The Cactus Eaters

by Dan White

  I recall long nights eating crunchy dehydrated meatballs, which amazed and disgusted me: Who knew that scientists could freeze-dry gristle? Dehydrated carrots grew to four times their normal size in hot water. My father flinched when he saw the carrots, for they reminded him of his childhood, in which he was forced to eat slimy root vegetables. The carrots scared me, too, because they looked like mutant orange leeches flinging themselves from the pot with crazed insistency. Sleeping was fitful, and for good reason. In those days before ultra-lightweight North Face equipment, we used cheapo nylon deathtraps known as “pup tents,” with not one but two poles propped—for reasons I still can’t understand—on the inside of the tent, to hold up the roof. If I so much as rolled over in my sleeping bag, or even fidgeted, the heavy steel poles would come crashing down on my skull.

  Mornings, however, were bright and pleasant. Skies were pink and purple and shot through with blue mist. Father would crawl out at seven thirty in the morning, in near-frozen temperatures, exposed knees knocking as he crouched in his mummy jacket vest—which, strangely, left his hairy arms completely bare to the elements—and light the fire. Then he’d stumble around for wood to make the fire larger. How strange to see him there, this streetwise New Yorker who grew up to be an electrical engineer and a wealthy man, who spent so many daylight hours away from home, troubleshooting or out on the road, now playing paterfamilias in Stone Age conditions, subjecting himself to inconveniences and low-level discomforts. “Young Daniel,” he would say to me, in a booming voice, “get a log,” and I’d make my way through the underbrush in search of kindling. For a shining moment I felt like a Walton. We had prunes, Ritz crackers, vacuum-sealed hash browns, and a stick of Hickory Farms smoked summer sausage big enough to inflict blunt trauma. For a short while, I had all I could ever need.

  Distracted and nostalgic, I led Allison to a wrong turn, down into a pine forest, which turned out to be an equestrian route to a trailhead, where some PCT hikers try to hitch a ride out to Lone Pine for supplies. We had just discovered our error and were turning around, hiking back to the place where we lost the trail, when a skinny man hurried toward us with a baffled expression on his bearded face. From a distance his legs looked hairless, as if he’d Naired them down. They flashed in the sun like scissors. On his back was a pack not much bigger than your average weekend warrior’s, but filthy. I figured he would blow right past us. Instead he stopped and stood in the way.

  “Hey you,” he said when he saw our packs, ice axes lashed to the bottom. His skin had a dull sheen, slimey from sweat. “You the couple in front of me?” he said. “The Lois and Clark Expedition? Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail?”

  Allison and I looked at each other. I nodded warily at the stranger. We were no longer very surprised when people we’d never met knew our trail names. The PCT has an amazingly proficient telegraph of gossip and innuendo, fueled by trail journals and occasional southbound hikers who tell the army of northbounders about everyone they’ve met en route. In a sense, the PCT has its own Internet.

  “Mmm-hmmm,” the stranger said, sizing us up. He had a tight little fuzz beard. His small eyes squinted through spectacle frames. “Tell me,” he said, “did you lose a shit shovel seventy-five miles ago?”

  I felt my face turn crimson. Yes, as a matter of fact, we’d lost that cat hole shovel somewhere in the southern Sierra, forcing us to scratch out our constitutional trenches with various branches and rocks. I nodded sheepishly.

  “Huh?” he said, as though he hadn’t heard me. “You lose some toilet paper, too?”

  I blushed again. Well, yes, as a matter of fact, we’d also lost some toilet paper quite a while ago, forcing us, for a brief period, to scratch our bottoms with various leaves and branches.

  “And a bedroll?”

  “No,” I said. “We did not lose a bedroll.”

  “Huh?” he said. “Okay, so the bedroll isn’t yours, but you should be more careful next time. It’s not good to, you know, toss your stuff all over the place. This”—he interrupted himself, gesturing toward the foxtail pines and their jigsaw puzzle bark the color of chocolate—“this is not a dump.”

  “I will be more careful,” I said.

  “What? Okay, yeah, you should try to be more careful.”

  We all stood in awkward silence for a while. Then he smiled. “So…” he said, “anyways, everybody calls me the Wolf. You heading to Canada?” After hearing our answer, he jumped in and continued. “Yeah, I can walk forty miles in one day. We’re late in the season, I know, but I’ll push on through even if it’s snowing in the north, even if I’ve got to do the trail in snowshoes. And when I get to that finish line, I’m gonna drink a dry beer.” Wolf meant this literally; he insisted that he was in possession of a dehydrated “malt beverage” that foamed up when you added water.

  Allison smiled. “You can’t dehydrate alcohol,” she said calmly.

  Wolf would not be dissuaded. He insisted that it was an actual beer. He kept staring at us, smirking, tilting his head in birdlike motions. I could tell he was waiting for something to happen. I felt like I was on a stage, unable to remember my lines.

  “You’re overpacked,” he said at last, pointing at Big Motherfucker.

  Oh, so that was the cue. I was supposed to comment on his puny backpack. Not wanting to be a Grinch, I played along. “Wow. It’s amazing to me that you can hike the PCT with that little pack,” I said. “How do you do it?”

  He handed me his pack, which weighed next to nothing. In it I found a weatherproof bivouac sack, a fistful of Dots candies, marshmallows, and cinnamon bears in a Ziploc bag, a few packets of regular-flavor Top Ramen, and several squashed Snickers bars. I kept pawing through his pack. He had no tent, no sleeping bag, no Ridgerest, not even a compass. He didn’t have maps, either. “What the hell?” I said. “Are you crazy?” It’s one thing to hike the Appalachian Trail mapless. It has easy-to-find markers on trees. But the PCT is not nearly as well marked, with many confounding intersections. What if he got stranded or injured? “Where’s the guidebook?” I said.

  “I hate the guidebook. It’s expensive and a waste, so I typed up this thing.” Wolf reached into his shorts pocket and handed me a well-thumbed booklet of data, crudely stapled, with mileage figures in rows and basic information about water sources. “I’m thinking of printing up copies so other people can use it. So. Anyways. As much as I’d love to chat with you guys, I’ve got to get to Lone Pine and back. Chances are I’ll sneak past your campsite in the middle of the night and you won’t see me. That’s how I got my name, Wolf. I can hike forty miles day if I want, but sometimes I get turned around and end up going in the wrong direction. One night, on the Appalachian Trail, I got so lost I snuck into camp at midnight. Some lady saw me and got scared. She thought I was a wolf.”

  “So…” I said, “You must be one of those crazy Jardi-Nazis.”

  He smirked. “Not one of those,” he replied. “That Ray Jardine is way overpacked.”

  He waved good-bye and raced down the horse trail and was out of sight behind the trees.

  The next day, Allison and I set off on a seventeen-mile round trip to the top of Mt. Whitney and back, four thousand feet up, four thousand feet down again. The Whitney round trip is not part of the PCT route, but we couldn’t resist. Those who hike up the summit from Crabtree Meadows need no technical skills. You just walk up. It is, as John Muir said, a mule road. First the two of us put up the tent and stashed our gear at the lush base camp. At the time we just wanted views and the bragging rights. But Mount Whitney has always been one of my favorite peaks for psychological reasons. Unlike Mount Hood and Mount Rainier, Whitney doesn’t try to be showy or bossy, dominating the landscape for hundreds of miles. Whitney has no fetching pyramid symmetry, no shapely figure that might look good on a beer can or pop bottle. Whitney isn’t even the tallest mountain in America. It’s merely the tallest in the contiguous forty-eight states. That qualifier condemns it to eternal also-ran status. As magnificent as it i
s, the mountain is also a little pathetic. On top of this, the mountain has been subject to one indignity after another.

  Seventy years after white explorers had named most of the dominant West Coast peaks, Whitney sat in the darkness of obscurity, waiting around for someone to notice. Part of the problem is its location and surroundings. Unlike Mount Hood, which has no competition for miles around, Whitney is nothing but the highest spoke on a range of sawteeth. From the San Joaquin Valley, you can’t see the peak at all. In the past century, many a man has tried and failed to reach its summit, not because the climb was all that difficult, but for the simple fact that they could not find the goddamned thing. Clarence King, celebrated geologist and outdoorsman, made a two-day trek toward Whitney, past tumbling boulders, over hazardous slopes, shredding his shoes as he made his way to “the highest peak.” He arrived on July 6, 1864, only to look up and see two peaks that were significantly higher. Seven years later, he dragged his sorry carcass up the “real” Mount Whitney and was, by one account, “immensely pleased with himself.” For two years he glowed with the knowledge that he’d conquered America’s loftiest summit. Then, on August 4, 1873, during a meeting of the California Academy of Sciences, he dropped a bomb: in somber tones, he reflected about the arduous trek, and the mules he rode to “the highest crest of the peak southwest of Lone Pine, which for over three years has been known by the name of Mount Whitney…I know this peak well.” Unfortunately, he added, “This peak is not Mount Whitney.”* On September 19, 1873, King stood, at last, on the true Mount Whitney, only to find that three local fisherman had beaten him to the task by a month. King, who went on to become the first chief of the United States Geological Survey, was not the only great Californian to get confused. No less an explorer and mountaineer than John Muir set his sights on Whitney in 1873, only to climb Mount Langley by mistake.

  All of this is enough to give any mountain low self-esteem, but Whitney faced even more degradation in the last half-century. As recently as 1958, it was the undisputed highest point in America. Then, in 1959, Alaska became a state, which meant that the 20,320-foot Denali was suddenly part of our country. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, people with too much time on their hands put forth the theory that White Mountain Peak, facing Whitney from the other side of the Owens Valley, was really a few feet higher than Whitney, and that White Mountain rangers had perpetuated the “Whitney is the highest” myth to keep tourist hordes out of White Mountain’s delicate high-desert ecology. I asked District Forest Ranger Jan Cutts, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service, about this conspiracy theory. She suffered my queries with good humor. “We’re rather low on the pecking order, you know,” she said. “We only manage land. We don’t determine tallness.” In any case, a 1998 global positioning study put the matter to rest: Whitney conclusively dominates the lower forty-eight, and White Mountain is merely the third highest peak, at 14,246 feet.

  Pushing our way slowly up the switchbacks, hiking fast above the timberline, I could understand all the confusion. Even when we made it to thirteen thousand feet, feeling nauseated and barely able to nibble our chocolates, the summit was nowhere in sight. We climbed, up talus slopes, past a platoon of marmots, and straight through the slush of melting ice. On rocky wastes where no trees grew, flowers bloomed through cracks in the granite. “How far are we from the top?” I croaked to a man with a walrus mustache.

  “You’re on the summit, buddy,” he bellowed back, “I mean it. You’re on top of it!”

  An hour and a half later, we were still nowhere near the summit, and a second man, also with a walrus mustache, assured us we were still two miles from the top. It was pushing 3:00 P.M., and we had to allow four hours to get back. What if we got caught in the dark? I was tired, looking around, wondering why Allison was not in sight, when I heard a blast of “fucks” and “shits.” I looked back and saw Allison fifty yards back, in a wet heap in a snowbank. “Do you want to get to the top so badly that you don’t care if I break my leg?” she said, dusting off snow particles. I pulled her out of the snow and was about to apologize when a familiar figure came bolting down from the switchbacks. It was the Wolf, looking no cleaner from his journey to Lone Pine. He’d just scaled Whitney from the opposite side, out of Whitney Portal, and was now skipping toward us. “Hey,” he said, looking at Allison, who was still shaking the snow off her haunches. “I’m worried about you guys. Take my headlamp in case it gets dark. It can be hard to find your way up there. If you make it down by dinner time, I’ll make you eggs and bacon.”

  “You mean real eggs and bacon?” Allison said. “What if it leaks all over your gear?”

  “What gear?” Wolf said, flashing a smirk. He waved and ran away from us down the switchbacks.

  We turned to face the mountain and made our way up the last pitch. At last we stood on top, staring at flat-bottomed clouds and the shadows they cast on the Owens Valley, a sultry murk to the east. Below us, day hikers in orange, yellow, red, and blue formed a rainbow inchworm making its way up the switchbacks. On the mountain, no one was around, just a brick shack with a metal roof among the talus. We were standing on Whitney, savoring our triumph, when we saw a thin man, unshaven and puffing a cigarette, even as he walked into the shack and signed the guest register. When he was done scribbling his message, I bent down to sign the next available space. The smoker had written, “Jason,” giving no last name. Under “Address,” he’d written, “Wherever.” Outside, he took only a sleepy interest in the peaks and clouds. Thinking I might get him to smile, I unholstered my Pentax K1000 monster camera and stepped up to take his picture. Jason From Wherever threw his hands in front of his face.

  “No pictures” he shouted.

  With vague thoughts of hidden bodies and the Witness Protection Program, we followed him as he trotted back down toward base camp, off the mountainside. The land unfolded, rock staircases dropping to a mandolin lake where a beautiful woman sat on a rock alone, peeling an avocado. Back at camp, Allison and I stopped to fetch some food from our tent, then followed Jason From Wherever through the smoke of burning logs. At dusk, Wolf sat in a clearing tending a fire, while making good on his promise to cook us dinner. After ensuring he had an audience, he set a box of bacon on the flames and stripped the lid off to reveal a pound of white fat streaked with red. When the bacon was good and bubbling, Wolf took out twelve unbroken eggs from a red shock-proof container and dumped them in the bacon, which received each egg with a haughty hiss. Jason From Wherever sat down with us; Wolf had invited him to share our supper. The eggs foamed and spat. When they were cooked, Wolf grabbed a gluey clump of eggs and meat and stuffed it down the hole in his beard. Between moans, he said, “I’m gonna catch that Gingerbread Man and pass him, ’cause no one keeps up with me for very long.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said, reaching out with my Lexan camp fork.

  “Oh, I’ll get him,” Wolf said through a muffler of eggs.

  We sat there, hunched, and bared our teeth in the firelight. All of us grabbed fistfuls of the smoked-meat pudding. The fire gave off so much smoke, the moon turned yellow. I felt part of something larger than myself, a wolf pack, a clan. Eating this burned, wet food felt like the fulfillment of an unspoken promise, a backwoods communion. When the flames died out, the first stars showed through the trees, and Allison announced it was time for dessert. She took out a brown Ziploc bag full of dirt-brown powder, spiked with a pinch of powdered espresso, added some filtered water, twirled the mixture with a stick, and, voilà, there was a pot of chocolate mousse so thick it clung to the stockpot’s sides. Those with bowls made use of them. Those without them ate like bears. Wolf was speechless. “Fucking awesome,” said Jason From Wherever.

  We sat there most of the night, having the kind of loopy conversations that might sound intelligent in college, when all the dorm mates sit in the stairwells draining twelve-packs of Black Label, smoking impotent Samoan skunkweed, and pronouncing it “kind,” then analyzing Peter Gabriel lyrics backward for an ho
ur or two. “Followed the Grateful Dead for a while,” Jason From Wherever said. “The thing about the Dead is they never fuckin’ moved. Oh yeah, they sorta pivoted sometimes, but they mostly just stood there. Went to a concert once when Jerry moved, just a bit, I mean, he kinda shook his shoulders or something, and the whole place just fuckin’ exploded.”

  The whole night went like that. Wolf talked to Allison about an “easy” way to cure her blisters. “Don’t pop them ’cause they’ll grow right back,” he said. “What you want do is take a hot, clean needle with the thread still attached, and run it through your blister and let the pus wick off it.” In the woozy haze of fat, sugar, and exhaustion, this sounded like a brilliant suggestion. And the night kept stumbling along until, at last, Jason From Wherever stood up and let loose with an extravagant belch. He took a tug off his cigarette, bathed us all in blue smoke, thanked us all for the free food, picked himself off the log, dusted off his bottom, and bid us farewell. He walked out into the woods and the forest swallowed him up.

  Allison and I were about to take off, too, when Wolf, poking at the burned crisp of the bacon box, called out to us. “Listen, you guys. You want, we can hike together a while if you like,” he said. “I could use the company.”

  Allison and I looked at each other. We hadn’t seen this coming. The Gingerbread Man had proven to us that these speed-demon hikers could make good conversationalists, and could guide us over dangerous terrain. On the downside, speed demons could make us collapse from exhaustion with their relentless hiking techniques.

  “You don’t have to answer now,” Wolf said. “I’ll be in the lake near Crabtree Meadows tomorrow at ten thirty, taking a bath. If you want to hike, come looking for me. You’ll find me.”

  Allison and I lit up our headlamps and made our way through the meadow, while considering his offer.