The Cactus Eaters

by Dan White

  Don’t get me wrong. I smoked pot a few times but felt nothing but forgetful, craving Beer Nuts, and convinced that everyone on earth was out to beat the shit out of me. In other words, it had no affect on me whatsoever. Once, at an outdoor music festival with my sister, Edie, I decided to join the counterculture once and for all. Unbeknownst to my protective sister, I bought a hash-infused granola bar from a freak in a dashiki. The granola burned in my stomach and made me dance shirtless to long-haired bands with names like Pele Juju and Leftover Salmon. Soon I was sitting in a lawn chair watching the landscape flash red and green and blue. Edie found me and stood over me shouting, “Dan, are you okay?” I might have asked her the same question, considering that my sister’s head had inflated to twenty-five times its normal size and was rotating on its axis. Didn’t that hurt?

  I spent the rest of the festival hiding in my tent moaning and groaning. That day, the drugged cookie let me down. The next morning I was the same person I’d ever been, but with one more ridiculous new experience behind me. That’s the problem with drugs. If you’re a nerd, you might hope against hope that drugs will make you into something you’re not. “Nerd plus drugs equals cool.” But most of the time, there is no transformation. The nerd merely becomes hyphenated. “Nerd plus drugs equals drug-taking nerd.”

  But now, at last, I had reason to feel ecstatic. I was truly rebelling, like never before. I had stopped bathing. My beard was blood red and messianic. I had stories to tell. I had a gorgeous girlfriend, and with every sweaty mile, she looked more like an Amazon. The sun had bleached out every dirty part of her dirty-blond hair; it was pure gold and yellow now. Besides, we had reached central California, and had finished 12.1888 percent of the trip. Only 87.8112 percent remained. We felt unstoppable.

  Still, I had no idea what to expect from Cedar Grove. The last time we’d left the trail for a supply town, the locals had treated us like rubes, thieves, and arsonists. We were hungry. Cedar Grove was a campground, hotel, and RV resort along the three-pronged Kings River. A sprawling wooden building housed a lodge we couldn’t afford, a tasty if overpriced café/ snack bar, and a grocery that was decent if you ignored the night crawlers that throbbed in plastic containers near the food items. A crowd gathered around us at the resort café, where we sat pile-driving pie, turkey, and ice cream down our throats. At first I wondered if they would mock us, but it soon became clear that we were rock stars. An old woman from Brooklyn in a black overcoat and pink scarf came up to see us. Our every utterance about trail life made her swoon with curiosity and worry.

  “Oh, it’s so interesting,” she cooed. “My son did a cross-country bike trip once and it helped him get a job ’cause his employers all wished they’d done the same thing. But I worried about him all the time. I hope you’re not being reckless. You drinking enough water? You wearing sunscreen? You’re both so fair-skinned.”

  Allison laughed when the old woman went away. “New Yorkers are so fascinated with anyone who’s not like them,” she said, shaking her head.

  It was true. The New Yorker regarded us as fascinating but not entirely sentient objects of curiosity, as if we were bioluminescent toads in a cardboard box. But I didn’t mind being someone else’s pleasure toad. All my life, I’d craved attention. Now so many people had so many questions that it became difficult to shove fistfuls of potatoes down my throat. Since we were so late in the Pacific Crest Trail hiking season, there were no other smelly through-hikers to elbow their way into our spotlight. Another couple was hanging out in the café, but few people were interested in them. For one, they were fresh-faced, not haggard like us. The young man and his girlfriend had heavy packs but looked like they hadn’t spent much time in the woods. We’d overheard them saying they were walking from Mount Whitney to the Oregon border, laden with gourmet foods. They were taking it easy, going seven miles a day. Moments later, they slipped into the forest. Soon they left my consciousness altogether.

  For once, I was full of stories, and everybody listened. Attention was like oxygen. I gulped it down so fast it made me lightheaded. Even Allison started hamming it up, believing in our legend. A pale-faced boy sidled over and asked for a look at her scrapes and bruises. “Look at this,” she said, rolling up the sock of her right foot to show the boy her blood blister, red and livid, straight out of a medical textbook. “Nice, huh?” she said.

  The boy’s eyes opened wide. “Don’t die,” he said.

  Everyone, all of a sudden, thought the trip was worthwhile and amazing, and we did nothing to discourage this view. So many people thought we were bad asses that I believed it, too. A Virginia family, including three luscious Southern belles with creamy skin and tapered noses, walked over and mobbed me. The girls chattered and interrupted one another in catty but charming ways in an effort to talk to me. For a moment I wondered if Lee’s Press-on Nails would be the weapon of choice in a blood fight for my attentions. Soon the hot girls found other amusements, and less attractive well-wishers took their place. “Back off. Pick a number,” I wanted to shout.

  Heady with the crowd’s adoration, Allison and I retired to our tent at sunset, where we had wild, if muffled, celebration sex with the rain cover draped above the tent. Famous people need privacy, too. We filled my sleeping bag, and our Northface Bullfrog tent, with our egos and naked vastness. In my mind’s eye, we were a pair of 757-pound Sumo wrestlers grappling each other in the darkness. The feeling that we were larger than life, and an inspiration for others, only got stronger when we were lying there afterward in each other’s arms watching the sky go black through the mesh lining in the tent. Bit by bit, after Allison nodded off to sleep, I began to hear other couples across the campground groaning and panting with desire. We seemed to have triggered a bacchanalia of lust that blew through the grove. A geeky, standoffish Eurotrash couple, whom we had met hours before, now filled Cedar Grove with loud Esperanto grunts and gurgles rising from their tent. “Kwok, yok, yarooog!” they snorted. A few minutes later, through the opening in our tent, I saw that the Euro-couple, in a shameless move, had emerged, all sweaty, from their tents, well aware that half the campsite was watching them. They looked like a pair of contortionist dancers taking their sweaty bows in the moonglow. Allison lay mop-headed across my shoulder. She was bathed in the red tint of a Winnebago’s beer lights. Children ran wild through the woods. Generators whirred. Out of the distance came the faint, amplified drone of someone giving a “ranger talk” at the outdoor amphitheater about “what animals do when people aren’t around.” The wind picked up. I fell asleep.

  The next morning we felt so buzzed from confidence that we did something we dared not consider before: we streamlined the expedition. We took Draconian measures to lighten the pack load, getting rid of our inflatable Therm-a-Rest mattresses and our extra sweaters. If Todd the Sasquatch, the Gingerbread Man, and Wolf could hike with so little, then dammit, so could we. Feeling like Jardi-Nazis, we swaggered through the campfire convoys of Cedar Grove. I sat down on a bench and wrote a letter to my good friend James, the North Carolina journalist who had suggested we hike the trail in the first place. When he first said it, it seemed like a joke. Now I wanted to let him know that his grand escape plan had worked out after all.

  I wrote:

  Hiking has given us a new perspective. We’ve climbed down an icy, snow-covered pass, probably the scariest experience of my life. We’ve met a lot of people, many of them truly friendly and giving, and others who are straight out of some Hangar 18 extra-terrestrial cover-up seminar. We met an aging cowboy who bought us biscuits and gravy. We met a toothless prospector who likes to eat newborn goats and basically frightened us. Adventure really is a good thing. In the past month, I’ve done a lot of things I’ve never done before, including hiking 26 miles across a desert toward a “reliable water source” only to find a piggly little mud hole waiting for me. All of this has made me a slightly different person. So then: What do I do when I return to civilization?

  1. I’ll probably have to shav
e my ever-growing brown-red beard. That’ll take a week right there.

  2. Clean my fingernails—that will take a month.

  3. Have my belongings, and myself, dry-cleaned.

  4. Perhaps seek employment.

  5. Eat nonstop until I gain back the fifteen pounds I lost. (Not kidding. I look downright cadaverous.)

  I’ll write again after I get out of the Sierra. See you soon.

  Your friend,

  Dan.

  After mailing the letter at the Cedar Grove resort, I came across the young couple I’d recognized from the day before at the café, the ones who were hoping to walk from Whitney to the California-Oregon border. Immediately I noticed that a small crowd had gathered around them. It made me envious and annoyed. Who the hell were they to steal my limelight? Suddenly I noticed that their once-bulging backpacks looked empty.

  “What the hell?” I said. “What did this? And why are you back so soon?”

  “Bear,” the man said, shaking his head.

  Chapter 20

  The Hairy Other, Part One

  The man, tall, rangy, and handsome, in his early twenties, looked only moderately bummed out. He didn’t act like a man who had just been mugged and humiliated by a mammal.

  “So what happened?” I said.

  “Well,” he said, “I know we’re supposed to only camp in places that have those bear-proof food lockers. But we overshot it and didn’t feel like backtracking. We tried to hang our food up in a tree. We hung it up as high as we could, but I guess we did a bad job. The bear just climbed right up and knocked it down and ate our stuff. We banged pots and pans and screamed, and it just gave us a look like, ‘What, are you crazy?’ and took off with all the food. He got our organic cheese. Our breads. He got all our snacks.” The man shrugged, sighed, and smiled. “That bear must’ve needed that food way more than we do,” he said with a dreamy expression. “Lorraine and I appreciate our blessings. We aren’t subsistence. We’ve got good teaching jobs. We don’t have to eat grubs or go eating diapers to get by. The way I figure, when that bear came after our food, it was karma. That bear got some great stuff. I was just giving back something to nature.”

  While I appreciated his kindness, I wondered if bears would be quite so forgiving if they were to switch places with us humans. My general feeling is that the bears, given half a chance, would wipe us off the globe. A squirt of fear ran up my spinal cord. Suddenly I remembered all those warning signs posted throughout Cedar Grove. I didn’t want to go out there and get my food swiped by a bear. I’d heard horror stories of bears chasing people until they dropped their backpacks. Allison and I had entered the realm of the Hairy Other, the dark master that lurks in the woods. The Hairy Other is bigger than you. He hides his bulk in the underbrush, or beneath a stand of pines, and though you may not see or smell him, he sure as hell sees and smells you. There are six hundred thousand black bears in thirty-seven states. Each one ranges over five square miles to gather its food. The chances of walking into any reasonably remote forest and not seeing one are slim. I knew black bears attack people rarely. They’re too busy sucking down chipmunks, marmots, beehives, blueberries, thimbleberries, rose hips, hazelnuts, dogwood, and plums to want to take a bite out of our hairy asses.* But attacks do happen. A starving bear can and will administer a sucking chest wound. If a six-hundred-pound bear that can run as fast as a pony comes bowling after you on the trail, what the hell are you supposed to do?

  “If the bear comes after you for your food, don’t resist,” the man said. “Sometimes the bear will do a fake-charge, to make you drop your stuff. They know what scares you. Usually it’s just a bluff-charge, but you never know. Don’t fight him off. Once the bear gets your food, it’s his.”

  From that moment on, Allison and I could not seem to escape the signs of bears at Cedar Grove: hooded trash cans with security latches, written warnings, pictures of scraggly blackies all over the men’s room, creating the impression that one of them might come up from behind you while you’re taking a piss and scalp you where you stood. Quiet as a cat, the bear waits in shadows as you stumble around the bathroom, searching for something—anything—on which to dry your hands. You ask yourself: Where are the paper towels? Where the hell is the automatic hand drier? Thinking you are all alone, you don’t feel the least bit self-conscious as you shake, shake, shake, then zip up your pants. Slowly, methodically, the blackie unfurls the two-inch nonretractable claws that will soon rip your face off. The last thought that goes through the oblivious murk of your mind, mere moments before your brains are scattered like confetti all over the bathroom walls, is “Why do those last drops always fall down your pants?”

  I knew, in the rational part of me, that black bears got the worst of it in their stand-offs with humans. Among the many indignities they face: a multimillion-dollar black market trade, originating in Asian countries, trafficking in black bear body parts. American poachers shoot black bears dead, then remove their gall bladders, which are shipped, via middlemen, to unscrupulous pharmacists, who buy them for as much as three thousand dollars a pop and use them in phony “cures” for impotence, cancer, and rheumatism. Bear bile, sold by the gram, has a higher street value than cocaine. And you don’t need to be a poacher to harm a bear. Campers who toy with them by offering them food and garbage, and then snapping their pictures, seal their doom. If a marauding bear, enticed by human smells, loses its fear and starts prowling campgrounds, harassing humans, and busting into cars, rangers will relocate or “put down” the animal. But those guilty feelings did not make me less fearful. The fact was Allison and I would be helpless out there.

  That afternoon I asked a frowning backcountry ranger about “bear troubles” in that area. He had a gigantic beige hat and Oakley-type reflective glasses. He kept a shotgun as long as his arm mounted in the dash of his patrol car. The ranger told us that bears can recognize the shape of a food-storage cooler. The object’s particular look and color translate as food. This thoughtful abstraction can drive bears to bust open a window or unhinge a car door to get at its contents. I didn’t believe the ranger until he showed me a fistful of photographs: a car whose insides looked like they had been attacked with the business end of an industrial food processor, and a van with fat hunks of upholstery puffing out of tears in the backseat. There were nibbles all over the furnishings. It wasn’t hard to extrapolate. Those nibbles could be all over us. “The fact is [bears are] unpredictable, and a lot of ’em around here have lost all fear of humans,” the ranger said. “And that’s not a good thing when you’re sleeping out in the woods. Never, and I do mean never, sleep in a camp that doesn’t have bear-proof boxes for your food. And never, never take your food into your tents with you at night. They’ll go after toothpaste. They’ll go after underarm deodorant. They’ll even go after bug spray. They’ll eat damn near anything.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?” I said.

  “Show respect,” the ranger said. “Leave ’em alone. And stay out of their way.”

  That’s all very well and good, I wanted to say. But suppose we blunder into a mama and her cubs? What then?

  Back in the woods with Allison, farther north on the trail, in a dark stretch of a secluded section of the Sierra Nevada, I kept hearing burbling sounds all around me. No, it couldn’t be a bear, I kept saying. Maybe it’s just yesterday’s rice pilaf. It was getting late in the afternoon. We walked through a stand of strange trees, their bases as black and plump as potbellied stoves. The slanted red light fell on the trees, making them look hot to the touch. Allison was not helping matters. To pass the hours in the forest, she’d started telling me a series of “Pacific Crest Tales,” penny dreadfuls she invented on the spot. She made a good case that these tales helped us climb steep switchbacks. They took away the occasional pain and boredom of hiking. The trouble was, I was already on edge from fear of bears—and her tales were always horror stories, ending with geysers of blood. In most cases, the victims were insipid men. One of her stories was ab
out a family reunion in a creaky old cabin on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

  “See, the family was drinking, having a great time, except for the crazy older brother. The family had him locked in a stinky basement with rats crawling all over it because he was so insane. So he’s down there for twelve years, eating rats, going crazier and crazier. His skin is bright white ’cause he’s never in the sunshine. So there they are, having a great old time, when the older brother starts screaming and begging for mercy from the basement. Won’t somebody please help meeeeeeeee? So the family is getting really drunk, and the younger brother is going to the bathroom, where he hears the sound coming up from the floorboards—somebody pleeeeeeeeeeease help meeeeeeeeeeeee. I am so lonely. Would somebody come downstairs and keep me company? Please. I haven’t seen the light of day for over a dozen years. I promise not to harm any of you.’ So the younger brother can’t stand the guilt anymore. What’s the worst that can happen? He unlocks the deadbolt from the basement door. Then he takes down the main lock, and then the other lock, and finally the last latch on the door. His family has no idea where he is. They think he’s on the toilet or something. ‘Hello, is anybody down there? Hellooooooooooo?’ He walks downstairs on creaky steps and he hears nothing at all. And he sees nothing ’cause it’s pitch black. And suddenly he sees a glowing shape, glowing, moving toward him. And it’s the white glowing skin of his older brother, smiling, smiling. ‘Helllooooooooooooo? Are you gonna hurt me?’ says the younger brother? ‘Are you gonna do anything mean to me?’ And the older brother says, ‘It’s okay, nothing’s gonna harm you, nothing’s gonna harm you.’ And then he grabs his little brother by the throat. Cuts his throat. Chops off every single one of his fingers. Cuts off his toes. Cuts off his nose. And then he cuts off his dick!”