The Cactus Eaters

by Dan White

  The Tehachapi Mountains were brawny and tan in the sun, their folds hiding stables and settlements. On the hills, electricity-generating windmills spun. We sped past them on the way to the city, just below the mountain range of the same name at the southern boundary of the San Joaquin Valley, a jumping-off point to the southern end of Sierra Nevada, the 430-mile-long granite batholith to the north. Here, forty miles from Bakersfield, we would reconnect, rest up, and prepare to take on one more section of pig-dirt desert, frying-pan sunshine, and chaparral foothills before entering John Muir’s range of light. We were heading to a town of many identities, on the edges of steep terrain where Kawaisu Indians had hunted game and gathered piñon nuts. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Kawaisu now—they’re lost to time—but they left behind a name: Tehachapi, or Tihacipia, or Tah-ee-chay-Pah, depending on your phonetics skills. Historians can’t agree on the meaning. They’ve interpreted Tehachapi to mean “hard-climbing place,” “sweet water,” “windy place,” “cold place,” and “place of many acorns.”

  For us, every meaning was appropriate: hard climbing to be here, the sweet waters of rest and pent-up sex, the cold wind against the van and the promise of long-awaited gorging on burgers and pancakes. Randy Travis’s nasal tenor oozed from the tape deck. We all sang along with the tune, with the bird screaming, “Grackety grack shit,” in the background. Allison smiled at the wind and the weepy sound of the steel guitar. I smiled, too, though I felt a twinge of something unexplainable. The song, the stranger, the sing-along. It was all too perfect, like that moment inside the Conestoga wagon circle in the purple midnight of a cowboy movie, where one of the fellas says, “It’s just a little too quiet out there, aint it?” What was the catch? Where was the trick? The PCT can work that way, make you think a wrong turn is around the next bend, even when the going is clear. Then I realized I was being silly, thinking too much. It was time to relax.

  Samantha let us out in “Old Town Tehachapi,” a street of low-slung Western-style buildings near a train depot–themed park with green grass and kids climbing on unused trains standing about like statuary. The street had a dusty look as if the buildings could use a splash of paint or a few words of encouragement, and some of the buildings had flimsy wooden railings, the kind that cowboys are always crashing through in Western-movie fight scenes. It was exciting to us: antiques shops, Laundromats, food, possibility. We checked into a motel. The place was run by an owlish lady who couldn’t give one rip about our hike, our room was close to the railroad tracks, the furniture was dingy, and the walls had fist-size holes in them, but who cares? To us, it was the Waldorf Astoria.

  “Oh my God, running water,” Allison said from the bathroom. The shower was sensational, hot water pulsing, our dirt twirling down the drain like Janet Leigh’s blood in Psycho.

  True, we’d been out in the wilderness for only ten days before coming to town, but desert hiking can warp your perspective, making time stretch out like taffy. We’d allowed the desert to chasten us a bit, and take the edge off our itchy lust for each other. Sun and dust suck the chi force out of man and woman. After a while, you forget you are lovers. There’s nothing like a twenty-nine-dollar-a-night motel to make you remember. After two hot showers each, Allison and I could hardly wait to make love in the creaky bed. Allison’s wet towel fell to the ground. She was all sunburned neck and blond hair, and with her skin washed clean, she’d never looked more beautiful. Before the trail, both of us lacked muscle tone and color. She now looked longer and taller than usual, as if the bed elongated her as she lay there beneath a poorly rendered oil painting of a chuck wagon charging across a bleak and smeary tundra. The bed bucked and wobbled beneath us, rusty coils squeaking. I felt very much in love then, as if the two of us were celebrating a trial that had made us stronger as a couple, a Mojave litmus test. Afterward, we lay in bed with no thoughts of ever getting up again. The original plan was to spend one night in Tehachapi, then take off early the next morning. But we had so much to do, and were having such a good time, that we decided to prolong our stay.

  Next morning the two of us, all showered up and blissed out, took a stroll through town. I was stupidly happy, my arm around my girl, my hand pinching her bottom. Retrieving our first supply of gear and food at the local post office was a joyous experience. It was hard to contain myself when the postal clerk stooped to hoist a twenty-five-pound cardboard box of loot that Allison’s parents had mailed to us general delivery from the Midwest. I stabbed it twice in the belly with my Swiss Army knife; out came Snickers, Ziploc bags of espresso-spiked chocolate mousse powder, Farley’s Gummi Dinosaurs, dried cherries from Michigan, freeze-dried meals, and DEET spray in plastic bottles. We walked to the other side of town, where we found a wondrous assortment of monolithic, predatory, slave-wage–paying chain stores selling every conceivable kind of lotion, gummi creature, and body wash. One of them had a whole aisle dedicated entirely to scrunchies. There we bought lanolin for our feet, deodorant for our armpits, and moleskin for our blisters.

  By then, it was time for brunch. Stout cowboys left a diner, one hand on their guts, the other greeting us with a two-fingered wave, a rural peace sign gesture, in which they propped up their Stetsons with a thumb and forefinger. We waved back. Their satisfied expressions led us to try the diner, which was packed with people, its walls lined with black-and-white photos of a quake that jackhammered the town in 1952. Ravenous, we ducked in and found a booth.

  On the trail, it is possible to eat six thousand calories worth of food every day and lose weight. That’s why layovers in towns are a sanctioned form of exercise bulimia. In town, hikers can gorge on burgers, shakes, and anything else they please. I had heard stories about a PCT hiker who ate a stick of butter, peeling it like a banana. I felt even hungrier when I saw the people in the diner. They ate like wood chippers. All around were the sounds of smacking mouths. We ordered eggs over hard, biscuits in gravy, and sausages on the side. In towns, you expect to see fellow PCT hikers pigging out. Perhaps that’s why I noticed a thin man in the corner of the diner, alone, ignoring his orange juice while an egg congealed on his plate. Why was he not joining in on the gluttony? His joylessness made him stand out like the shy one at an orgy.

  There he sat, slouching but meticulous, picking at some unseen annoyance in his beard. A lentil? A bug? His plaid shirt and khaki shorts were beige from washed-out mud and desert dust. His skin was tan, and his pack was covered with dirt. No doubt, he was a Pacific Crest Trail hiker, and yet this realization did not fill me with joy. His woeful countenance made me want to turn away. I wondered why he looked lethargic and depressed as he leaned into his juice and sniffed the rim of the glass. He kept glancing toward us and frowning, but when I’d look back, he’d stare at the table top as if embarrassed. The stranger winced. At last he rose and made his way toward us, a twiggy figure passing rows of fat bodies. “Dan and Allison? Is it you?” he said. He leaned over our biscuits. “Did you meet the Gingerbread Man? We hiked together but we broke up, as hiking partners, I mean. He left me a note, saying you’d gone to town, so I found you. I know it’s you. Remember Mark the postman, back in Agua Dulce? He said you were nice but a little unprepared.” He gave me his right hand. His fingers were cool and tapered. “I’m Doctor John,” he said. “But I’m only a doctor in the Ph.D. sense. Mathematics, actually. I kept looking over at you, trying to get your attention. You kept looking away. It seemed like you were trying to avoid me.” His voice was squeaky.

  “That isn’t true,” I said, suddenly vaguely remembering that the Gingerbread Man had warned us of a fussy and difficult hiker coming up behind us. Allison smiled up at him, but I didn’t like this intrusion. All I wanted was to be alone with my girlfriend. I wished we were in our motel room again, making the bed rattle and squeak. “Pleased to meet you,” Allison said. She rose halfway out of her seat to shake his hand. “How are you doing?”

  “Well…” he said as he sat down at the table, across from me, next to Allison. “I’m all right, I
guess. Actually, it’s been very hard. I haven’t been doing the trail. The trail has been doing me. I can never quite figure out how much water to bring. Water is so heavy, so I never end up drinking quite enough. Just the other day I was hiking and it was quite warm outside, hot, actually, and my pee, pardon my language, my urine was getting very dark, turning pink, and after a while I could barely urinate at all. I finally came across a bottle of water that someone had left behind, and I thought, well, should I drink it? Should I take this? Suppose someone else needs it more than I do? And then I thought to myself, well, who needs it more than I do? Who? And then I started to cry.”

  There’s nothing as miserable as being thirsty in a desert. I understood this as well as anyone. But why did he have to talk about pee while we were eating? Perhaps I’m oversensitive but I can’t bear it when people talk about snot, pee, blood, sweat, mucous, musk, ejaculate, excreta, or the particulars of animal husbandry while I’m enjoying my breakfast.

  “And in that dehydrated state of mind,” Doctor John said, continuing with his story, “I almost stepped on a rattlesnake. Anyway, there it was, right on the trail, in the middle there, tongue flickering away, and I didn’t realize I was about to step on him, not until my boot was hanging in space. In midair I somehow managed to switch my stride to a standing long jump. Up and over the snake I flew.”

  I sighed, sensing what was coming. This man—seemingly depressive, struggling with every step of the trail—would want to team up with the Lois and Clark Expedition. And I could tell, even after our brief exchange, that this would be disastrous for all three of us. Morale was of the utmost importance at this part of our journey. Allison and I had just gone through a difficult introduction to the PCT. Somehow we had made it through and found happiness in Tehachapi, but our joy was as fragile as the wings of a ghost moth. I had to take care not to let hardship put a damper on our sex life and well-being at this juncture. I did not want a fifth wheel on our expedition, especially one with fatalistic tendencies and a preternatural eagerness to talk about bodily functions.

  “I have a poem I made up,” Doctor John said. “It helps me forget about my feet, which are in agony all the time. Would you like to hear it?”

  “Um…” I said.

  “It goes like this,” Doctor John said. “My feet can not harm me / How can they harm me? / When my feet, my feet, my feet do not exist.” He rested a hand on Allison’s shoulder and said, “I’ll be right back. Save me my place at the table. I might be gone for a while. I’m going to the rest room. In fact, I may be sitting down in there.”

  I felt a knot in my stomach. Sitting down in there? There was no reason he had to share that detail with me. I stared with dismay at my black and coiled sausages. When Doctor John left us alone, I grabbed Allison’s hand. “Sweetheart,” I said, “can we go back to the motel?”

  “We haven’t paid.”

  “Okay, but when the check comes, can we get out of here?”

  She smiled at me. “I’m not done eating.”

  “Listen,” I said. “Nothing against the guy. Nice enough fellow. But we absolutely cannot hike with this guy. Here’s what we’ll do. We’re gonna get out of town early, first thing in the morning, just get out of town the second we get out of bed tomorrow.”

  “Would you listen to yourself?” Allison said. “Could you please just stop and take a deep breath? I don’t want you freaking out on me.”

  “Listen to me,” I said. “All we have is one more section of desert to go and then we’re home free. One more section! Then it’s mountains, glaciers, gorgeous country, meadows, and wildflowers all the way to Canada. But this next section is going to kick our asses. It’s gonna be hard enough as it is. I don’t want anybody weighing us down.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “Either way, it’s no big deal.”

  My increasing panic might seem silly or peculiar to those who have never hiked a national scenic trail. But when you’re on the PCT, it’s impossible to escape from someone if he or she has the same pace as you. The trail is 2,650 miles long, but it’s only 3 to 10 feet wide. There are crawl spaces wider than that. The trail can be claustrophobic unless you set boundaries with people, which I’ve never been able to do.

  Allison shook her head and frowned at her biscuit. “He might be a little strange, but you’re blowing this out of proportion. If you don’t feel comfortable hiking with him, why don’t you just tell him?”

  “No way,” I said. “I couldn’t live with myself. Can you imagine how much that’s gonna hurt his feelings?”

  “Sooner or later, you’re going to have to get over your ridiculous fear of confrontation.”

  “You don’t understand. What if it gets back to the Gingerbread Man that we blew off Doctor John? Remember how he said the trail is a brotherhood? After all he did for us. He’s gonna think we’re a couple of raging assholes.”

  “Why don’t you just relax?” She spied Doctor John emerging from the latrine. “Here he comes. I bet you’re making a big deal over nothing at all. I bet you he won’t even mention it.”

  Doctor John sat back down at our table. “Will you hike with me?” he said.

  I froze. He waited for our answer, looking annoyed. “It’s not a complicated question,” he said. Allison and I just stared at each other.

  “Listen,” I said. “We’d love to hike with you. But we’re…unfortunately leaving early in the morning.”

  “Early?” Doctor John said. “When?”

  “Maybe too early for you,” I said.

  “Could you be more specific?”

  “Crack of dawn,” I said. “When do you get up?”

  “Seven,” Doctor John said. “I don’t like getting up any earlier than that, not normally, or I’m tired for the rest of the day.”

  “Well, that might not work,” I said. “Because we’ll probably have to leave at six.”

  “Oh?” Doctor John said.

  “Six?” Allison said.

  “That is a little early,” Doctor John said. “Though I suppose I could drag myself out of bed this one time if we all wanted to hike together. And it does make sense that we stick together. It’s safer that way. Besides, we’re all such slow walkers.”

  “I probably should make myself clearer,” I said. “We’ll start hiking at six. But that really means we’d have to get up at five. Or four, depending on how much time we give ourselves to hitch a ride and get out to the trailhead.”

  “Four?” Allison said, giving me a look that could etch glass.

  “That’s silly,” Doctor John said. “I don’t see why you’d need to get up so early.”

  The waitress brought the check.

  “Where are you staying?” Doctor John said.

  Allison, after some hesitation, mumbled the name of our motel.

  “I’ll follow you there,” Doctor John said.

  Back in our motel room, we were sitting around, watching television, when we heard a thump at the door. I feared it was Doctor John but when I opened the door, a cowboy stood there. “I’m Dave,” he said, “and I’m here to check the electrical wiring in your room.” We let him in. Dave looked to be in his early fifties. He had a cowboy hat, big hands, blue jeans, and a pot belly. When he found out we were PCT hikers, he gave us a concerned look. “I used to cowboy all through the foothills where you’ll be walking tomorrow. You’ve got some hard miles ahead.” He looked at our light switches and squinted at the ceiling light. “Everything looks fine to me. Anyways, I’m sorry to disturb you, and I think you hikers are some of the finest people I’ve ever met. Always looking out for one other. Tell you what. You need a ride back to the trailhead tomorrow morning, you got it. I’ll take you anywhere you want.”

  “That’s fantastic,” Allison said.

  “How early can you leave?” I said.

  Chapter 13

  Operation Water Dump

  It was 4:00 A.M. and my head was swimming. I’d barely slept that night, knowing that Doctor John was two doors down at the mot
el, probably wide awake and dreaming up ways to ruin the Lois and Clark Expedition. Time to get the hell out of Tehachapi. Time to get away from Doctor John and his poetry. Time to flee from his existential anecdotes about sadness, dehydration, loneliness, and his strawberry chiffon–colored urine. Doctor John had told us that he rarely woke before seven. That’s why we were leaving at five. But what if he was fibbing, and was waiting for us outside the room right now? I knew Dave wouldn’t be late, and he’d blast us back to the trail in no time at all. But Allison was still asleep, in spite of all my fidgeting.

  She stayed asleep, even when I flicked on the motel light. In a man’s life, there is nothing worse than having to wake up a woman—that awful sinking moment when you shake her shoulder and know that her eyes will open wide, that they will fix on you like motion sensors. Suddenly the beatific expression, the innocence of sleep, melts from her face, and in its place a look of disgust comes over her as she remembers all the annoying things you said and did the previous evening. No, I couldn’t bring myself to shake her awake. Instead I lurched about the motel room hoping all my crashing and stumbling would rouse her so it would look like an accident. I tried to find all our stuff, which wasn’t easy, for we’d trashed the motel room pretty thoroughly. It looked as if two vaguely hominid creatures from four or five hundred thousand years ago had bedded down for the evening after leaving coal-black footprints on the tiles and filthy garments hanging from the cabinets. Air-dried socks dangled, like drying meat, from the curtain cords. Ski-pole walking sticks tilted like clubs over a copy of Gideon’s Bible. Was the trail turning us wild? Is that why I felt so claustrophobic in the motel, so eager to return to the woods? The motel had been a luxury the day before, but now it just seemed weird, with rock-hard curtains against the window, not to mention the stinky little soaps, pink and beige but smelling the same, and the weird paper stripe that housekeeping had stretched over the toilet bowl, as if its inaugural use was an occasion of great pomp and circumstance, a ribbon-cutting ceremony. The time on the clock radio was 4:20. Then it was 4:21. I waited for what seemed like ten minutes, and looked at the clock again. Now it was 4:22.