The Cactus Eaters

by Dan White

  We pressed on in silence, past a group of wind turbines and straight up a sunburned crest, where we saw the painted rocks of Jawbone Canyon below us to the west. We walked for hours to a blue oak savannah with a crystal fire ring in the foreground, as if a race of giants, with diamonds to spare, had used a row of them to hem a fire. We climbed through a homely expanse of scrub oak as the heat burned down on us. And just when I was about to say, “Screw this, no more, I’ve had enough,” the landscape did something cruel.

  I wanted the landscape to be as ugly as my mood. But suddenly, fourteen miles from Golden Oak Spring, it turned beautiful. Shadows made a black mantle of the closest peaks to the north. A sudden light rose from the black wall, throwing streamers of color across the sky. I’d never seen a sunset like this one, a horizontal band of yellow beneath a row of purple clouds with wings rising off of them. I saw bands of cinnamon and sulphur, and below them, an oblivious strip of blue, straight out of an ordinary day. We spied for the first time a massive rock formation, five mountains, their arms linked together and a white skullcap on the top. This was our first tantalizing glimpse of the High Sierra.

  We walked, if not in peace then at least in silence, as we chewed gobs of “desperation fudge,” blobs of peanut butter mixed with dehydrated milk and hot cocoa powder. Though my tongue still throbbed, it occurred to me that we’d almost made it, that it was beautiful here, that it was close enough almost to touch, and that perhaps the cactus was a blessing, for now things could not get worse. In the desert, every little trickle, every effluvial blat from a drainage ditch, has a grand name. Up there, in John Muir’s Sierra, there were so many glaciers with cold water melting from them. In the mountains, some rivers, streams, creeks, and lakes had no names at all. If only we could get there.

  I wonder what Clinton Churchill Clarke, reputed “Father of the Pacific Crest Trail,” would have thought to see the Lois and Clark Expedition on the path that day, staring down lizards, guzzling water, passing out on the ground, and getting back up again. I suspect he would have been pleased. Clarke believed that backpacking trips were supposed to be a character-building struggle. One part John Muir, five parts General Patton, Clarke wanted to preserve the high wild country along the crest of the western states, then set it aside to beef up the bodies and morals of America’s sow-bellied youth.

  Clarke was an advocate for the forests, but he was as far from a backcountry bohemian as you could get. In a portrait shot taken in his early fifties, the great man is stiff and un-smiling, his hair slicked back, his neck folds creased above his bowtie and tuxedo collar. In the picture, he looks like a well-off blueblood—and he was. Clarke could trace his lineage to the earliest settlers of New England. He claimed Cotton Mather, the fiery seventeenth-century Puritan leader, as a direct ancestor. He held a bachelor of arts degree from Williams College, where he was a proud, paddled member of the Delta Upsilon fraternity. Clarke lived with his wife, Margaret Ruddick, in Pasadena’s palatial Hotel Green, and was one of the first men in his town to own a car.

  But Clarke’s nearly forty years of service to the Boy Scouts, including a seat on the Eagle Scout Examining Board, reinforced his notion that the wilderness was a testing ground. Clarke did not come up with the original idea for a Pacific Crest Trail. Apparently, the first person to broach this subject in public was a Miss Catherine Montgomery of Bellingham, Washington, who spoke in 1926 of her dreams about a “high trail winding down the heights of our western mountains…from the Canadian border to the Mexican Boundary Line.” But Clarke was the first to fight for the trail and articulate a clear PCT philosophy. Born in 1873, Clarke lived at a time when America was still trying to figure out how to use the forests and parklands it set aside for preservation, distraction, and amusement. In the early days of “ecotourism,” most tourists didn’t venture very far into the backcountry, perhaps out of laziness, but more likely because of lousy equipment. Their hiking gear was even more awkward and clumsy than the irksome loads I shouldered on the Pacific Crest Trail. As recently as the 1920s, tents were white canvas monstrosities that weighed fifty pounds. “People slept in bulky woolen bedrolls fastened at the end with giant safety pins,” wrote Roderick Nash in Wilderness and the American Mind, his history of America’s relationship with the great outdoors. “Food came wet-packaged in cans…. Wilderness travelers who carried their equipment on their backs were so rare as to be considered eccentric.”*

  Because there was so little access to the forest, hucksters filled the void by creating entertainments that reduced tourists to meek observers and wilderness to empty spectacle. James McCauley, perhaps the creepiest showman in the history of cheesy backwoods tourism, amused late-nineteenth-century Yosemite visitors by flinging various objects—including, by one account, a live chicken—off the 3,200-foot-high drop-off at Glacier Point. A San Francisco reporter filed this eyewitness report: “With an ear-piercing cackle that gradually grew fainter as it fell, the poor creature shot downward; now beating the air with ineffectual wings, and now frantically clawing at the very wind…thus the hapless fowl shot down, down, down until it became a mere fluff of feathers…then again dotted the sight as a pin’s point, and then—it was gone.” The story could be apocryphal, considering the newspaper reporter claimed the chicken survived the fall and climbed back up the cliff to be hurled off again, but McCauley certainly flung burning bushes and other detritus to amuse the masses, while shouting, “Let the fire fall!” The tradition survived through the 1960s.

  Empty spectacles and tourist coddling irritated Clarke. He loved to take forays through the woods near San Gorgonio Mountain in Southern California. With each exploration, he noticed more concession stands, roads, and development ruining the “primitive” feel of his beloved mountains. In the backcountry it was becoming impossible to escape “the honk of the auto horn or the smell of the hot dog,” he said. “Our wildernesses are about gone. They have been driven to the high mountain divides where runs the Pacific Crest Trail System.”

  His disaffection gave birth to his PCT vision. The West Coast, he said, must have a long trail that melts flab and serves as a watchtower from which day hikers and long-distance backpackers can keep a careful eye on excessive logging, modern conveniences, and development. Without such a trail, primitive areas could be lost altogether, and so would the souls of California’s youth. Seventy years before Keanu Reeves played an anti-robot resistance-fighter in The Matrix, Clarke warned Americans of our “enslavement” by radios, automobiles, and film projectors. “Make a ratio of the number of motors, of the number of tickets sold for movies, the number of radios sold, compared to our population, and compare these figures to any nation in Europe…and we see what an appalling over-mechanization has done to enslave the people of the United States.”

  In 1932, Clarke lobbied the U.S. Forest and National Park services to support the construction of his “continuous wilderness trail…maintaining an absolute wilderness character.” To plead his case, he warned the government about “a marked deterioration in the physical, mental and spiritual caliber of our youth. The medical report of the U.S. Army on the physique of 5,000,000 young men taken into the armed forces shows a serious deterioration in…their legs and backs, causing a misplacement of the internal organs…In a word, too much sitting on soft seats in motors, too much sitting in soft seats in movies…too much lounging in easy chairs before radios.”

  Taking his cue from Benton MacKaye’s blueprint for the East Coast’s Appalachian Trail, Clinton Clarke articulated his cure-all for America’s oppressive softness: a 2,650-mile trail linking three countries—the United States, Mexico, and Canada—while spanning the length of California, Oregon, and Washington. Clarke, at first, was dismayed by the rights-of-way issues that stood in his path. The trail, even now, crosses a hodgepodge of private and public interests, and some of the owners aren’t thrilled about bearded smelly Wookies like me trudging across their ranches and grazing fields at the behest of the federal government. Fortunately, by the early 193
0s, various trails along the route were already established, and could easily be subsumed by the PCT, including the Tahoe-Yosemite Trail and the spectacular John Muir Trail, which plunges into territory so remote that hikers don’t cross a road, or see a powerline, for two hundred miles. At the time, the proposed route was the longest scenic trail in America, five hundred miles longer than the Appalachian Trail. Clarke envisioned a path on a Cecil B. DeMille scale. In one of his writings, he said that the PCT might one day be part of an even more gargantuan footpath, “The Trail of the Americas,” ten thousand miles long, from Alaska’s Mount McKinley to Chile’s Mount Aconcagua, the highest mountain in South America. This übertrail would use “ancient mule trails” and the shoulder of the “Pan-American Highway.”

  I suspect that Clarke would have enjoyed seeing the Lois and Clark Expedition rise up, the day after the cactus-chomping incident, and hike to an overlook where we saw our first snowy glimpse of Olancha Peak, to the north. He would have liked to see us grimace beneath our pack weight as we climbed steep hills, each with a tiki-shaped dolmen on the top and, out of nowhere, a row of foxtail pines. Fallen needles softened our steps. Pain and reward were Clarke’s mottos, although he never put those philosophies to the test on the PCT. There is no record of him even taking an overnight camping trip on it. It saddens me to think he fought so fiercely for something that he didn’t get to enjoy, but maybe it’s for the best. After all, his hiking philosophies were so weird that I wonder how he would have held up out there. “Always rest by standing on the trail in the sun,” he once wrote. “If you sit down you will lose pep. Drink little water. A raisin under the tongue will help. Do not eat when overtired.” Clarke also advocated bringing almost seventy pounds of pack weight into the forests, not including water. With that much weight on his shoulders, he may very well have given himself a Pacific Crest coronary. And Clarke was deep in his middle age before he even started thinking about the trail. When he took up the PCT’s mantle, he was already fifty-eight years old, and trying, with mixed results, to drum up publicity. He asked the Boy Scouts to do a “team relay” in which groups would hike small chunks of the trail in tandem, to help map the route. The Boy Scouts turned him down flat. His second choice, the YMCA, reluctantly agreed to help. The mapping didn’t exactly light the headlines on fire. The Los Angeles Times of 1932 hardly even mentioned his efforts. But through the relay, Clarke met Warren Rogers, then secretary of the Alhambra YMCA, and another unlikely advocate for the longest trail in America at the time. Like Clarke, Rogers was a native midwesterner. Stricken with polio as a child, Rogers suffered from the nickname One and a Half Step, because one of his legs was half an inch shorter than the other, forcing him to walk with a gimp. Years of playground teasing drove him deep into the forests and up the faces of steep peaks. He wanted to prove that he could go where anyone else could. Rogers bagged 11,502-foot San Gorgonio Mountain when he was only fifteen, and in the course of his lifetime, he scaled 19 peaks over 9,000 feet “and never had so much as a sprained ankle.”

  It seems inevitable that Rogers would pair up with Clarke to develop the Pacific Crest Trail. Clarke was the visionary, and Rogers was the leg man, willing to walk vast distances to help chart the trail. In his mid-twenties, he led teams of boys to hike and help map out the proposed PCT route in relays over three years. There’s a photo of Rogers from that time, eager and gawky, with a goofy smile, hiking with a fuzzy beard, jeans, work boots, and a heavy pack. Thirty-four years younger than Clarke, he handled most of the field work. The federal government helped out with groups of Civilian Conservation Corps workers, who burned connector trails on the footpath. Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, America took up arms, and federal trail funding came to a dead halt. The PCT withered. By the time Clarke died, in 1957, at age eighty-four, the trail had fallen into obscurity. Clarke’s hometown newspaper obit did not mention the PCT in its headline, which read, “Cotton Mather Descendent Dies Here.”

  But Rogers kept rallying for the trail, and he never compromised Clarke’s original vision. In a newspaper interview, Rogers made it clear that his dream trail was no place for tender-feet or casual pleasure-seekers. The trail, he said, would be an “authentic” experience that would test the resolve of everyone who traveled on it. “It isn’t like going through a path in the city among the trees,” he said. “We never intended to stick mileposts up on the damned thing and destroy the wilderness. You’re supposed to be enough of a backpacker to follow the maps.”*

  Rogers’s perseverance paid off in the 1960s, when America was finally ready to support the PCT. Backpacking, once considered a “marginal” activity, started to boom then. The other development was gear. World War II nearly killed off the PCT, but the accompanying technology boom helped the trail in the long run. The war led to the proliferation of lightweight plastic, nylon, aluminum, and foam rubber gear, some of it spun off from state-of-the-art military rucksacks. Freeze-dried rations helped inspire the stomach-turning, flatulence-inducing “foods” that made the Lois and Clark Expedition possible.† Backpacking’s new convenience and popularity emboldened PCT advocates, who lobbied Congress to pass the National Trails System Act in 1968, placing the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails under the care of the U.S. Department of the Interior, and the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation. Congress declared the Appalachian Trail and the PCT the first two official national scenic trails. By 1975, about thirty people had through-hiked the PCT. Interest fell in the 1980s but rebounded in the 1990s, with the advent of the light packers, led by backpacking guru Ray Jardine, whose once-ridiculed ideas about ultra-minimalist loads are now common practice on the trail. Another breakthrough came in 2004, when Scott Williamson—who had already hiked the trail six times—became the first person in history to through-hike it twice in one seven-month slog. Interest in the trail remains strong—these days, roughly 125 people a year complete it—but the PCT brought no such stability to its cocreator, Rogers. For the last twenty years of his life he tried to build a living off the PCT, producing food packs and maps, but could not get the business off the ground. Rogers eventually lost possession of his 850-square-foot redwood house in Santa Ana.

  “He just could not keep it together,” his son, Donald, told me. “There is no money to be found in the Pacific Crest Trail, and it just bankrupted him. He always gave so much more than he got in return.”

  The last time Rogers set foot on the Pacific Crest Trail, it was 1991. He was in a wheelchair. A photo shows him cutting the ribbon at a ceremony dedicating a new trailhead for the PCT at Walker Pass, California. His smile looks strained. He’s wearing a plaid windbreaker and a scarf around his neck. Because of a bureaucratic holdup, Rogers did not live long enough to see the official completion of the PCT route. The last major snag was the privately owned, 275,000-acre Tejon Ranch in Southern California. The ranch’s recalcitrant owners, fearing litter and fires, refused to let trail planners chart a course through their land and posted armed guards to keep hikers away. Those who dared trespass on the property complained of sentries taking potshots at them. Finally, the trail’s managers started condemnation proceedings against the ranch. The owners relented, but the trail through Tejon is ugly and waterless.

  This holdup robbed Rogers of a moment he had been waiting for most of his life. He died in April 1992, after making one last push to set up some much-needed water supply stops in the Mojave Desert section of the footpath, just north of Tejon Ranch. The final “golden spike” was pounded into the Pacific Crest Trail in June 1993.

  * Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, fourth edition, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001, pp. 317–18.

  * Alan Parachini, “A 2,606-mile Odyssey Through Wilderness,” Los Angeles Times, p. G 1, October 30, 1983.

  † Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind.

  Chapter 16

  Wilderness Voodoo

  One hundred miles south of the High Sierra, we entered a buffer zone between the chaparral foothills to the
south and the highest peaks to the north. It felt as if the desert and the mountains were casting spells on us from opposite directions. At the same time, I entered a buffer zone between actually speaking with my girlfriend and merely grunting at her. In retrospect, this was understandable. She no longer trusted me because of the cactus incident. Because of the same incident, I no longer trusted the outdoors. The day we entered Jawbone Canyon Road, south of the Piute Mountain range, I gesticulated a lot, and sometimes snorted. Sometimes she tried to engage me in conversation, but I refused. Throughout the week, instead of saying, “Allison, would you please hand me that bottle,” or “Allison, would you offer me a bite of that lemon-ginger Pemmican Bar?” I’d point and say something approximate, such as “Unk.”

  It’s not that we were fighting, exactly. It’s just that we were slipping backward into a Pleistocene frame of mind, our hair matted, our body odors indescribable. I tried to bond with the woods, the way the Gingerbread Man did. But what did I get for my bonding attempt, save for a row of perforations on my tongue and a lot of strange notions in my brain? Life out here was becoming too random. I was on high alert now, edgy and anxious. For this reason, I began to modify my notions about God and spirituality, and wonder if paganism was my only protection from the chaos and overwhelming power of nature.