The Cactus Eaters

by Dan White

  Bears once frightened us. Not now. The more I studied them, the more they seemed ridiculous. In a letter home that week, I wrote that bears “look like bloated overfed Labrador retrievers. We’re not that scared of them (anymore). They are oversized raccoons with fat asses.” I felt sorry for black bears, and sometimes pitied myself for being born too late. The last wild wilderness was just about gone. California was once home to a hundred thousand grizzlies. They lived in chaparral foothills, on mountains, in deserts, and out on the beaches. Native Americans forged an uneasy truce with them. Some tribes thought the grizzlies were just another variety of human being. Then came the Californios, forty-niners, and ranchers, who fought wars against grizzlies with rifles, lassoes, whaling guns, and lances dipped in strychnine. Ursus horriblus lived in California for millions of years. It took six decades, the lifespan of a single bear, to wipe them all away.* The last known Golden State grizzly was gunned down in 1922 in the foothills of Fresno County, apparently for sniffing too close to a sheep enclosure. Nowadays, California is the only state whose official animal is stone dead within its borders. The grizzly was a menace and pest when he lived. Now that he’s gone, he is a totem on savings-and-loan buildings and Hollister Brand fashion T-shirts. If you glance at the Great Seal of California, the griz looks like a neutered Chihuahua. He’s bending in front of Minerva with an expression of accommodating weakness. He looks as if he expects the goddess of wisdom to drop-kick him into the San Francisco Bay.

  That day we headed north toward, of all places, Grizzly Peak. On the one hand, it was comforting to walk without worrying about an animal that could strip the bones from our backs without provocation. On the other hand, the grizzly’s absence made the forest feel like a terrarium with the disagreeable elements removed. If black bears—those wimps—were the standard-bearer of hairy otherness in this wilderness, what kind of wilderness was it, anyhow? And did wilderness have meaning anymore? And so I became a quiet stalker of black bears, convinced they were tame and silly, not truly wild.

  It happened on September 17, north of Lassen, in a logged-out section of trail. I was hiking ahead of Allison. As I rounded a curve in the trail, I arrived at a sculpture of an adult bear. The statue seemed to be made of marble. It had a vacant expression. The poorly designed artwork was the biggest non sequitur I’d seen on the PCT. I was deeply offended. Why would someone take the time to sculpt and sand down and set up this marble lump and plant it right in the middle of the PCT, where a hiker might run right into it? And what, exactly, was the sculptor trying to prove? Was the artwork an expression of guilt? I was getting myself all worked up and annoyed when the statue, suddenly, moved. Then it turned to look at me. Glare at me. Snort at me. The statue was not a statue, but a real fucking bear who had been resting in the middle of the trail. He was not polished stone, but flesh, hair, and black eyes filled with something between hatred and mere annoyance. The bear huffed once, then dashed into the woods.

  “Oh my God,” I cried out.

  Allison caught up to me. My breathing was fast and sharp. It was hard to speak. I explained to her what had happened.

  She looked disappointed. “I didn’t get a chance to see it,” she said. “You’re always out front. You always scare everything away.”

  She was right. I felt guilty about frightening away all the quality wildlife. And so we decided to stalk that black bear on the Pacific Crest Trail. We got very quiet. We tiptoed through the woods. I’d heard many ranger warnings against this behavior. Never sneak up on an animal. Never enter its “defense perimeter.” But I didn’t care. At the time, my behavior did not seem, in the least, retarded. I thought we were just being cheeky.

  On we walked, in search of the Miracle Statue Bear. The trail cut across the side of a steep and pine-covered hillside. To the left of the trail was a slanting forest. We walked for fifteen minutes and saw no sign of the beast. Allison took the lead. She saw nothing; she was getting frustrated, so we called off the search. “Forget it,” she said. “Let’s just walk on.” And so we did. Allison stayed about ten paces ahead of me, to make sure she got the best look at all the good fauna. Suddenly, she stopped and stared at something I couldn’t see. She smiled. She was looking down, off the left of the trail, at something just below her in the forest, about twenty feet away. “How cute,” she said. Then the color drained from her. I heard a sound like a bloodhound, but louder and full of reverb, as if the dog were baying into a hollow tube. Something just off the trail was calling out to us in a rage. “Ha-ruff-squonk,” it said. “Huffa-huffa SQUONK. Ha-ruff-SQUONK!” Allison turned to me and said, in a soft and wavering voice, “We’d better get the fuck out of here.”

  “What do you see?” I said.

  “Let’s just get out of here,” she said. She started shaking. She walked backward, slowly, while keeping her gaze focused on the copse of quaking trees just below the trail, and a huge brown shape just behind it. The thing kept snorting, the trees kept quivering, and I knew, all at once, that we were about to get mauled. Thrashed. Bitten everywhere.

  “What are you doing?” I said. “Why are you walking? Let’s run!”

  “No,” she said. “Don’t. They can run faster than us. Don’t try it. They can’t resist a chase.”

  “But I don’t want to just stand here like a fucking idiot…”

  “Don’t run,” she said again.

  Fine. I did as she said. I took several giant steps backward, slowly, methodically, still staring at the trees, and lifting up my arms so the bear would think I was larger and would be afraid. Then I took another giant step back. So did Allison. We did this for several minutes. Then, we ran. We ran like crazy. We ran as if someone had set us both on fire. We tore up that hillside, running until our lungs ached, running until the lactic acid burned in our legs.

  “So,” I said, between gasps. “What the hell did you see?”

  “Cute cubs,” she explained as she ran. “Two of them. Cute little furry things. Round little fuzzy ears. And then…”

  That was all I needed to know. We kept running. “This,” she exclaimed, “is the most frightened that I have ever been because of an animal.”

  When we arrived at the top of the steep slope, we were out of breath. We glanced down at the forest far beneath us, to see if the bear was pursuing us. She wasn’t. In fact, it took us a while to spot her. Allison saw her first, below us in the woods beside the trail. She was nosing her cubs one by one up a tree, her vast and hairy rump pointed in our direction, as if inviting us to kiss it.

  So maybe I was wrong. Maybe the woods were sending me a little message. “Back the fuck up,” the forest seemed to say. “Perhaps we’re not as wild as we used to be, but we’re wild enough for you.” I sat there with Allison in a pile of wet leaves, still pumped with adrenaline, but relieved that the forest had let me off easy. I vowed to be more respectful next time. I vowed not to mix it up with any more woodland creatures until we hit Canada. From now on, I’d avoid confrontation with the mindless fauna of the forest.

  But it was already too late to avoid confrontation.

  A much smaller monster, one we couldn’t even see, was lying in ambush for us in the woods of the Pacific Northwest.

  * Susan Snyder, editor, Bear in Mind: The California Grizzly, Berleley: Heyday Books, 2003. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.

  Chapter 25

  Attack of the Pain People

  In late September, we entered the kingdom of Shasta, a sleeping stratovolcano in the South Cascades. We were now just 230 trail miles south of the Oregon border. Allison and I were entering a time of year when the weather was getting colder. The sky swirled with odd colors: gunmetal gray, off-white, tooth-plaque yellow, brown, and blue, and yet this did not bother me. In the past few weeks, we’d faced down near-horrible disasters, and some deus ex machina always showed up at the last moment to save us. Allison had taken some severe headers face first into the rocky soil, but she’d always caught herself in time. In another instance, hogging th
e map and directions, she was so spooked by a gaggle of wicked quail that she very nearly fell off a cliff. But she somehow caught herself. Nature could be frightening and unpredictable, but we seemed to have luck on our side. How else could we have escaped from Mama Bear? Now, in Northern California, I just wanted that luck to hold out for a while. The kingdom of Shasta was our final obstacle before we finished all of Northern California. By every indication, our journey was going smoothly now. Never mind the disturbing legends I’d heard about Shasta. According to Native American tradition, it’s taboo to cross into the mountain’s sacred kingdom. Vengeful beings occupy the waters and rocks, where they stand sentry against any human who dares to trespass on or desecrate the land. Wayfarers who travel above the tree line are especially vulnerable to this race of spirit beings. The name Native Americans gave to these little people is the same word they used for “pain.”

  According to author and California cultural historian Philip Fradkin, Shasta crowns a region that attracts more myths and legends than any other part of California. Allison knew a bit about the stories. She’d mentioned a thirteenth-century mystic named St. Germain, whose wraithlike presence haunts Panther Creek near Shasta. Allison and I shared an interest in the occult. When we were first dating, in rural Connecticut, we gave impromptu tarot readings at parties. With our limited knowledge of tarot rules, we misinterpreted the cards, which led us to tell my already anxious downstairs neighbor that he was going to die very soon. Allison and I once traveled to the remains of an allegedly haunted settlement called Dudleytown, near Cornwall, Connecticut. The silence was unearthly there. Even the birds were quiet. Allison discovered a tree with a human face—a lump for a nose, two knobs for eyes, and sap crying out of them. It made me wonder if trees could imprison human souls. Allison had asked me, that day in Dudleytown, if I believed in the landscapes of evil. As we left the ruins of that colonial town, we talked about the powers of good and ill that resided in certain forests.

  I have always been superstitious. I suppose, in the back of my mind, I was concerned about the region of Shasta, and whether the powers within the landscape would work for or against us. Still, I felt nothing but hope and excitement as we hiked into Castella, a former lumber town and railroad settlement in the heart of the Sacramento River Canyon. Castella is exalted by hikers because of Milt Kenney, the most famous “trail angel” to live near the trail. Milt earned his reputation as “Mayor of the Trail” by helping an average of sixty hikers per season for the past twenty years. We were looking forward to meeting him. Allison and I were also aware of Castella’s reputation as a place for the “halfway blues.” Although it’s only 210 miles from the Oregon border, many hikers get demoralized because of a sign at the Castle Crags Campground saying MEXICAN BORDER, 1,487 MILES. CANADIAN BORDER, 1,113 MILES. Something about the sign can make a man feel small; the task at hand is nearly as enormous as what you’ve already accomplished.

  Perhaps that’s why, historically speaking, trail couples break up at Castella. The task makes you reflect on your partner’s flaws as if through the lens of an electron microscope. But it comforted me that Allison, by now, knew all of my weirdnesses and hadn’t dumped me. She now took it for granted that I lost or broke crucial pieces of gear—the flashlight gone AWOL in a river, the shit shovel dropped in a ravine, and the thermometer I sat on until the mercury leaked. She once caught me using my dirty nether garments, which I referred to as “undie-pants,” as eye pillows to block the moonlight as I slept. This did not seem to bother her. Over the past month, I’d noticed, with some distaste, that she was starting to pee standing up without taking her backpack off, and that she sometimes peed directly off the trail. This no longer struck me as bestial. Our moods were often disparate, with one of us happy and burbling, the other bored or despondent, but I accepted this. I tried very hard to pay more attention to her, not to call out military cadences when she fell behind or to cut short her well-earned breaks. I tried active listening, and to let her get in at least six consecutive sentences before making the conversation all about me. Besides, I was learning to tend to her, take care of her, elevate her knee, and feed her Excedrins, tortilla chips, and bean dip when she was in pain. I still knew how to make her laugh. For her sake, I was trying to be stoic, and complaining less. In every way, I was trying to give her more reasons not to take off into the woods by herself.

  Allison’s parents, wondering how we were faring, had sent us a Far Side cartoon showing two explorers stumbling through the hills. The man in the front is singing, “My knapsack on my back, valderi, valdera, valderi, valdera, ha, ha, ha!” The man in the back is muttering, “God, I hate him.” The caption reads, “More tension on the Lewis and Clark Expedition.” But by now the trail was running out of ideas to hamper our expedition. We were ruthless, skinny, stripped down, fierce. After making so much progress, we couldn’t wait to celebrate with the most famous trail angel of them all. He would be the good-luck charm we needed to push us all the way into Canada.

  In the heart of Castella, beneath the sharp granite crest of Castle Crags, Ammirati’s Market was open, so Allison and I ducked in to inquire about Milt Kenney, but he wasn’t there. I asked a store clerk where he might be found. The clerk placed a call, murmured something into the receiver, and a moment later, a navy Oldsmobile Sedan came rolling up to the market. An old man, five foot three, with a stained-felt porkpie, trousers, and a maroon cardigan got out of the car and stood in front of us. He had rheumy eyes, leathery skin, and a smile that belonged on the face of a young boy, not an eighty-four-year-old man. He’d unbuttoned his sweater to reveal a T-shirt with a Pacific Crest Trail map printed across it. The shirt listed the names of all trail supply stops along the route, including Castella, which lay an inch above the old man’s sternum.

  Milt Kenney gave us the litany he’d recited to hundreds of other hikers over the years. The words sounded broken in from being said so many times. “Hullo, I’m Milt Kenney and I’ve been greeting the hikers now for twenty years.” His voice was plummy. He extended his hand, and his grip was as crushing as everybody had warned. “So what do you need? Where would you like to go? I can drive you anywhere you want. Treat you lunch? Treat you breakfast?” He said these words without slavishness, and smiled with confidence, as if his offers of generosity were a power he wielded over strangers.

  Allison and I looked at each other. We were thrilled to meet a trail celebrity, but I felt sheepish about accepting favors, perhaps because I’d spent the past decade in New England small towns, where you could be curled up frozen on the pavement, turning blue, and passersby wouldn’t stop to offer you so much as a small cup of lukewarm broth. It felt weird to hear someone peddling altruism, as if kindness were something to be hard-sold, a zirconium bracelet on late night TV. But refusing his offers of help would have been crueler than sponging off him. So the decision was made. “Throw your stuff in the car,” he said, and we obliged.

  Allison and I piled into the backseat. As Milt stepped on the accelerator, and pulled out on to the highway, he admitted that his eyesight was not the greatest. He drove conservatively, but by no means timidly, as he confessed: “Don’t know if I’ll get to drive hikers around in the future.” The speed crept up on the odometer—forty-five, fifty, fifty-five, sixty. “Depends on the cataracts. I don’t know how long my eyes will hold, and that’d be a shame.” Allison’s hand dug into the armrest as Milt’s car swept beneath the Castle Crags, swirled with mist and built like the spires of Oz. Milt laughed as he glanced up at the Crags. “Told my nephew I built those rocks up there and he believed me.”

  Milt drove us six miles up the road to Dunsmuir, near the Sacramento River. The whole town was peeling and sad and set close to the ground, but Milt said it was a hiker’s Fantasyland, with all the food you can eat. He took us to the Burger Barn near the center of the historic railroad town and shouted out to the half-empty place, “Hey, look, I’ve got two more!” We found a table and Milt ordered us a pair of “Barn Buster Burgers,” en
ormous ground round discuses smeared with mayo. While we sat there, gulping wet meat, Milt smiled, leaned forward, and said, “It tickles me to watch you eat.” In between urging us to order more food, he told us about himself. Three-quarters Swiss, one-quarter Karuk Indian, Milt was born in Clear Creek, nine miles from Happy Camp, California. As a child, he kept a bear cub as a pet and walked to school through the woods eight miles each way. He worked as a forester in northern California, felling and cutting lumber. For thirty-nine years he was married to Florence, the founder of a local school. They skied, hiked, and danced every week. “She was my buddy, my best friend. I loved her so.” He bought her a heart-shaped gold nugget. In 1979 she had a heart attack and died. “It was real sudden,” he said. “I did not want to live.” He was so grief-stricken, his daughter, Adele, wondered if he would last the year. Winter pinochle games were the only respite from his loneliness. “I didn’t know what to do with myself,” he said. “But then I saw that hikers were coming through town and saw that they were good people. I decided to help them. I treat a lot of ’em dinner, treat ’em lunch, and some of ’em treat me. Some people think what I do is pretty silly, but most think it’s great. Most of ’em think I’m doing all right.”