The Cactus Eaters

by Dan White

  The desert dropped out from under us as we rose up a series of crumbled-rock foothills, moving in and out of canyons full of scraggly live-oak bushes, with flies rising off the branches like smoke. The Gingerbread Man followed six-inch survey stakes pounded in the hard ground. A few stray Joshua trees reached with crooked arms. The Gingerbread Man, without even pausing for breath, reached in his pack and pulled out a dairy-free snack. He had wheat-germ Pop Tart knockoffs, corn chips, and a bag filled with some kind of dried fruit or vegetable that looked like small shrunken heads. Many of his food items looked like their expiration date had run out long ago. This turned out to be true. “Some of this stuff I’ve had in my pack since Mexico,” he said. “And that was five hundred miles ago!”

  Pumped up with vegan energy, he surged ahead. Allison, taking a breather, motioned me to pass her on a high switchback. Then it was my turn to listen to him, while wondering how a person could walk more than three miles an hour uphill, with a limp and a sack of junk in his arms. Normally Allison and I walked only two miles an hour. The Gingerbread Man planned to walk twenty miles that day. Normally we did fifteen. I had to jog-walk to keep up, sweating. We reached a ravine, and he left me in the dust as he scrambled up the sides to “bag” a lump of sandstone rising twenty feet off the ridge. “Ooooooh-weeeeeee,” he screamed. Astride the lump, he shot his arms in the sky in his best Christ pose. With its black gullies, punishing switchbacks, and hills, the land looked like the sort of stark backdrop against which they might shoot a low-rent Bible film. With Allison well behind us now, he climbed down and paused in front of a shaggy plant with a licorice smell. He undid his shorts, yanked them halfway down, and peed, like a riot hose, all over the shrub, while bellowing, “Live again, desert plant. I water thee!” We could hear Allison trying to catch up, mumbling something derogatory about the desert all around us. She was following close behind me, and I was right behind the Gingerbread Man, and then we were all hiking together, as fast as we could go, when the Gingerbread Man suddenly stopped in front of us, and I had to stop in my tracks to avoid a three-way pileup in the desert. He whirled around and started chanting about the desert’s wonderful attributes.

  “Your clothes dry fast here! You can wear tennis shoes instead of boots! You don’t need a big tent! Let’s hear it for the desert!”

  And right then and there, he started clapping for the wasteland. I clapped, too. I didn’t want to be rude.

  It was a peculiar display, but I couldn’t help myself. I was starting to like him now, against my better judgment. The Gingerbread Man, it seemed, was the Nerd King of the desert, the man who knew how to find all the water, who tried to help his fellow hikers, and had even developed his own technique to immobilize a tick. All you have to do, he later explained, is pinch it in a certain place “to paralyze it temporarily, and feed it to ant lions, who love to drag them screaming into their lairs.” His bursts of arcane wisdom made me more forgiving when he strutted around braying Edward Abbey–esque observations about every juniper bush and crested lizard. Besides, he made Allison and me feel taken care of for the first time on the trail. She turned to me at one point and said, “No matter what happens, we’re not gonna die in this section.”

  The Gingerbread Man was a bike messenger who, though he was thirty-two—six years older than us, impossibly old it seemed—lived with his mom and dad in Houston. “Amazing,” Allison whispered in my ear. “Where does the guy get all his energy?” The Gingerbread Man told us he had a crush on a woman and was trying to woo her with letters he composed while camped on lonely hillsides. Allison asked if the woman liked him back. He just smiled in a dopey way. We offered to mail the letter for him at Tehachapi, but he wasn’t through with it. “I want to get it right,” he said. “I’m an Aries. That means I’ve got to do something in a thorough way. I’ve got to finish what I start.” That, he said, is why he kayaked the Mississippi, where ships threatened to squash him like a water bug, and biked through Death Valley in summer. To pay for these excursions, he did odd jobs, working hard at a parcel service but often finding fault with the bosses, whom he did not refer to as “sons of bitches,” preferring the gender-nonspecific “sons of bastards,” which questioned their birthrights without impugning their mamas.

  A few hours after we started our power walk with him, he paused at an anonymous hill where the PCT tread disappeared. “Oh, noooo, an intersection,” he howled, and then laughed. When at last he found the trail, he stooped down and picked up a few jagged rocks and piled them up, starting with the widest rock and working up, adding smaller rocks as the tower rose. “It’s a cairn,” he said. “That way folks behind us will know which way to go.” Leaving signs was his responsibility, he said, because the trail was a brotherhood. “I always leave a sign,” he said. “The trail here’s so primitive.” He squinted into the wind. “You’ve got to pretend that you’re the guys who built the trail. You’ve got to learn to think like they do.”

  When Allison got tired and fell far behind again, the Gingerbread Man and I took a break in the shade of Tylerhorse Canyon, lined with stout junipers and pines with cones in fishhook shapes. “Better find ourselves a nice piece of real estate. Gotta wait for the woman,” he said. I laughed a little at his seemingly chauvinistic comment. I asked him about his trail nickname. He said it came from a folktale about a cookie boy who outruns all his pursuers. At last he dead-ends at a river, where a fox gives him a ride across and then submerges bit by bit until the cookie boy is forced to stand on the fox’s snout. Then the fox devours him. What a lousy ending. You run fast, do your best, then fall for a stupid trick and die. But the Gingerbread Man didn’t look as though he took this depressing lesson to heart. For one thing, he seemed insane, not in a threatening way but in the manner of a man whose devotion to something larger than himself had rewired his brain. He had the never-ending smile of someone who’d cashed in his marbles for something more important.

  The Gingerbread Man pulled a needle from a pine and stuck it between his teeth, letting it linger. It was a fine, clear day. He bit the needle and fixed his gaze southeast toward the snow-topped pyramids above the desert floor. San Gorgonio Mountain and Mount San Jacinto formed a wall to the south. “Hellacious view,” he said. We slouched in the shade, lying with no thoughts of getting up, swatting yellow jackets as the Gingerbread Man launched into a rant against the USDA food pyramid. He believed most Americans had been brainwashed “by bureaucrats trying to make you believe there’s a proven human necessity, or for that matter, digestibility, of milk after weaning, especially from other species.” He railed about the dairy industry and the federal government in general. “You know,” he said, “that’s the reason I came here in the first place.”

  “To get away from milk?” I asked below my breath.

  He winced. The Gingerbread Man believed humans had, for far too long, “denied the animal nature of our bodies.” He articulated this philosophy in a series of op ed pieces he’d written for his hometown weekly newsletter. After years of conventional living, he’d had enough of a government that, in his view, was forcing the public to eat “wimpy, pre-chewed food” like burgers, fries, and shakes. “Meanwhile, the government tells you that fruits and vegetables are rabbit foods for nerds. This only makes sense when you understand that by America’s standards, car-driving, car-dependent couch potatoes have a higher virility status than conscientious walkers.”

  Allison caught up at last. The sun, fiery a moment ago, was lower in the sky now. She limped. I got up, dusted myself off, and comforted her. “I’ll cook dinner for you tonight,” I promised, without telling her that dinner would probably be a dismal brick of Big Bill’s Beans and Rice, a blob of freeze-dried crud that could cramp the bowels of Satan himself. Allison staggered toward the Gingerbread Man. There were tears in her eyes from the blisters and discomfort. “Just look at you with your pathetic blister walk!” he said when he saw her. Allison recoiled in shock, but then she doubled up, laughing so hard she forgot to start up crying again.


  But the laughter died down as the day wore on. Soon we were wheezing and scrambling, forcing ourselves to gulp water and walk at the same time, lest we lose the Gingerbread Man. He took only one five-minute break per hour. By 5:00 P.M., it was all we could do to catch a glimpse of his skinny retreating backside. Mercifully, at 6:00 P.M., he decided we’d all had enough and looked for a place for us to sleep.

  “Set your tent down wherever you want,” he said as the sun sank below the blades of a wind-energy farm, blades spinning in the breeze, whirring. The sun glinted, like beach glass, on something shiny in the desert far below us. “I bet you guys want your privacy,” he said as he watched a distant town fade in the dark. “Set up wherever you like.” The Gingerbread Man smiled, sat on a flat-topped rock overlooking the ridge, and crossed his arms over his chest as the sun went away. He reached in his bag and took out miniature versions of the Mexican, U.S., and Canadian flags—a reference to the PCT connecting the borders of three countries—and twirled them in his hands, humming softly to himself and grinning.

  Soon it was dinnertime. Cooking dinner was the usual ordeal, with Allison concentrating hard as the water began to warm up. The Gingerbread Man carried no stove. He ate his food cold. After a while, he pulled himself into his tent, little more than a glorified sleeping container with a metal frame to hold it up. He was ready for bed by the time our water was boiling.

  I woke up at three in the morning and stepped outside my tent. The Milky Way was frozen foxfire. Satellites blinked. I kept thinking about the Gingerbread Man’s peculiar limp. Allison had mumbled something about him telling her the story behind it, about how he had kicked some rock or heavy box in a fit of anger. It surprised me that someone like him, a gentle spirit, would lash out in such a way and hurt himself. It got me thinking, once again, about the reasons for these expeditions, for difficult trips, and wondering if everyone brought along some kind of internal or external injury. Perhaps those wounds are the motivating factors. I’d posed the same question to myself but could not get a straight answer. Was it some unspoken childhood trauma that had brought me here? Or was it the accumulation of those niggling little memories I could never forget, like the one of that goose that went insane and mauled me in that petting zoo in Virginia?

  It was during a family vacation. The goose seemed so sweet at first. I fed him a nice big piece of stale bread, and it seemed like we were sharing a moment. Then, out of nowhere, came the goosey fury, the white eyes bulging, the orange beak stabbing as I fled screaming. The goose accelerated—he was fast as hell—and I found myself cornered near the Shetland pony enclosure. No one in my family helped. They just stood there smiling, pointing, snapping so many photos that I could stack the snapshots together now, make a flip-book, and watch the attack unfold in real time fifteen years later. Is that what this trail was all about? Tending to psychic wounds inflicted by poultry?

  I had gone back to sleep in the tent, half awake, half dreaming, still processing the petting-zoo memory, when a loud braying noise woke me up. The sky was purple, the sun wasn’t up, and yet the Gingerbread Man was ready to walk, with our without us. “Up, time to leave!” he shouted. I emerged from my tent. Allison and I doddered into the cold, taking down our tent as fast as we could, but the Gingerbread Man grew impatient—there were miles to cover—and he left without a word. We ran to catch up, our shirts halfway off, our packs hanging off one shoulder. “No more,” I said to myself between gasps. “This just isn’t worth it.” This was not going to work. I felt as if we’d met someone who might one day be a good friend of ours, and yet sometimes I wanted to stick out my boot and trip him. I appreciated his leadership and guidance, and the way the outdoors seemed benevolent when we were with him, but I longed for self-determination, to hike at my own pace and put the trail in my hands again. Besides, we were hungry, and our packs were full of wrappers, used toilet paper, and other trash that we needed to discard.

  We broke up with the Gingerbread Man about ten miles later, or he broke up with us. He had enough provisions so he didn’t need to reload in Tehachapi, our destination. The trail was like that sometimes, a turnstile where you never knew who would take the next man’s place. “I can never hike with anybody for too long,” the Gingerbread Man had said. “After a while we always split up on the trail. There was a guy who hiked with me last week. The most fastidious hiker I’ve ever met. His trail name’s Doctor John. He had to have his bootlaces perfect before he started out every morning. I’m probably the only hiker who could deal with hiking with him for long.”

  Before leaving us, Gingerbread Man told us it was time we got a proper trail name. “I came up with it last night before I went to sleep,” he said as we sat for a while by a stream flowing like a miracle through the bulrushes near the trail, “I’m thinking you should call yourselves the Lois and Clark Expedition, since you’re reporters and all. What do you think?”

  Allison and I looked at each other, for we knew he’d bestowed upon us a great favor. At that moment, “Dan and Allison” fell to our feet like a molted snakeskin. We were real explorers now. In one instant, the Gingerbread Man had elevated our trip from mere nature walk to full-fledged “expedition.” To get a trail name from a respected hiker is like passing an audition. Once you get a name, you become a “trail character,” with full membership in the backpackers’ cult, a shambling procession of hermits and acolytes making its slow way north toward Monument 78. Besides, we were lucky to get a great trail name. I’ve known some people who got seriously screwed with their trail monikers. Take, for example, the widely disliked physician who became known as Doctor Dickhead.

  That morning, the Gingerbread Man walked us close to the highway shoulder. We didn’t know what to say to each other. It’s awkward to share a trail with someone, then go around a bend, reach a junction, and know you’ll never see him again. He reached in his pack, pulled out a container of translucent goo, and insisted we slosh some on our armpits. “Smells like Ivory,” he said. “That way you won’t worry about stinking up the car when you hitchhike.” We turned to watch him limp into the foothills, his backpack leaning.

  In a moment the Gingerbread Man was gone behind a stand of high reeds.

  Chapter 12

  Doctor John

  The vision of the Gingerbread Man lingered long after he left us. He proved by example that people who succeed on the Pacific Crest Trail aren’t necessarily strapping or macho like Todd the Sasquatch. Gawky folks with strange sunglasses and chicken legs can do just fine out there, too. The trail doesn’t care if you’re awkward. The trail doesn’t judge you if you’re the kind of guy who received more than his share of wedgies, swirlies, and wet willies in middle school. To succeed on the trail, you don’t have to be muscular or cute. All you have to do is join the brotherhood and form a secret pact with all the lizards and coyotes. You must accept a certain amount of chaos and confusion as givens, and figure out how to incorporate these things into your life without losing your mind. You must not be uptight or selfish. You’ve got to leave a cairn of piled stones so the next guy won’t get lost. The wilderness is not out to hurt you. The trail isn’t out to harm you, either. You just have to become one with the trail, while channeling the collective unconsciousness of those who dwell on this gentle footpath. Or something like that.

  In any case, I felt renewed, invigorated, when we left the trail and reached the shoulder of the two-lane Tehachapi Willow Springs Road near a field of dried-out poppies. My only fear was getting from the trailhead to town in one piece. I mean that literally. I’d never hitchhiked in my life. All the newspaper horror stories I’d read about hitchhiking came to mind. They all had an opening paragraph along the lines of “Dan and Allison were a fresh-faced couple. They thought they could thumb their way to Tehachapi.” Second paragraph: “But they never made it. Their blowtorch-singed, rat-nibbled remains were found in a Dumpster in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.” But Tehachapi was 9.4 miles west of the Pacific Crest Trail. We were starving for burgers,
anxious to get supplies, and had no option other than hitchhiking. Car after car whooshed past. Allison hopped up and down, waving a sign reading WEST. She threw in a go-go kick, to no avail. I asked her to “show a little leg,” but she pointed out that perverts were the last people we wanted to attract, and besides, she was already wearing shorts. I wagged my thumb all over the place. Drivers just made faces and sped up. At last a white step van with a blue HANDICAPPED card slid to the shoulder and rolled to a stop.

  The side door swung open. Behind the wheel sat a sixty-ish woman, heavyset and smelling of cloves. She wore her long ponytail beneath a straw hat. A crested bird with an orange beak stood on the armrest to the right of the driver’s seat. “Come in,” the woman said. “I’m Samantha and this is Barry. She indicated a white cockatoo sitting in the passenger seat. He’s quite a talker.” Barry said nothing. We shoved the packs in the back. The woman was a paraplegic. Although the car had a regular steering wheel, the brake and accelerator were mounted below the dashboard; it looked like the controls on an Atari video game. We pulled the door closed. Samantha put the joystick to the floor and the four of us took off like a dustbowl hurricane. After 109 miles and 10 days on the trail, the pitch-forward sensation of motion thrilled me. Allison opened the window a crack and the wind ruffled her sweat-stiffened hair.