The Cactus Eaters

by Dan White

  “How could you do this to us?” I screamed. “How could you?” I called Betty a stinking hag and a worthless piece of crap. Finally, I called her a whore. The name stuck. Betty the Waterbag, from there on in, would be known as Betty the Whore. This new name made me and Allison feel a whole lot better about the situation, but the name did not erase the fact that we were in danger again. For the next hour, we made Betty the Whore the scapebag of all that had gone wrong in our journey. I grabbed Betty the Whore by the neck and held her aloft, partly to keep the remaining water from dribbling out and partly to strangle her, to make her scream with pain.

  We had another four hours of daylight to go, so we marched on. I started to lose the plot after a while, to thunder at no one in particular, and tighten my grip around Betty’s nylon neck. Allison tried as hard as she could to distract me. We often filled the trail hours by talking about old jobs. Long before we met, she’d worked as a waitress in the kind of restaurants where waiters kiss their fingertips while telling customers about the specials. Allison told me all about the way she used to gargle red wine, swishing it from cheek to cheek as it changed flavors in her mouth. “You know how to tell a lousy bottle of wine?” she said. “That’s when you sniff it and you detect barnyard.” She explained to me that good vines must be “tortured in subsistence soil to grow the best grapes. They must suffer to thrive.” It started to get dark. The air had a citrus-salty smell, slightly carbonated, with notes of sagebrush with yeasty overtones. We walked through scrub brush. The light was red and faint. Our water bag was running so low we would have just enough to get us through the evening and the next morning.

  At times like this, you’d think deep thoughts would come to a man’s mind. You’d think he’d get right down to business and start asking the big whys and the big ifs and the big whats. You’d think he’d take this time to inventory his list of sins and get right with God. But, no. Inanities enter the human brain. You may try to will deep thoughts and important questions into your head but they just won’t come. Instead you start analyzing the lyrics of the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” though you hate that song so much that you once fled from a diner where it was playing on the jukebox, and were almost run over by a truck. Walking up a windswept hill, you are troubled by the fact that the guests at Hotel California can “check out” anytime they like but they can “never leave,” which implies a 100 percent occupancy rate, so it makes no sense that there would be “plenty of room,” at the hotel, or any room left at all. You wonder if the Eagles had a game plan for all those extra guests. You figure there must be foldaway beds, but it torments you that Don Henley never mentions this in the song.

  It also occurs to you, somewhere on this windblown ridge, that there are people in this world who really love backpacking. There are people in this world who go backpacking by choice. And it occurs to you that you and Allison are here by choice.

  We were still hiking at the time of day when shadows lose their shape and run straight into one other, making one big shadow. We hiked toward a phantom radio tower, due north, saucer-equipped, high on a crag. A stripe of quartzite ran across a hill near the trail. In the almost-dark, minerals in the quartzite glowed like white teeth. As we passed the hills, I looked to my right, due east, at the glowing dunes of the desert, the great big swallowing nothing out there. The view was lovely enough to make me stop in my tracks, and yet it chilled me to stare at eastern ridges marching toward the Nevada border. “It could get me just like that,” I kept muttering to myself. “It’s gonna get me just like that.”

  “What’s gonna get you?” Allison said, squeezing my arm. “Nothing’s gonna get you, Fishbody.”

  A bluish light settled on the top of the tallest dune, and the light rose, wavelike, from the sand. The glow receded. My mouth felt as though it had just bit into an underripe persimmon, that suck-mouthed feeling, as if every bit of moisture were receding. We walked in the moonlight at the time of night when every twig looks like a snake. The moon turned pines into penitents frozen in their stations, arms bent in front of them. Allison picked a spot of flat earth beneath a pine and declared it ours. There, under the branches, we pitched Freddy, the Bullfrog tent, and found enough string cheese to make a rough dinner. Seam-sealed and vacuum-packed, the cheese had lasted several days in hot weather without going bad, though its texture was snotty and unpleasant. Allison took out our headlamp, fastened it to her skull, and flicked it on. Light shone on our thumb-stained maps. The next unreliable spring was five miles away. The moon was bright that night; it washed the stars away on all sides, but a few of them had escaped to the outer edges of the sky. Allison stared at a fixed point beyond the stars. I looked at her and wondered if this was the wrong dream. If it was the right dream it wouldn’t be this hard.

  I tried to cheer myself up by glancing up at the Big Dipper, glow dots in cruciform. Allison leaned into my shoulder. I remembered what a teacher had told me, long ago, about the Big Dipper. As long as there have been people on Earth, and no matter where they were living on this planet, it’s always been a good sign. The Big Dipper is the one superstition that everyone can agree on. If you’re in a desert somewhere, and you look up and find the Dipper, it means you’ll wake next day and find good water. You might be thirsty, but the Dipper’s always full. It’s a universally accepted concept.

  I found out years later that everything I knew about the Dipper was wrong. The Big Dipper, in various parts of the world, is not thought of as a dipper at all. In modern Europe, people think the Dipper is a cart. Egyptians look up and see a bull’s thigh. Others think it’s a bear. And the Dipper changes all the time. Human beings have lived on this earth in some stoop-shouldered form or other for millions of years. At the dawn of evolution, the Dipper formation didn’t look anything like it does now. Timothy Ferris, in his book, Seeing in the Dark, says that the Dipper, a hundred thousand years ago, had a “squarer bowl and a straight handle like a primitive implement.” In a million years, when Allison and I will have ceased to exist even at the microparticle level, the dipper won’t exist, either. I crawled in our tent and cuddled with Allison, then uncuddled, because her bare legs, smooth in Tehachapi, were getting stubbly. We slept on different sides of the tent. When I woke up, the Dipper was gone. The white sky had washed it away.

  We rose up that morning and walked into the foothills to look for the water for the better part of the morning, on dirt roads. We searched under rocks, behind piñon pines, and under hills. I don’t know how much time passed, and when at last we found the meager water, it wasn’t much of a relief. The two of us were sticky and tired, and the usual silty water was only a puddle, barely enough to quench us.

  “It’s our dream,” Allison said, staring at the murk. “But it’s just not worth this amount of anguish. You know what just kills me? We did everything right this time, and it’s not good enough.”

  This time we hadn’t screwed anything up. Equipment failure is an act of God. If we were going to quit anywhere, this was the logical place, right here, near a grove of thirsty pines. The Lois and Clark Expedition had gone far enough, it seemed. Eventually, we’d have to emerge from the woods and get jobs again. And did we really want to spend our vacation time bent over at another water hole, slurping mud, while mean greenies chewed holes in our legs?

  But the two of us could not will ourselves to quit. It is possible to make a momentous decision without knowing why. Perhaps we feared that if we quit then, we would leave the trail before figuring out why we’d tried to hike it in the first place. At the time, Allison, sitting by the waterhole, said that we had been “shamed” into sticking with our plan, but I now suspect she had other motivations. As I’ve mentioned, she was a feminist of sorts. Perhaps her trail was a kind of protest, a boot kick in the crotch of backcountry patriarchy. Allison was one of only a half a dozen women walking the PCT that year, and dozens of men walked it that year. She often wondered out loud about all the “sexism” and the “macho shit” that pervaded hiker culture.

/>   She had a valid point. A woman came up with the original idea for a PCT, and yet the trail, in some ways, was a sausage party. Even Allison sometimes talked about her experience from a masculine perspective. She spoke of the asceticism and humility that comes from walking a hundred miles a week and eating dried-food meals that she called “C-rats,” a military term. She was coming to appreciate the discipline that the trail was giving her, and the way the trail helped her draw from reserves of feral flintiness. Her body, once soft, was finding its true shape. The hike changed her every day. She often said she was “amazed at the transformation” when she looked in a motel mirror. She was surprised at her resiliency, and so was I; in spite of her cranky knee, which still caused her pain, she just kept chalking up miles. California was helping her claim something for herself. “How many women can say they’ve walked across California?” she told me one day.

  I had my own reasons for sticking to the trail. I can’t boil it down to any one thing, either. The trail still seemed better to me than an occupation. In fact, it was becoming my life now, Velveeta, horseflies, sunsets, and all. The trail made me feel like an iconoclast, zigging when the rest of the nation merely zagged. The national recession was only a seedling when we dreamed up our plan to walk the PCT. Now the bad times were in full bloom. There’s nothing like an economic slump to remind you of the chances you might have taken, if only you had found the cojones. I had some friends at that time who were becalmed in the Horse Latitudes of diminished expectations, even before the economy begun to plummet. They were stuck in the same small towns for years. Only their hair moved away, marching off their scalps and taking up residence on their backs and asses. All around me, men stood meekly as life’s changes ran roughshod over them. Prospects diminished while guts enlarged. Every year gave shape to new unspoken horrors: maxed-out credit cards, mortgages, children, male pattern baldness, and they didn’t even get to choose the pattern. I knew I had break out now or it would never happen. I needed find out what I had before the time was lost.

  It was July 6. Twenty-four days had passed since we first set foot on the Pacific Crest Trail. After resting up for the night, we rose up the next day and made a vow to march on as far as we could toward Kennedy Meadows, while drinking cup after cup of sun-brewed Twining’s Ceylon India blend, so strong it gave us cottonmouth. As we headed into the Domeland Wilderness, caffeine sang in our veins. We hiked, jogged, and sprinted through green-grass meadows, past tall trees that blocked the sun that lit the tops of rock giants above us. We ran until the landscape grew lush. The Lois and Clark Expedition hiked past a tilted shack, complete with a crone in a plastic chair out front and a pit bull at her side, but we paid them scant attention. On we walked until we reached a place where wildflowers grew to our waists, and the sound of something static filled our ears. It was water, more than we could ever need, flowing by the side of us. The Lois and Clark Expedition had crossed its last stretch of dry terrain. The first time we saw the Kern River, it seemed a dreadful waste, all of that moisture slipping past us. We also felt small beside it. In the desert we were the tallest things. Here, even the rocks on the meadow’s edges were bigger than single-family starter homes. Mountains moved in closer, until I realized they were not independent of one another, but were towers on a connected wall. The closer we got, the more the wall seemed to wrap around us.

  In a field, we found a Pacific Crest Trail journal in a weatherproof metal container mounted on a pole. Todd the Sasquatch had signed the trail journal in bold letters. “Am I the last through-hiker?” he had written. “NO YOU’RE NOT!” a message beneath it said. The spidery script was the Gingerbread Man’s. We whooped. Maybe the Gingerbread Man would catch up to Todd the Sasquatch and leave him in his dust. But that wasn’t all. Beneath his addendum to Todd’s message, GB had written a missive for us:

  “Hey, Lois and Clark Expedition,” he said. “You made it. Welcome to the family.”

  Allison and I did a spontaneous jig in the tall grass. Now every bit of our hike added up to this moment. We could not stop jabbering about how our feet alone had brought us here as we high-stepped through the meadow and stomped onto a two-lane blacktop to Kennedy Meadows. Get me to a hamburger stand. Get me to the nearest phone booth. I could hardly wait to call the people who thought we would die. And then I remembered that Kennedy Meadows had no phones. It was one of the last “off-the-grid” towns in America, with ranch homes, scattered stores, and two restaurants—Irelan’s Home Cooked Meals and Grumpy Bear Retreat, restaurant, information center, and home of Mountain Beef Jerky—all running on generators. The only way to call loved ones was to stand outside and yell. That, or you could borrow the emergency radio phone at the fire station for five dollars a call, but it was a long walk down the road. Oh well, we couldn’t brag to our loved ones after all, but at least the locals would hear our stories. We’d be kings for the day.

  The Kennedy Meadows general store was closed when we got there. Allison stuck her thumb in the air and waved it in front of the road. Minutes later a brick-colored pickup stopped. An old man and an old woman sat in the cab. A German shepherd crawled all over the bed. Its name, according to the owners, was Jake.

  “Where to?” the driver said.

  “Food,” I said.

  “Bath,” Allison said.

  “Painkillers,” I said.

  “I know the place,” the driver said. “Get in. Don’t mind Jake. He won’t bite you.”

  Jake curled his lips and showed some teeth as we climbed in beside him.

  “Jake,” the driver said, looking back, out the window. “Don’t bite them.”

  The truck sped up, with us and our things in the back. Polymorphic rocks in the distance held their shape. The landscape slipped back, cows in the foreground, dust on the cows, and the highway behind us. Ranch houses flashed red and white. The truck came to a stop in front of a bloated tan dog snoring in the road. He looked like a hair-covered sausage. We climbed out of the truck, shouldering our packs, and stepped over the dog, which didn’t flinch. The café doors were open. We looked through the crammed aisles: beer, tackle, Advil, muffins, salsa, banana chips, fishing lures, powdered Gatorade. Near the door was a barrel of sour fruit gumballs that squirted goop in your mouth. A middle-age woman regarded us with no facial expression. Her hair was curly, her body small and stocky. Standing next to her was a handyman, in his mid-thirties, plump, with splotchy stains on his overalls, a tool belt around his waist. “Hi,” I said, hopefully. “We’re Pacific Crest Trail hikers looking for a bite to eat.”

  “We get a lot of those,” she said, and did not smile. “Some of you are okay. Some of you haven’t been so nice. You steal the salt shakers.”

  “We what?”

  “And the pepper, too. The salt I understand, but I’m not so sure what you do with the pepper.”

  The handyman smiled at this. His eyes were bright marbles floating in an oil slick.

  “Did you say Pacific Crest Trail hikers?” the handyman said. “You hikers shit all over the woods around here. The coyotes get the turds, and then the toilet paper dries up and blows around. And one time, this hiker tried to burn his toilet paper after he took a crap in the forest. He burned the toilet paper all right, and he burned the trees down, too. Five thousand acres.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. So much for my king-for-a-day fantasy. Now, after walking 245 miles from Agua Dulce, I was just another potential condiment-swiping deadbeat, and an arsonist to boot. The woman’s husband, Frank, came out, sweaty from the burger grill set behind the store. He held his arms to his sides and yelled through the door at the dog, which had risen from its slumber to bark at cows. We were starving. The woman, whose name was Virginia, took our orders. Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, sundae, sundae.

  Allison and I walked out front and sat down. Virginia came up with our orders, one at a time. I fell all over that burger, biting wet chunks out of it, wanting more. The homemade ice cream was so cold it made my neck cramp up. We killed
our sundaes with long glinting spoons shaped like swords. I was starting on my second when I noticed a dented exclamation mark of a man, skinny and stooped, walking toward us. He could have been fifty. He might have been eighty. The man had a ragged beard, jeans, a ripped shirt, and an expression of stupefaction. Frantic motions, absent teeth, and yet I was happy to see him at first. I needed a bit of attention from the outside world. Besides, he seemed like a friendly fellow. He kept on smiling. I smiled back.

  “Damned Pacific Crest Trail hikers,” he said. “You’re not one of them, are you?” He let loose with a harrumph and shook his shoulders. The shake traveled south, down the length of him, like snake twitches. I no longer wanted to talk to him so much, and yet a talk was about to happen, perhaps a long one. He pulled up a chair and scooted up close to us. “You hear my question?” he said.

  “Yes, I heard,” I said. “And yes, we’re Pacific Crest Trail hikers.”