The Cactus Eaters

by Dan White

  I had just enough water to get us through the night and the next day, but now it was cloudy and discolored. Perhaps it was the effect of the tiny bubbles in the water. Still, I could not help but wonder what, exactly, was floating around in our water supply. I ran back to camp, jabbering that our water filter had just been gang-raped by amphibians, but Allison did not believe me, nor did she believe it was possible for salamander jism to find its way into our water supply. But how could she know for sure?

  Salamanders do produce sperm, and certain species engage in, and enjoy, sexual intercourse, although, technically, it’s outer-course, because the males lack penises. As part of their mating ritual, the male straddles his salamander girlfriend, grabs hold of her pelvis, and releases a goopy pile of spermatophores, which the female stuffs into her cloacal opening, also known as a “vent.” I can’t say which variety of salamander released its sour payload into my filter. All I know is that the water, even when blended with Gatorade powder, was sticky and bitter that night. I drank a lot of it anyhow because I was very thirsty. Allison tried to reassure me. “It’s the food itself that tastes so bad,” she said. “The bitterness comes from the food, not the water.” But I woke up the next day feeling sick, overcome, vomitous, staggering, barely able to move, hallucinating, out of my mind. Trees sprouted legs and surrounded me in a tight circle.

  The Pain People were taking over, closing in on me, and now there was no way out.

  Chapter 26

  No Mercy

  The steep trail showed no mercy in the Russian Wilderness. Allison, by this time, was also feeling a little ill, with some of the symptoms I’d shown a few days before; I was ahead of her on the sickness curve. In fact, I represented the future of her health, and she did not like what she saw. Still, she was stronger than me, at least for the moment. She looked scared, and for good reason. I was acting wild. My sickness made me loopy, as if I’d eaten a pan of hash-infused fudge. Sometimes I’d break into a little Morris dance of nausea, kicking up my heels, swooning through the forest.

  The path cut straight and sharp beneath a boulder called the Statue, which stood forty feet above the trail; it’s only a big, naturally eroded rock, but if you look at it from the south, the formation looks like a crude sculpture of a human with a jackal’s head. To my tired mind, the rock was nothing less than a vengeful deity, keeping tabs on us. As I staggered behind Allison, I sensed that the Jackal God of the Pacific Crest Trail was weighing our fate. Would we push on to Canada, or would I drag down the expedition by becoming even more enfeebled? The landscape hung on this moment, now, here, where hills wobbled like warm Jell-O, where tall trees danced the hokey-pokey, and mountains warped in the sun. Standing on a crest overlooking Lipstick Lake, I stared at the slack folds of dry mountains and wondered what I had done to deserve this.

  “Poor me,” I thought. “Is it really too much to ask, that I get to walk a trail and reach the finish line? Is this modest ambition really such an affront to the fates of the forest? What have I done to deserve this?” And then, it occurred to me: maybe I really had done something to deserve this. My sickness disabled the part of my brain that suppressed the memories of nasty behavior, the small cutting things I’d said and done. I recalled, with distaste, my time in middle school when I used to pal around with Bobby Wasserman, fang-faced, pitiless, possessed of a meager intelligence. We went to Disneyland together once. There, in the no-man’s zone between Fantasyland and New Orleans Square, I convinced him to spit on Donald Duck, just because I was bored and wanted to test out my theory that the walking cartoon characters at Disneyland will just keep smiling whatever you do to them. Throw Goofy into the moat around Tom Sawyer’s Island and he’ll still grin like he’s having the time of his life. We chose Donald Duck as our victim simply because he was standing alone with his flimsy white gloves. At my urging, Bobby coughed up an enormous blob of saliva into his hand—known in middle-school parlance as a “loogie.” Then he approached Donald Duck. “Mr. Duck,” Bobby shouted. “I’m a big fan. I want to shake your hand.”

  Donald Duck wiggled his tail feather in delight. He did a little hop, threw a gleeful kick in the air, and accepted Bobby’s extended hand. The two of them shook hands very hard, and you could see a tremor of shock shoot through the duckman’s body, as Bobby worked that warm and feculent saliva so deeply into Donald’s glove. Bobby let go at last, and the two of us ran away, doubled over with laughter. We watched from behind a hedge as Donald Duck stomped up and down in a rage, while still somehow smiling maniacally at the sopping wet glove that he waved, in frantic motions, in front of his large orange beak.

  I’ve performed hundreds, maybe thousands, of small cruelties like this. Were any of these things so terrible, really? No. They were all pretty small on the face of it. I’m not talking about capital offenses here. But the fact is we don’t need to commit murder or grand theft to do lasting harm. These small things remain in the minds of our victims, not as individual memories but as generalized feelings of ill will or anxiety.

  It was too late to apologize for all these things. The jackal gods were furious with me, and now I was going to pay.

  Somehow we made our way to the Etna-Somes Bar road by following a spur trail that led from the PCT to the highway. For a while we sat to the side of the shining blacktop, resting on our packs, chins on knuckles, hearing the buzz of what we thought were car engines but always turned out to be the distant drone of planes. The sky was darkening, the steep mountains flattening into silhouettes. I wondered what would happen if no one drove past. In fact, I was sure no one would come to get us. It was all part of the Jackal God’s vengeance.

  Finally, a red Chevy pickup cruised around the bend and stopped. Inside was a tan, lean couple in their late thirties, Tom and Linda, who told us they were teachers who had spent the day hunting in the woods. Tom was clean-shaven, wiry. Linda had a softer appearance, with silky hair. Religious Christians, they had a stack of green, soft-bound Gideon’s Bibles that could fit in your palm. They gave me one. “We stopped to help you guys ’cause that’s what people do when they live out here,” Linda said. “You help people as a way of life, but I might have thought twice about it if it was just me in the truck.”

  As I climbed in the cab with Allison, I wondered if Linda was just being modest. I suspect it was faith, not just the realities of country living, that made her help us out that day. Say what you will about fundamentalists. If you’re stranded, and if you and your girlfriend look like Charles Manson and Squeaky Fromme, religious people are the only ones who will pick you up. If it weren’t for born-agains, we hitchhikers would probably rot in patchouli-scented piles by the side of the road.

  The road swept down past stables and horses in the black-green grass. Barnyards leaned in fading light. We rolled down the town of Etna’s Main Street, with an old pharmacy and soda fountain, a movie theater and a corrugated building that housed the Etna microbrewery.

  Tom and Linda drove through to the other side of Etna, down to the residence of a “country doctor” named Erikkson, who they hoped would cure me and Allison so we could continue our sojourn. Though he was part-retired, Erikkson still received patients in his house, which doubled as a walk-in medical clinic. Maybe the Jackal God wasn’t angry after all, I thought. Maybe the born-agains and the country doctor were signs of Him smiling.

  Dr. Erikkson received us at the door of his modest home. Allison waited in the living room while he escorted me to a nearby room. There was a white protective wrapper on an examination table, a cabinet with some pills, and a few pieces of equipment. Erikkson was tall and bowlegged. He looked sixty, and as if he spent more time tending and riding horses than making people well, which was true, as he admitted.

  The doctor had me sit on the table, and this made me very nervous. In my youth, I hated going to doctors because they tended to bend down and squeeze my cringing and frightened testicles while making me stick out my tongue and cough, regardless of my symptoms. In fact, he went out of his way to
avoid doing anything that might make me uncomfortable, such as taking my pulse, taking my blood pressure, applying a stethoscope to my chest, or bopping me on the leg with the little silver hammer that doctors often have on hand just for perversity’s sake. In fact, he did so very little that, after a while, I wondered how he knew whether I even had vital signs. At last he decided to take my temperature. Only after I had the thermometer wedged very deeply into my mouth did he ask any substantive questions about my health. I answered as best I could, but it was hard to articulate speech.

  “So,” Dr. Erikkson said. “What do you think made you so sick?”

  “I sink it was the wedder.”

  He harrumphed in apparent annoyance. “People are always blaming the weather. Weather, by itself, cannot make you sick. So you’re hiking on a trail. You come to a town and you’re exposed to all kinds of germs. Weather by itself is not a sickening agent. What are your symptoms?”

  “Dauseated. No affetite. I seal like wombat vomit.”

  “Listen, I’ve got some Biaxin I can give you. It’s powerful stuff. It’ll knock it right out.” Conveniently enough, Dr. Erikkson just so happened to have a bunch of free Biaxin samples hanging around in a drawer. He even threw in some extra Biaxin for Allison, as a preventive measure, “in case she starts feeling sicker, too.”

  I was happy and relieved, even though the doctor had not explained how he somehow knew what was ailing me; after all, he hadn’t drawn blood. Yet I sensed that he was right, and that by some miracle, he had saved our trip. He couldn’t be wrong, I thought. I’d never met a man with such Zenlike confidence in his curing powers. If all that was not enough, he wrote me up an IOU instead of giving me a formal bill, though he took down my permanent address to make sure I didn’t dodge out on payment. I left his office feeling great. Dr. Erikkson was a necessary corrective to an inhumane world of PPOs and HMOs. Hooray, I thought. Our trip was saved. Our last obstacle on the way to Canada had just been swept away. Perhaps the Jackal God wasn’t mad at me at all. He was merely testing me.

  Chapter 27

  The Jackal God Strikes Back

  When we finally left Etna five days later, we had lost the equivalent of ninety walking miles to the north—and had shelled out three hundred dollars for lodging. Allison had taken ill in Etna, and for a while, it was touch and go, as she succumbed to nausea and exhaustion. But by the time we returned to the trail, she, too, had rebounded, and now it seemed that all our symptoms had subsided. We were a bit sleepy, but the worst of our ailments seemed to be gone, and we were confident that the illness had somehow washed its way out of our bodies. Braggadocio ruled the day. I even crowed to Allison that this next section of the trail would be “as easy as knocking back a shot of watered-down vodka.” Allison laughed at this, and we both broke into a gleeful song, to the tune of Sinead O’Connor’s weepy 1990 hit, “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance”:

  This is our last part of California! Oh-ho-ho.

  I’ll meet you later somewhere in Oregon—Oh-ho-ho!

  To our great relief, the trail was undemanding and gentle at first, as we rose up over Big Creek Canyon and dropped into creek-filled gulches choked with underbrush. Nothing was going wrong, and that was crucial, for there was no room for the smallest setback now. We were hurrying, and so, it seemed, were the creatures in the forest. Everywhere you could hear animals in the underbrush, the sounds of gathering, hoarding, and last-minute preparations. Having hiked from late summer and into the fall, I sensed the long days shrinking, the air getting colder, the sun setting faster. We rose earlier now, before sunup, sometimes when frost persisted on the grass and leaves; it shone like bits of glass. At times like that, I sensed the planet was moving toward darkness, with a shrinking wall of sunlight breaking up an eternal night. Shadows persisted. Streams got sluggish. The cold snap quickened our steps. But after a while, we couldn’t will our bodies to move quickly anymore. Our weakness had returned, and then the sickness rebounded, strong as ever but different. It hit me hard close to the Kidder Lake Trail, where the trail laid siege to black-green mountains measled with red rock. As I walked up, I experienced the onset of symptoms far more striking and unique than anything that had hit me so far. The first was flatulence so devastating that the sustained whoosh of its backward thrust propelled me northward toward Canada with the strength of a pair of blazing booster rockets. But later, as the day wore on, things got even more interesting. I experienced an attack of vomiting and diarrhea so spectacular that my body transformed into an overstuffed pastry bag ruptured at both ends and squeezed from the middle.

  Allison tried to make me eat, but that was challenging, considering that she was weak and nauseated, too, which distracted her from assisting me. Even the smallest bite of food, ingested for a moment, burst forth from my throat. As far as I’m concerned, the trots were the pièce de résistance; I’d never experienced anything like them in my life, not even in Mexico. Every ten to fifteen minutes, I had to take my leave of the Pacific Crest Trail and run into the woods, searching desperately for a shady bower in which to void. I’d just be pulling my shorts up when another attack would hit me—POW!—and I’d have to look for yet another likely spot, forcing me to hop through the underbrush, howling and yipping, my electric-blue hiking shorts fettering my ankles as I bounced like a kangaroo from one tree to another. I was no longer hiking, per se. It was more like a modern dance composed of physical jerks, wailing, crumpling into trees, and writhing like Twyla Tharp. On one such occasion, as I lay on the ground, the sun stabbing my eyes like diamond points, and cold shivers running through me, I wondered to myself, “What on earth could be doing this to my body? Do I have trichinosis? E-coli? Shigella?”

  I started to wonder if I had giardia, a much-feared ailment of the backcountry. The PCT guidebook mentioned it several times. I didn’t know the particulars of this affliction then but I’d heard horror stories about it, and spoken to hikers who’d contracted it. According to a reliable medical text, those who come down with giardia, or more specifically, giardia intestinalis, experience the “sudden onset of explosive watery foul-smelling diarrhea with nausea and anorexia and marked abdominal distension with flatulence,” perhaps accompanied by “chills and low-grade fever, vomiting, headache and malaise.” All this and malaise, too?

  It was disappointing to speculate that beaver fever had gotten the best of me. I figured that if anything caused me problems on the trail, it would be something big and glamorous, something that would get my name in the paper, such as a savage hairy creature or serial killer. But the truth is no Pacific Crest Trail hiker has ever been murdered along the trail throughout its history, and there has never been a reported serious bear attack on PCT hikers, either. Looking back, it just about kills me to think that a protozoan parasite eight microns long, so small that a million-population city of these tiny buggers could fit, no problem, under your fingernail, could make me so miserable. Giardia may be small but it gets around; these vicious creatures have tails that thrash like the whips of dominatrices as they dart through your intestines. Appropriately enough, when viewed through an electron microscope, they look like smirking clown faces.

  Lying there on a rock, in pain, I suspected that something tiny was wreaking havoc inside me, and I wanted vengeance. I wished I could shrink myself down to the size of a microbe, just so I could punch whatever it was in the face, or at least tell it to go fuck itself, but in essence, my giardia was fucking itself already, with wild abandon. Giardia engages in asexual reproduction so quickly that just one of these pests can yield a million more in a week and a half through a process called binary fission. Even now, the creatures were proliferating and adhering to my intestines, where they were injecting chemicals into my gut; those enzymes were making it harder for me to absorb nutrition and fats, which explained the greasy, floating, stucco-colored stools. The acid in my stomach lining could do nothing to block the invasion; in fact, my body’s acid actually helped the giardia by serving as a catalyst, making inert cysts ha
tch into swimming monsters.

  In our campground, Allison was becoming sicker by the moment, but she wasn’t quite as sick as I was, which forced her into the Florence Nightingale role. The view of the fog and hillocks of Seiad Valley to the north might have made for a romantic evening. Instead, she was compelled to spend the night turning green in our hermetically sealed flatulence chamber. She’d lean out from under the rain fly, take frantic gulps of night air, and then duck back into the den of misery. Watching her face turn blue from the farty excess of our nylon shelter, I no longer had any doubt that we would marry. Most marriages are travesties because of the simple fact that young marrieds set themselves up for disappointment by hiding reality from each other. They conceal their worst traits and then let it all hang out after their honeymoon—the ingrown toenails, the gnashing of teeth in their sleep, the halitosis, the habitual infidelities, the annoying folk songs in the shower. In the case of me and Allison, there was no dreadful aspect of my person that she didn’t know by heart, and yet she loved me. Because of this, I felt a surge of tenderness so painful that it was hard for me to bear it. No one had ever loved me like this before, and if she ever let me go, no one would ever love me like this again. This was steely love, tested by the fires of gastrointestinal distress. And yet it made me feel strange. I wondered what I would have done if our situations had been reversed. Would I have been as loyal and patient? Feeling guilty that night, I finally reminded her that, after all, I’d saved her from drowning in Bear Creek back in Yosemite.