The Cactus Eaters

by Dan White

  “Forty miles in the wrong direction?” Allison said wistfully. “No map? No tent? No guidebook?”

  I didn’t know what to say. He did seem a bit wacky, but I liked the knock-kneed coltishness that made me forgive the know-it-all smirks. More than that, I was curious. But I slept fitfully, knowing what lay ahead. Forester Pass was slippery and dangerous. I’d never hiked up and over an icy pass before. Suppose I split my skull? Allison had grown up in the frozen Midwest. She understood how snow behaved. I’m a Southern Californian, born and raised. The first time I saw snow falling, while going to college in Connecticut, I thought there had been an explosion at a detergent factory. Besides, I hate slippery surfaces. Sure, we had ice axes, and everyone said they could save our lives. Back in the desert, the Gingerbread Man had tried to show us how to use them by throwing himself on a mound of dirt and stabbing it with his hiking pole. But his display wasn’t all that helpful. The fact was I’d never practiced a self-arrest before. But not hiking with Wolf would have seemed rude at this point, considering the feast he’d given us. And besides, backing down would have made me look like a pantywaist in front of Allison. The decision was made. We would walk with Wolf over dreaded Forester Pass, the highest point on the Pacific Crest Trail.

  Next morning we found Wolf floating in water so cold it made him howl. He put his clothes on, and we hiked into a deep wood where spider webs drooped in hammock shapes. Shelf mushrooms grew in plates so thick up the sides of trees I swore I could climb them and they would hold my weight. Wolf was patient and kind, indulging our slow pace. He walked in a birdlike manner, using his legs for the forward thrust while letting his arms hang to the sides as if they were incidental. He kept turning back to watch us waddle. “You guys need extra energy?” Wolf said. “I’ve got snacks.” He reached in his pack and pulled out a baggie full of white glop mixed with red paste and blackish lumps. “You’re welcome to eat as much of this as you want,” he said. “It’s cinnamon Gummi Bears, marshmallows, and raisins.”

  I thanked him but feared the snacks would make me heave. By my own calculations, we had plenty of food. I asked Allison to hand me the food bag. But when I looked inside, there was almost nothing left except some crumbling oat bars. We had plenty of flatulent freeze-dried dinners remaining: Lipton’s Noodles, space-age stroganoff, and Big Bill’s Beans and Rice. What had happened to our crackers? Where were the string cheeses and Blenheim apricots? Suddenly I remembered, with self-recrimination, that I had thrown our five-pound bag of granola into a Dumpster at Kennedy Meadows. I had my reasons—the granola was sickly sweet and the cashews had all gone bad—but we needed the calories now. I felt my body starting to digest itself.

  Wolf frog-hopped boulders. Slow and indulgent as first, he was racing along, as if making up for wasted time. And there was one more unsettling factor. This was clearly not the Pacific Crest Trail. The signs all read, LAKE SOUTH AMERICA TRAIL. Rushing to catch a glimpse of him, we had no time even to ask him why we were going this weird way, or to check the directions to figure out where we’d gone wrong. Tired and ornery, I began to wonder if our imperious leader had any sense of direction. I also wondered if he was aware of his surroundings. I once read that a certain species of European swallow can fly when it’s fast asleep. Is that how Wolf hiked? Did the wilderness even register in his mind? He never commented on wildlife except the sort that could harm him: chiggers, blackflies, and the like. His pace was robotic, metronomic. No slope could tire him out. Wolf hurled himself over every steep thing we saw without comment. He seemed superhuman. And though we were out of breath, and worried we would never catch him at all, the pace made me curious. What was the source of his tremendous strength? And what sort of person can hike for a day in the wrong direction, get up the next day, find his way back to the trail, get lost again, and not go mad? Or was he mad already?

  Allison caught him on a rare rest break and asked him why he couldn’t stop hiking. He told her that one of his girlfrends broke his heart. “I’ve never gotten used to rejection. I’ve been hiking ever since.” When Wolf surged ahead of us again, and was out of earshot, Allison and I privately discussed why he didn’t just leave the trail and meet someone else. When we finally managed to sprint our way alongside him, Wolf gave us a few more tidbits of his life story. He was twenty-three. In high school, his classmates voted him shyest. His driver’s license showed a confused-looking young man with hair that reminded me more of an alpaca than a wolf. Wolf had been a roofer, camp counselor, and, to my surprise, a trail guide. But his main purpose in life seemed to be walking vast distances to mend a fractured heart.

  He did not go into any detail about the true love who had dumped him. He did not even tell us what she looked like, how old she was, or the state where she lived. He talked only about his many treks into the backcountry. On his first fateful Appalachian Trail hike, he carried close to eighty pounds. At one point, he carried two backpacks at once. He brought along a trail guide dating to 1978, no map, six pounds of pancake mix, and a bundle of clothes, all of which got soaked. Then he hurt himself and could barely walk. It took him a month to hike a hundred miles. He gave up early, called his mother, and said he was quitting, but she knew that her son was so reluctant to give up any goal that she thought he was just kidding around. She would not pick him up at the trail turnoff. Consequently he had to walk, and hitchhike, a hundred miles home. “I thought I’d give up hiking forever after that,” he said. “But I tried the Appalachian Trail again. I hated it all over again, but then I went to a town near the trail, bought a gallon of ice cream and a can of fruit cup, the kind with the little half-cherries and all the syrup. I dumped it on the ice cream and ate the whole thing. I felt better after that and kept hiking.”

  This confession made me like him a lot more. We bonded over junk food. But his ice-cream confession only made my stomach howl with hunger. As we climbed higher, trees grew twisted and squat, bent to the wind, roots exposed. They were bare of foliage, except for a few tufts of green needles. Their hooked arms clung to the slopes. Soon there were no trees, just boulders and scree as far as we could see. At twelve thousand feet above sea level, marmots ducked in and out of rocky dens. One stood at attention, its mouth a black O, whistling in alarm. Breezes turned our sweat to ice water on the slopes leading up to Forester Pass, a monstrous gray shape protruding in the distance. “We’re going up and over that?” I kept saying to myself, my eyes bugging out at the ominous zigzag of snow and ice that rose from the base to the halfway point.

  All this time, Wolf barely took a rest, and when he did, he often cut the break short before we got there, meaning Allison and I were out of breath and soaked through with sweat at all times. When we finally caught him, resting on a slope munching Gummi Bears, I was out of my mind with hunger. Rocks took on the shapes of potatoes and bread loaves, hard-boiled eggs and cocktail pickles. Allison and I had decided to make our stand. We were going to break up with Wolf right now. Even our muscles were feeling woozy. This arrangement was not working out.

  “Uh, Wolf,” I said loudly, before I could back down. He whirled around and stared at me blankly. “Oh Wolf,” I continued. “We…uh…appreciate the fact that you’ve been nice to us. Thanks for the bacon. The thing is, we can’t take another step. We feel bad about holding you back. I’m thinking you’ll just go on ahead. We’ll do fine up here on our own. Cook some dinner. Figure things out from there, okay?”

  “Huh?” Wolf said. “What did you say? Well, that’s fine. Do what you have to do.” He looked pinched for a moment, put-upon and wincing, but he regained his equilibrium. The smirk returned. “Yeah, that’s fine, you guys. But let me ask you a question: Where’s the trail?”

  Allison and I glanced at each other and then at the landscape.

  There was no trace of trail. All around us was a crust of snow, footprints full of ice water, leading nowhere. Now Allison and I were too scared to continue without Wolf. Suppose we never found the trail and wound up stuck on that mountaintop? Of course, w
e had no indication that Wolf knew how to find the trail, either, but it made sense to stick together under the circumstances. That settled it. There would be no mutiny. We had no choice but to press on together, with Wolf leading. Flat-topped rocks became crude altars, set up for a quick sacrifice, as larger rocks, round as Olmec heads, looked on. I pulled hard on the cold air, which felt like mentholated smoke. All around me was a haze that hung in the middle distance and mountains with snow shapes draped on their flanks, chalk hill drawings of horses and leopards as long as football fields. I noticed the oddness of the light up there, the bluish tint that hung in the air and on the rocks and creeks, monochrome except for the black and green in the trees far below us.

  We were headed straight for the granite wall between Bubbs Creek and Tyndall Creek. Many PCT hikers dreaded this place. It was common to sprain a leg here. Every once in a long while, something far worse happened. In late July of 1940, six Sierra Club members tried to cross the pass in late summer. Altitude sickness overcame them, their breathing turned raspy, and their lips turned blue. Two of the party, H. M. Mergenthal and Vincent Smith, were barely breathing. Mergenthal died the next day, but Smith seemed to rally, showing signs of movement. His friends carried him seven miles down to a base camp twenty-five hundred feet below the pass. When Smith passed out again, the others tried to stir him with blasts from an oxygen tank. The group loaded him up and started to make the seventy-mile journey cross country over high terrain, knowing he had no chance unless they could get him to the Kern River Basin. Remoteness was the John Muir Trail’s selling point. It was so far from towns that hikers who wished to leave the trail, resupply, and return to the footpath had to budget at least three additional days for each supply stop. Not a road crosses its 211-mile route through Yosemite, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia national parks. That’s the problem with the backcountry. Isolation is romantic until something goes wrong. Smith died long before they got out of the forest.

  “Um…” Wolf said, standing before me. “It’s three o’clock. You’ll want to get down off the mountain before sundown. It’s gonna be cold up here when the sun sets.”

  He turned around and rushed the snow-covered slope as if laying siege to it. He dug steps in the ice, the two of us following close behind. I did not want to raise my legs and risk falling, but I knew what would happen if Allison and I just stood there; the longer we stayed in one spot, the more our weight would melt the snow beneath us, like a scooper left to sink in a gallon of ice cream. As best we could, we followed this Gumby messiah, climbing rocks and snowbanks, slipping and falling and getting up again. Gray rocks radiated heat, forming circles of blue shadow in the snow around them. “Don’t step near the base of those rocks,” Allison advised. “You’ll slip and fall.” Blue plastic snow pants hugged her hips. Her survival hat shaded her face, its brim drooping over her forehead. What struck me, more than all those things, was the calm of that face. She was surefooted and confident, while I found myself sinking waist-deep in snow, post-holing, and falling on my face.

  “Jesus Christ,” I roared.

  “Yes?” Wolf said.

  “God damn it!” I shouted.

  “Don’t take my name in vain,” Wolf said.

  Sandwiched between calm Allison, a few feet behind and below me, and smirky Wolf, I wobbled forward. An ice chute lay immediately to our left. If I fell into it, I would toboggan to the bottom, now twenty-five feet, now fifty feet, now seventy-five feet, straight below us. Wolf was still smirking but there was a strained, wet look in his eyes, a look of concern when he glanced at me. I could tell he was worrying about me. I froze, scared, before a gap between two rocks. “Take my hand,” he said. He grabbed hold of me, yanking me across the gap with such strength I felt like a child. He offered the same assistance to Allison, who said no. She leapt the gap just fine on her own. I should have been grateful then, but his concern and help just made me feel weak. All the same, I knew there was no climbing this pass without Wolf.

  The switchbacks narrowed until it seemed we were climbing a turret with an exterior staircase leading to a vampire’s perch: a stairwell, sinister but beautifully constructed, suggesting a backbreaking effort among its builders, even as it extracted the same from us. To the south, I looked down on a bowl of blue-streaked ice spreading out as far as I could see and culminating in a black crust that rimmed the horizon. A sign read, ENTERING KINGS CANYON NAT’L PARK. FORESTER PASS. ELEVATION 13,200 FEET.

  But this was not a moment to celebrate. Once you claw your way up the snowbound pass, you’ve got to claw your way back down the other side. Far below us, to the north, lay a bowl of dark water in the shape of a human foot. The lake had no name, only a number: Lake 12,248. It was so far below I couldn’t gauge the distance. Snow obscured our descent, turning it into a madhouse of confusion. Even our pathologically specific guidebook took a laissez-faire attitude toward the descent. All we could do was face the downward slope and aim for the black lake’s big toe. The only way down was to twist and squirm down a ridge covered with ice, rocks, and pebbles. Wolf plunged down the mountainside, tripping over sun cups, depressions in the snow shaped like the corrugations in an egg container. “Trust me, this is the easy way,” he moaned as he fell against a boulder. This was not hiking, exactly. It was more like selective tripping. I had learned, by now, that when Wolf said something was going to be easy, it meant a variety of things, none of them “easy.” It might mean “bound to inflict punishing blows all over your body” or “liable to knock the molars from your skull.”

  “Easy,” Wolf said a third time, and that’s when I knew I’d be fortunate to get out of this descent to Gangrene Lake without smashing my bones to atoms. By this time, I was a quivering Shmoo of fear, barely able to move. Allison was just behind and above me now, sliding down the mountain, inadvertently kicking bread loaf–size rocks toward me. One whooshed above my head. I skidded on my ass, with rocks and pebbles ripping at the seams of my electric blueberry survival pants. I was furious. How could Wolf have gotten us into this mess? How could Allison be so calm? It was all their fault, the fact that I was struggling and tired, the fact that I hadn’t had time to stop and get a proper snack. Up there on the mountainside, pebbles beneath my boots, I managed to stop myself from skidding for one blessed moment. And as I clung to the mountainside, contemplating all the falling and shrieking I was about to do, my thoughts, at last, became focused and clear. “Come on now,” I said to myself. “Get real.” It was time to stop blaming everyone under the sun for the fact that I was here, falling down a mountain and fixing to split my skull. It wasn’t Wolf’s fault. Hell, he’d practically pulled me up the mountainside, giving me encouragements as I went along. And it wasn’t Allison’s fault, either. She’d tried to keep me calm and focused. I couldn’t blame my upbringing, either. This wasn’t my parents’ fault. So whose fault was this, anyhow? Who was really to blame for the stupid and dangerous things that kept happening to me, over and over again?

  I am talking, of course, about John Muir.

  As I fought my way down the slopes, four words echoed out from my past: “Goddamn you, John Muir!” I said again and again.

  Long ago, when I was only eleven, my father took me and most of my family on a two-night backpacking trip across a small portion of the John Muir Trail. Above Thousand Island Lake, where I thought an uphill climb would never end, I threw off my backpack in front of my parents and started shouting, “DAMN YOU, JOHN MUIR! DAMN YOU, JOHN MUIR,” until my throat was raw. I was furious at him, even though, at the time, I had no idea who the hell he was. I had seen photos of the man, with his shag-moss beard and penetrating gaze, but I didn’t know he was the fellow who had founded the modern environmental movement, or that he had lobbied successfully to establish Yosemite National Park. I did not know he was the founding president of the Sierra Club. I just assumed he was some silly tool who had built his own trail with a rusty pickaxe and named it after himself.

  Muir didn’t build the John Muir Trail; it is a tribute
to him, not one of his projects. And yet my irrational impulse to curse him was more appropriate than I suspected. Muir was largely to credit, or to blame, for people like me who went to the western wilds in search of a salve for their psychic nicks and pains. Muir wasn’t the first to rhapsodize about the woods and nature’s redemptive power. In fact, his writings often repeated what Thoreau had said before. But Muir, unlike Thoreau, did not dilute his rapturous writings with descriptions of terror and frightful awe. To him, the woods were pure frosting, a celebration and tangible evidence of God’s paternal kindness. Muir was the first to popularize the notion that forests are wild but friendly places where a man can become whole again. Because of his influence, he helped countless Americans shake loose the influence of a Puritan-Calvinist tradition that cast the woods as a place of devilry and mischief, a place to be brought under the yoke of agriculture. In doing so, Muir provided the philosophy that unified my contradictory views about the outdoors. The more I learned about Muir, the more my attitude changed from scorn to admiration and idol worship. Until I read about him, I thought of my suburban life and my annual forest explorations as separate realms. Muir sold me on the notion that a man could internalize the beauty and harmony he finds within nature and bring those qualities home with him. He might even use these qualities to mend the broken pieces of himself.

  It may sound simplistic, and sentimental, to suggest that every hiker who comes to this place has a “defining wound” or loss that motivates his walk, like Wolf’s heartbreak or the Gingerbread Man’s implacable rage against the USDA food pyramid. Life doesn’t fit into any neat ABC After-School Special packages. But Muir’s wounds set the standard for those who travel to the wilderness to find the grace they lack outside the trees. Muir somehow survived not one but two beastly childhoods, first in Dunbar, Scotland, where his arch Presbyterian father thrashed him with a switch, even for minuscule offenses, and later, in Wisconsin, where that same father forced Muir to dig sandstone wells by hand. Muir passed out and almost died from inhaling carbolic acid gas—a condition called “choke damp”—at the bottom of a well, and yet his Grinch of a dad, after letting him rest for a couple of days, made him go right back down into another well. Muir learned to survive by guile and invention. His father was so controlling over Muir’s time that the young opportunist invented a pulley device that raised his bed and tipped him out before sunrise so he could sneak in a few minutes of study. It’s a lesser known fact that Muir also invented a machine that lopped the heads off gophers, but let’s set that aside for a moment.* My point is that Muir never lost his practical sense of loony improvisation. Those impulses could have helped him make a fortune in the industrial world, but a horrific accident changed his course.