The Cactus Eaters

by Dan White

  Through my dreams, I heard a mechanical rumble, metal teeth on metal teeth, a trembling like thunder, then a jolt on my shoulder, and Allison staring me in the face, shining her flashlight down on me as she shook me awake.

  “Mwwuuhh? Good Lord,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “What time is it?”

  “One thirty,” she said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “We’re about to get run over!”

  I opened my eyes with a start, in time to see a red light flood the tent. “It’s backup lights,” she said. “It’s a truck. Rolling right for us.”

  I rose up in my sleeping bag and turned around. The noise was deafening: the “chunka-chunka” sound of a massive engine, the crunch of thick tires getting closer. We should have cut and run then, but we were frozen in the tent, unable to act. The truck finally stopped, its exhaust pipes belching into our tent vestibule. The truck door opened. Out came the sounds of clomping boots, people stamping around our tent. “If anyone moves outta there, we’ll hit ’em with this,” one of them said. I gaped at Allison. Were they talking about us? Allison wondered if they were trying to provoke and smoke us out, rousing us out of sleep to beat the shit out of us, or worse. We huddled against each other, sipping our Sharkleberry Finn Kool-Aid and hoping to God that whoever they were would just go away. But they kept on shouting, and soon we heard a knock-knock-thumpa-thumpa-bonk-bonk nearby. “They’re building something out there,” Allison said. “They’re putting up some big tent. All of them!” It sounded like they were erecting the World’s Fair on the shores of Lost Lake. In between their labors, they made a point of trailing their flashlights across the camp, straight into us. One of the men cleared his throat and began to bray, “Hey you guys,” he said. “I’m readin’ a really good new biography of W. C. Fields. It said he started out in vaudeville. Did you know that?”

  “No. I had no idear.”

  “Well, it’s true. One day he was supposed to wrestle a real bear onstage. He’s scared out of his mind, so the management gets this tough old guy to dress up as a bear instead. And the old guy starts beatin’ the shit outta W. C. Fields! Just whalin’ on him. After a while, W. C. Fields starts screamin’ for mercy. ‘Bring back the bear! Bring back the bear!’”

  “I can’t believe this,” Allison said.

  “Ya get it?” the man said. “Bring back the bear?”

  “Oh man, I’m gonna get these idiots,” Allison said.

  “Oh, I get it!” another of the men said. “Bring back the bear. Ah-haw-haw-haw-haaaaah!”

  “But they’ll beat the crap out of us,” I said.

  “No, they won’t,” Allison said. “I’m gonna get them. But not yet.”

  “Did you know?” the first man said, “that a bear is a marsupial?”

  “No, it’s not, you fuckin’ idiot, it’s an omnivore,” another man said.

  We sat there, just taking it, while the redneck equivalent of the Discovery Channel kept blaring on outside. Allison was half Swiss, half Italian. The Swiss side of her was neutral, calm, nondemonstrative, but you did not want to fuck with the Italian side of her. When she made a vow of revenge against the cretins, you knew she’d follow through.

  At five o’clock in the morning, it was on. By then, our tormentors had fallen into a drunken sleep. Allison emerged from her tent and let loose with the most horrible whooping cough I’d ever heard. “Brraaaaaaaaaaaaaaackhhhh,” she said, dredging up hidden reserves of imaginary phlegm. You might say this was an act of passive aggression, considering our tormentors were unconscious, but there was nothing passive about her behavior. She stood just a few feet away from their tent’s zippered entrance, clearing her throat with as many decibels as she could muster. All at once, the thugs woke up. We could hear them rustle, and moan. Part of me wished to God that Allison had had enough, that her revenge was over—I was scared they were going to thrash us—but she was just getting started.

  “Hey,” she shouted. “Where are those goddamned tent poles? Where’s my fanny pack?” She tripped—deliberately—over pots and pans, and I kicked a few pieces of metallic gear around to show some solidarity, even though I was terrified. At any moment the men could dog-pile all over us. Now she was taking up tent poles, using them as bats, and pretending that our pots and pans were softballs. “Pow. Plink.” Then she began to cough again, but much more violently, doubled over, turning red with the exertion.

  “Oh, for the love of God,” the W. C. Fields monologuist moaned. “Doncha know what time it is? Lady, can’t ya take a cough drop?”

  I could tell they were getting pretty riled up in that tent by now, fixing to bust our heads, and I knew it was only a matter of time. Allison paused for a moment, and we packed up our things and got ready to go. But even then, she wasn’t finished. She turned around, stood in front of the tent one last time, cupped her hands in front of her mouth, and bellowed, in the deepest voice she could muster, “Thanks a lot for keeping us up all night, you assholes!”

  I braced for the worst, but silence followed. Allison stood there as if hoping something would happen. And then it occurred to me: the miscreants were scared. They were not coming after us. In fact, I wondered if they expected us to come after them. Perhaps they thought she was just crazy. Or maybe it was the fact that they hadn’t even taken a look at us. For all they knew, we had a Glock in our sleeping bag. In any case, there wasn’t a peep of protest as we stormed past their camp and vanished into the woods. Watching Allison stand up to the slobs made me feel clean. I’ve always had a hard time with bullies. In middle school, I tried to avoid them. I tried not to say anything to antagonize them. Some of them had it in for me ever since elementary school because I was part of the “Mentally Gifted Minors” program, hanging out with the brilliant dorks in the school portables, making stop-motion animated films, coming up with my own recipes, and inventing machines to save the planet, while my blond Cro-Magnon tormentors grunted and pounded wooden blocks together in homeroom. But Allison never hid from bullies. The more I thought about this, the more I thought I needed her as my wife. If she wasn’t scared of wild animals, newspaper editors, KFC clerks, or drunk assholes in a car camp, she would have no problem standing up to real estate agents, Montessori teachers, or annoying Lamaze instructors. And so, I was convinced. As we shuffled through the woods, I knew for sure that Allison would one day become my wife.

  But there is one aspect of marriage that nauseated and frightened me, no matter how much I thought about it. That aspect is called “compromise.” Allison and I still hadn’t figured out what to do about the fact that she wanted to get off the trail to make last-minute revisions to her anthology about doctors. She’d told me that we would have to give up at least a week of hiking time to do this, in spite of the fact that we were a month behind schedule. She wanted us to get off at the next major supply stop—Echo Lake—hitch a ride to Lake Tahoe, and take a bus from there to her aunt’s house near Sacramento. It was the one last significant interruption on our expedition to Canada. I dreaded this; we were in a groove, having finished 634 miles of trail. I still hoped Allison would just get off the trail by herself for a week and let me hike the next one hundred miles alone and then meet me in the next section. After all, it was her book, not mine. I knew full well that Allison had every right to work on her book off the trail, and that I should leave the trail with her. I fully supported her project. In fact, I had line-edited it. If I had been in her place, I would have insisted that she leave the trail with me to show solidarity. Walking the PCT did not diminish my ability to understand the difference between responsibility, compromise, and me-me selfishness. If anything, all those long hours in the woods had heightened my understanding of these things. It’s just that I was finding it harder to make the “right” choices in spite of this newfound clarity. By then I had convinced myself that the Pacific Crest Trail was my only chance to feel mature and complete. Every step toward Canada was a step toward manhood. I feared that the trail, if I never finished it, would lea
ve me stranded in a permanent kindergarten, like that freaky midget in The Tin Drum. But if the path was supposed to make me so “finished” and mature, how come I was starting to pitch fits and stomp around when I didn’t get what I wanted? It did not occur to me then that the trail was becoming more than just a path toward possible wisdom. At the same time, the footpath was turning into an alternate childhood and an extended leave of absence from rationality. The trail, in other words, was trying to teach me wisdom and mindfulness, but instead of listening, I was sticking my fingers in my ears and saying, “Blah, blah, blah.” The more I walked, the more I seemed to stand outside myself, observing my behavior, duly noting it, judging it, but doing absolutely nothing to intervene.

  One night we were camped out on the bare rocks on the shores of Smedberg Lake, a bowl of black gloss deep in the interior of Yosemite National Park. The words just blurted themselves out of me. We’d hiked all the way from Los Angeles County—and I didn’t want to stop.

  “I don’t think it’s right that I have to get off the trail with you,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. I really don’t think I should have to get off the trail because of your book.”

  The fight was on. We spoke in fusillades, words blasting into one another. To the bears and squirrels listening in on us, our fight must have sounded like one sustained sentence with no punctuation. We circled each other, with me baring my incisors at my girlfriend and jumping up and down. Both of us were convinced that the other party was obstinate, out-to-lunch, a mental homunculus devoid of fair play, reason, and rationality. “I don’t want to get off the trail,” I shouted. “You agreed to get off the trail,” she shrieked. Clearly, reason was not working for us. Compromise was not in the air. This was one of those fights that would have to be won by decibels alone. If she screamed at me, I’d just have to scream louder. There I stood, making sounds like lions and foghorns as I stood above Smedberg Lake, a water body I could not even begin to describe now because I paid so little attention to it, lest its natural beauty distract me from my yelling. After a while, she responded by getting quieter while I got louder.

  “You knew I had to do this, Dan,” she said.

  “No, I did not. This is your book. You did not tell me this. You’re ruining my dream for me. You’re derailing my dream.”

  “So this is your dream now? Know what, Dan? You look crazy right now. You’ve been shouting at me over a stupid hike, and yes, you look insane, and you’re freaking me out. You’re scaring me and I’m alone out here. I don’t have anywhere to go and you are fucking screaming at me over a hike. I just need you to stop it now. I just want you to get a hold of yourself or take a walk or go somewhere, but just stop screaming at me.”

  I stopped myself somehow, and the night got quiet. I heard nothing at all but the shameful ringing in my ears from my shouting. I walked away from the tent, just to get away from her, get away from us, and more than that, get away from myself. I stumbled around shore without a flashlight and watched the moon on the lake, bubbles on the surface, and something, a bug maybe, sending ripples through the moon’s reflection. The water murmured on the lake’s edges. When I returned to the tent, my voice had been stripped. I could not even bring myself to say good night. We fell asleep, but not in each other’s arms. My dreams erased the memories of the fight, but just momentarily; the blotted-out memories of the night returned as soon as I woke with a scratching throat under the white sky over Smedberg Lake.

  We got off the trail two days later, near Lake Tahoe.

  Chapter 23

  Bitter Fame

  Allison was angry and silent, but she took the time to bathe me as we stood in the shade near the highway shoulder. She swabbed a washcloth over my face and neck. I don’t know why she did this, and I didn’t understand the look of maternal concentration on her face. The washcloth smelled of Stilton cheese, cat farts, and moldy strawberries. In fact, Allison had dubbed the cloth “the odoriferous skankrag.” By now, I’d grown accustomed to our odors. They made me feel authentic. Our scents were like period costumes that gave us something in common with nineteenth-century pioneers. Some of those emigrants bathed only once a month. They must have smelled like us. I was squeamish when I started out on this trail. Now I was getting accustomed to filth. According to Backpacker magazine,* Pacific Crest Trail hikers are among the most foul-smelling things on this planet. Their “suffocating reek” comes not from sweat itself “but from the bacteria that feed on the amino acids, fats, and oils found in human perspiration. The bacteria emit a putrid blend of chemical compounds including ammonia and methylbutanoic acid that cling to the clothes and body—and multiply with each passing day. Opening the car windows will only help so much, but at least it spreads the misery. Depending on wind conditions, someone could pick up this hiker’s aroma from 100 feet away.”

  The fact that we had to scrub the stench away just to “fit in” outside the trail, just to hitch a ride to a supply town, filled me with disdain. And so I winced and made faces as she washed me, daubing my chin, anointing my forehead with redistributed sweat and dirt. Every time I swallowed hard, I felt the ache in my throat. My sore throat reminded me that I’d lost control forty-eight hours ago at the lake. I’d behaved boorishly. I couldn’t even begin to apologize for all my gnashing and howling. And yet it was all I could do to keep my mouth shut during the cat bath.

  We were close to the northern tip of the four-hundred-mile-long Sierra Nevada range, a short drive from the Nevada border, a few miles to the east. This was where the emigrants crossed after rolling westward from Kansas, Missouri, and Wyoming in the 1840s. The pioneers, like the Lois and Clark Expedition, were only trying to find something better. They dared liberate themselves from the banality of convention. And here we were, leaving the woods, but not by choice, heading straight for the banality we’d tried to escape. A young couple stopped to give us a ride that day. They were kind, and engaged us in small talk, but I could not help but notice when they rolled the car windows way down to release our stench.

  South Lake Tahoe, on the California-Nevada border, was ten minutes by car from the trailhead, but it might as well have been on Neptune. We arrived at a long reach of strip malls, pizza parlors, KFCs, motels, and bars with the green foothills bubbling up just behind them, as if to mock them, and then the big-boned mountains, and there, in the middle of all this, the lake itself, sitting there like an afterthought, 1,643-feet deep, nestled in a valley between the Sierra Nevada and Carson ranges. Burned out, wanting fast food, we decided to spend a half-day in Tahoe before taking the bus to Sacramento, but we were at a loss, wandering the town in a haze, past a late-night carnival Tilt-O-Whirl, and a real estate office, with a rumpled man working the phones, his tie draped across his left shoulder. It seemed inconceivable that the world could contain the rumpled man and the trail, and yet we were less than ten miles from the trailhead.

  We bummed around. I passed a shop selling T-shirts with almost incomprehensible sexual puns on all the shirts. One showed a cartoon of a leering man forming a hole with his right-hand thumb and pointer finger, and sticking his left-hand pointer finger into the hole. The caption read, “I don’t know any women who cry, but I know a few who sure like to bawl.” How stupid is that? “The pioneers didn’t have to deal with all this materialistic crap,” I thought to myself. This world is not real. Only the mountains above this town are real. With misanthropic relish, I imagined termites nibbling down the faux-Alpine motels, and casinos tumbling in the lake. I’d been to Tahoe once before, with my mother and father. They took me to see Tom Jones at Caesar’s Palace. I remember the wind machine, and Tom Jones wiggling through a fake fog that was really just liquid nitrogen, and the vixen-in-estrus yelps from the women, who were probably just making fun of him. Now I was walking in Caesar’s Palace once again, this time with Allison, past a false waterfall and plaster frescoes, electric pyramids, and a Cleopatra impersonator who looked and sounded as if her ancestral homeland were Sheboyg
an, Wisconsin. When we’d had our fill of casinos, card sharps, and the all-you-can-eat stroganoff buffet, we jumped on the Greyhound bus. It was a two-hour ride in black darkness on I-80 at sixty-five miles an hour. I did not bother looking out the window. Why look out at all that inauthenticity? Allison saw me looking glum and she nudged my shoulder. “Next stop, Excremento,” she said, and we both laughed.

  I was feeling glum, in withdrawal from the trail, when we holed up at her aunt’s house. I paced the hall, gnashed my teeth, and tried to give Allison space, because she was under deadline pressure and I didn’t want to upset her anymore. To give her a break, I wandered the deserted streets of a nearby town. While Allison faxed messages to her editors, I sat around at a diner drinking sour coffee and chewing Exxon-Valdez hash browns. Later, I stared for fifteen minutes at a closed-down movie theater with an existential message on the marquee: COMING SOON TO A THEATER NEAR YOU! How, I wondered, could a theater come to itself? At least Allison got her work done, while I was able to keep my hair-pulling to a minimum. But my feelings built within me, a surge of mute nostril agony that I could not control. With no other option, I vented my primal despair to my diary. The result was a passage that continues to amaze me with its primitive yet graceful display of incandescent rage. It ranks among the purest things I’ve ever written:

  I want to be back on the fucking trail. It’s not fair that I’m willing to make the big miles and work my ass off for this trip and morons [bastards here has been crossed out, with morons written across it as a replacement] from NYC are just shavin’ time off it. I want to get to the Oregon border. Here’s the deal. We got thru the Mojave, the Sierras and wouldn’t have made it unless we want it very badly, well, now coming off it’s like cold turkey heroin!