confused…No, as with the sacred places, so with the murderous spots. The record of events is written into the earth.” And so it was on our second day, when we made a slow descent down a steep-edged ravine into San Francisquito Canyon, a stomp through green gulches, repeating, repeating, like a desolation screensaver. Allison took the lead position that day. Her bright blue backpack rose up high above her head, and reached so far below her waist that when I viewed her from behind, only her boots were visible. Watching her wobble, I felt guilty that she was carrying such a big load, and worried it woul
d wear her down. She had been having a bit of knee pain on the steeper descents. Every so often, I’d stop, take some of her gear or water, and stuff it into my pack, which was now crammed to the bursting point. Mark had, indeed, done us a favor by taking so much of our stuff from the packs, but they were still very heavy, in spite of his best efforts. Our pack weight, once suicidal, was now merely ridiculous.

  Most of the time we were in the blasting sun, but sometimes we found a lovely surprise, a colonnade through the boughs of hanging trees, or a wall of fragrant flowers shaped like trumpets, stars, and baseball gloves. Already I felt the first day’s growth of beard, the scratch of it against my fingers. It made me feel steely. We pushed our way down to the canyon and to the highway across the trail. No other hikers there, no cars along the blacktop striped across the ravine. Plumes of smoke rose from distant forests to the north. We walked along the two-lane road awhile, until we arrived at a small and sparsely manned Department of Agriculture fire station. Four firefighters stood by the cooler, their faces smeared. The first humans we’d seen in twenty-four hours had been out extinguishing a minor but difficult-to-reach wildcat blaze in the hills. One of them, a cherubic fellow with grease spots on his dungarees, asked where we’d started.